What Scientists Can Learn From New York City’s Freakiest Residents

Elizabeth Carlen and Michael Parsons are two biologists from Fordham University who are studying the way that humans urbanization is transforming the ecosystems in and around New York City. Parsons’ work finds him headquartered at a waste management facility in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood. There, the ecologist has a colony of free-roaming rats that he tracks using RFID chips, and he hopes the data will help him understand the “silent language” of rats, through scents called pheromones. READ MORE