The economics of biodiversity and business

While climate scientists lament the fact that their flagship compendia, such as the IPCC reports, come under endless attack, scientists working on other environmental issues would love such high-profile pronouncements, even if they came with a similar cost. IPCC-envy was one of the rationales for ...Read More

When it comes to protected areas, less really can mean more

Thomas Brooks, a biologist with NatureServe, a conservation group based in Arlington, Virginia, has long been fighting to preserve biodiversity in the Philippines. Quite often it can feel like a lost cause. Conservation efforts in the country have struggled against ever greater de...Read More

Life recovered from its worst extinction much faster than previously realised

THE dinosaurs went out with a bang. Most palaeontologists agree that those creatures and much of the rest of Mesozoic life ended when the Earth collided with an asteroid or a comet 65m years ago. But the Mesozoic, too, began with a mass extinction. Some 251m year...Read More

A long way from anywhere, researchers are plugged into everywhere

NY ALESUND, a village devoted to scientific research on the island of Spitsbergen, in the high Arctic, seems about as isolated as it is possible to get. Beyond the confines of the village and its outstations, there is no sign of human beings; just snow, water, rock and scraw...Read More

Christie's and Sotheby's face buyer resistance

THE two leading auction houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, have come a long way since the dark days of late 2008, when the sudden collapse of the art market caused their revenues to plummet. At the time, they were forced to pay out nearly $200m in guarantees to honour contracts on w...Read More

Farming one of the ocean’s greatest fish

DURING May and June, when the mighty bluefin tuna returns to the Mediterranean to spawn, fishermen arrive from all over the world to catch it (click here to watch a video). In days gone by, the fish were netted and killed on the spot. Now, in high-tech operations involving divers and video cam...Read More

A banner month for London's art and antiques fairs

IT IS either an embarrassment of riches or overkill. Either way, the abundance of art fairs in London this June is a dramatic departure from how things looked a year ago. Then, London's prestigious Grosvenor House Antiques and Fine Art Fair was closed down after 75 years. Pundits blamed th...Read More

Predicting the Arctic’s summer fate is not so simple

MARCH is the maximum month. In March 1979, the first year for which satellite records are available, the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean covered 16.4m square kilometres (6.4m square miles). By the time summer was gone, the ice was down to about 7.2m square kilometres. Every March since...Read More

Climate-change negotiations settle in for the long haul

SOME of the trappings are the same. Outside the conference venue there are still followers of Supreme Master Ching Hai urging veganism as a path to climatic salvation. Inside, the public spaces are as thronged, the piles of paper as daunting and the procedures as arcane as ever. (Tryi...Read More

An auction of Chinese snuff bottles surprises the experts

IN A time when the market for Chinese treasures is constantly breaking records, the success of the sale of George and Mary Bloch’s snuff bottles in Hong Kong still caught many off-guard. The May 28th event marked the first so-called “golden gavel” sale in Hong Kong...Read More