Brendan Borrell

One fine afternoon last may, Jayne Belnap drove north out of Moab, Utah, in her beige Lexus SUV when the highway vanished. In an instant, a 100-foot-tall cloud of dust had swallowed up her vehicle. She wanted to brake, but she worried about another car slamming into her from behind. She tried to pull over, but she couldn’t see the shoulder. So Belnap split the difference: “I figured if I just crept slowly enough that I’d eventually get out of there or fall off the road.”

In June 2010, Michael Finkel needed a new idea. The Bozeman-based author of True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa and writer for GQ, National Geographic, and Men’s Journal wasn’t satisfied with the stack of print-outs in the two-inch deep brownie pan on his desk. And none of the hundreds of ideas in a Word document on his computer struck his fancy. So, he opened up his web browser and typed a query into Google: “Amazing human feats.” That nebulous search brought him to a YouTube video of a blind man careening down a trail on a mountain bike, and by the end of the day he had a killer one-paragraph pitch for Men’s Journal: The Incredible (Yet True) Way That (A Few) Blind People Can “See”: Echolocation.

There are whole books on interviewing, and whole books on structure, but finding ideas remains one of the most mysterious and frustrating parts of journalism. “Nobody teaches you how to come up with ideas,” Finkel says. “It’s alchemy.” As a freelancer, I find that there are few things worse than running out of ideas and becoming paralyzed in front of the computer, wondering what I am supposed to write about next. It’s not writer’s block, exactly. If I had the idea, I could start the research, and if I could start the research, then I could start the writing. It’s that old catch-22: I don’t want to invest time researching a topic that may not turn into a sellable story, but if I’m not researching that topic, I’ll never find that story.

The bidding starts early at the seafood auction in Gloucester, Mass. Each day about 30 tons of fish—mostly cod, haddock, and flounder—come in by boat on Cape Ann, a fist jutting into the Atlantic Ocean. Fishermen motor up to the concrete docks behind the beige-and-white warehouse, then wait while workers in rubber boots hoist their catches and weigh them out on a stainless-steel digital scale. At 4 a.m. grocery store buyers, restaurant owners, and distributors file in to inspect and bid on the haul.

The traders and graders were wrapping up their business just after 9 a.m. on Dec. 7, 2006, when 16 federal agents in Crown Victorias and Ford Expeditions pulled into the parking lot. They entered the building in pairs. Although most of them worked for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, they wore bulletproof vests and carried Glock pistols.

When Shirley Ann Jackson was in elementary school in the 1950s, she would prowl her family’s backyard, collecting bumblebees, yellow jackets and wasps. She would bottle them in mayonnaise jars and test which flowers they liked best and which species were the most aggressive. She dutifully recorded her observations in a notebook, discovering, for instance, that she could alter their daily rhythms by putting them under the dark porch in the middle of the day. The most important lesson she took away from these experiments was not about science but compassion. “Don’t imprison any living thing for very long,” she says in a mellow drawl that belies her reputation as a lightning-fast thinker and influential physicist. “I have never been a fan of dead insect collections.”

Helen ‘Happy’ Reichert died in September. She was a lifelong New Yorker, a former television talk show host and Cornell University’s oldest alumna. She was 109. Despite her death, however, Reichert’s memory may live on through her genome sequence.

On 26 October, the nonprofit X-Prize Foundation—best known for its attempt to spur the development of private spaceships—launched a $10 million competition to accurately sequence 100 genomes from 100 centenarians over the course of one month, starting 3 January 2013.

The patient had endured 20 years of pain: her calves had turned into two bricks,  and she now had trouble walking. A slew of doctors had failed to treat, let alone diagnose, her unusual condition. So when her x-rays finally landed on William A. Gahl’s desk at the National Institutes of Health, he knew immediately that he had to take her case.

Gahl is the scientist and physician who leads the Undiagnosed Diseases Program, which tries to unravel the underlying causes of, and find therapies for, mysterious maladies and known but rare conditions. Louise Benge’s x-rays had revealed that blood vessels in her legs and feet bore a thick coat of calcium that restricted blood flow. Benge’s sister, Paula Allen, along with several other members of the family, also shared the disorder. Over the course of several months Gahl identified the genetic root of the disorder—a mutation in a gene that regulates calcium—and he went on to propose a treatment with drugs already on the market. He continues to assess the treatment’s value.

Quinn Werner’s backyard pumpkin patch overlooks a wooded creek. In the winter, when the maples and oaks stand like toothpicks and snow coats the western Pennsylvania valley, Werner gazes out his kitchen window and caresses his prizewinning seeds. The topsoil is frozen solid and his orange Kubota tractor gleams in the garage like a showroom floor model. He is not a big talker, but every Thursday his buddy Dave Stelts phones, and their conversation always comes back to springtime, to the patch and the weigh-off.

In April, Werner germinates his seeds, each one as long as a quarter, by soaking them in a mix of hydrogen peroxide and water. He pots them and incubates them in a cooler with heating pads.

He then places the seedlings under fluorescent lights upstairs in what he calls his pumpkin room. On nice days, he takes the little pots outside for an hour or two for fresh air and natural sunlight. In May, every seedling is planted in the patch under its own clear plastic tent fitted with incandescent bulbs that are switched on during chilly nights. Within weeks, the vines stretch out octopus-like from underneath the plastic. In June, when the first golden trumpets of female flowers begin to open, Werner brushes them with pollen-covered stamens from select male flowers and covers them with plastic foam cups to prevent honeybees from meddling with the pumpkin’s pedigree.

Read more in the October 2011 issue of  Smithsonian magazine

Get your rifles ready: Wolf season opens at the end of August, and for as little as $11.50 you’ve got a better chance than ever of bagging this toothy predator.

In July, Montana doubled its kill quota to 220, and Idaho, well, it has declined to set a quota. Wyoming plans to treat wolves as predators in most of the state, allowing them to be killed on sight. If all goes according to plan, the Rocky Mountain wolf population will be knocked down 60 percent from its peak of 1,733 in 2009.

This is obviously a perfectly sound strategy for preserving an iconic American species, which taxpayers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars breeding and feeding. No, not wolves, but public-lands ranchers, whose livestock graze on federal property and who are increasingly concerned about attacks by free-ranging wolf packs.

Last year wood and paper products made up nearly a third of British Columbia’s total exports and brought in about $9 billion. Leaving nothing to chance, the government is now embarking on the largest assisted-migration project in history by moving some 250,000 larch seedlings up to 200 miles outside the species’ native range. The hope is that even if its old territory eventually becomes inhospitable, as experts predict it will, the larch and other trees will thrive in their new homes, and so will British Columbia’s economy.

A disagreement within the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) Fisheries Service has meant that the service is delaying making a decision over whether to elevate the status of a threatened population of loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) to endangered. The six-month delay means that the loggerheads will have to spend another summer migrating through Atlantic fisheries under rules that the regulators call “inadequate to ensure the long-term viability of the population”.

Roger Beachy grew up in a traditional Amish family on a small farm in Ohio that produced food “in the old ways,” he says, with few insecticides, herbicides or other agrochemicals. He went on to become a renowned expert in plant viruses and sowed the world’s first genetically modified food crop—a tomato plant with a gene that conferred resistance to the devastating tomato mosaic virus. Beachy sees no irony between his rustic, low-tech boyhood and a career spent developing new types of agricultural technologies. For him, genetic manipulation of food plants is a way of helping preserve the traditions of small farms by reducing the amount of chemicals farmers have to apply to their crops.

Lotus Vermeer downshifts into first, and the brown Landcruiser lurches up another steep dirt track on Santa Cruz Island, on a Nature Conservancy preserve three times the size of Manhattan off the coast of Southern California. After seven years navigating the island’s accordion-fold topography as director of the Conservancy’s work on Santa Cruz, Vermeer has earned solid four-wheel-drive credentials. But her petite frame means she often has to lean out the side of the doorless truck to see the road in front of the hood. 

It’s during one of these maneuvers that she spots a speckled gray-and-orange ball of fur lounging in the road. She slams on the brakes. With its short snout, squat legs and feather-duster tail, the endangered Santa Cruz Island fox looks more like a plush toy than a svelte carnivore. The fox, which is half the size of a house cat and a quarter the size of its mainland canine relatives, gazes at the truck a moment before loping off into a stand of sagebrush.

“You just saw the top predator on the island,” Vermeer says with a grin. “Pretty ferocious.”

A decade ago, as part of a study on diet, psychologist Tom Baranowski was asked to recall everything he had eaten the previous day. A chicken dinner, he said confidently, remembering that he had prepared it for himself and his wife Janice. The thing was, he hadn’t made chicken that night. It was only later that he realized he’d treated himself to a hamburger.

If Baranowski, who studies children’s diets at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, was an unlikely candidate for making such a mistake, consider how abysmal the dietary memories of everyone else must be. By observing his study subjects one day and following up the next, Baranowski has found that children routinely forget about 15% of the foods they have eaten, and more than 30% of the foods they do recall turn out to be figments of their imagination. Adults show similar patterns. “The errors of dietary assessment are overwhelming,” says Baranowski.

These mistakes are more than a reminder of the human memory’s fallibility: they threaten to undermine the foundations of modern medical epidemiology. In this field, researchers make associations between past events and experiences, and later ones such as the emergence of cancer or other diseases. But if the initial records are inaccurate, these associations can be weak, misleading or plain wrong. Although the problem is most jarring in studies of diet, it also infects investigations of exercise, stress, pollution or smoking — basically, anything that relies on people reporting their own exposures through interviews or questionnaires. “This is the weak part of epidemiology,” says Paolo Vineis, an environmental epidemiologist at Imperial College London.

Plant ecologist Mark A. Davis will not participate in this year’s “Buckthorn Roundups” around his St. Paul, Minn., neighborhood. ­Davis will not tag along as these intrepid crusaders set out to eradicate the common and glossy buckthorn, two ornamental shrubs imported in the 19th century from Europe. The nonnatives have now taken over some Midwestern forests, prairies and wetlands. That is why eco-minded volunteers eagerly wrench young weeds from the soil, hack away at thick stems and douse remaining stumps with herbicides. Their hope: a return of Minnesota to its primeval state.

At one time, Davis, too, could see the logic in eradicating these “invaders.” He even advocated planting only Minnesota nativeplants on the Macalester College campus where he teaches. That changed in 1994, when he read an essay by journalist Michael Pollan in the New York Times Magazinethat made his blood boil. He bristled at Pollan’s statement that turning the “ecological clock to 1492 is a fool’s errand, futile and pointless to boot.”

Misjudgements made two years ago during a rat-eradication programme on Alaska’s aptly named Rat Island, which led to the death of more than 420 birds — including 46 bald eagles — have now been detailed.

A report by the Ornithological Council — an association of ornithology organizations in the Americas — documents flaws in the eradication programme carried out by the US Fish a

nd Wildlife Service (FWS) and two conservation groups on the remote Aleutian island, which lies within the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge. The key finding is that Island Conservation, the group based in Santa Cruz, California, that led the operation, applied poison in excess of that recommended by an advisory panel and probably above the legal limit approved by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

“Rat Island was a huge and complicated project,” says Steve Delehanty, manager of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge. “It was a learning experience, and we made mistakes together.”

In June 1996 a game rancher named John Hume paid about $200,000 for three pairs of endangered black rhinos from the wildlife department of the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal. Among them was a male who would come to be called “Number 65,” and whose death would play a central role in the debate about conservation.

South Africa did not start the auctions because it had a surplus of the animals. Quite the opposite. Although the black rhinos had been reproducing, they were still critically endangered. Only about 1,200 remained within the country’s borders. But black rhinos are massive animals, and with just under 7 percent of the country set aside in protected areas, conservationists and wildlife departments had run out of room to accommodate them.

Hume’s 6,500-hectare ranch, Mauricedale, lies in the hot, scrubby veldt in northeastern South Africa. Hume, 68, made his fortune in taxis, hotels, and time-shares, and Mauricedale was his Xanadu, a retirement project of immense proportions. In the late 1990s he began buying up many of the neighboring farms and ranches, and his triangular estate would soon be boxed in on all sides by roads and sugar cane plantations. Hume also was rapidly becoming the largest private owner of white rhinos; there are currently 250 split between Mauricedale and another similar property. He also raises cape buffalo, roan and sable antelopes, hippos, giraffes, zebras, and ostriches.

When the black rhino bull arrived, Hume’s farm manager—a burly Zimbabwean named Geoff York whose typical mode of dress is army boots and a pair of purple shorts—tranquilized him, clipped two notches in his left ear and two in the right, and gave him a number: 65.