A man and his robot: Professor Geovanny Martinez Castillo. Source: UCR In the near future, robots exploring other planets could find their way around thanks to the work of scientists from Costa Rica. According to a press release by the University of Costa Rica (UCR), researchers at the Image Processing and Computer Vision Research Laboratory (IPCV-LAB) recently got their hands on a new toy tha...

The National Emergency Commission – Comisión Nacional de Emergencia (CNE) – has declared a “green alert” for the areas of Sarapiquí (Caribbean coast), north Pacific and the Central Valley, that is affected by a low pressure system dumping large amounts of rain in those areas. The alert follows a forecast by the Instituto Meteorológico Nacional (IMN) – national weather service – to expect some 6...

In Costa Rica, the hammerhead sharks of the Sphyrnidae family are not yet terribly endangered, but conservationists and public officials are proactively moving towards a protective stance. According to online news media site CRHoy.com, steps towards comprehensive conservation of hammerhead sharks are being implemented. Mision Tiburon (Shark Mission), a non-profit organization in Costa Rica that...

While Costa Rica’s tourism officials spend millions telling the world how “esencial” Costa Rica is, images like the above published in the New York Times have a greater impact. Published on Thursday Sept 5 in the New York Times Travel section, is the story about Santa Teresa’s unpaved roads by Dave Seminara, titled “In a Costa Rican Beach Town, the Road Less Paved”. In the article, S...

The questions is: How is it that the Eastern Pacific Hawksbill Sea Turtle has come back into the Gulf of Fonseca, a species that many scientists considered virtually extinct? The answer to that question, for now, is unknown. This amazing discovery is being investigated by the Scientific Committee of the Inter-American Convention for the Protection and Conservation of Sea Turtles (IAC), which ju...

Source: Zoo Ave Officials from the Zoo Ave Wildlife Rescue Center in Costa Rica are hopeful that a rare Puma yagouaroundi that was struck on a highway by a vehicle will fully recover. According to daily tabloid La Teja, the small wild cat was found in Pilas de Canjel, in the Lepanto community of the province of Puntarenas. This town is located on the shores of the Gulf of Nicoya, near the s...

A team of researchers from the Universidad de Costa Rica and the Universidad Nacional analyzed the color of the waters that gives the name to the famous Rio Celeste (Light Blue River), located in the canton of Guatuso, the province of Alajuela, and managed to unravel the mystery. Many hypotheses, conjectures and beliefs have been brought up, including that the color was due to the presence of a...

Source: OVSICORI Last Sunday morning, neighbors of La Fortuna in the northwest region of the Alajuela province, woke up to an eruption of monetary anticipation. The Arenal Volcano, one of Costa Rica's most iconic tourist spots, finally came alive after two years of sheer inactivity with a spectacular steam column and lingering vapor plumes. Whereas many residents saw a typical reaction by t...

Costa Rican officials want to close down public zoos and set the animals free. But releasing zoo animals into the wild is not quite so simple as it may seem. Costa Rica has long been known for the rich biodiversity its natural environments offer - and it is continuing to new steps to protect wildlife. The Central American country had previously banned the use of animals in circuses and sport h...

Source: Wikimedia Commons Standing in line (or queuing up) for long periods of time is a staple of life in Costa Rica, but not everyone is willing to readily accept this social convention. Complaining about the inefficiency of services offered by Costa Rica's public and private sectors is a national pastime, which is actually better enjoyed at while standing in a long and serpentine line, but ...

It took some 8,000 use plastic bottles to create the work that aims to raise the awareness about the amount of discarded plastic material in the country. Artist Francesco Bracci used the thousands of discarded plastic bottles to form a missile that hangs overhead on Avenida Central (the Boulevard or Bulevar in Spanish). Bracci’s idea is to catch the attention of passerby and create an awaren...

New York — A powerful cohort of women leaders from +35 countries including Christiana Figueres the Executive Secretary at United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and Lorena Aguilar the Global Senior Advisor for International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) both from Costa Rica, will come together in New York later this month to take bold action on climate change ...

Source: Flickr CC If there is something that foreign visitors and residents of Costa Rica quickly learn is that lining up (or queuing up) is a tradition. Costa Rica thrives on long lines and waiting times; this is how business is done and how errands are accomplished. It has been this way for quite some time and is unlikely to change any time soon; it is also highly inefficient, but there may ...

Long, fat, round pipes in dark brown and off-white snake along the rust red ground through the underbrush. They remind me of giant worms from some prehistoric setting … though not quite like that terrible 1990 movie Tremors. The pipes belong to the Pailas Geothermal Power Plant at the Rincón de la Vieja Volcano in Costa Rica’s northwestern Guanacaste region. As the world investigates alternat...

The yellow warbler may not pull a perfect latte, but it turns out it's a friend to coffee drinkers all the same. Research in Costa Rica shows that hungry warblers and other birds significantly reduce damage by a devastating coffee pest, the coffee berry borer beetle. A study found that insectivorous birds cut infestations by the beetle Hypothenemus hampei by about half, saving a medium-sized co...

The Laboratorio de Igeniería Sísmica de la Universidad de Costa Rica reported a 5.8 magnitude earthquake at 6:29am, with its epicenter some 68.3 kilometers off cabos Velas de Santa Cruz. The USGS reports the magnitude at 6.0. According to the National Volcanological and Seismological Observatory (Ovsicori), at 6:35am there was another earthquake with a magnitude of 3.8, 39 km to the southwes...

An interview with native Costa Rican Tica & AGU Academic Consultant Ania Chaves about university life in Costa Rica, courtesy of ISA Association of Global Universities. Filled with exotic wildlife and damp rainforests perfectly preserved by a government who has sectioned off over a fourth of the country’s land mass to nature preserves and national parks, Costa Rica is truly a unique study desti...

Source: Wikimedia Commons Exotic pet owners in Costa Rica continue to be a concern. Not long ago, reports of an escaped anaconda that was kept in a cage by an expat farm owner from the United States scared residents of some Guanacaste towns -although recent news reports indicate that this may have been a hoax; more on that below. The latest report of an ophidian on the loose come from the c...

Announcement from the Asociación de Vecinos y Empresarios de Playa Hermosa, Guanacaste. Guanacaste recycles! September is Mes de la Patria  ("Month of the Country") and the Municipalidad de Carrillo is promoting recycling at the COMUREC (Comité de Mujeres Reciclando/Women's Recycling Committee) Recycling Center in Filadelfia de Carrillo, Guanacaste. We have received word from Lic. Henry Aba...

Though it does not seem like it, this year to date, there have been fewer rainy days, when compared to the average of the last 14 years in Costa Rica. The areas with the least rain have been Guanacaste, San José and Alajuela. According to the Instituto Meteorológico Nacional (IMN) – national weather service – the province of the “pampa” (Guanacaste) has seen 35% fewer rainy days this year, w...

With the storms of the rainy season comes lightning, which can cause transient voltage changes that can be very damaging to electrical appliances in your home. Therefore, precautionary measures should be taken in offices and homes to minimize electrical damage. -During lightning storms, turn off and unplug appliances. If they remain plugged in and there is a voltage change of considerable magni...

As you head south along the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica from Jaco down past Quepos/Manuel Antonio toward Dominical, vast forests of palm trees stretch for miles along the highway. Lush and thickly planted, with emerald ferns growing on the trunks and a dense carpet of green underneath, the palms always remind me of a tropical enchanted forest. These immense plantations are African Palms, and...

Monsanto GMO Corn Stalk Roots. Source: Wikimedia Commons Costa Rica's ongoing fight to keep genetically modified organisms (GMOs) bio-engineered by agro-industrial leviathan Monsanto away from her land has been justified once again. Researchers from the University of Illinois are Pnvestigating an outbreak of western corn rootworm in two Prairie State counties where Monsanto's bacillus thurigie...

Several NGO’s and non profit organizations, including PRETOMA, Widecast and The Leatherback Trust, known collectively as Salvemos Nuestros Mares, have come together to improve marine management in Costa Rica through a series of legal, political and civil actions which will lead all around improvement of our valuable and incredibly bio-diverse marine resources. Their first action is an online pe...

Source: Wikimedia Commons If you live near the banks of the Tempisque River in Guanacaste, you may want to keep an eye on your livestock, as well as your dogs and cats. An anaconda slithered away from its unnatural farm habitat, where it was kept as an exotic pet by an owner described by neighbors as “a powerful gringo” in Costa Rica. The 12-meter long anaconda is not native to Costa Rica, ...

Costa Rica has been host to thousands of foreigners who have settled here for four centuries, if one counts the Spanish. But before the 1990s, none of them were able to scuttle across the ceiling like spiders. That ubiquitous little Far Eastern lizard, the Gecko, may have hitched a ride aboard a freighter (or a series of them) touching in at Costa Rican ports. However it happened, they found Co...

The first birding app for Costa Rica is a digital field guide replete with photos, sounds, text, and range maps for more than 500 bird species. If you want The Costa Rica Star to cover your business press release, please contact us. San Jose, Costa Rica – The second version of the Costa Rica Birds-Field Guide app became available in the iTunes Store in July, 2013. This is the second version of ...

An anti-GMO activist in San Francisco. Source: Wikimedia Commons The number of cantons in Costa Rica that have adopted legislation to prohibit the cultivation of potentially dangerous genetically modified organisms (GMOs) is now at 62. These transgenic-free territories are following a legal strategy often called the “anti-Monsanto doctrine” after the world's most powerful distributor of GMO se...

If you would like The Costa Rica Star to publish your business press release, please contact us. Kava Delfin considers the environment, our local community as integral pieces of our success. We hope to set an example for good corporate role models who consider people, and the planet, in addition to profits, when making strategic decisions. Kava Delfin is the first restaurant fully dedicated ...

Source: Wikimedia Commons A woman in Costa Rica has spent the last ten years of her life surrounded by bats. Her name is Ana Iris Cruz, but her neighbors call her Batgirl. She lives in a farm in Cedral, in the Monte de Oros canton, province of Puntarenas, and her chiropteran friends hang from the rafters of a small produce storage shed in her house. According to tabloid newspaper La Teja, M...

Costa Rica’s ban on clearing of “mature” forests appears to be effective in encouraging agricultural expansion on non-forest lands, finds a study published today in the journal Environmental Research Letters. The research, which was led by Matthew Fagan of Columbia University, is based on analysis of satellite data calibrated with visits to field sites in the lowlands of northern Costa Rica. ...

During community consultations conducted in June and July by representatives of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), they found four common problems among the four cantons most affected by the earthquake on September 5, 2012. The first concern is the need for training organizations and community leaders, said Lucrecia Siles, project coordinator. Currently, only the community of Nosara...

Source: Wikimedia Commons Officials from the National Animal Health Service (SENASA in Spanish) in Costa Rica decided to put down a striped dolphin (Stenella coeruleoalba) that had persistently beached itself despite repeated efforts to return it to sea. The marine mammal in question was initially found on the beach by surf fishermen in Playa Lagarto, province of Guanacaste. They returned t...

Another year, another week spent watching the most commonly misunderstood elasmobranch species swim, feed, reproduce, and (rarely) attack humans. We are talking about Shark Week, a ratings machine that is one of the most anticipated TV programs every year. In Costa Rica, Shark Week is also known as “El Clasico de Discovery en Espanol” due to its popularity among cable and satellite television cust...

Source: Zoo Ave Facebook Simona, an adult female Bradypodidae sloth that was electrocuted when she touched high-voltage lines in Tilaran, province of Alajuela, is showing great improvements. Officials at Zoo Ave, Costa Rica’s premier wildlife rescue center, explained that Simona suffered five major electrical discharges and extensive burns that required two major surgeries. You can watch Simon...

Source: Flickr CC Costa Rica’s rich biodiversity is getting richer. According to a recent article published by national news daily La Nacion, researchers and environmental officials in Costa Rica discovered and classified 5,000 new species between 2011 and 2013. This discovery is part of the country’s National Biodiversity Strategy (ENB in Spanish) for 2014-2020, which is part of the United Na...

The story of the legendary crocodile Pocho and his “owner,” Costa Rican fisherman named Gilberto “Chito” Shedon, will be shown in Latin America on the nature TV channel NatGeo next Saturday a 7 p.m.. A filming team originally picked up on the story in 2009 that had captivated Costa Ricans. The team filmed the unlikely pair but decided that the 15 minute segment they had programed for the film w...

In Perez Zeledon, hundreds of citizens have planted 110,000 native trees as part of a project to protect watersheds and promote reforestation of rainforests. The project is called Sowing Water (“Sembrando Agua” in Spanish) and has been operating for one year through the foundation of the same name. The whole idea comes from ​​a local entrepreneur: Fernando Leon, who joined other community le...

The Central Pacific area is home to one of the most exotic animals in Costa Rica: the gray crown spider-squirrel monkey. This species can only be found in Costa Rican territory. These monkeys are endangered because its habitat is fragmented in forest patches, so they find it difficult to travel and interact with other members of their population. This has led them to interact with other species...

The Costa Rican International Herpetology Symposium and Field Exploration will be held September 2-7, 2013, at Selva Verde Lodge & Rainforest Reserve in Sarapiquí, located amidst primary forest in the Caribbean lowlands of Costa Rica. The symposium will feature presentations, workshops, conservation, herpetological organizations, and new findings and research from all over the Americas. The sym...