The world is facing a biodiversity crisis and around 1 million animal and plant species are estimated to be threatened with extinction (IPBES, 2019). Trees are highly visible in most landscapes and are excellent biodiversity indicators. They are ecologically, culturally and economically of vital importance and yet there have been surprising gaps in knowledge of the diversity, distribution, abun…
In 49 states (and four Canadian provinces) where the program exists, Master Gardeners (MG) are trained and supervised by the Cooperative Extension Service (CES). In fact, the CES created the MG Program. When you work as an MG, you are representing the CES in your state. enesis of CES The CES grew out of the U.S. Congress’ concern for the education of the average citizen. Prior to the Civil Wa…
Fifteen years ago, historians of the Roman world were in the process of dismantling the hierarchical structure of their subject that had endured since the beginning of scholarly discourse about the Roman Empire. In the late sixties and early seventies, scholars began to move away from work concentrating on the dominant social and political group that had produced the bulk of the surviving liter…
People may be visually oriented, but unconsciously we turn to other senses to simplify and de-stress our complicated existence. Fragrance is mysterious, ethereal and elusive. Yet it is rooted solidly in the physical world and can therefore be examined scientifically. The chemistry behind fragrance is complex and fascinating. How do you build fragrance molecules to withstand heat and water and t…
After several days of intense debate, first the United States House of Representatives and then the U.S. Senate voted to authorize President George W. Bush to attack Iraq if Saddam Hussein refused to give up weapons of mass destruction as required by United Nations’s resolutions. Debate about a possible military action against Iraq continued in various governmental bodies and in the public fo…
Continued, in that and the subsequent four prefaces, in the following way. We could use the techniques, well established, which have provided dictionaries of excellence, such as the Oxford English Dictionary. The painstaking scrutiny of texts from a range of contexts, the recording of new words and senses on slips, and the systematic correlation of these as a preliminary to representing pattern…
The open access publication of this book has been published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation. From pilgrimage sites in the far west of Europe to the Persian court; from mystic visions to a gruesome contemporary “dance”; from a mundane poem on wine to staggering religious art: thus far in space and time extends the world of the Armenians. A glimpse of the vast and st…
Brain science matters. The strange computational material in our skulls is the perceptual machinery by which we navigate the world, the stuff from which decisions arise, the material from which imagination is forged. Our dreams and our waking lives emerge from its billions of zapping cells. A better understanding of the brain sheds light on what we take to be real in our personal relationships …
The Runaway Species is a deep dive into the creative mind, a celebration of the human spirit, and a vision of how we can improve our future by understanding and embracing our ability to innovate. David Eagleman and Anthony Brandt seek to answer the question: what lies at the heart of humanity’s ability—and drive—to create? Our ability to remake our world is unique among all living thin…
Until the enf of the eighteenth century, two races of the wild horse Equus ferus, existed in Europe and the Russian steppes, and the Mongolian wild horse, or Przewalski's horse, in Mongolia wild horse, or Przewalksi's horse in Mongolia. These two races were the relics of vast populations of wild equines that inhabited virtually the whole of Europe, Asia, and North America at the close of the la…