Have you walked outside lately? Like, anytime in the last four months? Miami’s been pretty damned hot. In fact, a University of Miami scientist says, it’s been the hottest year to date in recorded history. Brian McNoldy, a senior research associate at the Rosenstiel School (and a passionate meteorologist: “I just…
Any guess where Florida’s largest flock of sheep lives? Quite possibly right in the middle of Miami Beach, inside a nondescript Mt. Sinai research building just off the Julia Tuttle Causeway. Unlike their rural cousins, these fluffy animals, more than 100 of them, aren’t kept for wool or left alone…
Remember in August when half of Miami was loosing its mind over the possibility of Tropical Storm Erika coming our way? Yeah, well now Joaquin, which has reached full Hurricane status, is closer to us as a full fledged cyclone than Erika ever was as a mere Tropical Storm. In…
Did you all enjoy last night’s super moon eclipse? It was pretty wasn’t it? A real once in generation astrological event? Yeah, well, residents on Miami Beach woke up this morning to find their streets flooded thank to the extreme high tides brought on by a super moon. The tides…
As a child growing up in Florida there are a few things that are drilled into your head that need saving: Save the Everglades! Save the panthers! Save the mangroves! Save the manatees! But as the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission controversially grapples with new proposed policy that Florida…
During a protest in front of the Miami Seaquarium last summer, a Miami-Dade cop arrested animal activist Steven Bagenski for holding a “Free Lolita” sign while standing on a public sidewalk. Believing his First Amendment rights were being curtailed, Bagenski, along with fellow activists, filed a lawsuit against MDPD with the…
Earlier this week, environmentalists raised a sea level rise rallying cry with Miami Dade County commissioners. Their demands: a $500,000 pool for engineering solutions and a new “chief resiliency officer” for the county who would act as a point person for new infrastructure to keep Miami dry. “The eyes of…
Between making billions with Amazon, experimenting with home drone delivery and buying a little publication called the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos also has been quietly pumping money into a secretive company aimed at blasting paying customers and scientists into space. Tomorrow, the Miami Palmetto Senior High School graduate is set…
In June 2014, Colin Foord and his assistants, with hammer and chisels in hand, dove to the bottom of the PortMiami shipping channel. Their mission: to rescue 500 native corals threatened by the Army Corps of Engineer’s massive dredging project to deepen the port. Foord also had a bigger mission…
Animal rights activists have been pushing Miami Seaquarium for two decades to release Lolita, a now 50-year-old orca held in the smallest tank in the country. Protestors have marched on the Virginia Key park and held press conferences, but now a 29-year-old New Zealander has a different idea of how…
For longtime Redland resident Pat Milone, the best part of her commute home from Kendall is a stop at a farm stand along Krome Avenue. She takes her pick from dozens of vendors selling fruits and vegetables — many grown just a few feet away. “There are grove trees and…
Tropical; Storm Grace is headed for Puerto Rico and could be in South Florida next week, the National Hurricane Center is reporting..The storm, still far out to sea, is moving west at a good clip and strengthening. It was about 685 miles west-southwest of the Republic of Cabo Verde on…
Most Miamians can never quite seem to get around to purchasing that pesky flood insurance for their house or apartment. Try as they might to put it on a to-do list, dishing out the bucks for a weather event that never seems to happen inevitably gets eclipsed by other tasks…
“Oh my god,” a woman intones, a shaky camera phone aimed at the sky. “There’s something that is releasing a whole bunch of light in the … Oh my god!” No, the footage isn’t the start of the latest insufferable “found footage” horror flick about an alien invasion. It’s just…
Right about now, thousands of especially grumpy Miamians are sitting in traffic wondering what the hell happened to the tropical storm that was supposed to get them out of work today. Erika was a dud, turning into nothing more than a wave of decent thunderstorms on Saturday and Sunday. If…
The streak is alive! After nearly a week of dire predictions about Tropical Storm Erika, it looks this morning like South Florida’s decade-long hurricane-free run is going to continue. Erika is actually no longer a tropical storm — overnight, it weakened into a depression. And this morning’s projections now call…
In these days of complex computer-graphed simulations and space-assisted data mining, hurricane prediction has steadily approached something like a real, reliable science. Usually, scientists can at least guess with some decent certainty what a hurricane is going to do in the next couple days, if not four or five days…
The projected path of Tropical Storm Erika has veered slightly north since yesterday, putting Miami out of the middle of various computer forcecasting models, but the city is still abuzz about the possibility of its first Hurricane strike in years (and knowing how quickly those forecast models can change, its…
See the image up above? That’s the result of meteorologists running Tropical Storm Erika’s data through a bunch of different computer simulation models and placing them all on a single map. You’ll notice just one of those models makes a direct hit in Miami-Dade. You’ll also notice however that Miami…
Set beside the aquamarine waters of Whale Harbor in the Keys is Theater of the Sea, one of Florida’s oldest marine mammal parks. For nearly 70 years it has attracted thousands of visitors with its diverse assortment of animals, many of whom are rescued and bear colorful names, like “Aphrodite,”…
Right now, if you happen to be in the middle of the Atlantic, say 1000 miles or so east of Puerto Rico, you should really be prepared for some serious anthropomorphized weather hell. If you’re in Miami, or anywhere on land, for that matter, there’s nothing much to worry about…
In April 2012, Miami-Dade Animal Services began using a new chemical disinfectant to clean the floor of its kennel. Within weeks, multiple male dogs at the kennel developed an alarming problem, a former employee says: their scrotums were badly irritated or burned. It happened more to large dogs, and sometimes…
