Mental Floss

ENVIRONMENT

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With their incredibly strong teeth for cutting down trees and adaptions for semi-aquatic living, beavers are nature's wetlands engineers.

Hannah Keyser
We live among ancient trees that are thousands of years old.

The oldest known trees are thousands of years old. The ancient plants have witnessed the rise and fall of multiple civilizations.

Haley Sweetland Edwards
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Galápagos National Park is an ecological treasure trove, a biological hoard guarded fiercely by conservationists. Visitors to the islands must abide by the park’s rules, which include not taking anything from the wilderness—or leaving anything behind.

Kate Horowitz




Wikimedia Commons

A miniature desert blankets 40 acres of land just a stone’s throw west of Freeport, Maine. An uncanny contrast with the state’s sweeping trees, the dunes (dubbed the “Desert of Maine”) are a geological curiosity—and Mother Nature’s way of reminding us tha

Lucas Reilly




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On a cloudy spring day, a little spider scales a tall blade of grass. At the peak, the spider arches up, points its abdomen up to the sky and begins releasing strands of silk from its silk glands. Tens of thousands of strands fill the air, fanning out and

Matt Soniak
iStock / B&M Noskowski

It's time to pull out those calculators and do the math with the density and volume to determine the total water content of the cloud.

Matt Soniak






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Last month, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced that if water in Lake Michigan drops below the level of the Chicago River, the River could reverse course and begin flowing backward to its source. Has an American river ever done an about-face like t

Matt Soniak


Wikimedia Commons “It was in the month of February, 1814, that I obtained the first sight of this noble bird, and never shall I forget the delight which it gave me.” That’s John James Audubon, the American naturalist and artist, writing in The Birds of

Matt Soniak

The story of the Macquarie Island ecosystem may remind you of the song about the woman who swallowed a fly. The island was exploited mercilessly, but various plans to repair the damage had their own unintended consequences. Introducing a non-native specie

Miss Cellania

Every once in a while, an environmental disaster makes big news, but the effects remain years after the headlines have faded. Here are six stories of what human activity did to mess up Mother Nature. 1. Mossville,

Miss Cellania

We've all heard about the dangers of global warming and climate change. It's going to make the oceans rise, drown our cities, kill plants, cause hurricanes and ruin the Earth for our grandkids. But that's all secondary to the real effects of global warmin

Jason Plautz