newspaper

“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”  ― Albert Camus Make way for fall colors: Gold, yellow, orange and red are all set to arrive, ready to delight with their brief but beautiful display. Viewing fall foliage is a perfect way to spend a weekend afternoon and The Nature Conservancy's many preserves are prime destinations. So pack a lunch and plan a weekend escape to one of these special places that your support is helping to protect. 1. Bear Rocks Preserve, West Virginia Bear Rocks Preserve offers visitors a unique and incredibly beautiful hiking experience. Here, high above Canaan Valley in Dolly Sods, a windswept expanse opens up to the sky, offering views of undulating mountains folding out eastward across the skyline. 2. Barr Hill Natural Area, Vermont Barr Hill is a minor mountain by Vermont standards at just 2,120 feet elevation. But this 256-acre preserve presents unparalleled vistas, easily reached with little climbing o...

DNA sequence expanded in areas otherwise reserved for vertebrates. Norbert Wu/Science Faction/Corbis The octopus genome offers clues to how the creatures evolved intelligence to rival the craftiest vertebrates. With its eight prehensile arms lined with suckers, camera-like eyes, elaborate repertoire of camouflage tricks and spooky intelligence, the octopus is like no other creature on Earth. Added to those distinctions is an unusually large genome, described in  Nature 1  on 12 August, that helps to explain how a mere mollusc evolved into an otherworldly being. “It’s the first sequenced genome from something like an alien,” jokes neurobiologist Clifton Ragsdale of the University of Chicago in Illinois, who co-led the genetic analysis of the California two-spot octopus ( Octopus bimaculoides ). “It’s important for us to know the genome, because it gives us insights into how the sophisticated cognitive skills of octopuses evolved,” says neurobiologist Benny H...

European mission will shed light on hidden asteroids, the Universe’s expansion and exoplanets. C. Carreau/ESA The Gaia spacecraft’s billion-pixel camera maps stars and other objects in the Milky Way. Astronomers the world over are about to get their first taste of a tool that will transform their working lives. Gaia, a  space telescope  launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) in late 2013, will release its first map of the Milky Way on 14 September. The catalogue will show the 3D positions of 2,057,050 stars and other objects, and how those positions have changed over the past two decades. Eventually, the map will contain one billion objects or more and will be 1,000 times more extensive and at least 10 times more precise than anything that came before. Some groups have planned ‘Gaia hacking’ and ‘Gaia sprint’ events, at which researchers will collectively work out how best to exploit the sudden manna. “Gaia is going to revolutionize what we know about star...

Martin Harvey/Getty Images Giraffes may now be considered more than one species, but their conservation future remains less clear. One of the most iconic animals in Africa has a secret. A genetic analysis suggests that the giraffe is not one species, but 4 separate ones — a finding that could alter how conservationists protect these animals. Researchers previously split giraffes into several subspecies on the basis of their coat patterns and where they lived. Closer inspection of  their genes , however, reveals that giraffes should actually be divided into four distinct lineages that don’t interbreed in the wild, researchers report on 8 September in  Current Biology 1 . Previous genetic studies 2  have suggested that there were discrete giraffe populations that rarely intermingled, but this is the first to detect species-level differences, says Axel Janke, a geneticist at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, and the study’s senior author. Ruminating on r...