On:

Where would we be without rats and vultures? We might think we’d be a lot better off. But evidence continues to mount that working with Nature’s wildly varied cast of characters is far better for our health than making holes in the web of life by trying to wipe them out.

For instance, the African Giant Pouched Rat is proving itself invaluable for reclaiming land and saving lives. And the lowly, smelly vulture became conspicuous by its absence in India after approximately 40,000,000 of Nature’s winged garbage collection/recycling units were accidentally wiped out in a mere two decades through the introduction of a drug that was used to treat livestock.
read more

On:

A lucky accident aboard the Curiosity Rover has confirmed that there is life on Mars. A life-detection experiment conducted by the Viking lander in 1976 generated a pattern of responses that fulfilled criteria for the presence of life on the planet, but the results were dismissed by JPL experts. Over the years that followed, this conclusion came into serious question, and a paper published in the International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences in March of 2012 presented convincing evidence that the earlier analysis of the data was flawed. Now the leak in Curiosity’s wet chemistry test has confirmed the presence of gasses that can only be created by living organisms.read more

On:

Over the past two years, the kind of serious crime that is usually reserved for humans has extended into the world of canines. In February of 2013, Cruz, a dog in contention at the 18th Annual Rocky Mountain Cluster Dog Show in Denver was murdered with poison. This had happened before, but very rarely, with the last incident in Denver’s dog world taking place in the 1880s. Now, on March 9, it has happened again, this time at the famed Cruft’s Dog Show in England, the UK equivalent of the US Westminster event, when a 3 year old Irish Setter called Jagger was poisoned with slug bait.
read more

On:
Unknowncountry reader Patrick Fernane was on the beach last November making an early morning video when a flash of light shot past and disappeared into the surf. He found that he had recorded it, and set it to Unknowncountry for analysis. These are the responses of our experts:read more