Medicine & TechnologyThere is a rift forming among energy investors in some of the world's largest energy companies over a global campaign aiming to make fossil fuels as unpopular as tobacco, to better combat climate change. Over the past seven months, investors including the likes of the heirs to the Rockefeller Standard Oil fortune and the board of trustees at California's Stanford University have decided not to invest in coal companies. And the ramifications are significant.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced earlier this week that it is considering placing the monarch butterfly under the federal protection of the Endangered Species Act. And now, for the next sixty days, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will hear comments from the public on the idea of listing the butterfly.
While bacteria win the award for largest species abundance, and Archaea take the award for oldest organisms known to man, the most abundant animal on the face of the Earth is still the formidable and diverse phyla arthropoda—which include all species of insects. They come in an array of shapes and sizes, and compose nearly 80 percent of all animal species identified by man to date, and there are still undoubtedly thousands of species we’ve yet to find. But researchers believe that the diverse little creepy crawly bunch may hold more secrets than they let on, perhaps even secrets about our very own evolutionary origins.