TOP 100 CAMPING SITES
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| Extinct black-footed ferret returns to Canada For the first time in more than 70 years, black-footed ferrets ( Mustela nigripes ) are now living wild on Canadian soil. Last Friday, the Toronto Zoo released 34 black-footed ferrets into the prairies of Grasslands National Park in southern Saskatchewan near the U.S. border. The endangered species--once "probably the rarest mammals on Earth," according to the Black-Footed Ferret Recovery Program --disappeared from Canada in 1937, and was thought to have gone completely extinct around 1974. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Subcontinental Smut: Is Soot the Culprit Behind Melting Himalayan Glaciers? SAN FRANCISCO--The Himalaya Mountain region is warming up three to five times faster than the global trends--or about half a degree Celsius per decade--and many of its glaciers are rapidly losing mass. Greenhouse gases alone cannot explain this warming, however, and several new studies are pointing to an old form of pollution: soot. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Floor Plan: Linoleum May Be Green, but Is There an Ecofriendly Way to Keep It Clean? Dear EarthTalk: I have a new linoleum floor, which I chose partly for its ecofriendliness. How do I clean and maintain it without using harsh or toxic chemicals? --A. J. Maimbourg, via e-mail [More] rss.sciam.com |
Summer Camp, for the Creative and Career-Conscious For some children, vacation season is a time to be hip and “aspirational.” nytimes.com |
A Geometric Theory of Everything (preview) Modern physics began with a sweeping unification: in 1687 Isaac Newton showed that the existing jumble of disparate theories describing everything from planetary motion to tides to pendulums were all aspects of a universal law of gravitation. Unification has played a central role in physics ever since. In the middle of the 19th century James Clerk Maxwell found that electricity and magnetism were two facets of electromagnetism. One hundred years later electromagnetism was unified with the weak nuclear force governing radioactivity, in what physicists call the electroweak theory.This quest for unification is driven by practical, philosophical and aesthetic considerations. When successful, merging theories clarifies our understanding of the universe and leads us to discover things we might otherwise never have suspected. Much of the activity in experimental particle physics today, at accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, involves a search for novel phenomena predicted by the unified electroweak theory. In addition to predicting new physical effects, a unified theory provides a more aesthetically satisfying picture of how our universe operates. Many physicists share an intuition that, at the deepest level, all physical phenomena match the patterns of some beautiful mathematical structure. [More] rss.sciam.com |