Provocative New Study Warns of Crossing Planetary Boundaries

Posted on September 23, 2009May 13, 2020 by admin

Yale Environment 360, September 23, 2009

Human civilization has had a stable childhood. Over the past 10,000 years, as our ancestors invented agriculture and built cities, the Earth remained relatively stable. The average global temperature fluttered slightly, never lurching towards a greenhouse climate or chilling enough to enter a new Ice Age. The pH of the oceans remained steady, providing the right chemical conditions for coral reefs to grow and invertebrates to build shells. Those species, in turn, helped support a stable food web that provided plenty of fish for us humans to catch. The overall stability of the past 10,000 years may have played a big part in humanity’s explosion.

Continue reading “Provocative New Study Warns of Crossing Planetary Boundaries” →

The Secrets Inside Your Dog’s Mind

Posted on September 21, 2009May 13, 2020 by admin

Time, September 21, 2009

Link

Brian Hare, assistant professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University, holds out a dog biscuit.

“Henry!” he says. Henry is a big black schnauzer-poodle mix–a schnoodle, in the words of his owner, Tracy Kivell, another Duke anthropologist. Kivell holds on to Henry’s collar so that he can only gaze at the biscuit.

“You got it?” Hare asks Henry. Hare then steps back until he’s standing between a pair of inverted plastic cups on the floor. He quickly puts the hand holding the biscuit under one cup, then the other, and holds up both empty hands. Hare could run a very profitable shell game. No one in the room–neither dog nor human–can tell which cup hides the biscuit.

Continue reading “The Secrets Inside Your Dog’s Mind” →

Where Does Sex Live in the Brain? From Top to Bottom

Posted on September 9, 2009May 13, 2020 by admin

Discover, September 9, 2009

Link

On April 11, 1944, a doctor named T. C. Erickson addressed the Chicago Neurological Society about a patient he called Mrs. C. W. At age 43 she had started to wake up many nights feeling as if she were having sex—or as she put it to Erickson, feeling “hot all over.” As the years passed her hot spells struck more often, even in the daytime, and began to be followed by seizures that left her unable to speak. Erickson examined Mrs. C. W. when she was 54 and diagnosed her with nymphomania. He prescribed a treatment that was shockingly common at the time: He blasted her ovaries with X-rays.

Continue reading “Where Does Sex Live in the Brain? From Top to Bottom” →

Where Did All the Flowers Come From?

Posted on September 7, 2009May 28, 2020 by admin

The New York Times, September 7, 2009

Link

Throughout his life, Charles Darwin surrounded himself with flowers. When he was 10, he wrote down each time a peony bloomed in his father’s garden. When he bought a house to raise his own family, he turned the grounds into a botanical field station where he experimented on flowers until his death. But despite his intimate familiarity with flowers, Darwin once wrote that their evolution was “an abominable mystery.”

Darwin could see for himself how successful flowering plants had become. They make up the majority of living plant species, and they dominate many of the world’s ecosystems, from rain forests to grasslands. They also dominate our farms.

Continue reading “Where Did All the Flowers Come From?” →

First Trace of Color Found in Fossil Bird Feathers

Posted on August 31, 2009May 13, 2020 by admin

The New York Times, August 31, 2009

Link

Birds, more than any other group of animals, are a celebration of color. They have evolved to every extreme of the spectrum, from the hot pink of flamingos to the shimmering blue of a peacock’s neck. Yet, for decades, paleontologists who study extinct birds have had to use their imaginations to see the colors in the fossils. Several feather fossils have been unearthed over the years, but they have always been assumed to be colorless vestiges.

Now a team of scientists has discovered color-producing molecules that have survived for 47 million years in the fossil of a feather. By analyzing those molecules, the researchers have shown that they would have given a bird the kind of dark, iridescent sheen found on starlings and other living birds.

Continue reading “First Trace of Color Found in Fossil Bird Feathers” →