If you stop to listen to the “solution” to the energy crisis, you’ll hear millions of people (including most politicians) reassuring themselves that coal will be the new oil, because the United States has plenty of it and because there is now a way to burn coal “cleanly.” This last…
I read quite a few textbook quotes from this report and I must agree: they are shockingly inaccurate. This book repeatedly pushes the conservative line, even when the facts don't support it--just like the Bush Administration. The existence of this high school textbook is yet more evidence that we are…
I’m in Chicago with my nine-year old daughter and Shedd Aquarium was an important destination for us. We spent much of our Aquarium time at the Wild Reef exhibit.
The coral reefs of the world support about a quarter of our sea life, so they are immensely important, yet humans are destroying them in a wide variety of ways.
As important as the reefs are to world ecology, reef life is also stunningly beautiful. You can see these communities up close at Shedd. The irony is hard to ignore whenever you can view warm water life in Chicago while it’s bitterly cold outside.
Shedd Aquarium does a wonderful job displaying its marine life. It’s difficult to stop taking photos, if you have a digital camera. I took more than 100 photos, then deleted many of them, leaving about a dozen photos I liked. The challenge is not finding beautiful scenes to photograph. The Aquarium is full of such opportunities. The challenges are the low light conditions (no flash photography allowed, for the protection of the animals), combined with the quick movements of some of the creatures. Note: I took all of these photos with a Canon A700, a modest consumer-grade digital camera that is about 2-years old. Also, these photos are only minimally retouched. Comparable scenes await anyone interested in traveling to Chicago to visit Shedd Aquarium.
Many of the organisms living at a reef look like underwater plants, but they are actually animals. Those animals include the corals themselves…
Two can live more energy-efficiently than one, according to this article from New Scientist: “Divorced households are smaller than married households, but consume more land, water, and energy per person than married households,” says Jianguo Liu of Michigan State University in East Lansing, US, who carried out the 12-country analysis with…
I’ve just read a good book about genetics. The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution by Sean B. Carroll. There is much food for thought in this book. One reviewer called it “A Primer of Evolutionary Theory for Beginners”, and this is accurate. One doesn’t need to know chemistry or physics to follow his reasoning, because he teaches the most necessary pieces.
Basically, this book examines what has turned up in studying the genomes of various species over the last couple of decades, as well as tracing genes from generation to generation in the same family line. It starts with a simple introduction to what DNA is, how it works, and how we know this. Then it gradually leads one to understand how genes transform from one generation to the next, and how this leads to speciation.
Basically, ever-present radiation, random chemistry, and aggressive biology cause frequent single-letter changes in DNA. Also RNA copy-and-paste errors regularly drop or duplicate entire gene sequences. After this see Darwin for how some mutations are explicitly preserved, some are inevitably removed, and most simply languish in or become fossil genes because there is no preference one way or the other. Carroll covers all this in many examples.
Carroll presents the simple probability and large numbers theory to illustrate the surprising speed at which populations can change, and then shows functioning (or no longer functioning) genes that have in fact visibly changed populations so rapidly.
This book gives plenty …