Category: Nature
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Rivers. Complex deltas. Order out of chaos.
River deltas, with their intricate networks of waterways, coastal barrier islands, wetlands and estuaries, often appear to have been formed by random processes, but scientists at the University of California, Irvine and other institutions see order in the apparent chaos. Through field studies and mathematical modeling, they have concluded that deltas “self-organize” to increase the…
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Bear. Silence. Destruction.
Alaska’s Gates of the Arctic National Park is so vast that it stretches across an area bigger than Vermont, Rhode Island and Delaware combined. Karupa Lake, tucked off in its northern corner, is so remote that reaching it takes a four-hour skiplane flight from Fairbanks. And it’s so quiet — a day alone there could…
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Iced water. With no ice. Alchemy. Summer breeze…
Water can remain liquid below zero degrees Celsius. It is called supercooled water and is present in refrigerators. At even smaller temperatures, supercooled water could exist as a cocktail of two distinct liquids. Unfortunately, the presence of ice often prevents us from observing this phenomenon. (1) Water has got super high surface tension and apparently,…
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Nature in Balance… A lesson we choose not to know.
In October 2016, Hurricane Matthew roared through the Caribbean as a near-worst-case Category 4 storm, with high winds that devastated Haiti and other countries. But when it made landfall in the United States a few days later, Matthew limped into South Carolina as a Category 1, bringing torrential rains and flooding but little else. That…
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Stealing seeds. Digging earth…
Earlier this month, a federal court indicted a Chinese national for trying to steal GMO corn technology from DuPont, Monsanto, and AgReliant Genetics. The scientist’s arrest is just the latest in a series of indictments against six other people linked to a Beijing seed-development company called Dabeinong Technology Group Co. The FBI alleges the Dabeinong…
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