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I am always astonished to see stories such as these. A tree-dwelling animal with a teddy-bear-like face and rust-coloured fur has become the newest mammal species discovered by scientists. The olinguito, the smallest known member of the raccoon family, lives in the cloud forests high in the Andes Mountains of Colombia and Ecuador, reported a team of scientists from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., which described it in the journal ZooKeys Thursday. The animal has actually been displayed in museums and zoos over the past 100 years, but was mistakenly identified as a different, known species among its close relatives, the olingo. "It's been kind of hiding in plain sight for a long time," Kristofer Helgen, curator of mammals at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, and lead author of the new report, told The Associated Press. And this. Giant Maya Carvings Found in Guatemala Archaeologist Anya Shetler cleans an inscription below an ancient...

One hundred years ago, this week - July 7, 1911 , to be exact - an American man named Hiram Bingham found the ruins of an ancient ceremonial city, mostly overgrown with Peruvian jungle. Some indigenous families were living on the site, tending small subsistence farms. Despite the fact that local people had always known about the ruins, and despite the fact that the clues of other explorers and many indigenous people enabled his route, Bingham claimed to "discover" these ruins. Those ruins are now one of the world's most famous and most remarkable places: Machu Picchu. Over the next few years, Bingham would bring Machu Picchu to the attention of the larger world. He would uncover other nearby Incan ruins and open the ancient paths between them, now known as the Inca Trail . He would also violate an agreement he made with the Peruvian government, and illegally excavate, remove and steal ancient artifacts from those sites, including the remains of Incan people - the ancestor...

I missed World Water Day , but this excellent video is relevant every day. From the good people who brought us The Story of Stuff , comes The Story of Bottled Water . We were in Peru in 2006. The water is not drinkable there, not for anyone for any reason. The very rich have filtration systems in their homes; everyone else boils water for a full 10 minutes before using it for anything. For tourists, which is a big chunk of the Peruvian economy, there is bottled water. Women sell it along the roadside, at train stations, in parking lots - everywhere there are tourists, there are women selling bottled water. They sell it cheap (by tourist standards) and cold. In many places where tourists are gathering, it's hot and very dry, and it's important to stay hydrated. You simply have no choice. You have to buy bottled water everywhere. And you can't refill the bottles, because you can't drink the tap water. And... plastic is not recycled. Only glass is recycled. We were there f...

You may have heard that, last week, the Supreme Court of Peru sentenced that country's former president, Alberto Fujimori, to 25 years in prison. That's hopeful, exciting - and enviable - news. Author James McEnteer offers his perspective about how Norteamericanos might learn from Peru's example. Peru's Supreme Court sentenced former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori to twenty-five years in prison last week for creating death squads during his presidency - from 1990 to 2000 - which murdered dozens of people. More than seventy thousand people died during Fujimori's reign in the war between his iron-fisted administration and Maoist guerilla groups, the "Shining Path," and the "Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement." After a fifteen-month trial, the presiding judge, Cesar San Martin, said, "The charges have been proved beyond all reasonable doubt." The court found that Fujimori targeted various political opponents for kidnapping and assass...