Thousands of years ago, the Earth went through a warming phase that rivaled the drama of modern climate change predictions. And at least one species adapted its diet to survive. Between 18,000 and 10,000 years ago, an ice age was ending. Juniper trees vanished from what is now the Mojave Desert, in the southern reaches [...]
As a newcomer to the blogosphere in recent months, I’ve stumbled on a few really innovative sites. One of the first was “Framing Science,” a blog at scienceblogs.com authored by Matthew Nisbet. Nisbet is a communications professor at American University, and he’s churning out some incredibly helpful ideas. I love the blog — and Nisbet’s [...]
I’ll probably never forget that hour in my living room, in the middle of the night in Cullman, Alabama (population about 10,000). The rain drops were so big they sounded like hail on the roof and windows (and might have been), and a city-wide siren was going off — a martial-law type sound accompanied by strobe [...]
On the very day a deadly earthquake struck Italy, new research was unveiled that could help people survive such tragedies. Civil engineer Darcey Donovan, a graduate of the University of Nevada at Reno, has been building straw bale homes since 2006 in the foothills of the Himalayas — where 100,000 people died in a 2005 quake. [...]