Nature surrounds us with an amazing variety of animals, insects, birds, plants, and topographic features. To refer to and distinguish the entities in this bounty, we assign them names — often two: one for common use and one, a two-parter, for scientific identification. Usually, the person credited with discovering or …
British explorer and Royal Navy officer Robert Falcon Scott reached the South Pole on January 17, 1912. A hundred years later, on January 17, 2012, in honor of this historic adventure, the National Geographic Society exhibited some rare photos of the expedition, taken by Herbert Ponting. A former rancher out …
In 1719, when cartographer John Senex was drawing a map of the English empire in America, there was still a lot that was unknown. The little information about this “new land” that he did have came from the accounts of various Jesuit and French explorers, and not much of it …
Ever since the explorers of old used oral storytelling, flyers, and published journals to spread word of streets lined with gold, fountains of youth, or rich silks and spices, people have been using mass media to motivate others to go on adventures. A hundred years ago, even Ernest Shackleton promised …
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 …
Great adventures make for great books; and if you browse the “adventure” shelves of any bookstore, you’re likely to find tales of mountain climbing feats, polar expeditions, diving derring-do, or deep wilderness hiking. Rarely, though, when we want a tome of adventure do we think of perusing the children’s books …
We humans seem to have a great need to anthropomorphize; that is, we tend to want to ascribe human characteristics to inanimate objects, nonhuman animals, and natural phenomena, such as the wind, rain, or sun. We want to believe that everything that we touch or that touches us adheres to …
I’ll admit it: I’m a vampire-story junkie. Ever since I read Anne Rice’s 1976 novel Interview with a Vampire, I’ve been thirsting — shall we say — for more. So, you can see why I was “sucked in” to watching The Vampire Diaries series on TV, ever since it premiered …
When Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, stepped into her twin-engine plane in Miami on June 1, 1937, they were embarking on an adventure of a grand sort. The two hoped to fly around the world, following the Equator. For four weeks, people across the globe eagerly awaited the …