Indigo Buntings One of the most distinctive birds of the Americas is the indigo bunting. Named for its resemblance to an ancient dye, the bird can be brilliantly colored. A male indigo bunting – photo by Dan Pancamo Indigo is the black sheep of the ROYGBIV colors. Is it closer to blue or purple? Is it even a […]
Yellow Dust In the fifth year of Di Xin, it rained dust at Bo. –The Bamboo Annals In the past decade, Americans living east of the Mississippi have become accustomed to occasional skyscapes that were previously confined to the West. At times, the Sun’s disk can almost be viewed safely with the naked eye during the day,
Top Dads written by Deborah S. You might be familiar with some of the better-known dads of the animal kingdom, such as the Emperor penguin, where the father incubates eggs and cares for newborns, while the mother leaves to gather sustenance. Or, perhaps seahorse papas, which, unlike almost all other species, carry eggs in a pouch
Orangey Minerva Animal characters on television and film can be as memorable as the most iconic human personalities. Toto. Mr. Ed. Lassie. In 1939’s The Wizard of Oz, Toto was played by a female Cairn Terrier named Terry. For many of the television roles, multiple critters played the part. Six collies played Lassie, starting with Pal
The Red Queen Hypothesis Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. –Red Queen, Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass Undoubtedly, one of the greatest scientific revolutions transpired in the mid-1800s, as Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace advanced the theory of evolution. Borne time and again
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Oklahoma Has Mountains! It’s always dangerous to assume stereotypes are true or, at the very least, absolute. The states in the Great Plains have earned reputations as flat, featureless bread baskets. In some ways, this standing is accurate. The majority of agriculture in the United States comes from this region. However, digging into the statistics
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The Mountain Is Coming and We Must Go For many who feel the call of the mountains, living amongst the Alps in Switzerland might be Edenic. If you lived in Blatten, one of four tiny villages in the Lötschental, a valley in the Bernese Alps, you could wake up every day to see these views
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Simona and the Forest of the White Tower We should finally acknowledge that Earth is not our property. We are only co-tenants of Earth and we could, in a way that would not be too costly for us, curb our appetites and let all those other creatures live. –Simona Kossack Before modern human civilization reshaped
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Mostly Clear vs. Partly Cloudy We love to hate on weatherpeople and their nebulous percentages. How can they get it so wrong? As it turns out, meteorologists are increasingly accurate. Graphic by Hannah Ritchie Even if we concede that the weather prognosticators have improved, perhaps some of their success comes from vague wording. For example,
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Hay Fever Many people cite spring and fall as their favorite seasons. The moderate temperatures and humidities allow us to enjoy the outdoors without freezing or heat exhaustion. For billions of people on Earth, however, these in-between seasons don’t arrive string-free. Spring and autumn can bring a punishing reaction to nature’s rhythms: seasonal allergies. Colloquially termed hay