500 Science:
THE “NATURAL SCIENCES” include physics, astronomy, geology, chemistry, and biology, and are usually referred to as such in contradistinction to the “human sciences,” such as anthropology, sociology, and linguistics. Of course, there is some overlap. Those disciplines which study human beings as biological organisms belong to both the natural and the human sciences.
-Stephen M Barr, A Student's Guide to Natural Science (ISI Guides to the Major Disciplines) .
“The more that science unravels about the wonder of life and the universe, the more i am in are of it. the beauty and wonder of the universe and all that surrounds us offers proof of God. I like that idea”
― Ranya Idliby, The Faith Club: A Muslim, A Christian, A Jew--Three Women Search for Understanding
Science is ruled by human passions and limitations and creativity. Science is the story we tell ourselves, or are told, to make sense of the world of atoms and cells, illness and beauty, ozone and oxygen, the world in which we—collections of atoms and cells—find ourselves.
-Sue Halpern, Four Wings and a Prayer
“You want fantasy? Here's one... There's this species that lives on a planet a few miles above molten rock and a few miles below a vacuum that'd suck the air right out of them. They live in a brief geological period between ice ages, when giant asteroids have temporarily stopped smacking into the surface. As far as they can tell, there's nowhere else in the universe where they could stay alive for ten seconds.
And what do they call their fragile little slice of space and time? They call it real life.”
― Terry Pratchett, A Slip of the Keyboard: Collected Non-Fiction
“In fact, humans on Titan could fly by muscle power. A human in a hang glider could comfortably take off and cruise around powered by oversized swim-flipper boots—or even take off by flapping artificial wings. The power requirements are minimal—it would probably take no more effort than walking.”
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“But I’ve never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive.”
― Randall Munroe, What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
In Whewell’s time, and for centuries before him, science was less often a career and more often an extravagance for the wealthy. Science didn’t necessarily require expensive equipment or training, but it did require an abundance of spare time; most who pursued a scientific endeavor did so as an elite hobby. Charles Darwin was not hired as a scientist on the HMS Beagle; he was a companion to Captain Robert FitzRoy and a “gentleman naturalist” traveling the world before moving on to his planned occupation as a parson. Gregor Mendel, who deciphered hereditary traits through a series of experiments breeding pea plants, was a monk. The roots of science have always been in leisure time, spare time, or spiritual time.
-Caren Cooper, Citizen Science: How Ordinary People are Changing the Face of Discovery .
510 Math:
The chapters in this book are filled with things like breath mints, pandas, popularity, gift wrapping, and spas. By the time you finish reading them, however, you’ll be a whiz at tons of pre-algebra topics, including integers, negative numbers, absolute value, inequalities, the distributive property, working with variables, word problems, exponents, functions, graphing, and tons of ways to solve for x. Yep! In fact, these are the topics that tend to be the most confusing, and if you don’t understand them now, they can cause tons of trouble later in algebra. That’s right-they don’t just go away. So, let’s clear them up now, shall we?Danica McKellar, Kiss My Math: Showing Pre-Algebra Who's Boss
"If you've got a dollar and you spend 29 cents on a loaf of bread, you've got 71 cents left; But if you've got seventeen grand and you spend 29 cents on a loaf of bread, you've still got seventeen grand. There's a math lesson for you."
— Steve Martin
“Music is what mathematics does on a Saturday night.”
― Aaron Sorkin, The Farnsworth Invention
“A basic rule of mathematical life: if the universe hands you a hard problem, try to solve an easier one instead, and hope the simple version is close enough to the original problem that the universe doesn’t object.”
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“Knowing mathematics is like wearing a pair of X-ray specs that reveal hidden structures underneath the messy and chaotic surface of the world.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking
520 Astronomy:
Today was the last day of the International Astronomical Union meeting in Prague, and the final item on the agenda at the end of two weeks’ worth of discussion was a vote on what to do with Pluto. Everyone’s favorite ice ball was in imminent danger of being cast out of the pantheon of planets by the vote of astronomers assembled half a world away, and whatever happened would be big news around the globe.
In the days that followed, I would hear from many people who were sad about Pluto. And I understood. Pluto was part of their mental landscape, the one they had constructed to organize their thinking about the solar system and their own place within it. Pluto seemed like the edge of existence. Ripping Pluto out of that landscape caused what felt like an inconceivably empty hole.
-Mike Brown, I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming.
GUY: Would you baptize an extraterrestrial? That is one of the questions people ask us all the time here at the Vatican Observatory … along with questions about the Star of Bethlehem, the beginning and end of the universe, Galileo, Pluto, black holes, killer asteroids, and all the other topics astronomers always get asked about
PAUL: Do you think that both science and faith should be taken seriously, but you struggle with how to hold science and faith together, with integrity? Do you find yourself tending to keep science and faith isolated from each other, in separate, watertight compartments, but you wish that science and faith didn’t have to “take turns” in your life? Then this book is for you. Read on!
-Guy Consolmagno, Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?
“Every cup that passes through a single person and eventually rejoins the world’s water supply holds enough molecules to mix 1,500 of them into every other cup of water in the world. No way around it: some of the water you just drank passed through the kidneys of Socrates, Genghis Khan, and Joan of Arc.
How about air? Also vital. A single breathful draws in more air molecules than there are breathfuls of air in Earth’s entire atmosphere. That means some of the air you just breathed passed through the lungs of Napoleon, Beethoven, Lincoln, and Billy the Kid.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
“Cosmology is among the oldest subjects to captivate our species. And it’s no wonder. We’re storytellers, and what could be more grand than the story of creation?”
― Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality
We can compare space-time to an open, conic cup. . . . The bottom of the cup is the origin of atomic disintegration; it is the first instant at the bottom of space-time, the now which has no yesterday because, yesterday, there was no space.
-Fr. Georges Lemaître, The Primeval Atom
NO ONE KNOWS for certain the exact day of that week in October 1927 when Albert Einstein ran into the round-faced Catholic priest. If it was Wednesday, then it was a few days after the new moon. The weather in Brussels may have been raw, and the forty-eight-year-old Einstein was probably in no mood to discuss his work with strangers, least of all strangers wearing Roman collars. But that is what happened.
-John Farrell, Day Without Yesterday: Lemaître, Einstein and the Birth of Modern Cosmology .
529 Chronology
A clock does two things: it ticks and it counts the ticks. The clepsydra, or water clock, ticks to the steady drip of water, which, in more advanced devices, drives a set of gears that nudges a pointer along a series of numbers or hash marks, thereby indicating time’s passage. A tick is simply an oscillation, a steady beat; Earth’s turning provided the rhythm. In practice, what ticked was the day, the rotational interval from one sunrise to the next. Everything in between—the hours and minutes—was contrived, a man-made way to break up the day into manageable units for us to enjoy, employ, and trade. Increasingly our days are governed by seconds.
For centuries, the second existed only in the abstract. It was a mathematical subdivision, defined by relation: one-sixtieth of a minute, one thirty-six-hundredth of an hour, one eighty-six-thousand-four-hundredth of a day. Seconds pendulums appeared on some German clocks in the fifteenth century. But it wasn’t until 1670, when the British clockmaker William Clement added a seconds pendulum, with its familiar tick-tock, to Huygens’s pendulum clock, that the second acquired a reliably physical, or at least audible, form.
Alan Burdick, Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation(2017)
530 Physics
Cosmologist Stephen Hawking tried to prove that time travel was impossible by finding a new law of physics that would forbid it, which he called the “chronology protection conjecture.” Unfortunately, after many years of hard work he was unable to prove this principle. In fact, to the contrary, physicists have now demonstrated that a law that prevents time travel is beyond our present-day mathematics. Today, because there is no law of physics preventing the existence of time machines, physicists have had to take their possibility very seriously.-Michio Kaku, Physics of the Impossible
Nevertheless, 25 light-years is a pretty long way in human terms. A light-year is the distance that light can travel in one year, and light travels really, really fast. The speed of light is about 300,000 kilometers per second (186,000 miles per second), which means that light could circle Earth nearly eight times in a single second. If you multiply the speed of light by the 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, and 365 days in a year, you’ll find that a light-year is just a little less than 10 trillion kilometers (6 trillion miles), so the 25-light-year distance means a trip of nearly 250 trillion kilometers in each direction.
-Jeffrey Bennett, What Is Relativity?
Purple verbena flowers, along with red cabbage, blood oranges, and lots of other red and purple plants, contain chemical compounds called anthocyanins. These anthocyanins are pigments, and they give the plants their bright colors. There are a few different versions, so the color varies a bit, but they all have a similar molecular structure. That’s not all, though. The color also depends on the acidity of the liquid that the molecule is in—what’s called its “pH value.” If you make that environment a little more acidic or a little more alkaline, the molecules change shape slightly and so their color changes. They are indicators, nature’s version of litmus paper. You can have lots of fun in the kitchen with this. You need to boil the plant to get the pigment out, so boil a bit of red cabbage in water, and then save the water (which is now purple). Mix some with vinegar, and it goes red. A solution of laundry powder (a strong alkali) makes it go yellow or green. You can generate a whole rainbow of outcomes just from what’s in your kitchen. I know: I did it. I love this discovery because these anthocyanins are everywhere, and accessible to anyone. No chemistry set required!
-Helen Czerski, Storm in a Teacup: The Physics of Everyday Life
It is perhaps small wonder that, faced with such bizarre proposals concerning the inner workings of a universe that had heretofore exhibited clockwork predictability, these scientists sought relaxation not in fantastic science fiction adventures but in the conventionality of dime-store detective novels and American cowboy motion pictures. In fact, the predictability of these western films led Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum theory, and his colleagues to construct theories regarding plot development in Westerns, when not grappling with the mysteries of atomic physics. In one participant’s recollection, Bohr proposed a theoretical model for why the hero would always win his six-shooter duel with the villain, despite the fact that the villain always drew first. Having to decide the moment to draw his pistol actually impeded the villain, according to Bohr’s theory, while the hero could rely on reflex and simply grab his weapon as soon as he saw the villain move. When some of his students doubted this explanation, they resolved the question as good scientists, via empirical testing using toy pistols on the hallways of the Copenhagen Institute (the experimental data confirmed Bohr’s hypothesis).
-James Kakalios, The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics
The elegant physics of an oscillating pendulum underlies the working of both the clock on the wall and the electronic timer on your coffeemaker, and plays a crucial role in many of the devices you will use as you prepare for the day. It’s as true for the digital timer on the coffeemaker as it is for the mechanical pendulum—to mark the passing of time, one needs a power supply (as everything, even counting seconds, requires a source of energy) and a way to convert that energy into a periodically varying cycle. The coffeemaker is plugged into an outlet connected to an external electric power grid. Conveniently for us, the mechanism by which electric power is generated at a power plant automatically leads to an electric current that oscillates back and forth like a pendulum that can be exploited when making a timer.
-James Kakalios, The Physics of Everyday Things
537 Electricity & electronics
When my father was a little boy, in a village in Poland before the First World War, an electricity blackout wouldn’t have been especially important. There were no cars, which meant there were no traffic lights to fail, and there were no refrigerators—just blocks of ice or cool rooms—so food wouldn’t suddenly spoil either. A very few rich people would find their electric lights failing if the generators stopped working in their homes, and the single telegraph line that passed through the town might stop operating, but by and large daily life would continue as it had before. By the time my father’s family had migrated to Canada, and then to Chicago in the early 1920s, a big power outage would have been different. People would still have been able to buy things—there were no credit cards that depended on computer verification—but the streetcars that workers rode to the factories wouldn’t run. The telephones that offices depended on wouldn’t work either, and the skyscrapers that the city was so proud of would quickly have become inaccessible, or at least their upper floors would have, as their elevators failed too. It still wouldn’t have been a complete catastrophe. Farm crops could still be raised—there weren’t many tractors—and coal-fired trains and steam-driven ships would have kept the city pretty well supplied. Today, though?-David Bodanis, Electric Universe
540 Chemistry & allied sciences
With chemistry we can use the things around us to make our lives better. Take the example of plastic. There wasn’t any plastic a hundred years ago: no cheap, light, strong material that could be molded into any shape. Carving stone and wood is time-consuming, and other materials like clay or glass are both fragile and heavy. Without the science of chemistry, we wouldn’t have the opportunity to make newer, better materials like plastics that make life easier. Think about the plastic tubing used at a hospital, artificial limbs, safety-sealed aspirin bottles and video game controllers. They were all created using polymers designed for these specific purposes. Or how about deodorant—think about how unpleasant sitting on a crowded airplane or bus would be if there were no antiperspirant or scented soap. These products are all created using chemical reactions.-Suzanne Lahl, Chemistry for Everyone: A Helpful Primer for High School or College Chemistry
550 Earth sciences
Biosphere: Life Sphere
Lithosphere: Rock Sphere
Hydrosphere: Water Sphere
Atmosphere: Air Sphere
When we say something is a system, we mean it has parts that are interdependent and interact within the system. A cell phone is a good example of a system. It has many parts that interact and depend on one another-buttons, screen, microphone, and speaker-to name a few. You can think of the earth as a system of interacting spheres, one inside the other. Fish (biosphere) swim though the ocean (hydrosphere). During a storm (atmosphere) rain falls to the ground (lithosphere) and may run off into a stream (hydrosphere) where a deer (biosphere) is drinking.
The spheres of the Earth system are also interdependent. That means they affect one another. For example, the location and depth of a lake (hydrosphere) is affected by the shape of Earth’s surface (lithosphere). In turn, the shape of Earth’s surface is affected by erosion by streams and waves (hydrosphere). The lithosphere affects the hydrosphere and the hydrosphere affects the lithosphere-the lithosphere and the hydrosphere are interdependent.
-Edward J. Denecke Jr., Painless Earth Science (Barron's Painless)
551 Geology, meteorology
The map is in many ways a classic representation of the ambitions of its day. It was, like so many other grand projects that survive as testament to their times—the Oxford English Dictionary, the Grand Triangulation of India, the Manhattan Project, the Concorde, the Human Genome—a project of almost unimaginably vast scope that required great vision, energy, patience, and commitment to complete. But a signal difference sets the map apart. Each of the other projects, grand in scale, formidable in execution, and unassailable in historical importance, required the labor of thousands. The incomparably beautiful geological map of 1815, however, required none of these. As vital as it turned out to be for the future of humankind, it stands apart—because it was conceived, imagined, begun, undertaken, and continued and completed against all odds by just one man. William Smith, then forty-six years old, the orphaned son of the village blacksmith from the unsung hamlet of Churchill, in Oxfordshire.
-Simon Winchester, The Map That Changed the World
The ability to know the weather in many places at one time was the first step toward knowing the weather in one place at many times, most usefully times in the future. Once the telegraph caught on, meteorologists found their work newly practical, and the field was transformed “from weather science to weather service,” as the historian James Rodger Fleming has put it. In 1848, the Smithsonian launched a meteorological observation program that aimed to take advantage of the new telegraph networks to provide advance notice of bad weather. When its new headquarters building opened on the Mall in Washington in 1855, the lobby featured a giant map of the United States. Volunteer and paid “Smithsonian Observers,” as they were known, would send weather reports in from all over the country, and a paper disk the size of a poker chip was pinned to the location of each report on the lobby map, with conditions indicated by different colors: white for fair weather, black for rain, brown for clouds and blue for snow. “This map is not only of interest to visitors in exhibiting the kind of weather which their friends at a distance are experiencing but is also of importance in determining at a glance the probable changes which may soon be expected,” the Smithsonian’s directors reported in 1858.
-Andrew Blum, The Weather Machine
560 Paleontology Fossils & prehistoric life
THE JURASSIC PEROID marks the beginning of the Age of Dinosaurs proper. Yes, the first true dinosaurs entered the scene at least 30 million years before the Jurassic began. But as we’ve seen, these earlier Triassic dinosaurs had not even a remote claim to being dominant. Then Pangea began to split, and he dinosaurs emerged from the ashes and found themselves with a new, much emptier world, which they proceeded to conquer.
Over the first few tens of millions of years of the Jurassic, dinosaurs diversified into a dizzying array of new species. Entirely new subgroups originated, some of which would persist for another 130-plus million years. They got larger and spread around the globe, colonizing humid areas, deserts , and every-thing in between. By the middle part of the Jurassic, the major types of dinosaurs could be found all over the world. That quint-essential image, so often repeated in museum exhibits and kids’ books, was real life: dinosaurs thundering across the land, at the top of the food chain, ferocious meat-eaters comingling with long-necked giants and armored and plated plant-eaters, the little mammals and lizards and frogs and other non-dinosaurs cowering in fear.
“Dinosaurs had been around for over 150 million years when their time of reckoning came. They had endured hardships, evolved superpowers like fast metabolisms and enormous size, and vanquished their rivals so that they ruled an entire planet…
Then, literally, in a split second, it ended.”
― Stephen Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World
570 Life Sciences
A good case can be made for our nonexistence as entities. We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts. We are shared, rented, occupied. At the interior of our cells, driving them, providing the oxidative energy that sends us out for the improvement of each shining day, are the mitochondria, and in a strict sense they are not ours. They turn out to be little separate creatures, the colonial posterity of migrant prokaryocytes, probably primitive bacteria that swam into ancestral precursors of our eukaryotic cells and stayed there. Ever since, they have maintained themselves and their ways, replicating in their own fashion, privately, with their own DNA and RNA quite different from ours. They are as much symbionts as the rhizobial bacteria in the roots of beans. Without them, we would not move a muscle, drum a finger, think a thought.-Lewis Thomas, Lives of a Cell . Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
572 Biochemistry
“But to understand what DNA and genes really are, we have to decouple the two words. They’re not identical and never have been. DNA is a thing—a chemical that sticks to your fingers. Genes have a physical nature, too; in fact, they’re made of long stretches of DNA. But in some ways genes are better viewed as conceptual, not material. A gene is really information—more like a story, with DNA as the language the story is written in. DNA and genes combine to form larger structures called chromosomes, DNA-rich volumes that house most of the genes in living things. Chromosomes in turn reside in the cell nucleus, a library with instructions that run our entire bodies.”
― Sam Kean, The Violinist's Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code
573 Bladder Issues
We are all aware that in order to survive, we have to be able to poop. But what many people don’t realize is that our bowel movements affect our health on many different levels. We all know how the process works, we eat food, our body absorbs what it will use and the rest is excreted as waste. What many people don’t realize is that if that process is thrown off in any way (too slow, too fast, etc.) it causes a chain reaction within our bodies. When we do not digest food properly, it can back up in our intestines, literally rotting inside of us. If we digest foods too fast, or if our body comes across something it doesn’t agree with and pushes it through quickly to get rid of it, we encounter problems of vitamin deficiencies and malnutrition. We will get into all the intimate details soon. For now, we’ll keep it simple; poop happens, and it is a good thing.David Koski, How To Poop Like A Pro: The Ultimate Guide To Healthy Bowel Movements
Less squeamish generations than ours took the productivity of pee for granted. Like plants, animals, minerals, water and the bounty of the sea, urine was regarded as a natural resource, copiously available and self-evidently capable of being put to work. Long before anyone knew it contained the bio-chemicals that created the planet and continue to sustain its life, people understood that urine was powerful. So, from the earliest days of history we find it being examined for illness, tested for pregnancy, recycled for health, spread on fields and used to clean just about anything. We find the Romans basing their commercial laundry system on it (one of their emperors even had the chutzpah to tax it) and the medieval mind embracing it as the key to the secrets of the universe itself. We discover it making dyes, strengthening swords, painting stained glass and decorating manuscripts. It was the resource that supported Europe’s woollen industry for hundreds of years, provided gunpowder for sundry wars and kept Britain in alum until the 1870s. Bought and sold, traded and transported, even carried to work in jugs, it was in such demand in the seventeenth century that the peeing populace could barely keep up.
Sally Magnusson, The Life of Pee: The Story of How Urine Got Everywhere (2010).
Sir Thomas Crapper is often given credit for inventing the flushing toilet during the 1880s. The truth: Thomas Crapper’s plumbing company built flush toilets based on the patent to the flushing toilet which he purchased from Albert Giblin. So the next time you finish a number 1 or 2, you actually just used the “Giblin,” not the “Crapper.”
-Charles Austin, The Toilet Book: What Goes In Matters
The medical term for a fart is “flatulence,” which is defined as “flatus expelled through the anus.” Flatus is strictly defined as gas produced during digestion— generally in the stomach and/ or gut. The word “fart” dates back to the fourteenth century, before the term flatulence came into use, and was used specifically to mean breaking wind loudly. Today the term fart is more commonly used to describe any gas expelled from the end of an animal that is opposite to its mouth— whether this be through the anus, cloaca or a specialized duct— and if it is audible or not.
-Nick Caruso and Dani Rabaiotti, Does It Fart? (Does It Fart Series)
Everything you are—all your thoughts, dreams, fears—every breath you take—your heart, your brain, your blood—it’s all contained inside your skin. But you probably never give skin a thought—until it gets itchy. Skin is like a bag holding you together. But it isn’t like a plastic bag, airtight and waterproof. Things can get on, or under, or into your skin, and can give you a big ITCH. Your skin isn’t the same all over. On top of your head, it grows lots of hair. On your palms, there’s no hair at all. Your skin is paper-thin and delicate around your eyes, much thicker on the bottom of your feet. So some parts of it are more likely to get itchy. That’s why wool socks might be annoying on the sensitive skin of your ankles but not bother the tough soles of your feet. If you could somehow peel off your skin and spread it on the floor, it would cover about twenty square feet—the size of a blanket on a double bed. Your skin is your body’s largest organ. And like all of your body’s organs, it has a crucial job to do. You can feel your heart pumping blood around your veins while your lungs breathe air in and out. It may seem as though your skin just sits there under your clothes, not doing much. But it is working hard every minute of every day. It helps protect you from danger—germs, burns, frostbite. Your skin stretches and grows. Air and water can flow through it. When damaged, it can (usually) repair itself. And it comes in many beautiful colors.
-Anita Sanchez, Itch! (p. 1)
574 Biology
“One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that , in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.”
― James D. Watson, The Double Helix
576 Genetics and evolution
Beginnings, it’s said, are apt to be shadowy. So it is with this story, which starts with the emergence of a new species maybe two hundred thousand years ago. The species does not yet have a name—nothing does—but it has the capacity to name things. As with any young species, this one’s position is precarious. Its numbers are small, and its range restricted to a slice of eastern Africa. Slowly its population grows, but quite possibly then it contracts again—some would claim nearly fatally—to just a few thousand pairs. The members of the species are not particularly swift or strong or fertile. They are, however, singularly resourceful. Gradually they push into regions with different climates, different predators, and different prey. None of the usual constraints of habitat or geography seem to check them. They cross rivers, plateaus, mountain ranges. In coastal regions, they gather shellfish; farther inland, they hunt mammals. Everywhere they settle, they adapt and innovate. On reaching Europe, they encounter creatures very much like themselves, but stockier and probably brawnier, who have been living on the continent far longer. They interbreed with these creatures and then, by one means or another, kill them off.-Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction
577 Ecology
Ecology is a vast subject, embracing the many disciplines needed to understand the relationships that exist between different living things, and the physical worlds of air, water, and rock within which they are embedded. From the study of soil microorganisms to the role of pollinators, and from research into the water cycle to investigating Earth’s climate system, ecology involves many specialist areas. It also unites many strands of science, including zoology, botany, mathematics, chemistry, and physics, as well as some aspects of social science— especially economics— while at the same time raising profound philosophical and ethical questions.-DK ,The Ecology Book (Big Ideas)
580 Plants Botany
Plants are nature’s alchemists, expert at transforming water, soil, and sunlight into an array of precious substances, many of them beyond the ability of human beings to conceive, much less manufacture. While we were nailing down consciousness and learning to walk on two feet, they were, by the same process of natural selection, inventing photosynthesis (the astonishing trick of converting sunlight into food) and perfecting organic chemistry. As it turns out, many of the plants’ discoveries in chemistry and physics have served us well. From plants come chemical compounds that nourish and heal and poison and delight the senses, others that rouse and put to sleep and intoxicate, and a few with the astounding power to alter consciousness—even to plant dreams in the brains of awake humans.-Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire
After having evolved over millions of years, papyrus could be counted on to produce a swamp community that was in equilibrium with itself and a species that was perhaps more extensive, more useful, more efficient, and more luxuriant than anything seen today, because at that time the air, soil, and water quality were almost untouched,
unspoiled. Thousands of years in the future, the ancient Egyptian would disappear and the eternal marriage would be dissolved against all reason, and afterwards, like some brave widow, papyrus would carry on, serving different masters through the years—Persians, Macedonians, Greeks, Romans, and finally Arabs, all of whom would use her in turn. Yet despite everything, she stayed green, lush, fragrant, and self-contained until the very end.
John Gaudet, Papyrus (2014)
589 No longer used—formerly Forestry
One reason that many of us fail to understand trees is that they live on a different time scale than us. One of the oldest trees on Earth, a spruce in Sweden, is more than 9,500 years old. That’s 115 times longer than the average human lifetime. Creatures with such a luxury of time on their hands can afford to take things at a leisurely pace. Trees need to communicate, and electrical impulses are just one of their many means of communication. Trees also use the senses of smell and taste for communication. If a giraffe starts eating an African acacia, the tree releases a chemical into the air that signals that a threat is at hand. As the chemical drifts through the air and reaches other trees, they “smell” it and are warned of the danger. Even before the giraffe reaches them, they begin producing toxic chemicals. Insect pests are dealt with slightly differently. The saliva of leaf-eating insects can be “tasted” by the leaf being eaten. In response, the tree sends out a chemical signal that attracts predators that feed on that particular leaf-eating insect. Life in the slow lane is clearly not always dull.
-Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees
590 Animals(Zoology)
590.72 Aquariums, Aquarium fishes, Aquarium plants, Aquariums - Equipment and supplies
“When I was a child I had a fishless aquarium. My father set it up for me with gravel and plants and pebbles before he'd got the fish and I asked him to leave it as it was for a while. The pump kept up a charming burble, the green-gold light was wondrous when the room was dark. I put in a china mermaid and a tin horseman who maintained a relationship like that of the figures on Keat's Grecian urn except that the horseman grew rusty. Eventually fish were pressed upon me and they seemed an intrusion, I gave them to a friend. All that aquarium wanted was the sound of the pump, the gently waving plants, the mysterious pebbles and the silent horseman forever galloping to the mermaid smiling in the green-gold light. I used to sit and look at them for hours. The mermaid and the horseman were from my father. I have them in a box somewhere here, I'm not yet ready to take them out and look at them again.”
― Russell Hoban, Turtle Diary
590.73 Zoos
It had never occurred to me that zoo animals would resent their vets. We are hardwired to love animals. We spend our whole lives plotting this career, scooping up clinic poop as kids, getting good grades even in the classes we hate, and volunteering our way through life long beyond the time when our childhood friends are having kids and buying houses. All to get to this glorious station: Zoo Vet. Then we find out that most animals can smell a vet coming before the truck rattles into the driveway, and will prepare their most unwelcoming demeanor. If they have limbs capable of hurling something, they will find something to hurl. If they can emit a nasty smell, they will be at their smelliest when you get there. And those with teeth and loud voices? Well, despite the thickest steel bars between you, being four feet from a lion that has just received a dart and is standing full height and roaring at you can truly necessitate a wardrobe change.-Lucy H. Spelman and Ted Y. Mashima (Editors), The Rhino with Glue-On Shoes
591.77 Marine animals
“A lion is a mammal like us; an octopus is put together completely differently, with three hearts, a brain that wraps around its throat, and a covering of slime instead of hair. Even their blood is a different color from ours; it’s blue, because copper, not iron, carries its oxygen.”
― Sy Montgomery, The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness
That’s the thing about sex in the sea. It is at once utterly foreign, yet there are hints of the familiar—but only just. For the most part, sex beneath the waves looks nothing like what we think of as intercourse. That’s what happens after several hundred million years of intense battles over who can reproduce the most—evolution gets a little funky. From the highest reef crests to the deepest trench in the sea, getting laid and not getting eaten are the two biggest concerns for nearly every animal on the planet. Thus Nature invests heavily in the art of both sex and survival. Life’s great purpose—to successfully pass along to future generations one’s good looks and all the genes that go with it—relies on both skills. But not equally. A deft survivor that lives a long but celibate life loses the evolutionary game; a great lover, adept at attracting and securing a mate, needs only to survive long enough to get the deed done. In the end, it all comes down to sex.
Marah J Hardt, Sex in the Sea. (2016)
594 Mollusks
“I found a snail in the woods. I brought it back and it’s right here beneath the violets.” “You did? Why did you bring it in?” “I don’t know. I thought you might enjoy it.” “Is it alive?” She picked up the brown acorn-sized shell and looked at it. “I think it is.” Why, I wondered, would I enjoy a snail? What on earth would I do with it? I couldn’t get out of bed to return it to the woods. It was not of much interest, and if it was alive, the responsibility—especially for a snail, something so uncalled for—was overwhelming. My friend hugged me, said good-bye, and drove off.
But what about this snail? What would I do with it? As tiny as it was, it had been going about its day when it was picked up. What right did my friend and I have to disrupt its life? Though I couldn’t imagine what kind of life a snail might lead. I didn’t remember ever having noticed any snails on my countless hikes in the woods. Perhaps, I thought, looking at the nondescript brown creature, it was precisely because they were so inconspicuous. For the rest of the day the snail stayed inside its shell, and I was too worn out from my friend’s visit to give it another thought.
Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating (2010). . Algonquin Books. Kindle Edition.
595.7 Insects
Ants are Earth’s most ubiquitous creatures. They throng in the millions of billions, outnumbering humans by a factor of a million. Globally, ants weigh as much as all human beings. A single hectare in the Amazon basin contains more ants than the entire human population of New York City, and that’s just counting the ants on the ground—twice as many live in the treetops.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
When I call an ant “she,” therefore, I’m simply reflecting reality. During their brief lives, males perform a single duty: they fly out of the nest, mate with a virgin queen (often several mate with one queen), then die.
-Mark W. Moffett, Adventures among Ants
595.78 Butterflies, Moths
When I looked up again, what I was seeing made so little sense that I turned it into something else, something I understood—autumn leaves, falling through the air. That was what it sounded like, too. Millions of leaves, ripped and ripping from their moorings. The sound was overwhelming. It woke the baby in my arms, who opened her eyes to this sight. The three of us stood there, looking and looking, and gradually it occurred to me, gradually it registered, that though there were millions of them, they were not leaves at all, they were butterflies, monarch butterflies, the butterflies of my backyard. They were in the air, and so heavy on the branches of the pine trees that the branches bent toward the ground, supplicants to gravity and mass and sheer enthusiasm. We moved on. As we hiked we saw even more butterflies, more than would seem possible, twenty or thirty million. Every available place to roost was taken. Even the baby became a perch. There were butterflies on her shoulder and shoes, butterflies in her hair. Somehow she knew not to touch them, and not to be afraid. We found a rock at the edge of the forest, and the baby and I sat down. The clamor of butterfly wings was as constant and irregular as surf cresting over rocks. I watched my daughter watching the butterfly resting on her shoelace, watched her reach down and wait until the butterfly crawled up the ladder of one of her fingers, climbed over the hump of knuckles, and rested on the back of her hand. She was completely silent, as if she had lost her voice. Her eyes were wide open, and so was her mouth, and for twenty minutes, maybe longer, the two of us just sat, eleven thousand feet up the side of a mountain, and paid attention. If I were a more religious person I would have called that place, and that moment, holy, or blessed. But my vocabulary did not typically include those words. Still, unbidden, they were the ones that came to mind.
-Sue Halpern, Four Wings and a Prayer
Peter Laufer, The Dangerous World of Butterflies: The Startling Subculture of Criminals, Collectors, and Conservationists
597 Fishes, Sharks, Rays (Fish)
If wearing bright clothes is useful, being able to change them may be even better. By expanding or contracting their melanophores—clusters of cells containing black granules—fishes like cichlids and boxfishes are able to quickly turn darker or lighter in color. Some fishes, such as flounders and cornetfishes, have remarkable control over which cells expand or contract, while colorful coral-reef fishes in particular can usually control the intensity of their so-called “poster coloration.” They can ramp up their beauty to lure a potential mate or intimidate the competition, or tone it down to mollify an aggressive competitor or go undetected by a predator.
-Jonathan Balcombe, What a Fish Knows
597.8 Amphibians, Frogs, (Toads)
A creature that starts off as an algae-eating, swimming blob attached to a tail ends up as a large-mouthed predator hopping about on four sturdy legs. The tadpole’s long, coiled intestine shortens. Skin glands mature, and legs develop. Eventually the tail shrinks to nothing. Even to an amphibian biologist, the process seems magical. Frogs’ transformation evokes resurrection and rebirth, suggesting supernatural powers.
-Marty Crump, Eye of Newt and Toe of Frog, Adder's Fork and Lizard's Leg
597.9 Reptiles, (Turtles), (Lizards), (Alligators), (Crocodiles), (Snakes)
Earth’s last warm-blooded monster reptile, the skin-covered Leatherback Turtle, whose ancestors saw dinosaurs rule and fall, is itself the closest thing we have to a living dinosaur. Imagine an eight-hundred-pound turtle and you’ve just envisioned merely an average female Leatherback. It’s a turtle that can weigh over a ton.
-Carl Safina, Voyage of the Turtle: In Pursuit of the Earth’s Last Dinosaur
598 Aves (Birds)
The mockingbird, which quite likely was the herald of the dawn chorus, is also quite likely the last bird standing fourteen, fifteen, sixteen hours later. In my experience in New Jersey, it was the only bird that bookended the day in this way, and with the same song out of a repertoire that may include more than a hundred. (On the West Coast, so far, I have neither encountered nor heard about any bird that behaves this way.) The mockingbird may even continue singing throughout the night, off and on . . . and on . . . and on. The whip-poor-will is out and about, along with other local goatsuckers (yes, that’s what they’re called), such as the Chuck-will’s-widow, the common poorwill, and the common nighthawk. Of course, the owls will be active, generally throughout the night—the barn owls with their ghostly hisses and shrieks, the barred owls with their who cooks for you? who cooks for you all? call. Highlighted against the overpowering surround-sound chorus of katydids on summer nights in New Jersey, the screech-owl always got my concerned attention. If you haven’t heard one before, it will get yours, too. Although it has a quieter kind of call, this owl can be pretty frightening. On group expeditions, campers sometimes report hearing a woman screaming during the night. I take these concerns in stride, as it is almost certainly just a screech-owl. (Along these same lines, the sound of a pair of raccoons in territorial conflict can be misinterpreted as the Jersey Devil himself: intense, frightening, bloodcurdling—even more surprising and chilling than a midnight catfight.) I understand that the nocturnal frog chorus keeps some people from sleeping. This is good! It provides an opportunity to lie there and speculate about why the frogs have suddenly stopped croaking. Like the birds, they have their reasons. Maybe a raccoon has passed by, or did the distant rumbling of a train give the frogs pause? Or was it the much more distant, barely discernible hum of an airplane high overhead? And so the cacophony of harmony cycles around, and soon enough the birds will be at it again, the thrushes singing the opening notes of the dawn chorus.-Jon Young, What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World
598.47 Penguins
Had I been told as a child in 1950s England that my life would one day run parallel with that of a penguin—that for a time, at least, it would be him and me against the world—I would have taken it in stride. After all, my mother had kept three alligators at the house in Esher until they grew too big and too dangerous for that genteel town and keepers from Chessington Zoo came to remove them.
That Fortune would assign me a penguin as a friend and fellow traveler who would one day provide a wealth of bedtime stories for generations then unborn was a singular twist of fate that still lay far over the western horizon.
-Tom Michell, The Penguin Lessons
599 Mammalia (Mammals)
The book’s narrative pivots on the discovery of the gorilla, considered at the time to be man’s closest relative and the wildest beast on the planet.The hunter circled to the right of the boulders, while a few of his companions walked to the left. He emerged from the granite blockade just in time to catch an obstructed view of four dark creatures fleeing rapidly into the dense cover of forest. The figures disappeared as quickly as they had exploded into view. Running with their heads down and bodies bent forward, the woolly creatures appeared to him, he later noted, “like men running for their lives.” Just minutes before, he might have sworn that the mountain torrent had been the most awe-inspiring inspiring sight he’d witnessed in his young life. But this blurred vision of bodies in motion—gone in the blink of an eye—blew it away.
-Monte Reel, Between Man and Beast
THE HUGE, FOREBODING OAK doors of the Dengchi Valley Cathedral are mostly locked. But once a week, on a Sunday, they are opened for the local inhabitants to attend a service in one of the oldest Catholic churches still standing in China’s Sichuan Province. Occasionally, too, perhaps a few times a month, a peculiar kind of tourist will step off the beaten trail and head up the dusty valley to this Christian outpost. More than likely it is not God calling them but the giant panda. For it’s in this remote spot, in 1869, that a French priest and keen naturalist by the name of Armand David became the first Westerner to clap eyes on this extraordinary beast. His ‘discovery’ resulted in the formal scientific description of this animal and with it the panda bandwagon began to roll. Although the inhabitants of the Dengchi Valley and other rural communities had clearly encountered this species before David, they did so only infrequently. And beyond such communities, it would appear that the panda was simply not known at all. This is a truly remarkable fact. How could it be that a species so instantly recognisable today could have been virtually unknown as recently as 1869? This is particularly surprising given that anatomically modern humans have been in China for tens of thousands of years, and we have ancient Chinese texts inscribed from almost 3,000 years ago, which tell of events still further back in time. Given the long history of humans in China, it’s hard to imagine that no one ever bumped into a giant panda, particularly as (one assumes) there were once many more of them, so the chances of seeing
one would have been that much greater. And if you were out in the forest and encountered this striking creature, you’d tell someone about it, right? Surely word about this animal would have found its way into one or other of the many historical texts. Surely someone would have dipped a pen into ink to scratch out a sketch of this alluring black-and-white beast. You’d have thought so.
-Henry Nicholls, The Way of the Panda: The Curious History of China's Political Animal .
599.222 Marsupialia Kangaroos –
Evolutionarily speaking, kangaroos are stamped ‘Made in Australia’. They evolved on that fragment of Gondwana we call Australia and have adapted superbly to its range of habitat types, and its unpredictable and often fickle climate.The large grazing kangaroos differ from other grazing animals in that they can digest plant material without producing methane gas—an evolutionary adaptation that, if harnessed, could quite literally help to save the planet.
Macropods are exquisite hoppers, their method of locomotion energy-efficient and surprisingly rapid—and probably the first thing that springs to mind when we think of a ‘kangaroo’. Why? Because it is such a strange thing for a large mammal to do.
Modern preoccupation with macropods seems not to diminish with familiarity either—depictions of kangaroos appeared in art, official currency and the literature of Australia’s early European colonists, and continue to be used today by sporting teams, sports fans and advertisers as a symbol of all things Australian. Direct use—in the form of food—has also been a big part of the human experience of kangaroos for as long as people have lived alongside them.
-Stephen Jackson, Kangaroo: Portrait of an Extraordinary Marsupial
599.9 Anthropology
On a hike in East Africa 2 million years ago, you might well have encountered a familiar cast of human characters: anxious mothers cuddling their babies and clutches of carefree children playing in the mud; temperamental youths chafing against the dictates of society and weary elders who just wanted to be left in peace; chest-thumping machos trying to impress the local beauty and wise old matriarchs who had already seen it all. These archaic humans loved, played, formed close friendships and competed for status and power – but so did chimpanzees, baboons and elephants. There was nothing special about humans. Nobody, least of all humans themselves, had any inkling that their descendants would one day walk on the moon, split the atom, fathom the genetic code and write history books. The most important thing to know about prehistoric humans is that they were insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment than gorillas, fireflies or jellyfish.-Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens . Harper. Kindle Edition.
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