Tag - nature

 
 

NATURE

JAPAN
Oct 10, 2013
Japan team develops compound to prevent Alzheimer's
A team of Japanese researchers has developed a compound to suppress the formation of a protein believed to cause Alzheimer's disease, according to a study published Wednesday in a British science journal.
Japan Times
WORLD / Science & Health
Sep 16, 2013
Bats, snakes face deadly fungi threat
Jeremy Coleman was on the trail of a ruthless serial killer recently, studying its behavior, patterns and moves at a Massachusetts lab. The more he saw, the more it confirmed a hunch. He had seen it all before. He was looking at a copycat killer.
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT
Sep 4, 2013
Scientists tracing ancestry of India's large mammals
About 120 million years ago, the supercontinent of Gondwana broke into a jigsaw puzzle of continents and isles in the Southern Hemisphere. One of those was a giant island forming what we now call India.
Japan Times
WORLD / Science & Health
Aug 28, 2013
Dolphin deaths, linked to virus, worst in years
Marine scientists said Tuesday that a die-off of bottlenose dolphins along the U.S. Atlantic coast is the largest in a quarter-century and is almost certainly from the same cause as a 1987-88 outbreak: cetacean morbillivirus, which is spreading throughout the population.
WORLD / Science & Health / FOCUS
Aug 28, 2013
Air gun noise sparks alarm in war over offshore drilling
The use of "seismic air guns" to determine how much oil and gas lies beneath a vast swath of the ocean floor off the southeast coast of the United States is provoking an early skirmish in a battle over oil drilling that is still years away.
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT
Jul 15, 2013
Russian activist pays high price for actions
After three men in this heavily polluted city west of Yekaterinburg beat Stepan Chernogubov unconscious, fracturing his skull and knocking out three teeth, criminal investigators took him, still bleeding, to a police station where they questioned him for four hours and then threatened to bring charges against him.
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT
Jul 1, 2013
U.S. plans first tribal national park to protect buffaloes
Buffalo stroll undisturbed, pausing occasionally to wallow in the grass and caked dirt, while prairie dogs yip intermittently as they dive into their holes and pop out again to survey the landscape. This northern stretch of Badlands National Park, known as Sage Creek Wilderness, is what the northern Great Plains used to look like.
Japan Times
WORLD / Science & Health
Jun 25, 2013
Asia demand making ginseng in U.S. scarce
The long tradition of ginseng hunting in the U.S. can be traced from Daniel Boone, the folk hero frontiersman, to Glenn Miller, a retired concrete inspector.
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT
Apr 23, 2013
Little bird on the prairie could help save entire ecosystem
Under an indigo predawn sky, as a frigid wind whipped across the plains, a half-dozen brown-and-white birds emerged from tufts of dry grass. They emitted a low cooing sound, akin to the hooting of an owl.
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH
Apr 21, 2013
Nature art: It's in the 'I' of the beholder
When a thing of beauty is perceived, the observer experiences some kind of a reaction; but what defines “beauty”? Is it art?
ENVIRONMENT
Apr 2, 2013
Exxon Mobil mops up large pipeline spill
Exxon Mobil said that one of its pipelines leaked "a few thousand" barrels of Canadian heavy crude oil near Mayflower, Arkansas, late Friday, prompting the evacuation of 22 homes and reinforcing concerns many critics have raised about the Keystone XL pipeline that is awaiting State Department approval.
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT
Mar 30, 2013
Brazilian chief wields high-tech tools in battle to save tribe, forests
As a small boy in the early 1980s, Almir Surui hunted monkeys with a bow and arrow, wore a loincloth and struggled with Brazil's official language, Portuguese.
WORLD
Mar 24, 2013
Obama to name five national monuments
President Barack Obama on Monday will announce five new national monuments that will be added to the U.S. list of protected land.
Japan Times
WORLD
Feb 11, 2013
Brazil dams Amazon to feed energy-hungry economy
When it is completed in 2015, the Jirau hydroelectric dam will span the Madeira River, feature more giant turbines than any other dam in the world and hold as much concrete as 47 towers the size of New York's Empire State Building.
BUSINESS / Tech
Jan 26, 2013
Cuttlefish could be key to revolutionary camouflage technology
Cuttlefish are ugly-cute. With their big eyes, stubby tentacles and bulbous head, they look like creatures from an H.P. Lovecraft horror story. When they move forward, rippling their fins underneath their body, they resemble prehistoric flying saucers. And they hunt at night and are masters of disguise.
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT
Jan 19, 2013
Why spider's silk is becoming man's best friend
Up on the roof of professor Fritz Vollrath's lab in the zoology department at Oxford University, there is a makeshift greenhouse in which he nurtures his favorite golden orb web spiders. Walking into the greenhouse is a little like finding yourself inside one of those Damien Hirst vitrines that dramatize fast-forward life and death.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
May 13, 2012
Getting away from it all on Aguni Island
I set out for the hospital lecture hall in high spirits, looking forward to a relaxing, refreshing stay on this tiny and seemingly uncrowded island.
COMMENTARY
Sep 20, 2011
End the grad student quotas
Starting in the 1991 academic year (April 1991 through March 1992), a number of leading national universities in Japan underwent major structural changes, led by the Law School at the University of Tokyo.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Mar 13, 2011
From Kurama to Kibune: Hiking in northeastern Kyoto
The Eizan Electric Railway serves a sparsely traveled route — or so I infer from the dinky two-carriage train we board shortly before it lurches out of the terminus at Demachiyanagi Station in Kyoto heading for the mountains on the city's northeastern outskirts.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Jul 4, 2010
Amami Oshima: Take a trip to the cloud forest of the imagination
Despite the environmental mistakes of the postwar decades, the violation of a once pristine landscape, a recent trip to Amami Oshima, gave very real cause for hope. Some regions have always, it seems, been in good shape. Flying over the island's green, volcanic hills, I felt as if I were gazing down upon an eastern Camelot.

Longform

Later this month, author Shogo Imamura will open Honmaru, a bookstore that allows other businesses to rent its shelves. It's part of a wave of ideas Japanese booksellers are trying to compete with online spaces.
The story isn't over for Japan's bookstores