| MIND Reviews: The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us about Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life by Alison Gopnik. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009 [More] rss.sciam.com |
Grizzly Details: Salmon Collapse Could Be Bad News for Bears [Slide Show] For most of May Chris Darimont, an environmental scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz , poured liters of fermented cattle blood mixed with pureed rotten fish guts on 3,000 square kilometers of British Columbia's coastal wilderness. [More] rss.sciam.com |
How Toads Conquered the World [Slide Show] Cane toads are seemingly innocuous enough. First imported to Australia to control a beetle pest of sugarcane fields, they are now frog-marching their way across the island continent , wreaking havoc on in situ flora and fauna. The key to their domination has been protection from would-be predators and an ability to breed fast. But how were cane toads gifted with those traits in the first place? [More] rss.sciam.com |
Oil spill worsens, offshore drilling plans in dire straits? The Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill keeps getting worse--now gushing more than 200,000 gallons per day , according to NOAA estimates--five times more than original estimates and more than BP's absolute worst case scenario in disaster plans filed with the government. That may not change any time soon. The last big blowout, at Ixtoc off Mexico in 1979, took almost a year to stop and spilled some 140 million gallons of oil before it was through, making it still the second largest oil spill ever (Saddam Hussein's intentional opening of the Kuwaiti and Iraqi wells during the first Gulf War remains, by far, the largest oil spill at roughly 1 billion gallons .) [More] rss.sciam.com |
Light-control measures appear effective near a key Arizona astronomical site Kitt Peak in southern Arizona is blessed with two of the attributes astronomers most value in a telescope site, high elevation and low humidity, both of which reduce the atmospheric distortion of starlight before it reaches a ground-based telescope peering into the night sky. Add in generally clear weather, and it is no wonder that more than two dozen telescopes now dot the 2,100-meter summit. The National Optical Astronomy Observatory has operated the Kitt Peak National Observatory there since 1958, and several university consortia and research groups have built telescopes on the mountain as well. [More] Astronomy - Kitt Peak National Observatory - National Optical Astronomy Observatory - Telescope - Observatories rss.sciam.com |