Interstate rest stops are some of my favorite places when it comes to getting ideas for new adventures. Inside their doors are racks filled with printed brochures and colorful maps that promise excitement just down the road. It’s a banner day when I can replace my old, well-worn, highway map …
Antibacterial soaps, alcohol wipes, and bleach in our everyday cleaning products have made us focused on eliminating all the germs that we possibly can from our lives. And when it comes to our children, it seems that focus turns into an obsession. It’s here, though, where we soon become at …
When you hear about the great journeys undertaken by some of nature’s smallest creatures, you can’t help but feel inspired to step into adventures of your own that may be outside your comfort zone. And no odyssey is greater than that of the Arctic tern (Sterna paradisaea). Weighing only 3.2 …
Cute, adorable animals are often used to garner support for environmental causes in places that are remote. After all, it’s hard to have concern for an area that is at the opposite end of the Earth from where you live and for which you have no plans to ever see. …
There are twice as many emperor penguins in Antarctica than previously thought, stated the National Science Foundation in mid April. That’s certainly good news, as concerns about the effects of global warming on penguin colonies rise. But another new report mentions an increasing number of something else in Antarctica that …
Big dreams of exploration were not uncommon in the late 1800s and early 1900s. But one explorer may have taken such aspirations to the next level: In 1895, at a London conference on polar exploration, a Swedish engineer named Salomon August Andrée declared his intention to reach the North Pole …
When early, intrepid European explorers first began trekking through the New World in the late 1400s, they were awed by the strikingly different cultures they encountered. But they also came to notice something else: remarkable physical similarities between the Asian peoples they had seen during their many travels and these …
An arctic fox off the coast of Baffin Island has recently proved that wanderlust isn’t restricted to humans. Apparently, this little canid — and some others of her kind — has a propensity for it, too. In spring 2008, Canadian biologists fitted twenty-nine arctic foxes with tracking collars and began …
After missing for more than eight years, Petunia, an American Staffordshire terrier, was found. She had disappeared from her home in Virginia sometime around Thanksgiving 2003. Last weekend, she was located in an animal shelter in California, more than three thousand miles away. How do we know the dog is …
In the first few hours of my first day in the first country I ever visited, I was stopped on the street by a local man, who guessed by the camera hanging around my neck that I was a tourist. “Welcome, welcome,” he heartily greeted me, shaking my hand. “Enjoy …