Knowable Magazine

2 weeks ago | knowablemagazine.org | Lela Nargi

James Gentz has seen birds aplenty on his East Texas rice-and-crawfish farm: snow geese and pintails, spoonbills and teal. The whooping crane couple, though, he found “magnificent.” These endangered, long-necked behemoths arrived in 2021 and set to building a nest amid his flooded fields. “I just loved to see them,” Gentz says. Not every farmer is thrilled to host birds. Some worry about the spread of avian flu, others are concerned that the birds will eat too much of their valuable crops.

3 weeks ago | knowablemagazine.org | Amber Dance

Did you know that mushrooms can get sick? It was in 1948, in a Pennsylvania mushroom farm operated by the La France brothers, that scientists first observed a mushroom malady featuring puny caps and crooked stems. But only in 1962 did researchers finally realize viruses were behind La France disease, as it came to be called, and that viruses caused other fungal afflictions as well — thus launching a whole new field of study.

3 weeks ago | knowablemagazine.org | Nicola Jones

The word  bureaucracy  is often spoken with a tone of distaste, as if it means “official rules that just make life difficult for no reason.” It conjures images of reams of paperwork: a tangle of red tape that stands as an obstacle to progress. But the definition of  bureaucracy  is, simply, a body of nonelected government officials that undertakes administration — in other words, the people who actually get stuff done.

1 month ago | knowablemagazine.org | Lesley Evans Ogden

Treading carefully through yellowing aspen forest in southeastern British Columbia, wildlife scientist Clayton Lamb parts undergrowth with his arms as he looks for a sturdy tree to tether his bear trap to. A tantalizing scent trail has been laid to lure an animal that can range over a thousand square kilometers to this precise spot, outside of the town of Fernie. Lamb’s colleague, wildlife technician Laura Smit, drizzles rotten cow blood through the woods from a red plastic gas can.

1 month ago | knowablemagazine.org | Rachel Ehrenberg

In late winter, in the swampy lowlands of the northeastern United States, you might catch a whiff of rotting flesh. The unlikely source is flowers — maroon pointy things, the size of fists, that protrude from the still-frozen ground like grotesque harbingers of spring. These are the flowers of the Eastern skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus), and flies and other pollinators are drawn by their putrid odor as well as by the flowers’ warmth.