Not So Silent Spring
By Dawn Stover
January-March 2009 / Vol. 10 No. 1
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Discussion Questions
1. Define the term soundscape. What is the soundscape of your classroom? Your home? The “ecosystem” in which you live?
2. What background noise do you hear when people are not talking or otherwise making noise […] Read More »
The Nature of the Fiscal World
By Tali Woodward
January-March 2009 / Vol. 10 No. 1
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Discussion Questions
1. According to Oliver Pergams, how might economic growth have been miscast as a panacea? What might be misleading about simply characterizing economic growth as “good” or “bad”? What are some of the possible […] Read More »
Mushroom Messiah
By John Weier
January-March 2009 / Vol. 10 No. 1
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Discussion Questions
1. Why are old growth forests so important for understanding the services provided by fungi? Why does Paul Stamets say “We can make the argument that we should save old growth forests as a matter of national defense”? […] Read More »
Writers and Thinkers in the Current Issue
Bernie Krause started out as a musician, but hanging out with the Beach Boys gave way to a career in bioacooustic science. After 40 years in the field, Krause has amassed recordings of ecosystems all over the world and developed a revolutionary theory about how animals work together […] Read More »
Maps in The Atlas of the Real World: Mapping the Way We Live show us the familiar image of the world distorted into ways we’ve never seen before. The landmass displayed in each “cartogram” is proportional to any number of factors, from coal use to species at risk of extinction.
Click here to read […] Read More »
The Atlas of the Real World: Mapping the Way We Live
By Daniel Dorling, Mark Newman, and Anna Barford
Thames & Hudson, 2008
Open The Atlas of the Real World and you’ll find pages and pages of maps that look like reflections from clown mirrors. On one page, Africa fills up half of the […] Read More »
The Better to Eat You With: Fear in the Animal World
By Joel Berger
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Review by Florence Williams
It’s been said that some scientists unconsciously take on the characteristics of the wildlife they study. I know a grizzly biologist who lumbers through the woods, picking edible berries with his […] Read More »
To feed, humpback whales round up prey into nets of bubbles, then blast through the trapped swarm, mouths agape, to catch the feast. Believing bumps on the humpbacks’ flippers aid the underwater maneuver, scientists, in an unlikely twist, are now mimicking the design for a next-generation wind turbine.
The connection between whales and wind […] Read More »
Inspired by plankton, researchers from the University of Genoa, Italy, are developing tiny robots that drift through the ocean and collect data along the way. Dubbed “smart plankton,” the gadgets would keep track of everything from temperature to pollution; thanks to an ingenious design that harvests power from the ocean, they could provide a […] Read More »
When Phil Kithil decided to help victims of Hurricane Katrina, he wanted to do something far more dramatic than donating money or building houses. Kithil, an entrepreneur and inventor, set out to devise a way to actually prevent future destruction by weakening hurricanes before they strike land. And his solution—a system of self-powered pumps […] Read More »
It takes plenty of water to farm fish, and West Virginia aquaculturists have tapped into an unlikely source: abandoned coal mines. But if the thought of eating food grown in mine runoff makes you queasy, consider that the water is perfectly clean and that fish raised in it are safe to eat.
Mining leaves […] Read More »
One freezing day in February 2006, physicist Andreas Mershin huddled with others around a tree on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus to watch an unlikely demonstration. An engineering company claimed it could produce electricity simply by wiring a nail in the tree’s trunk to a metal rod in the ground. Sure enough, the […] Read More »
