The Dawnland Dedicated to Sloane Acadia For at least the last 12,000 years, Indigenous Americans have inhabited a region of the Atlantic Coast, including Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and parts of Quebec. The people called this land Wabanakik. A group of nations – the Maliseet, Mi’kmaq, Passamaquoddy, Abenaki, and […]
Apgar When a baby joins our planet today, doctors or nurses evaluate them at one minute old and again at five minutes old, using a system called the Apgar Score. Five attributes each receive a score of 0-2, making the overall score a range between 0 and 10. If you have a child in modern times,
Visualizing Wind Speeds We recently learned about the Beaufort Scale. In the early 19th century, Sir Francis Beaufort sought to create an empirical system for describing wind speeds, in an effort to make communication about conditions useful to mariners. As the scale matured, it moved from informing dedicated sailors to anyone on the water to anyone
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The Beaufort Scale The son of a cartographer, Sir Francis Beaufort was born in Ireland, despite the French last name, in 1774. His father instilled attention to the accuracy of charts and information, but his grasp on the value of these accuracies sunk in with literal meaning when he was shipwrecked due to erroneous graphs
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ʻOumuamua Our solar system is a big place. We sent the Voyager probes on a one-way trip out of the sun’s domain in 1977. It took the two crafts more than 35 years to reach the edge of the heliosphere, the point where they entered interstellar space. And they only had to travel approximately the
Bear Huggers In addition to the intellectual and spiritual awe that wildlife elicits in the lover of nature, it is undeniable that many of the furry, feathered, and fluffy fauna that share our planet are downright cute. Many humans have a soft spot for critters, especially the baby variety. Puppies and kittens get all the
Carrauntoohil – Ireland’s High Point Ireland’s western coast is strewn with fantastic mountains. The southwestern tip of the island contains the famous Ring of Kerry, a loop that tours the Iveragh Peninsula of County Kerry. This region is a quintessentially Irish mix of rock and green. The mountains and the sea intersect in a sensory delight. Nestled
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Tree Speak and the Wood Wide Web Traditionally, we have viewed trees as individuals, stoic as they compete for sunlight, survive storms, and slowly grow from tiny seeds to monstrous sentinels. This viewpoint is human, a sort of anthropomorphized version of a natural-resource economy or a misunderstanding of Darwinism. Only the strong trees endure, as they
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Forrest Fenn’s Treasure A human named Forrest Fenn flew 328 combat missions in 365 days during the Vietnam War. Twice he was shot down. His experiences earned him a Silver Star. When Fenn left the military, he ended up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he eventually established an art gallery that turned into a multi-million-dollar
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Old Whitey Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary and Underwater Preserve occupies 4,300 square miles of Lake Huron on the northern half of Michigan’s southern peninsula. This zone was the 13th area to be protected in American waters but the first in the Great Lakes. As you might gather from a name such as Thunder Bay,