'Hundreds buried' by China quake

Almost 900 students are buried after an earthquake measuring 7.8 caused a building to collapse in south-western China, state media reports.

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Ape Genius reveals depth of animal intelligence

Anthropologist Jill Pruetz believes she has made a landmark discovery - a species other than humans learning - and passing on - the skills to make a lethal weapon.

How pathetic that our definition of "intelligence" revolves around having the skills to make a lethal weapon.

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Senators ask God to deflect hurricanes

“Let’s ask God that he spare us again this year from any more hurricanes,” said Sen. Dan Webster, R-Winter Garden. He noted that last year the Senate also asked for God to rein in El Nino and atmospheric patterns that had created a horrendous prediction of a terrible hurricane season.

Webster said that the state was spared last year, boggling the minds of scientists.

Christ in a basket, these people.

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Why I Quit Hunting

It should be obvious to any thinking person that nature is a powerful but delicate force. Each living thing on the planet is striving for survival in one way or another, and striving to keep its kind from becoming extinct. Various species of plants, birds and animals have survived earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, fires, floods and many other kinds of natural catastrophes only to fall victim to uncaring humans.

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More often than not, the creature is killed for pleasure instead of for food. A certain sadistic pleasure is derived by killing another creature. When a human kills an animal the act fuels his ego: he has mastered the creature by taking its life.

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It is nothing but fuel for the insecure ego of small men.

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Humanity lives not by reality but by habits— often anchored in selfishness and staggering ignorance. It is this aspect of human nature we must work against.'

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Dolphin answers whales' SOS call

In a act of selflessness which has astounded experts and confirmed the
friendly nature of the species, a bottlenose came to the rescue of two
whales stranded on a beach in New Zealand.

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"I don't speak whale and I don't speak dolphin, but there was obviously
something that went on, because the two whales changed from being quite
distressed to following the dolphin willingly and directly along the
beach and straight out to sea."

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Natural disasters have quadrupled in two decades: study

More than four times the number of natural disasters are occurring now than did two decades ago, British charity Oxfam said in a study Sunday that largely blamed global warming.

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Following Honeybee Disappearance, Bumblebees Begin Vanishing Act

He fears that the species — Franklin's bumblebee — has gone extinct before anyone could even propose it for the endangered species list. To make matters worse, two other bumblebee species — one on the East coast, one on the West — have gone from common to rare.

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Gorillas now 'critically endangered'

The most common type of gorilla is now "critically endangered," one step away from global extinction, according to the 2007 Red List of Threatened Species released Wednesday by the World Conservation Union.

The Ebola virus is depleting Western Gorilla populations to a point where it might become impossible for them to recover.

Commercial hunting, civil unrest and habitat loss due to logging and forest clearance for palm oil plantations are compounding the problem, said the Swiss-based group known by its acronym IUCN.

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Butterfly shows evolution at work

Scientists say they have seen one of the fastest evolutionary changes ever observed in a species of butterfly.

The tropical blue moon butterfly has developed a way of fighting back against parasitic bacteria.

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Our oceans are turning into plastic...are we?

A vast swath of the Pacific, twice the size of Texas, is full of a plastic stew that is entering the food chain. Scientists say these toxins are causing obesity, infertility...and worse.

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This news is depressing enough to make a person reach for the bottle. Glass, at least, is easily recyclable. You can take one tequila bottle, melt it down, and make another tequila bottle. With plastic, recycling is more complicated. Unfortunately, that promising-looking triangle of arrows that appears on products doesn’t always signify endless reuse; it merely identifies which type of plastic the item is made from. And of the seven different plastics in common use, only two of them—PET (labeled with #1 inside the triangle and used in soda bottles) and HDPE (labeled with #2 inside the triangle and used in milk jugs)—have much of an aftermarket. So no matter how virtuously you toss your chip bags and shampoo bottles into your blue bin, few of them will escape the landfill—only 3 to 5 percent of plastics are recycled in any way.

There's a lot more here.