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"My Satirical Self" (a link)

Link to a great article in the New York Times yesterday about satire, irony, sarcasm, and our modern world. It's by Wyatt Mason, who is a contributing editor at Harper's. "Satire, then, signals both the sickness and health of a society in equal measure: it showcases the vigor of the satirist and the debility of the satiree. As such, we might conclude, in America, that its abundance suggests a normal balance of destructive yin and creative yang, a human need to view the most vexing frailties of a culture through the liberating prism of lampoon." All told, it's a good narrative that gets…

Dinosaurs provide clues about the shrunken genomes of birds

There is a reason why there are no dinosaur geneticists - their careers would quickly become as extinct as the 'terrible lizards' themselves. Bones may fossilise, but soft tissues and molecules like DNA do not. Outside of the fictional world of Jurassic Park, dinosaurs have left no genetic traces for eager scientists to study. Nonetheless, that is exactly what Chris Organ and Scott Edwards from Harvard University have managed to do. And it all started with a simple riddle: which came first, the chicken or the genome? Like almost all birds, a chicken's genome - its full complement of DNA…

Genetic diversity gives honeybees an edge

Social insects like ants, bees and wasps are some of the most successful animals on the planet. By acting as large super-organisms, they can achieve things that larger singular creatures cannot. Their astounding selflessness is driven by an unusual way of handing down their genes, which means that females actually have more genes in common with their sisters than they do with their own daughters. And that makes them more likely to put the good of their colony sisters over their own reproductive legacy. The more related the workers are to each other, the more willing they will be to co-…

Simple sponges provide clues to origin of nervous system

Sponges are among the most primitive of all animals. They are immobile, and live by filtering detritus from the water. They have no brains or, for that matter, any neurons, organs or even tissues. If you were looking for the evolutionary origins of animal intelligence, you couldn't really pick a less likely subject to study. So it was with great surprise that Onur Sakarya from the University of California, Santa Barbara found that sponges carry the beginnings of a nervous system. With no neurons to speak of, these animals still have the genetic components of synapses, one of the most…

The evolution of animal personalities - they're a fact of life

Animals have distinct personalities and temperaments, but why would evolution favour these over more flexible and adaptible mindsets? New game theory models show that animal personalities are a natural progression from the choices they make over how to live and reproduce. Any pet owner, wildlife photographer or zookeeper will tell you that animals have distinct personalities. Some are aggressive, others are docile; some are bold, others are timid. In some circles, ascribing personalities to animals is still a cardinal sin of biology and warrants being branded with a scarlet A (for…

Old wounds show that Triceratops used its horns for combat

Thanks to its trinity of horns, Triceratops has become of the most recognisable of dinosaurs. The sight of two bulls charging at each other and jousting with their horns must have been an incredible one - geeky palaeontologists might get a small thrill just thinking about it. But did it ever really happen? Did Triceratops ever use its unmistakeable horns in combat, or were they simply for show? Both theories have been put forward, but Andrew Farke from the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Palaeontology (who blogs at the Open Source Palaeontologist) thinks that both were probably right. By looking at…

Drugs and stimulating environments reverse memory loss in brain-damaged mice

You swallow the pill. As it works its way through your digestive system, it slowly releases its chemical payload, which travels through your bloodstream to your brain. A biochemical chain reaction begins. Old disused nerve cells spring into action and form new connections with each other. And amazingly, lost memories start to flood back. The idea of a pill for memory loss sounds like pure science-fiction. But scientists from the Massachussetts Institute for Technology have taken a first important step to making it a reality, at least for mice. Andre Fischer and colleagues managed to restore…

Higgs Hates Us?

Supposedly there's no such thing as bad publicity, and indeed just about every large organization from business to charity spends tremendous amount of time and money trying to get noticed by the public. You'd think therefore that it would be a good thing that particle physics gets the press it does. You'd think, but then you see news stories like this, from which we can get the gist by quoting the second paragraph: ...Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I'm not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black…

The Forensic Astrophysics of Superman

Kal-El, native of the planet Krypton, came to Earth and was adopted by Jonathan and Martha Kent. Being a Kryptonian, he found that he had superhuman powers and used them for good as Superman[1]. We all know the story. But what do we know about Krypton? Any information would be a dramatic coup for astronomers of all varieties. Superman couldn't tell us, he was just an infant when he left[2]. We might have to do some deduction. I propose we start by trying to determine the orbital period of Krypton - in other words, how long a Kryptonian year was. To do this, we need the equation for…

Another vote for 350 ppm

Al Gore has joined the growing list of notable climateers calling for a new target for atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. Speaking at the Poznan climate change gabfest this week he said we need to aim for no more than 350 parts per million. The best known climatologist advocating such a low target ;;;; remember we're at 385 ppmv now ;;;; is NASA climate science chief James Hansen, who is the lead author on a recently published paper that identifies that specific number as the low end of a range of values associated with a climate regime shift between a world dominated by ice and one…

RFK Jr: crank candidate for EPA chief?

Most of my favorite ScienceBlogs colleagues are up in arms at the very hint that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could end up as the next administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. The problem is RFK, while justifiably cherished for many years by the environmental movement, also happens to be the best-known member of a group of cranks that opposes childhood vaccination because of its alleged links to autism. Are Orac, MarkH, Mike the Mad Biologist, Mike Dunford and the rest justifiably worried? I think so. According to Politico, "Obama advisers said the nomination would please both Sen.…

Water, water everywhere...

Two new studies on sea level rise appearing this week deserve our attention, one in Nature Geoscience, the other in Science. Both conclude the IPCC's estimates of no more than 59 cm of rising waters by 2100 should be tossed out the window. We've been hearing this since early 2007, when the latest IPCC reports were released ;;;; specifically, complaints that the cut-off point for research that could be considered was early 2006, and so much has come out since then that we really shouldn't be paying too much attention to IPCC numbers. But most of those comments were based on observations that…

University of Maryland Joint Institute Scores Big

The University of Marland's Joint Quantum Institute has won an NSF Physics Frontier Center. $12.5 million over five years. This is the first frontier center devoted exclusively to quantum information science. Congrats to UM! Press release below the fold. UM Awarded $12.5 Million for Research Center at Frontier of Quantum Physics COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- The National Science Foundation has awarded the Joint Quantum Institute $12.5 million over five years to create and operate a Physics Frontier Center at the University of Maryland. The Joint Quantum Institute is a partnership between the…

Hesitancy as a Good Thing, Or Maybe Not

Dr. Richard Friedman, professor of psychiatry at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, has an article in the New York Times.  In it, he claims that reforms in medical residency training may be leaving young doctors "a little more hesitant and uncertain than you might like."  At first I was hesitant to write about it, because I was uncertain as to what point he is trying to make.  But then I decided to go ahead. href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/17/health/17mind.html?pagewanted=print">Accepting the Risks in Creating Confident Doctors By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D. Published:…

Biting the Dust

In March, I wrote a post on some tantalizing new findings about the secrets of human evolution lurking in our genome. In brief, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania studied a gene called MYH16 that helps build jaw muscles in primates. In our own lineage, the gene has mutated and is no longer active in jaw muscles. Perhaps not coincidentally, we have much smaller, weaker jaws than other apes. The researchers estimated that the gene shut down around 2.4 million years ago--right around the time when hominid brains began to expand. They suggested that shrinking jaw muscles opened up room…

Smart Wings of the Jurassic

Evolution is nature's great R&D division. Through mutation, natural selection, and other processes, life can find new solutions for the challenge of staying alive. It's possible to see a simplified version of this problem solving at work in the lab. The genetic molecule RNA, for example, can evolve into shapes that allow it to do things no one ever expected RNA to do, like join together amino acids. Over millions of years, evolution can solve far bigger problems. How can a mammal became an efficient swimmer? How can a bug fly? Humans would like to build ocean-going vehicles as efficient…

Jerry Coyne's open letter

Go read Open letter to the NCSE and BCSE. Or read it here: Dear comrades: Although we may diverge in our philosophies and actions toward religion, we share a common goal: the promulgation of good science education in Britain and America--indeed, throughout the world. Many of us, like myself and Richard Dawkins, spend a lot of time teaching evolution to the general public. There's little doubt, in fact, that Dawkins is the preeminent teacher of evolution in the world. He has not only turned many people on to modern evolutionary biology, but has converted many evolution-deniers (most of…

Quick Thoughts on Sanjay Gupta and CNN Science

Kudos to the Obama administration for approaching one of America's top science communicators for the position of Surgeon General. Not only could CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta be a visible and persuasive media presence on heath care reform, but he will also hopefully use the authority of the Surgeon General's office to emphasize the health impacts of climate change. As I have written in the past, by re-framing climate change as a public health problem, there is an important new emphasis on the linkages to infectious diseases, heat stroke, and other familiar health problems, especially among the…

The WPost on Science, Politics, and the Miserly Public

As I like to say, when it comes to science debates, the public is far more likely to be miserly in reaching a judgment than fully informed. Most citizens are cognitive misers relying heavily on information short cuts and heuristics to make up their minds about a science controversy, often in the absence of knowledge. The fragmented nature of our modern media system magnifies the problem of a miserly public, introducing the "problem of choice." Absent a strong preference for the really good science coverage available, citizens can completely avoid such information, paying attention instead to…

Science, Environmental Justice, and Community Context: Part 3 with Julie Sze

Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 --- Part 3 with Julie Sze, discussing her book Noxious New York, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here. WF: What place did science play in the EJ issues of the communities you've studied? We've talked about tensions between expertise, technical knowledge, and lived community experience in other conversations. It's a vast subject, in fact, and I shouldn't cast this question so tidily. But for Noxious New York, where did scientific practices fit? JS: Science played a large part in the story I told in New York City, a story…

The Candy Hierarchy Anew (Halloween Experiment Debriefing '08)

The data presented below were first published after Halloween in 2006, here at The World's Fair. After further (non-anonymous) peer review, we pushed into the second phase of the research in 2007, as published here. We are proud to acknowledge that these earlier efforts--pilot studies, both--led to further funding. We've now been able to pursue the third phase of the work. Difficult work, yes. Labor-intensive, to be sure. Gut-wrenching, perhaps. But huge breakthroughs were in the offing. The hierarchy below includes the results of our continuing work. To re-repeat our earlier claims to…

Brainspace: Literacy in the humanities and in the sciences vs Britney Spears et al.

Last night, we rolled in the new course (Arts Science Integrated Course - ASIC 200) and it was a lot of fun (a little odd for me doing what was essentially a history speel, but there you have it). Anyway, one of the first things I got to do was play a little game with the class. It's actually something I do quite often when working with the general public and trying to hone in on the disparity of brain "airtime" devoted to what are essentially trivial things, versus things that really you'd hope everyone was comfortable or literate in. (Click on the movie to move through slides) - - -…

Back from Harbin: some numbers on academia in North East China.

Shop fronts on the streets of Harbin Well, I've been home for a week now from my trip to Harbin, still with a cold, and my mind whirring trying to compartmentalize all that I was lucky enough to see in the latter parts of my stay. During those days, I was fortunate enough to take in a few sights, particularly in the neighbouring city of ChangChun - a city most famous for its role in the Japanese invasion of NorthEast China, and its subsequent set up of the puppet nation of "Manchuria." This includes the story of Puyi, or the last Chinese emperor, who was caught in the middle of everything…

Corn-based ethanol may starve the world's poor

C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer, writing in Foriegn Affairs, summarize the likely effects of corn-based biofuels on the world food supply. Take home message: the biofuel craze has led to skyrocketing food prices which -- along with government subsidies and tariff protections to domestic corn producers -- has the potential to starve the poorest in the world. Money quote: Now, thanks to a combination of high oil prices and even more generous government subsidies, corn-based ethanol has become the rage. There were 110 ethanol refineries in operation in the United States at the end of 2006,…

More on Autism and Faces

Less than a week after I had to correct myself on autism and face perception, I read another article on the subject that has me skeptical. Let's see if we can apply what we learned before. The conclusions from my earlier piece were a couple: 1) people with autism do not seem to possess a global deficit in face perception although they may evaluate faces differently and 2) the evidence with respect to fMRI is mixed. Here is the new work (unfortunately not available as a paper yet): In a report to be presented May 5 at the International Meeting for Autism Research in Seatlle, researchers…

I am lectured in logic by a man who believes in invisible magic men in the sky

Rabbi Moshe Averick asks, "Seriously, Aren't Atheists Embarrassed by P.Z. Myers?" Seriously, aren't you? What's the matter with you people? What prompts his outrage is his discovery of a lecture I gave some time back on the complexity argument from intelligent design creationists. He is appalled at my total lack of logic! Unfortunately for him, his misconceptions arise because he makes some unwarranted leaps about what I was saying. He specifically objects to the fact that I showed a slide of a wall of driftwood at a beach, and that I explained that it had accumulated by chance and the…

Wrong, root and branch; wrong at every cell and molecule; wrong to the core

The world didn't end last Saturday (obviously), but Harold Camping and his predictions are just a smokescreen, and everyone is missing the heart of the problem. Camping has now spoken. He now claims that Jesus did arrive 'spiritually' on the 21st, and that in his generous mercy, God has decided to spare us the 153 days of the tribulation, but that the world will still be ending on 21 October. This is no surprise. This is exactly what these crackpot prophets do: they're never right, but they are great at rationalizing. His followers are busy readjusting. Here's a radio interview with one bible…

Economy Update

I have been a bit lax on the blogging, but here is what I have been reading on the economy. Tyler Cowen attributes the financial bubble to three main causes: The current financial crisis comes from a conjunction of three major trends, common to many countries and to a wide variety of financial institutions. The first trend was a positive one: an enormous growth in wealth that needed to be moved into investments. Before he became chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben S. Bernanke wrote of a "global savings glut," particularly from Asia. Furthermore, over the last 20 years, many countries have…

Elsewhere on the Interweb (6/24/08)

Presh has a great post on game theory and voting power using nominations to the Israeli Supreme Court as an example. Take homes: Here is what you can take away when creating your own voting structures: 1. Vote size does not equate to voting power 2. Smaller voters can still hold great power 3. Voters can increase power through voting blocs 4. Raising a majority might not diminish the power of a voter or bloc Astronomers have nailed down the exact date of the events described in the Odyssey by Homer -- the non-mythical ones anyway -- by looking closely at astronomical references in the text:…

Immune response to brain infection may trigger Alzheimer's

ALZHEIMER'S Disease is the most common form of dementia, affecting an estimated 30 million people worldwide. The cause of the condition is unknown, but the prime suspect is amyloid-beta (Aβ), a 42-amino acid peptide which accumulates within neurons to form insoluble structures called senile plaques that are thought to be toxic. Aβ is synthesized in all neurons; it is associated with the cell membrane, and is thought to be involved in cell-to-cell signalling, but its exact role has eluded researchers. A new study published in the open access journal PLoS One now shows that Aβ is a potent…

A Handy Graphic/Timeline of Gonzalez's Publication Drop

Intelligent Design is a career-killer. There's just no two ways about it. And not because of how peers treat the ID supporter; they throw their own productivity under the bus, to use Casey Luskin's overworked cliche. We saw the same thing with Behe and Dembski. Behe has published ONE peer-reviewed paper in the last decade-ish. And Dembski... well, does anybody even know where he works these days? All hyperbole aside, let's look at Gonzalez's publication track record while we keep in mind that tenure committees consider work that comes in after one joins the university to be of prime…

"Attention Training" via Meditation Influences the Ventral and Dorsal Attentional Networks Differently

As discussed earlier this week, meditation may be an alternative form of brain training - or "brain untraining" - that shows transfer to tasks requiring cognitive control. There have been a few updates to this fascinating line of research, not least of which is a fascinating paper by Amishi Jha and colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania. They showed that relative to a control group, meditation influences particular components of attention in ways that are compatible with beliefs long held in the meditation community. In particular, Jha et al focus on mindfulness meditation, which is…

Filtering Perception To Save Memory

One of the bottlenecks in human memory capacity is its "filtering efficiency" - irrelevant information in memory only detracts from an already-constrained memory span. New work by McNab & Klingberg images the neural structure directly responsible for such filtering, and shows it can predict behavioral measures of memory span. Impressively, the location of this "memory filter" is the globus pallidus, as predicted by a computational network model of cortex, but in contrast to that model, it shows functional correlations with parietal in addition to frontal areas. This work has immediate…

Simulated Simulation: Mirror Neurons Emerge in a Speech Recognition Model

Speech recognition remains a daunting challenge for computer programmers partly because the continuous speech stream is highly under-determined. For example take coarticulation, which refers to the fact that the auditory frequencies corresponding to a given letter are strongly influenced by the letters both preceding and following it - sometimes interpreted to mean that there is no invariant set of purely auditory characteristics defining any given letter. Thus it's difficult to recover the words that a person is saying, since each part of that word is influenced by the words surrounding it…

Source Monitoring and Childhood Amnesia

Yesterday I outlined a few reasons to think that we may not actually forget all of our earliest memories; instead, they may merely be mislabeled due to a failure of source monitoring. According to a 2002 article by Drummey and Newcombe, a similar problem may underlie childhood amnesia - the fragmentary nature of autobiographical memory prior to age 6. Failures of source monitoring are more frequent in patients with brain damage to the frontal cortex (and may be especially reliant on the right frontal lobe). Just like these frontal patients, preschool-aged children have a prefrontal cortex…

A Benefit of Ignorance: Inhibition of Return and the Stroop Effect

While subjects are generally faster to respond to a stimulus if it is presented at a previously "cued" location, they are paradoxically slower to respond if the spatial "cue" occurred more than 300 ms beforehand. This strange phenomenon is known as inhibition of return (IOR), and is thought to result from the reflexive "suppression" of previously-attended locations in space. IOR can be considered an adaptive characteristic of neural information processing, in that IOR ensures that the environment is being constantly searched for new information. It turns out that IOR may have other…

Civility, Science Communication, and the White Patriarchy

My friend Henry Gee at Nature Network wrote a few thoughts about how issues of race, gender and communication were discussed at the recent ScienceOnline2010 conference (#scio10 for the Twitter inclined). In his post he raises what he felt were unfair criticisms to his comments about laying ground rules to enforce civil conversation in science blog posts: I make the point that civility can be encouraged by laying out ground rules - as John Wilkins says on his admirable blog, Evolving Thoughts - and I hope he won't mind my quoting it in extenso: 'This is my living room, so don't piss on the…

Friendly Fire

This is an essay from several years ago, but with so many WWII vets dying, I thought I'd keep this little bit of oral history around. About an hour before my patients begin to show up, I sit at my desk and enjoy a cup of coffee while looking over the charts for the day. On my list was a new patient for the 9:00 slot. I opened his computer chart and saw that he was not new to the VA, only to me. He had been to a series of doctors over the years, and was noted to be hostile and dissatisfied with each. This is often how people seeking help become labeled as "bad patients", and are even "fired"…

The Dark Side is Powerful

Hope, of all ills that men endure, The only cheap and universal cure. ---Abraham Cowley, The Mistress. For Hope. c. 1647 I was visiting my friend in the hospital the other day. She had a port put in under the skin of her chest for chemotherapy. The whole story is unfair. She's a terrific person, with a great husband and an adorable son. She's also doing remarkably well. But that's not today's story. Another friend wondered if maybe she should recommend a macrobiotic diet or something, anything, to help stop this stupid disease. Now, you…

Next Stop Space Elevator

If we're going to make it in this future of ours, we've got to stop thinking that our planet hangs in some kind of splendid isolation in the dead vapor of empty space. We're part and parcel of a dynamic system, a vast cosmos of activity and, probably, intelligence; though our home planet's life span is limited, the Universe is not going anywhere. That said, meet the Space Elevator, probably the most revolutionary idea in the history of aeronautics. Why? Because it's exactly what it sounds like. An elevator. To space. Image courtesy of Liftport Group What's so elegant about the space…

Hyperdrives, Superscript: Computers is Real

A few months ago, in homage to the last puffs of summertime breeze to caress the Pacific Northwest, I visited the largest computer in the world. Not exactly beach blanket bingo, and I probably could have found a more youthful way to celebrate the dog days of summer, but this monument to computational power, too, is unorthodox. Built on a 30-acre plot of land bordering the Columbia River gorge -- a place, up until now, known solely for its excellent windsurfing -- it kicks back 10 million watts of power yearly and hooks into the largest direct DC current in the world, a backbone of fiber…

Understanding urban, low socioeconomic status, African-American Girls’ attitudes towards science

So often we hear of large studies like the GSS being used for attitudes towards science. We also hear the results of science achievement metrics and are disappointed. This article provides a great mix between generalizable quantitative understanding gained through use of a validated instrument and more individualized understanding gained through qualitative research using a critical feminist lens. The authors choose this sequential mixed-methods approach to attend to "questioning how to meet the needs of the many while coming to understand the uniqueness of the individuals among the many." …

SSP09: Wrap up of day two

Seems like I was at the wrong session at the wrong time - I missed Bilder's comments and others that have traveled widely on twitter. Search for #ssp09. The opening keynote today was by the current head of href="http://www.arl.org">ARL, the Association of Research Libraries, Dr Charles B. Lowry.  ARL includes123 major research libraries from the US and Canada - members are the libraries, not individual librarians. Note, too that I think he said that 113 of these were universities.  There are research libraries that are not in universities, btw.  You can read about their mission on…

Gay Penguins Resort To Crime To Become Dads

A few years ago, there was a lot of debate around a penguin couple at the Central Park Zoo. The couple were clearly very much in love - at least as much as any penguin couple can be, and had been for years. They spent their days making love, singing sweet penguin nothings, and cuddling. They even raised a child - and did a "great job", according to their primary keeper, Rob Gramzay (as quoted in the San Fransisco Chronicle). But still people felt they should not be together, and even tried to ban the book in the gift store about their life. Why? Because Roy and Silo are both males. Read The…

Parapsychology Research at Boeing Corp.

Well I guess Boeing does a lot of government research so it really isn't surprising that they would be involved with some of the really stupid things the military has been involved in. Thankfully their research didn't focus on flying their planes psychically (well that we know of). From Danger Room, a Wired Blog: Boeing researchers don't just spend their days designing killer drones and networked tanks. They also investigate unexplained powers of the mind, sometimes. Especially if those times are the late '60s. This study, New Correlation Between a Human Subject and a Quantum Mechanical…

Greenpeace Rocks

A couple weeks ago, Greenpeace invaded the Brussels Seafood Expo and hung signs calling attention to the dismal state of tuna fisheries. Just a week later, Greenpeace-USA announced its forthcoming publication that ranks U.S. supermarkets in terms of procuring sustainable seafood. This is an analogue to the U.K. campaign that has so far been one of my favorite market-based seafood initiatives (read about it here) because it uses negative messaging to affect reputation. Last week, I spoke with Greenpeace-USA's John Hocevar, who is spearheading the U.S. initiative. He revealed Greenpeace's…

Flickering Lights: One-Shot Wonders versus the Network Model

Several bloggers have commented on Paul Bloom's Seed plaint about brain imaging studies receiving too much attention and a certain false credibility. (See the posts at Cognitive Daily , Mixing Memory and — in refutation — Small Gray Matters, as well as other citing blogs via Technorati or BlogPulse.) Bloom has a point: Both popular and science media show an outsized fondness for brain imaging studies, inspiring much work more diverting than informative. The most overhyped of these studies and stories suggest that in some busy brain area lies the locus of love, the center of empathy, or the…

White-Eyes Killing Off Native Birds In Hawaii

Introduced and invasive species are a hot topic in ecology. Even when brought in for good reason, introduced species can have unforeseen negative impacts on the environment and the species around them. Take Cane Toads, for example. They were introduced to Australia to control a particular bug, but ended up eating everything they could fit in their mouths, especially native, endangered species. Or look at the mongoose, brought to Hawaii to control rat populations. While it does enjoy the invasive rodents, it also feeds on the eggs of native birds, decimating their populations. Now, there's…

Our effects are simple: the more people, the fewer fish

People are bad news for fish - yeah, we've known that for awhile. Just look at the decrease in size of catch off the Florida Keys from 1957 to the 1980s and 2007 (on right) and that conclusion is obvious. But, surprisingly, little research has been able to show how human populations affect a group of fish. Most studies focus on one type of fish or are contained to a small area because their manpower is limited to a small team of scientists diving and recording data themselves. Others simply look hypothetically at what increases or decreases in some variable like pollution would have. And even…

Waking the Baby Mammoth

The frozen tundra that covers a majority of Russia and northern Asia is a hard place to live. The average winter temperature is 30 below zero, and winter seems to last a lifetime. The short summer, which still gets only glancing rays of sun, barely breaks above freezing. It's so cold year round that part of the ground never defrosts. Without the flowing groundwater and rich sunlight of more southern climates, the tundra cannot support trees. That's its defining trait, really - "tundra" comes from the Finnish word tunturi, meaning treeless plain. The dominant plant life, thus, are the grasses…