environment
grrlscientist | August 28, 2009The cricket sang,
And set the sun,
And workmen finished, one by one,
Their seam the day upon.
The low grass loaded with the dew,
The twilight stood as strangers do
With hat in hand, polite and new,
To stay as if, or go.
A vastness, as a neighbor, came,--
A wisdom without face or name,
A peace, as hemispheres at home,--
And so the night became.
~ Emily Dickinson
This is the cutest event I've heard of for NYC: a night spent counting crickets and katydids.
What: NYC Cricket Crawl (counting 7 species of crickets and katydids in NYC)
Where: New York City area
When: Friday, 11 September 2009 at 7:…
pharyngula | August 28, 2009Tips for flourishing after a mass extinction. Ceratites nodosus (MCZ-7232) (A), from the Triassic of Germany, was similar to the ceratitid ammonoid species that thrived in the water column in the Early Triassic (1), while bottom-dwelling species languished. Key to the ceratitids' rapid success after the end-Permian mass extinction were their ecological tolerances, which may be inferred by reference to their closest living relatives, the coleoids (squids, octopuses, and cuttlefish), including the low-oxygen specialist Vampyroteuthis infernalis (B).
This picture has a little story behind it.…
ejohnson | August 27, 2009
For the first time in over a century, New York's Salmon River is home to its namesake species of fish. Young Atlantic salmon were abundant in the Salmon River and nearby Lake Ontario in the 19th century but were driven away by damming, pollution and overfishing—now, USGS scientists have reported that efforts to reestablish the salmon population are beginning to produce results. Atlantic salmon made a comeback this year in the Seine River as well after a similarly lengthy absence. But as Jennifer Jacquet warns on Guilty Planet, the prognosis for fish is still bad; the shrinking sizes of the…
emjohnson | August 26, 2009It took the threat of nuclear annihilation between the two greatest powers of the 20th century to solve one of the most profound scientific controversies of the 1800s. In 1952 Dr. Harry Ladd, a researcher for the US Geological Survey, convinced the US War Department to drill holes deep into the Bikini and Eniwetok Atolls just prior to their obliteration by hydrogen bombs. The reason for the drilling had little to do with the nuclear tests as part of Operation Crossroads, but was simply to conduct an experiment based on the hypothesis of coral reef formation first proposed by Charles Darwin…
grrlscientist | August 26, 2009The cricket sang,
And set the sun,
And workmen finished, one by one,
Their seam the day upon.
The low grass loaded with the dew,
The twilight stood as strangers do
With hat in hand, polite and new,
To stay as if, or go.
A vastness, as a neighbor, came,--
A wisdom without face or name,
A peace, as hemispheres at home,--
And so the night became.
~ Emily Dickinson
This is the cutest event I've heard of for NYC: a night spent counting crickets and katydids.
What: NYC Cricket Crawl (counting 7 species of crickets and katydids in NYC)
Where: New York City area
When: Friday, 11 September 2009 at 7:…
grrlscientist | August 24, 2009The cricket sang,
And set the sun,
And workmen finished, one by one,
Their seam the day upon.
The low grass loaded with the dew,
The twilight stood as strangers do
With hat in hand, polite and new,
To stay as if, or go.
A vastness, as a neighbor, came,--
A wisdom without face or name,
A peace, as hemispheres at home,--
And so the night became.
~ Emily Dickinson
This is the cutest event I've heard of for NYC: a night spent counting crickets and katydids.
What: NYC Cricket Crawl (counting 7 species of crickets and katydids in NYC)
Where: New York City area
When: Friday, 11 September 2009 at 7:…
grrlscientist | August 23, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
grrlscientist | August 22, 2009The cricket sang,
And set the sun,
And workmen finished, one by one,
Their seam the day upon.
The low grass loaded with the dew,
The twilight stood as strangers do
With hat in hand, polite and new,
To stay as if, or go.
A vastness, as a neighbor, came,--
A wisdom without face or name,
A peace, as hemispheres at home,--
And so the night became.
~ Emily Dickinson
This is the cutest event I've heard of for NYC: a night spent counting crickets and katydids.
What: NYC Cricket Crawl (counting 7 species of crickets and katydids in NYC)
Where: New York City area
When: Friday, 11 September 2009 at 7:…
grrlscientist | August 21, 2009The cricket sang,
And set the sun,
And workmen finished, one by one,
Their seam the day upon.
The low grass loaded with the dew,
The twilight stood as strangers do
With hat in hand, polite and new,
To stay as if, or go.
A vastness, as a neighbor, came,--
A wisdom without face or name,
A peace, as hemispheres at home,--
And so the night became.
~ Emily Dickinson
This is the cutest event I've heard of for NYC: a night spent counting crickets and katydids.
What: NYC Cricket Crawl (counting 7 species of crickets and katydids in NYC)
Where: New York City area
When: Friday, 11 September 2009 at 7:…
khannula | August 20, 2009Anne Jefferson, a hydro-geomorpho-climate geologist at UNC-Charlotte, has officially joined Highly Allochthonous as Chris Rowan's co-blogger. Anne's been unofficially co-blogging there for a while, but it's great to see her role made more official. And it's especially great to see someone with expertise in water and surface processes on Sb.
(Anne and I are also working together on a survey about women geoscientists and blogs - if you haven't taken it, please check it out.)
grrlscientist | August 16, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
revere | August 14, 2009If you are a paranoid hypochondriacal person with young children who lives in a suburb, you've come to the right/wrong place (take your pick). Because now you get to hear about Baylisascaris procyonis. What's that, you ask? The procyon part should be the tip-off, but I suppose not that many people know that Procyon is the genus to which raccoons (Procyon loto) belong. We're going to talk about raccoon latrines.
Yes, raccoons have latrines. Who would be crazy or stupid enough to build a latrine for raccoons? Other raccoons. Raccoons have communal defecating sites called raccoon latrines where…
razib | August 13, 2009A helpful invasive species?:
Introduced species can wreak havoc on the ecosystems they invade. But what happens after they've been established for centuries? A new study in the latest Proceedings of the Royal Society suggests that, in one case, an introduced species has actually become an important part of the native ecosystem -- and helps protect native species from another invader [$-a].
...
Recently a news article in Nature discussed ragamuffin earth [$-a] -- the idea that human interference in nature has so dramatically changed natural systems that it may often be impossible to restore "…
grrlscientist | August 9, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
esiegel | August 5, 2009The Wall Street Journal has just reported that over 1,000 people in the Americas, according to data released by the World Health Organization, have died from the Swine Flu. They seem to think you should be alarmed.
The global A/H1N1 swine flu pandemic has claimed 1,154 lives since the outbreak was identified in April, data published by the World Health Organization showed Wednesday.
The Geneva-based health agency also said that the number of laboratory-confirmed cases stood at 162,380 worldwide as of July 31.
The WHO has estimated that 2 billion people, or one in three of the world's…
grrlscientist | August 5, 2009tags: potable water, safe drinking water, LifeSaver Bottle, streaming video
Too much of the world lacks access to clean drinking water. In this video, engineer Michael Pritchard did something about it -- inventing the portable Lifesaver filter, which can make the most revolting water drinkable in seconds. An amazing demo from TEDGlobal 2009. [10:05]
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes.
khannula | August 4, 2009There was a mountain lion in the courtyard of a local elementary school playground today.
A mountain lion.
At the elementary school.
A neighbor called the police, who called the Department of Wildlife, who shot the mountain lion. A young male, about 75 pounds, probably recently headed out on its own. Apparently that's the age they usually are when the DOW kills them for wandering around in town.
I just finished read The Beast in the Garden, this year's common reading at the college, so the story sounds eerily familiar. The Beast in the Garden is about the mountain lions that began showing up…
emjohnson | August 4, 2009In 1996 Cornell astrophysicist and science popularizer Carl Sagan posed the question, "What are conservatives conserving?" It was not something he asked lightly. The question appeared in his final book following a prolonged battle with bone marrow disease. Faced with his own mortality, he wanted to understand the individuals whose actions, whether consciously or not, threatened the lives of so many others. Sagan was a passionate advocate for science but, first and foremost, he was an advocate for humanity itself.
A kindred spirit, someone representing the same passion for science and…
grrlscientist | August 2, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
pharyngula | July 31, 2009That crank pseudoscience site, Watt's Up With That, got thoroughly reamed out with the video below (just the fact that the chief crackpot, Anthony Watts, would show up on Glenn Beck's show is indictment enough, though). Watt was not too happy with his public evisceration, however, and scurried off to get it taken down. Here it is, reposted. Enjoy — it's a very good takedown of the climate denialist claims.
(via Deltoid)