By this point, they had almost reached their full adult height of five feet, and their wings measured more than seven feet when outstretched. Their fluffy down had long been replaced by mottled tan-and-white feathers, which were growing whiter by the day, though their heads had yet to develop the signature crimson cap.

“You find joy in how small and cute those last chicks are, when the other birds have grown and he’s sleeping under his heat lamp like a little baked potato,”

The chick spent his first day outside of his shell resting in a heated Plexiglas box lined with gray carpet.

But he proved a “little bit too pecky” with other members of his cohort, so he had to take a breather.

As we were leaving, a man in a gold pickup slowly drove by. He rolled down the window and told Boone, “These are our birds. We’re going to watch over them and make sure no one hurts them.”

“The shooter did not just kill two birds. The shooter stole the deep monetary investment of governments and nonprofit organizations in Canada and the United States.

Meanwhile, the third crane spent the next week wandering the fields looking for his friends. “I don’t know where that one ended up going, but for a few days it kind of stood around hollering,”

Florida was selected for the second reintroduction site, and some 289 whoopers were released around Kissimmee beginning in 1993. But the birds failed to thrive, and the project was scrapped eleven years later. (Fewer than 10 cranes survive there today.)

The next morning, a local game warden would find their bloody, lifeless bodies on the side of the road.

“is a little bit nerve-racking, because you’re giving up control.

In late June 2014, at a government wildlife refuge in Maryland, a whooping crane chick emerged from his shell. He was a damp little thing, covered in cinnamon-colored fluff, and he weighed a respectable 137 grams, about as much as a baseball or a full-grown hamster. Because he was the thirty-third (and last) crane to hatch at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center that season, the biologists there called him Thirty-Three.

Nilsson’s model shines fresh light on an old debate

At the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Tom Cronin peers into an aquarium tank, and two googly compound eyes, like muffins mounted on stalks, peer back at him. “Mr. Googles,” as Cronin affectionately calls him, is a gorgeous animal, bedecked in a kaleidoscopic coat of peach, white, green, and blood-red. He is a mantis shrimp—one of a group of crustaceans named for the quick-punching arms protruding beneath their heads, like those of praying mantis. Mr. Googles’s arms end in formidable hammers, which unfurl with such speed and force that they can shatter seashells and aquarium glass.

But these eyes were already complex, and there are no traces of their simpler precursors. The fossil record tells us nothing about how sightless animals first came to see the world. This mystery flustered Charles Darwin. “To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances ... could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree,” he wrote in Origin of Species. Creationists like to end the quotation there, with the great man doubting his own theory. But in the very next sentence, Darwin solves his own dilemma: “Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist … then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real.”

With the help of its eyes, this brainless blob can find food, avoid obstacles, and survive.

“If you ask people what animal eyes are used for, they’ll say: same thing as human eyes. But that’s not true. It’s not true at all.”

He also suggested that my reporting methods were "better suited for celebrity and entertainment reporting."

most of the gates ain't got officers." He sighs dramatically. (CCA claims to have "no knowledge" of gates going unmanned at Winn.)

and are achieved mostly through "moderate reductions in staffing patterns, fringe benefits, and other labor-related costs." Wages and benefits account for 59 percent of CCA's operating expenses.

CCA and other prison companies have written "occupancy guarantees" into their contracts, requiring states to pay a fee if they cannot provide a certain number of inmates.

"Somebody's go' win. Somebody's go' lose. They both might lose, but hey, did you do your job? Hell yeah!" The classroom erupts in laughter.

I take a breath. Am I really going to become a prison guard? Now that it might actually happen, it feels scary and a bit extreme.

one of the first things that I look at is my horoscope.

DUBNER: These days, of course, there’s plenty of political information on TV, with a flock of cable channels especially devoted to politics. Or should I say, devoted to political entertainment?

I don’t think there’s any data, I’ve never heard of any study, that actually tries to pin down the way in which this sort of drama and entertainment element of primaries is a contributor to a more informed public.

DUBNER: Anya’s my kid. Maia and Logan are two of her friends. At school, in history class they have a current-events unit. Once a week, the teacher assigns them a news article to read, or the kids pick their own. From The New York Times, the BBC, CNN …