The New York Times
Last updated November 1, 2010.

Looking This Way and That, and Learning to Adapt to the World
August 16, 2010
The infants and toddlers resemble cyborgs as they waddle and crawl around the playroom with backpacks carrying wireless transmitters and cameras strapped to their heads. Each has one camera aimed at the right eye and another at the field of view, and both send video to monitors nearby. When the video feeds are combined, the result is a recording in which red cross hairs mark the target of a child’s gaze.

Cruise Lines Face More Policing of Waste Disposal
March 25, 2007
This summer, a new kind of passenger might make an appearance on cruise ships in Alaska: rangers whose job is to make sure the vessels are not polluting the state's waters. The Alaskan state program, which includes plans to have as many as 60 monitors inspect ships' waste disposal methods, is one of the latest examples of state and federal efforts to keep billions of gallons of cruise ship waste from affecting coastal waters.

Fears Rise That Antarctica Is Being Loved Too Well
November 13, 2005
As Antarctica becomes a hot destination, scientists caution that the rising number of tourists could disrupt or harm its delicate wildlife, and environmental groups are asking the countries overseeing Antarctica to limit the number of visits.

Digging Up Dinosaur Bones in the Fossil-Rich Badlands
September 11, 2005
In the summer, amateur and professional paleontologists, veterans and newcomers venture from across the globe to a family ranch in the Badlands of southwest North Dakota near the Montana border. Armed with pickaxes and shovels in their hunt for fossils, they brave 10-hour days with temperatures that are usually in the 90's, but can reach 120 degrees, and the occasional rattlesnake and scorpion.

At Trading Crossroads, Permafrost Yields Siberian Secrets
January 6, 2004
In a medieval Siberian graveyard a few miles south of the Arctic Circle, Russian scientists have unearthed mummies roughly 1,000 years old, clad in copper masks, hoops and plates -- burial rites that archaeologists say they have never seen before.

Among 34 shallow graves were five mummies shrouded in copper and blankets of reindeer, beaver, wolverine or bear fur. Unlike the remains of Egyptian pharaohs, the scientists say, the Siberian bodies were mummified by accident. The cold, dry permafrost preserved the remains, and the copper may have helped prevent oxidation.

The discovery adds to the evidence that Siberia was not an isolated wasteland but a crossroads of international trade and cultural diversity, Dr. Natalia Fedorova of the Ural branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences said in an interview in her office in this central Russian city.

Bottled baby octopuses turn out to be pygmies
September 24, 2002
In century-old jars of alcohol on museum shelves in Paris and Washington and off the coasts of Indonesia, Senegal and the Caribbean, zoologists are stumbling upon dozens of species of tiny octopuses once believed to be babies of their larger relatives.

Described by their discoverers as Lilliputian, some of the pygmy species are smaller than the hatchlings of the bigger and better known octopus. Each of the pygmies is about the size of a thumbnail, with weights measured in tenths of a gram, making them tiny even compared with the inches-high characters in "Gulliver's Travels."

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