Cold depends so much on context. In the last two weeks, I’ve experienced two different winters separated by thirty degrees of latitude – Rondane National Park, in central Norway (62 °N), and now Tucson, in Arizona in the lower United States (32 °N). The experience has made me think more about how organisms (people included)…

For more than two hundred years, Denmark has had no wolves. The year 1772 saw the last one killed. Loss of livestock and primal fear have made the wolf an unpopular animal in Europe. So imagine the interest when a wolf-like creature was spotted in western Jutland this fall, walking through a landscape not unlike…

Snow has been falling all week long in Copenhagen – winter has come properly. From a comfortable office an ecologist can easily contemplate the effect of the seasons on the natural world – then also easily spend the later part of that afternoon drinking gløgg while the storm continues outside! I’ve been thinking about what…

Imagine an experiment. Take an iceberg lettuce, Lactuca sativa, and leave it in a warm oven for a few days. What will happen? The outcome is not surprising. It shrinks by a very large amount. Who cares? I’ve been thinking about this ‘shrinkage effect’ for some time now, and it turns out that it matters…