[Photo by Jake Eberhardt via Flickr & CC 2.0 License] Lakes make excellent witnesses, says Utah State University assistant professor Janice Brahney. The sediment at the bottom of lakes can hold clues about life in the lake thousands of years ago, preserving everything from fossils to traces of rainfall. “I wanted to be a detective …
[Photo by David Short via Flickr & Creative Commons 2.0] “By Request” is a series of posts where I track down studies that answer questions asked by you, my blog’s readers. High School Friend Elna asked: “Impending extinction of bees- what can prevent?” That’s a tough question to answer, because some bee populations are at much …
About half a billion people live on fan-shaped floodplains that form where rivers meet the sea. Those plains, called river deltas, share the same fan-like shape the world over. Even after controlling for factors like the size of the river, the slope of the land its channel traverses, and the makeup of the local soil, …
The Talk: Uncharted Waters: Novel Ecosystems in the Marine Environment (part of the Ecological Systems in the Anthropocene series) In Plain English: Humans have messed up the ocean, so Harvard asks marine biologists, “What are you excited about?!” The Speaker(s): Mary O’Connor of University of British Columbia, Jeremy Jackson of Scripps Institute for Oceanography, Trevor …
The Talk: “Planetary Changes from Deep Time to the 4th Kind” In Plain English: Life doesn’t just adapt to geochemical features; it transforms them simply by…living. The Speaker: Andrew Knoll of Harvard and David Grinspoon of the Planetary Science Institute The Sponsor: Planet and Life Series, sponsored by MIT Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences dept. …
The Talk: Killing a Midwest Generation In Plain English: How a Chicago non-profit from a low-income neighborhood got an asthma-inducing coal plant shut down The Speaker: Kimberly Wasserman of Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO) The Sponsor: Fossil Free MIT What it covered: When Kimberly Wasserman of the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO) took …