TOP 100 CAMPING SITES
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| Putting the "Green" in Greensburg: A Tornado-Ravaged Town Reinvents Itself GREENSBURG, Kan.--On the north side of this Midwestern town, an enormous white grain silo--one of few structures that survived a 2007 tornado--stands watch over construction in the business district along U.S. Route 54.This commercial strip is still being rebuilt, along with the rest of Greensburg. New low-slung, ranch-style homes line some streets. Others are pocked by weedy open lots studded with "for sale" signs. Stumps dot the landscape, remnants of the once-stately trees that shaded the town. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Meteorologists say "yes" to geoengineering Pumping sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to block the sun, brightening clouds with reflective sea salt, or fertilizing the oceans with iron are just some of the way-out schemes some scientists have proposed to fight global warming if all else fails. [More] rss.sciam.com |
A tree grows in Vietnam... and another is lost in Burma Since the 1990s, Vietnam has managed a seemingly impressive forestry trick: While overall forest cover in the country has increased, so have its exports of wood goods, like patio furniture. So how did the Southeast Asian country manage the feat? [More] rss.sciam.com |
Rethinking "Hobbits": What They Mean for Human Evolution (preview) In 2004 a team of Australian and Indonesian scientists who had been excavating a cave called Liang Bua on the Indonesian island of Flores announced that they had unearthed something extraordinary: a partial skeleton of an adult human female who would have stood just over a meter tall and who had a brain a third as large as our own. The specimen, known to scientists as LB1, quickly received a fanciful nickname--the hobbit, after writer J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional creatures. The team proposed that LB1 and the other fragmentary remains they recovered represent a previously unknown human species, Homo floresiensis . Their best guess was that H. floresiensis was a descendant of H. erectus --the first species known to have colonized outside of Africa. The creature evolved its small size, they surmised, as a response to the limited resources available on its island home--a phenomenon that had previously been documented in other mammals, but never humans.The finding jolted the paleoanthropological community. Not only was H. floresiensis being held up as the first example of a human following the so-called island rule, but it also seemed to reverse a trend toward ever larger brain size over the course of human evolution. Furthermore, the same deposits in which the small-bodied, small-brained individuals were found also yielded stone tools for hunting and butchering animals, as well as remainders of fires for cooking them--rather advanced behaviors for a creature with a brain the size of a chimpanzee’s. And astonishingly, LB1 lived just 18,000 years ago--thousands of years after our other late-surviving relatives, the Neandertals and H. erectus , disappeared [see “ The Littlest Human ,” by Kate Wong; Scientific American, February 2005]. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Does the U.S. do a good job handling wild horses?: Yea or Neigh? There's been a lot of whinnying lately over the fate of wild horses in the U.S.: How many there should be? What happens to the ones that get culled? Should they remain wild at all? The fates of these iconic animals has people on each side of the debate, including celebrities like Sheryl Crow , up in arms, and the clutter of opinions makes it hard to cut through to the facts. For example, is it true that the government sells wild horses for slaughter? (We'll get to the answer later.) [More] rss.sciam.com |