beside the lake, beneath the trees
How Trees Calm Us Down: Urban environments can certainly elicit involuntary attention… but they do so in a harsh, peremptory way that requires voluntary attenti...
Category: nature
Lost highway
SFist The sleepy beach town of Bolinas has something lively to talk about this week, as reports emerge that a coyote (or coyotes) has been attacking cars along ...
What if the movie Contagion were about viruses rather than globalization?
Soderbergh’s Contagion is a movie about the ills of globalization, right down to the ridiculous closing sequence in which deforestation by a multinational...
A sentence about an animal that begs our species’ sense of self.
Nature: Chadwick relates the story of a wolverine kit that perished during its first winter. Researchers later found the tiny body in a depression scraped from ...
the microscopic battles that conquered the Americas
If the Spanish who arrived to the Americas in the 1400s had become infected with native viruses that felled them, they might never have become the conquistadore...
art/business/design/ideas/journalism/language/latin america/mental illness/movies & television/music/nature/people/play/power/technology/work
About a year of tweets, archived here for posterity.
I began this current journal, XSML, with the intent of reducing my own notes to extra small, XML-friendly updates. Increasingly, I have been drawn by the allure...
Of dependencies, complexity and what, if any, is our destiny.
The other day I was talking with colleagues about the way that we use tools to overcome our physiological limitations and, in particular, how we have begun to u...
We are bacteria all the way down.
From Burkhard Bilger’s savvy report on fermentation and underground food culture in the U.S., sadly available only as an abstract to non-subscribers: Mode...
CBD: “a ‘slow-motion response’ to a disease that’s already destroyed a major part of the animal kingdom.”
Wired: As an apocalyptic bat disease threatens to spread across the United States, the stage is set for a showdown between the federal government and environmen...
For a funny reconciliation of Jesus and Darwin, please read “When the Yogurt Took Over” by John Scalzi http://is.gd/gez4G
John Scalzi’s When the Yogurt Took Over: A Short Story is a wonderful take on evolution and the role of humans in the big picture (hint: not necessarily c...
Your dog has been ringing for the last four hours. Please pick it up. Or, a smart collar and smartphone app product.
I think knowledge of how dogs work is not equally distributed (otherwise, why would Cesar Millan, the dog whisperer, be rich and famous?) However, knowledge of ...
A nail-biter, page-turner, on the edge of your seats drama… about cap and trade.
Ryan Lizza’s recent account of the birth and death of the most promising U.S. response to global warming is by far one of the best written thrillers I hav...
Nothing is solid; gorgeous prose from The Ecomomist
Gorgeous writing from The Economist: The Earth is a recycling scheme that has been running for a third of the age of the universe. Microbes and plants endlessly...
Silvio, the renewable energy rich playboys of Portugal await your electric Ferraris.
The NYT: Nearly 45 percent of the electricity in Portugal’s grid will come from renewable sources this year, up from 17 percent just five years ago. Land-based ...
Why there are no more geese in Prospect Park, NYC.
Unintended Consequence #824,357 of humans “filtering” nature (aka, how evolution happens), from KingEdRa, a commenter at MetaFilter: First thereR...
Learning from nature.
Slime Mold Beats Humans at Perfecting Traffic Networks
Canaries (and more) in the coalmine that is Earth.
Margaret Atwood on why we should not assume any bird species will survive without our help: One more statistic: according to Al Gore, 97% of charitable giving g...
Tilting the scales, again.
This shark story from Australia (an estimated 20 ft long predator takes two big bites out of a 10 ft great white) is sad, to me. The prey was caught by a human ...
intelligence
Orangutans use leaves to deepen the sound of their voices in order to scare off predators. Previously: whales.