Sciences Textbooks

The Emerald Planet: How Plants Changed Earth’s History

Global warming is contentious and difficult to measure, even among the majority of scientists who agree that it is taking place. Will temperatures rise by 2ºC or 8ºC over the next hundred years? Will sea levels rise by 2 or 30 feet? The only way that we can accurately answer questions like these is by looking into the distant past, for a comparison with the world long before the rise of mankind.

We may currently believe that atmospheric shifts, like global warming, result from our impact on the planet, but the earth’s atmosphere has been dramatically shifting since its creation. This book reveals the crucial role that plants have played in determining atmospheric change – and hence the conditions on the planet we know today. Along the way a number of fascinating puzzles arise: Why did plants evolve leaves? When and how did forests once grow on Antarctica? How did prehistoric insects manage to grow so large? The answers show the extraordinary amount plants can tell us about the history of the planet — something that has often been overlooked amongst the preoccuputations with dinosaur bones and animal fossils.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: 8c, animal fossils, atmospheric change, chemists, computer models, dinosaur bones, dynamic evolution, experimental studies, fossil hunters, fossil plants, global warming, hippos, plants and animals, polar explorers, Volcanoes

Biophilia Reviews

View a video on Professor Wilson entitled “On the Relation of Science and the Humanities”

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: humanities, professor wilson, Science

American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon

From the host of the Travel Channel’s “The Wild Within.”

A hunt for the American buffalo—an adventurous, fascinating examination of an animal that has haunted the American imagination.

In 2005, Steven Rinella won a lottery permit to hunt for a wild buffalo, or American bison, in the Alaskan wilderness. Despite the odds—there’s only a 2 percent chance of drawing the permit, and fewer than 20 percent of those hunters are successful—Rinella managed to kill a buffalo on a snow-covered mountainside and then raft the meat back to civilization while being trailed by grizzly bears and suffering from hypothermia. Throughout these adventures, Rinella found himself contemplating his own place among the 14,000 years’ worth of buffalo hunters in North America, as well as the buffalo’s place in the American experience. At the time of the Revolutionary War, North America was home to approximately 40 million buffalo, the largest herd of big mammals on the planet, but by the mid-1890s only a few hundred remained. Now that the buffalo is on the verge of a dramatic ecological recovery across the West, Americans are faced with the challenge of how, and if, we can dare to share our land with a beast that is the embodiment of the American wilderness.

Read the rest of this entry »