“Humans have made a huge hole in nature in the last 10,000 years. [With de-extinction,] we have the ability now, and maybe the moral obligation, to repair some of the damage.” (Steward Brand, The Long Now Foundation)

When investment banker and hobby mycologist Gordon Wasson embarked on his first psychedelic shroom journey with the Mixatec shaman Maria Sabina, 1947 in Huautla de Jimenez, Oaxaca, he could hardly have fathomed that this very incident was not only to open "the doors of perception" (as Huxley so aptly described the psychedelic experience in his famous book of 1954) for him, accompanying fotographer Allan Richardson and Wasson's wife Valentina but, in the years and decades to come, hundred thousands of others, God-seekers, fun-lovers, hippies, mycophiles and celebrities like Jo

Eight hundred species of dung beetles in South Africa, two thousand on the African continent, six thousand in the whole world: ponder the numbers and you might change your attitude towards poo or at least concede that for some, it's quite something. For the so-called flightless dung beetle, Circellium bacchus, and his cousin Scarabaeus zambesianus, among other South African species of the superfamily Scarabaeoidea, it's the most delicious thing one can come about on an excruciatingly hot day in the South African bushland.

Hawaii's Silent Invaders

"Paradise found is paradise lost" E.O.Wilson

On Monday August 5, after "seven terrifying knuckle-in-teeth minutes", the Mars rover Curiosity successfully landed on Martian grounds, causing excessive shoulder patting among NASA engineers and U.S. government officials. In the months to come the spacecraft will investigate Gale Crater, the terrain surrounding its landing site Aeolis Palus, to explore Martian climate and geology and trace back the history of liquid water on the planet.

Minor uproar was caused earlier this year at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Vancouver when speakers Lori Marino of Emory University, Thomas White, Loyola Merymount University, and Chris Butler-Stroud, Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, once again called for a declaration of persona rights for cetaceans legally consolidated on an international level.

photo taken by renown wildlife photographer and conservationalist Paul Nicklen

Spy planes, aerial drones, night raids, heavy armory: usually the stuff of military operations, deployed, as one might think, in far away locales such as Afghanistan or Iraq, seem to become increasingly popular as weapons of choice in a long-waged war on US homeland territory, against a very special angiosperm belonging to the order of rosales: cannabis and its three most prominent subspecies sativa, indica, and ruderalis. 

It's not top news: coral reefs around the world are in a desperate state as a consequence of habitat destruction, marine pollution and climate change. One year after the disastrous tsunami following the Tohoku earthquake 11 March 2011 hit Japan, scientists now fear for one of the most unique and beautiful areas in the Pacific Ocean: the Hawaiian Islands.

Bioluminescence does not only occur in many creatures of the deep sea but also, though less commonly, in land animals and plants. Diverse fungi, most of them belonging to the genus Mycena, also display bioluminescence; however, little is yet known about the purpose of their nightly glowing.