Jim Robbins

2 days ago | boulder-monitor.com | Jim Robbins

One day after a fine spring hike near our Helena home, my friend found a tick embedded in her neck, under her hair. As we sat in our car in front of a convenience store, I used the tweezers from my Swiss Army Knife to slowly and carefully pull the critter out. Then she discovered a second one, near the first. I plucked that one out as well. Unpleasant, but no big deal, we thought. We’ve lived in Helena for half a century and, for anyone who spends time in the woods, ticks are part of life.

2 days ago | businessandamerica.com | Jim Robbins

There’s a tale told about a miner who found copper cans in his garbage dump in the early days of mining. Wastewater from copper mining had flowed through his land, he said, and turned steel cans into copper. The story might be apocryphal, but the process is real, and it’s called cementation. Montana Resources, the mining company that took over from the Anaconda Copper Company, still uses this alchemical trick in a process at its Continental Pit mine in Butte, Mont.

2 days ago | nytimes.com | Jim Robbins

Mining continues at the Continental Pit. Nearby is the Berkeley Pit, a site for acid mine drainage that poses an opportunity for extracting valuable metals. Ongoing extraction inside the Continental Pit operated by Montana Resources - an open pit mine in Butte, Mont. The company is working with researchers at the nearby closed Berkeley Pit, which holds a toxic brew now being examined for rare earths. Credit...

1 month ago | e360.yale.edu | Jim Robbins

One of the most endangered animals in the world, freshwater mussels are threated by pollution, climate change, habitat loss, and invasive species. But in the epicenter of their diversity — the Southeastern U.S. — the root cause of a catastrophic die-off remains a mystery. Recent finding have helped biologists develop techniques for raising the most threatened mussel species in labs.

2 months ago | yahoo.com | Jim Robbins

As I stood atop a rocky precipice in central Montana, the most striking thing before me was nothing. More precisely, it was space: the all-encompassing nothingness for which the West is famous. It was off this cliff that thundering herds of bison once jumped, driven to their death by the Native peoples who hunted them for their meat, hides, and bones.