How the Pine Beetle is Destroying Colorado Forests | Newsweek Environment

Rise of the Bugs
Lily Huang 6/20/2009 12:00:00 AM
The most important question not raised during the swine-flu panic could have been asked by a 6-year-old: where do viruses come from? The answer, it turns out, is simple, and scary: viruses come from a giant wellspring of diseases—also known as the environment—that grown-ups should be very careful not to disturb. Pathogens—viruses, bacteria and a wide variety of other parasites—appear in nature as unpredictable, minimalist terrors equipped with little genetic material of their own but the ability to make things up as they go. A bird-flu virus can rest coolly in pigs, then flare up in humans, scrambling genes from all three species in ways impossible to fully anticipate with vaccines. The SARS virus bided its time among palm civets (a kind of mongoose) and horseshoe bats before killing humans in 2002. And possibly the most diminutive of all, the retrovirus HIV emerged from the blood of wild monkeys to become the most efficient destroyer of the human immune system. With strong enough poison and infinitely transmutable genes, a single pathogen could lay deadly siege to the rest of the living world.
BSI: Bird Strike Investigation
Dina Fine Maron 6/9/2009 12:00:00 AM
Every day, tucked five floors above the eight-ton African elephant that greets visitors at Washington's Smithsonian Natural History Museum, Carla Dove tackles some of the Air Force's dirty work—literally—at her forensic ornithology laboratory. Behind a door marked FEATHER IDENTIFICATION LAB, Dr. Dove (yes, that's her real name) sorts through shredded feathers, bits of claws or beaks, and sometimes nothing but bird goo called "snarge"—all in an effort to discover, CSI-style, what types of birds crash into military and commercial airplanes.
SPEACIAL REPORT: TRAVEL
Giving it a Whirl
Tara Weingarten 5/2/2009 12:00:00 AM
Not everyone has the time, the inclination or the pocketbook to take off a month or longer for a dream trip. Sometimes less is more. A variety of whirlwind tours offer the cash-strapped, time-pressed or easily bored travelers a concentrated dose of R&R.
SPECIAL REPORT: TRAVEL
Without the Crowds
Jaime Cunningham 5/2/2009 12:00:00 AM
The world's national parks offer fresh air, wildlife, scenic vistas and breathtaking topographic formations. And that is why so many of them—from Yosemite to England's Lake District to Thailand's Khao Yai—are mobbed in peak season. But there are parks that have somehow slid beneath the radar of the photo-snapping masses. For travelers looking to really get away—far, far away—from it all, these are well worth the trip.
KIDS
Where the Wild Things Die
Jesse Ellison 4/18/2009 12:00:00 AM
There's a scene early in the gorgeous new documentary "Earth" in which a wolf stalks a caribou calf through the grasslands of northern Canada. The chase, filmed in slow motion, feels epic. At points the calf seems on the verge of escape. Then, in a blink, its little legs buckle. The movie doesn't show what happens next, but in the theater where I saw it, everyone got the point—including the little girl sitting in front of me, who jumped into her father's lap and buried her face in his neck. She was terrified. So was I.
ENVIRONMENT
Unleash the Critters
Christopher Werth
The Scottish countryside will soon be home to creatures nearly as strange to Britain as the monster that's said to inhabit the depths of Loch Ness. This spring, 17 beavers will be released into a remote area of rivers and deciduous forest. Hunted to extinction throughout Europe, beavers haven't roamed Britain's wilderness for almost 500 years. Their presence has been dearly missed, at least by some conservationists. Beaver dams create the kind of wetlands that many birds, fish and mammals rely on—and that costly land-management programs in Scotland and elsewhere have striven to re-create, with spotty results. Ecologists would like to invite back other long-lost species to help restore the natural balance. To save the country's vegetation from deer, which have doubled to 2 million since the start of this decade, an Oxford University biologist late last year called for reintroducing the lynx—a wildcat that died out in Britain 1,300 years ago.