National Geographic Society

Photograph by Julie Larsen Maher (c) Wildlife Conservation Society

National Geographic Digital Media staff have produced an imaginative lineup of stories, photos, and video for this year's Halloween.

Click through to the extended entry to see a video of a newly discovered vampire moth sucking blood from a human hand, stories about the origin of Halloween costumes and ancient candy, and more.

But the program also gives people with a lot of time something to do.

"I need help from people who have long periods of time available to observe and measure the growing mosses, access to extensive space to lay out flats of plants, and fresh minds to put forward innovative solutions," says Nalini Nadkarni of Evergreen State College, who runs the program with funding from the National Science Foundation.

Her researchers are inmates at Cedar Creek Corrections Center, a medium security prison in Littlerock, Washington.

Photo courtesey Nalini Nadkarni of Evergreen State College

Click here or the button above to go through to the official Web site of Gorilla.CD

The plea went out to the world via email and Facebook yesterday:

Heavy fighting in DR Congo's Gorilla Park started at 0400 today local time between the rebels of Laurent Nkunda and the army. It has now totally engulfed our Headquarters of Virunga National Park and the Gorilla Sector and our Rangers have been forced to flee into the forests. The rebels now are the only occupants of the Park Headquarters at Rumangabo. We have lost the entire gorilla sector.

This is a serious time. We need to get our 53 Rangers back to safety in Goma, 45km south of Rumangabo. The main road is blocked because of the fighting so they are walking through the forests of the park south, to Kibumba, about 20km away, where we aim to pick them up in trucks. We are trying to maintain phone contact but they don't have much battery life in their phones.

There is something you can do right now that would help us enormously:

If you have about 3 minutes spare today, please send this cause to all of your friends, and ask them as vigorously as you can to join the cause.

The rebels are aware that we have public support all over the world. We need to build it up into an army of supporters and increase the pressure on the warring parties to allow us to continue our work in protecting the mountain and the rest of Virunga National Park. The knowledge that you are part of this cause is also a boost for the morale of the rangers.

We'd be extremely grateful.

Emmanuel de Merode
Director, Virunga National Park

Illustration by Roy Andersen/NGS

The ability to make fire was likely a key factor in the migration of prehistoric hominids from Africa into Eurasia, a researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Institute of Archaeology reported today.

Excavations at the Gesher Benot Ya'aqov archaeological site in Israel showed that the occupants of the site -- identified as being part of the Acheulian culture that arose in Africa about 1.6 million years ago -- had mastered fire-making ability as long as 790,000 years ago.

Image of Three Gorges Dam, May 2006, courtesy NASA Earth Observatory

Annual flooding behind the world's largest hydro-electric dam, the Three Gorges Dam in China, will be unlike that of the Amazon River or anything else found in nature.

As the reservoir of Yangtze River water rises and falls by as much as 100 feet every six months there will be a profound impact on the landscape over time, many environmental experts worry.

Among the concerns: The reservoir will contain factory toxins and raw sewage and sediment might cause the water level to rise higher than planned, threatening to flood a large city upstream and possibly even send water spilling over the top of the dam.

But perhaps the flooding phenomenon can also be put to good use, according to a wetlands expert at Ohio State University.

Photo by Farzana Wahidy

Under the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, women's rights were completely stripped away. Women were not allowed to pursue their education, all girls' schools were closed down, women were not allowed to work, and they were ordered to remain in their houses.

Raised in Afghanistan during the Taliban era, Farzana Wahidy was forced to go to school in secret in a small apartment in Kabul. At the age of 11, she helped teach mathematics to 60 other girls.

People who colonized the Caribbean from South America about 1,500 years ago brought with them heirloom drug paraphernalia that had been passed down from generation to generation, anthropologists propose.

Ceramic inhaling bowls found on the island of Carriacou, in the West Indies, date back to between roughly 400 and 100 B.C, according to a study headed by Scott Fitzpatrick, an assistant professor of anthropology at North Carolina State University. These dates are well before the paraphernalia was carried to Carriacou by migrants from South America in about A.D. 400.

Ceramic snuffing tubes and inhaling bowls used for ingesting hallucinogenic substances are known from several islands in the West Indies, but their chronological distribution is often vague, the researchers said.

Photo courtesy North Carolina State University

Arctic Ocean ice floes photo courtesy NOAA

Arctic air temperatures are at a record 9 degrees F (5 degrees C) above normal this autumn, because of the major loss of sea ice in recent years, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The air temperature is but one example of changes in the Arctic climate. A near-record loss of summer sea ice and a melting of surface ice in Greenland are among other evidence of continued warming, according to an annual review of conditions in the Arctic issued last week by NOAA and its university, agency, and international partners.

"Changes in the Arctic show a domino effect from multiple causes more clearly than in other regions," said James Overland, an oceanographer at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle and a lead author of the Arctic Report Card. "It's a sensitive system and often reflects changes in relatively fast and dramatic ways."

About half the current kangaroo range could disappear as water holes dry up and pasture recedes, a likely consequence of a rise of only two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in average temperature, they said.

If temperatures rise by an average of six degrees Celsius (11 degrees Fahrenheit), which some climate models predict may happen in Australia by the end of this century, then almost the entire range of kangaroos could be destroyed and at least one species of kangaroo could go extinct.

Photo by Anne Keiser/NGS

"By 2030, these savings would add up to 16.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide -- more than twice the amount released in the United States every year," WorldWatch said in its Vital Signs Update, released today.

Electric lighting consumes more than 19 percent of the world's electricity, causing as much greenhouse gas pollution every year as half of all the light passenger vehicles on the road worldwide.

Photo courtesy USFWS

The inch-long iridescent blue Devil's Hole pupfish (Cyprinodon diabolis) rebounded this fall to 126 adult fish, 34 more than last fall's count and the highest number recorded since 2004, the Associated Press reported last week.

"We're feeling like we're at least maintaining the population," Bob Williams, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service field supervisor for Nevada, told the AP.

Listed as endangered in 1967, the pupfish is believed to spawn exclusively on a shallow rock shelf just under the water's surface in a bottomless geothermal pool in a cavern in the middle of the Mojave Desert. The water temperature is 93 degrees Fahrenheit.

Image courtesy GeoEye, Inc.

Commercial satellite imagery of the Earth will be a lot sharper thanks to GeoEye-1, a spacecraft that can make images of objects on the ground as small as 16 inches (41 centimeters) -- from more than 400 miles (640 kilometers) away.

The satellite has been undergoing calibration and check-out since it was launched last month. This week, while moving north to south in a 423-mile-high (681-kilometer) orbit over the eastern seaboard of the U.S. at a speed of 17,000 miles per hour (27,000 kilometers per hour), GeoEye started working.

The image (above) "captures what is in fact the very first location the satellite saw when we opened the camera door and started imaging," said Brad Peterson, GeoEye's vice president of operations. "We expect the quality of the imagery to be even better as we continue the calibration activity."

Photo by Brian Kubicki/Courtesy Conservation International

Adding to the urgency of the looming extinction crisis, conservationists today declared that 43 percent of amphibian species are declining, 32 percent are threatened with extinction, and as many as 122 species may have become extinct since 1980.

"This study confirms one of the greatest species conservation challenges of our time," said Simon Stuart, chairman of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Species Survival Commission (SSC) biodiversity assessment sub-committee. "In just the past 20 years, the number of known amphibians has increased by 48 percent. Tragically, we are losing them almost as fast as we find them."

"This desert animal has a thing or two to teach materials-handling and process-technology specialists," researchers said last week after using an MRI scanner to study how efficiently the sandfish swims through sand.

Wyland created the "Hands Across the Oceans" mural on 54 giant canvasses in Beijing for the 2008 Olympic Cultural Festival and the Green Olympics.

Images above and below of Wyland making earlier monumental Whaling Walls courtesy of the Wyland Foundation 

3-D computer rendering courtesy Pipestone Creek Dinosaur Project

Fossils of an entire herd of dinosaurs that died in a flood or some other catastrophe 73 million years ago in what today is Alberta, Canada, have been named after the science teacher that found them.

Pachyrhinosaurus lakustai is the name of the new species, Philip Currie, a University of Alberta paleontologist involved in the excavation of the fossils in the late 1980s, announced today.

The world's first carbon capture and storage (CCS) power plant began operations in Germany last month. Built by the Swedish utility Vattenfall, the pilot facility is designed to collect 80 to 90 percent of the carbon dioxide released from burning coal and pipe it into storage deep underground.

It is hoped that the test installation will provide guidance for the construction of a much larger 200-300 MW demonstration power plant to be built by 2015.

File photo of a conventional power station courtesy USGS