In Africa, elephants trample farms. Some traditional herders are prohibited from grazing their herds on land occupied by tourist-magnets like lions, leopards, giraffes and gazelles.

And buffalo, zebras and antelopes eat grass that could feed cattle.

In the East African savannas, the interactions between wildlife and the people whose livelihood depends on cows and goats, are complicated, critical and contentious.

Grazing is about the only way to make a living in this hot, dry land, but livestock and many wild herbivores eat similar vegetation.

And so the competition is obvious: How can a cow eat forage that a zebra ate first?

The question answers itself, and so nobody studied the issue.

Not so obvious after all

But in other realms, ecologists have found that organisms that seem to compete may actually aid each other. “We are just beginning to understand that the relationship between species is highly contextual,” says Truman Young, a professor of plant sciences at the University of California at Davis, “and this interaction includes competition and facilitation. Once, people thought if two species were similar, they always competed, but years ago, it became clear that facilitation exists in certain situations.”

Young is senior author of new study showing that in Kenya’s highland savannas, competition is partly offset by facilitation; although during the dry season wildlife steal food from the mouths of cattle, so to speak, the situation is reversed during the wet season.

When the rains come, wild ungulates (mammals with hooves), particularly zebras, seem to benefit cattle by eating fibrous, woody grasses and revealing the more delectable, higher-protein grasses beneath.

This gives cattle access to forage with more protein, and their wet-season weight gains nearly counterbalance the dry-season losses inflicted by wildlife.

Well done

The study was performed during 2007 and 2008, on nine fenced plots, or “exclosures,” each 4 hectares in size. The researchers placed four young, unbred females of an African breed called Boran on each plot for 16-week periods, and measured their eating habits and weight gain in three conditions:

First author Wilfred Odadi, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University and the African Wildlife Foundation, wrote us to explain that facilitation nearly equaled competition. “Wildlife-driven depression of cattle weight gain in the dry season is 35 to 40 percent. In the wet season, cattle put on weight faster by about the same percentage when they forage with wildlife.” The real-world situation, he added, would “depend on the lengths and frequencies of dry and wet seasons.”

This was the first experimental evidence that wildlife and livestock are engaged in facilitation and competition, Young says. “There is a basic-science excitement here. With this large-vertebrate system, we have shown that you can actually sometimes have competition and sometimes facilitation.”

It’s possible that the 15-year history of experiments on the site has changed the vegetation enough to weaken the results. But the continuous grazing of cattle kept the site’s vegetation similar to the surrounding savanna, Young says. “If we had excluded all large herbivores, the rangeland would become very different, and our inferences would be skewed. But because cattle are the dominant herbivores … the plots were not that different. My belief is if we had started the exclosures last year, we would have gotten the same result.”

What are the practical implications?

Killing wildlife, except for rogue animals, is illegal in Kenya, but it still happens, Odadi told us. “Because in Kenya wildlife belongs to the state, and not to the land owner, some livestock keepers still show a negative attitude towards wildlife because of perceived ‘detrimental’ effects on livestock including competition, livestock depredation and disease transmission. Some people react by fencing off their properties to keep wildlife away. There are also situations where water sources are fenced off by pastoralists to make them inaccessible to wildlife. In extreme cases, wild animals are actually killed, albeit illegally.”

And so in a region with unreliable rainfall and few resources, it’s good news for advocates of biodiversity conservation that the competition between domestic and wild ungulates, at least on savannas, may be more apparent than real.

Good news for conservation

Indeed, large mammal ecologist Johan du Toit of Utah State University, wrote in Science that the new information should eventually “provide managers with opportunities to capitalize on facilitative interactions, intervene against competitive ones, and enhance animal production overall.”

Rangeland managers often mix native and non-native plants, du Toit added. And after “bold experimentation and a break from orthodoxy,” a similar approach with animals could boost production while conserving biodiversity.

Odadi says better knowledge of cattle-wildlife interactions could support short-term changes, such as slaughtering or marketing livestock “at the end of the wet season, when they have recovered from competition in the preceding dry season, and also to minimize competitive effects (by reducing densities) in the next dry season.”

Conservationists in East Africa and elsewhere are seeking “to manage land for ecosystem biodiversity and short-term extractive value,” says Young, “but it’s pretty hard to find good examples, other than assertions about the profitability of ecotourism. We were able to show that wildlife and cattle have a complex interaction; that wildlife is not uniformly bad for cattle, and that allows us to be a little more lenient toward wildlife.”

– David J. Tenenbaum

Southwest fires still ablaze

Last week, New Mexico’s famous Los Alamos National Laboratory, home of the atomic bomb, was shut down when a wildfire exploded from 2,000 acres to 49,000 acres over 24 hours, forcing the evacuation of the town of Los Alamos.

A wildfire that started May 29 in droughted Arizona scorched 538,000 acres – the largest in the state’s history.

Historically, wildfires have been usually battled as threats to life, limb and property. But scientists and land managers now see them as a part of nature that can be postponed but not denied.

This edition of The Why Files examines the ecology of fire in the forest.

For a century, the highly successful Smokey the Bear ad campaign fueled fear and loathing of wildfires in the United States. Embezzlers have been more popular than wild fires, which scourged the landscape, burned the birds and rendered Bambi homeless. But in recent decades, ecologists have come to three startling conclusions about fire:

Forests afire

One touchstone for the reconsideration of fire was the “catastrophic” conflagration in Yellowstone National Park in 1988 — which, despite the frightening photos, turned out to be a temporary setback for the ecosystem. Still, even ignoring the human toll for a moment, scientists have found that massive debris flows from denuded slopes can permanently alter the landscape.

More recently, discussion has shifted to reducing the intensity of wildfires, and to their interaction with a warming climate. How effective is controlled burning? Are global warming and the likely increase in drought already accelerating wildfires? Will more wildfires turn arid parts of Australia, the American West and Asia to desert?

An old debate

Each fire is shaped by weather, geology, plant life, and topography, which makes them hard to study, let alone control. Beyond harming or killing plants and animals, fires force a broad range of changes in chemistry, pH, microbial activity, moisture, water flows, soil structure and erosion.

The debate over wildfire is old, according to Stephen Pyne, a fire historian at Arizona State University. Although it’s impossible to know for certain the prevalence of fire five centuries ago, for a 1998 Why Files, Pyne estimated that before Columbus, wildfires, often set to clear land for planting, burned five times as much area as today.

Pyne said the debate over wildfire in the United States when the first national parks opened a century ago “mirrored an earlier argument in Europe over the role of fire” in natural landscapes. The European emigrants to the New World associated fire with “primitive” agriculture, and the U.S. government sought to eradicate fire from its parks and forests. The policy of fighting pretty much all fires succeeded at first, Pyne said. “Absolute suppression will work for a number of years, even a few decades, but you are always going to have fires.”

In the long run, he contended, total suppression is futile or counterproductive, since it allows a buildup of fuel that makes future fires larger, fiercer and even harder — or impossible — to fight.

Controlled burns — a forest fire you can love!

In response to this fuel buildup, controlled (“prescribed”) burns have been used for decades to reduce the chance of a catastrophic fire and return forests to a condition adjudged to be more natural. Prescribed burns reduce the amount of fuel, try to remove the “ladder trees” that can carry a creeping ground fire into the treetops, and are the “primary management tool” in the Forest Service region that covers 18 national forests in California.

USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station

Watch this piece of Montana’s Bitterroot National Forest grow denser as fire is excluded and trees are harvested. Before 1895, low-intensity fires burned through this forest every three to 30 years, until people began logging and suppressing fires. Click the link for a more complete explanation.

But prescribed burns are expensive, difficult to pull off (as they require a forest that is dry enough to burn, but not so dry that a raging fire will result), and studies of their efficacy conflict:

Do controlled burns damage trees?

Despite some successes from these deliberate burns, scientists have noted that they are sometimes followed by outbreaks of destructive bark beetles, or that fire in the heavy layer of organic matter left after a century of firefighting can kill tree roots – and trees. In a 2007 report, Sharon Hood of the U.S. Forest Service wrote that prescribed burning “is causing significant mortality of these high-value trees even with low intensity fires.”

In a 2005 test in Lassen National Forest and Lassen National Volcanic Park in California, Hood and colleagues looked at the effect of raking litter and duff away from ponderosa and Jeffrey pine trees before a controlled burn. Raking did not confer a survival advantage, perhaps because trees survived well in both the treatment and control groups, but raking did confer some advantage against beetle attack.

Bigger ecological picture

In the search to find out how fires affect forests, one theme stands out: The aftermath of fires is as varied as their weather conditions, biology and landscapes. In some cases, as we’ll see for Yellowstone, the ecosystem bounces back after a fire. But the results vary, even in one fire in one location. For example, the 2002 study of the Rodeo-Chediski Wildfire (which set an Arizona record at 189,000 hectares) found that about half the area was severely burned, and that many more years would be needed to restore the area despite efforts to replant vegetation and contain erosion. The mildly burned half section, however, had reverted to pre-fire conditions by 2009.

In the Arctic, the aftermath of a fire was much more serious: A report after the 1,000-square kilometer Anaktuvuk River fire in Alaska in 2007 documented a dramatic reduction in stored carbon. The researchers concluded that the growing frequency and intensity of fire would cause major changes in the ecosystem, climate and “the well-being of humans and other animals that inhabit Alaska’s North Slope.” After a severe burn, soil carbon, a key indicator of fertility, is “unlikely to recover to pre-fire levels over the next millennia.”

In general, animals get less consideration than plants in research on the aftermath of fires, but several studies of birds describe changes for better and for worse:

Open-air experiment in Yellowstone…

Much of what we know about the ecological impact of fire has come from Yellowstone National Park, where a giant blaze burned about 45 percent of the 1-million hectare park in 1988. Photos of towers of flame and exhausted firefighters became symbolic of nature run amok. Yet long-term studies of the aftermath produced surprising results, says Monica Turner, a landscape ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

By 1998, 10 years after the blaze, Yellowstone was already on the rebound. Fish and mammals had survived the holocaust surprisingly well, and lodgepole pines—which dominated the park for 10,000 years — were poking through the shrubs and weeds, heralding a return of the park’s old ecosystem.

• While it looked catastrophic, Yellowstone’s infamous 1988 fire turned out to be a regular stage of ecological change.
  Photo: Jeff Henry, U.S. National Park Service, 12120
  
• Before: A stand of lodgepole pines tower above spruce and fir in Yellowstone 1965.
  Photo: RG Johnsson, , U.S. National Park Service, 08161
  
• 10 years after: The forest restored itself, as lodgepole pines sprout between dead ones in 1998.
  Photo: Jim Peaco, U.S. National Park Service, 15995
  

On cone-y island?

Why the quick rebound? Although the horrific photos from 1988 suggested that the vast sections of Yellowstone were uniformly charred, the severity varied from place to place. While intense crown fires killed all above-ground vegetation in some areas, trees and plants survived milder ground fires elsewhere, and the “mosaic” destruction allowed rapid, but patchy, regeneration. “In some places, very few trees are coming back, in other we see hundreds of thousands per hectare,” says Turner.

These extremes of tree density after a fire reflect that pattern of fire severity, Turner explains, and the biology of the dominant lodgepole pines. Many of these trees produce cones that, in a fire, open and release their seeds, which confront ideal growing conditions: Bare soil with little competition, plenty of sun, and the weather they are adapted to.

Other lodgepoles, however, release their seeds essentially on schedule, giving them less advantage after a fire. As the difference in tree density plays itself out over the decades, the fire’s imprint on the landscape can persist for more than 150 years, Turner says.

A flowering success

Because the soil was charred only to an average depth of 2 centimeters, and never more than 6 centimeters, some plants resprouted from roots or underground structures called rhizomes. By 1990, wildflowers were already abundant, Turner said. “Regeneration of these plants was very rapid, and it came from within the burned area. Even the really big fires leave a legacy of the plants that were there before the fire.”

In contrast, invasive species, did unexpectedly poorly after the fire, Turner said. “We had hypothesized that there might be an invasion by non-natives; the fires had created so much expansive, disturbed habitat, but the invasives have not appeared to spread, and are still where they used to be, along roads and trails.”

Burn and revive — or not

Over all, the fires had surprisingly little impact on wildlife, says Turner, who studied survival of elk and bison in Yellowstone, and the fire may even have given elk an advantage over the reintroduced wolf. “The young forest that is coming back after the ’88 fires provides quite a bit of cover for elk; the young pines are super-dense, it’s difficult to see your hand in front of your nose.” Furthermore, logs from the fallen trees killed by the fire can conceal elk and interfere with the wolf attempts to run down elk in open fields.

The summary word for Yellowstone is resilience, Turner says. The natural fire regime in the Yellowstone area includes a hot, crown fire “that replaces the whole forest and the cycle begins again about every 120 to 300 years. Big fires at the historic intervals are not detrimental to the system in any way.” Although these fires threaten homes and businesses, “from the perspective of plants and animals, fire is a normal event.”

Wildfires can carry other hazards, however. For example, a 2010 study of dry regions of Southeast Australia noted heavy erosion and debris flows after a big fire, mirroring what has been seen in the arid American Southwest. The debris flows were not seen in wetter forests, however.

Fire in a changing globe

Fire, obviously, removes stored carbon from the forest, making it a potential source of greenhouse warming. But the opposite is also true: global warming seems to cause more fires. According to experts on Western water and climate⁵ rapid climate change is underway in the American West, with:

The “signature” of global warming is already appearing in western forests, agreed a 2006 study⁶ which identified a change starting in the mid-1980s toward “higher large-wildfire frequency, longer wildfire durations, and longer wildfire seasons. The greatest increases occurred in mid-elevation, Northern Rockies forests, where land-use histories have relatively little effect on fire risks and are strongly associated with increased spring and summer temperatures and an earlier spring snowmelt.”

In other words, the increase in large, intense forest fires was more likely due to global warming than to the increased fuel load left by a century of fire-fighting.

Data: National Interagency Fire Center

In the United States, the area burned has gradually increased since 1983.

These changes are evident in Yellowstone, says Erica Smithwick, an assistant professor of geography and ecology who studies the aftermath of wildfires at Penn State. Historically, the “fire regime” — the average time needed to burn the entire area — is 120 to 300 years, but the lodgepole pines that dominate the plateau recover within a century, so the forest has survived regular large fires.

But Smithwick, Turner and colleagues came to an alarming conclusion when they compared projections for temperature and rainfall timing and intensity in 2050 to the history of fires when those conditions prevailed in the past.

Near Ryazan, Russia, 8 May 2011, mcsdwarken via Flickr

Record heat in Russia in 2010 led to a series of huge wildfires.

The interval between fires, they calculated, would be drastically shorter, and that is disturbing, Smithwick acknowledges. “If these projections are correct, there really might be a threshold in the vegetation where it would not be able to recover.”

Such a fire regime, she adds, is “more consistent with lower montane forests [with trees spaced far apart] or non-forests.”

What is the endgame of warmer, drier forests where fires are becoming more frequent? Could fires turn a forest to desert? Yes, according to a 2009 presentation by Daniel Neary of the Rocky Mountain Research Station in Flagstaff, Ariz. “Wildfire is now driving desertification in some of the forest lands in the western United States. The areas of wildfire in the Southwest U.S.A. have increased dramatically in the past two decades” from less than 10,000 hectares per year in the early 20th century to over 230,000 hectares today. “Individual wildfires are now larger and produce higher severity burns than in the past. A combination of natural drought, climate change, excessive fuel loads, and increased ignition sources have produced the perfect conditions for fire-induced desertification.”

It’s impossible to know the outcome in Yellowstone, a jewel of the U.S. national parks, Smithwick says. “I don’t think the ecosystem is doomed, but how do you manage a system like Yellowstone in that context? There should be some opportunity for the ecosystem to shift.” Eventually, grassland may replace forest, she notes. “Ecosystems are constantly shifting; that’s the kind of mindset we need to go forward. But this is a bit of a wakeup call. We are pushing the system, and we don’t know what is on the other side of the tipping point.”

– David Tenenbaum

They are the ear-wrenching, jaw-jangling junk of the scientific world, the poly-syllabic, hexa-enjargonated children of the refereed journal. Cobbled higgledy-piggledy, these stacks of Greek and Latin roots are primed with prefixii and capped with suffixii.

Some of these mongrelized mutants say the uber-obvious: Does “biomedicine” not equal “medicine”?

More of them seem to say the obscure, redundant or ridiculous, like “biomolecular medicine.” Eh?

Did ancient civilizations follow astrolacism to find their way around? Photo: Gerard Mercator

You don’t need much experience reading science to adopt a love-hate relationship with the incessant onslaught of obscurity: Some of these terms, like “decadal mean,” (average temperature during a specific 10-year period) have real utility and no synonyms, and you’d best learn them and soldier on.

Others seem mainly designed to serve as scientific ownership flags staked by the first to discover a phenomenon — whether it’s actually new or not.

Evidence of early-onset electrostatic compulsion? Photo: Steve Paine

And at a time when record numbers of people communicate in English, and that well-known tongue is the standard language for many scientific papers, why must every new hunk of jargon originate in Greek or Latin — or preferably both?

We could go on to decry the esthetic obnoxion of fabrications like “pharmacological,” which often could be replaced by the rather simpler “drug.”

Enough whining. We must move to today’s challenge:

Below, we’ve briefly defined some scientific jargon. Please tell us which are real, and which we concocted.

Positive “JargoPro” points are awarded for obscurity, over-reliance on Greek and Latin, length (measured in syllables), a grating quality on the ear, and esthetic points for excessive use of linguistic force.

Negative “JargoCon” points go to ease of pronunciation and a heightened chance that mere mortals may comprehend and even pronounce the term.

Pharmaco-optimalic (concerning the visual presentation of drugs)

JargoPro: Nice use of multiple obscure roots; ambiguity (does “optimalic” refer to a state of mind, or to optics)?

JargoCon: Rather straightforward pronunciation.

Phyto-viability: Real Or Fake?	SelectShow
Real, solid jargon!

Phyto-viability (ability of soils to promote plant survival)

JargoPro: Incorporates the Greek “Ph” phoneme instead of the more familiar Anglo-Saxon “f”; also grating on the ear.

JargoCon: Use of hyphen fosters understanding; perilously comprehensible to the one percent who recognize “phyt” as the Greek root for “plant.”

Did this plant succumb to poor phyto-viability or just neglect? Photo: pete_pick

Electrostatic compulsion: Real Or Fake?	SelectShow
Fake: April Fool’s!

Electrostatic compulsion (gravitational pull between silicon-powered screens and human minds)

JargoPro: The adjective seems familiar, but is tantalizingly obscure.

JargoCon: Condition is so common that readers may jump to the correct conclusion about meaning, always a negative to a jargoneer!

Stoichiometry: Real Or Fake?	SelectShow
Real, solid jargon!

Stoichiometry (related to the proportions of chemical elements in a chemical reaction)

JargoPro: Symmetrical, reverse-reiteration of “oi” as “io”; essentially unpronounceable.

JargoCon: Fundamental concept, so the term may be necessary.

Polymorphism: Real Or Fake?	SelectShow
Real, solid jargon!

Polymorphism (taking several different shapes)

JargoPro: Elegant concatenation of the Greeks: “poly” (many) and “morph” (shape).

JargoCon: At four syllables, syllabically deficient, thus impairing incomprehensibility.

Are the differently colored heads of these gouldian finches an example of polymorphism or did one just get into the hair dye? Nigel Jacques

Astrolacism: Real Or Fake?	SelectShow
Fake: April Fool’s!

Astrolacism (use of stars as fixed points in geography)

JargoPro: Suffic-ates with the opaque “-ism”; exploits confusion between astronomy and astrology.

JargoCon: Some people will understand “astro” as related to astronomy, and therefore stars.

Longitudinal: Real Or Fake?	SelectShow
Real, solid jargon!

Longitudinal (variations over time)

JargoPro: Easily dropped into an otherwise-comprehensible sentence; also may confuse geographers who think it refers to imaginary, north-south lines on maps.

JargoCon: Easy to pronounce, so long as you catch the soft “g”

Gastrophrenology: Real Or Fake?	SelectShow
Fake: April Fool’s!

Gastrophrenology (study of the correlation between microstructures in the small intestine and surface of the cranium)

JargoPro: Strong reliance on dead languages for roots; induces guilt — is this something your doctor warned about last year?

JargoCon: Although “phren” is satisfyingly opaque, “gastro” may give away at least part of meaning.

Etiological: Real Or Fake?	SelectShow
Real, solid jargon!

Etiological (related to causes)

JargoPro: Enviable compression of six syllables in 11 letters; tricky pronunciation leads with a long “E” where a short “e” is expected.

JargoCon: Basic meaning is accessible to all; streamlined American spelling avoids the “we’re Brits so we can add letters whenever we want” blighted spelling “aetiological.”

– David J. Tenenbaum

]]> http://whyfiles.org/2011/english-is-optional-dept/feed/ 0 http://whyfiles.org/2009/internet-the-fastest-teacher/ http://whyfiles.org/2009/internet-the-fastest-teacher/#comments Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:51:48 +0000 svmedaristwf http://whyfiles.org/?p=3375 Google/Yahoo/Bing: New brain tutors?

Staying mentally and physically active is a standard prescription for helping a healthy brain survive the assaults of aging. Crossword puzzles, Sudoku, specialized software and bridge are all prized elements of the mental magic, even if the data on their true utility are a bit sketchy.

Is it time to scribble “Internet search” on the prescription pad? Maybe so, according to research reported this week to the Society for Neuroscience. Researchers from the University of California at Los Angeles rounded up 24 volunteers, aged 55 to 78, and sorted out search users from non-users, who were rather hard to find, we are told.

Is she smiling because her brain is getting stronger?

Photo: Social Security Administration

Both groups endured two functional magnetic resonance (MR) scans, which detect blood flow through various parts of the brain, a good indicator of which areas were being used at the moment. Computer equipment cannot survive the intense magnetism inside an MR machine, so the volunteers performed a simulated Internet search during the scans.

At the first scan, the “savvies” had more activity in brain regions associated with language, reading, memory and visual ability. Two weeks later, after both groups performed seven one-hour Internet searches, that difference was pretty well gone, says Gary Small, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, who lead the study.

 

2007 figures from Internetworldstats.com, Sbw01f

Enormous changes in the mental machine?

Small says he is not shocked to see such a fast change in the brain. “Your brain is quite an amazing organ. The brain is sensitive to whatever we expose it to from moment to moment; it’s quite reactive.”

Brain scans compare first (blue) and second (red) session

The study, Small explains, “Shows that you can train the brain relatively quickly. An everyday activity, like searching the web, seems to activate areas involved in memory and complex reasoning.”

According to Teena Moody, the study’s first author and a senior research associate at the Semel Institute, “The results suggest that searching online may be a simple form of brain exercise that might be employed to enhance cognition in older adults.”

However, the study does not prove that Internet searching has real-world benefits, Small admits. “This is suggestive evidence that this exposure can do that in the short term, but whether that has any carryover to these aspects in daily life, I don’t know.”

Unfortunately, tests traditionally used to assess working memory and other faculties did not show any difference, says Small, co-author of iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind. That, however, was something he expected, he says. “This is a small sample, and even in larger studies, the results of brain scans change, but the paper-and-pencil tests do not.”

Still, the location of the changes was suggestive. “It looks like this is telling us something real. These are not changes in random areas; these are areas that we know are used in cognitive activities.”

From original image: UCLA

Arrow shows major change in brain activity in the second brain scan. In the second scans, which followed Internet training, activity is similar for naïve and savvy subjects.

Hop aboard the brain train!

Brain training is a burgeoning business, but the results to date are somewhat limited, Small says. “We find you get better at the specific activity you are training. If it’s verbal reasoning, that’s what improves. If it’s rote memory, then rote memory improves. The ability to transfer that to everyday memory challenges is a little trickier.”

Could improving your brain be as simple as searching out a fusion Asian restaurant or a nature preserve on the web? Perhaps, but it’s also possible that all this net-work could be harmful…

As people ranging from toddlers to the elders spend more time with screens and keyboards, Small says it’s important to know how this will affect our brains. “We want to do this with larger samples. It’s important. Technology is only continuing to penetrate our everyday lives, and we want know the upside and the downside.”

David J. Tenenbaum

Related Why Files

• Pay Attention. Change the brain?

• Learning in the Brain

• MRI Tracks Stress in the Brain

• Brain battle

]]> http://whyfiles.org/2009/internet-the-fastest-teacher/feed/ 0 http://whyfiles.org/2006/new-yardstick-for-the-universe/ http://whyfiles.org/2006/new-yardstick-for-the-universe/#comments Thu, 10 Aug 2006 17:00:35 +0000 schulte http://whyfiles.org/?p=909 Feeling cramped? New measurement says the universe is bigger than you thought. Meet the astronomers’ new yardstick.

]]> http://whyfiles.org/2006/new-yardstick-for-the-universe/feed/ 0 http://whyfiles.org/2006/cloning-fraud-howd-it-happen/ http://whyfiles.org/2006/cloning-fraud-howd-it-happen/#comments Fri, 13 Jan 2006 06:20:57 +0000 schulte http://whyfiles.org/?p=869 Korean scientist Woo Suk Hwang pulled off the biggest scientific fraud in memory. How did he do it? How is science supposed to prevent fraud? Why did it matter, and who loses in medical fraud?

]]> http://whyfiles.org/2006/cloning-fraud-howd-it-happen/feed/ 0 http://whyfiles.org/2005/time-to-consider-the-leap-second/ http://whyfiles.org/2005/time-to-consider-the-leap-second/#comments Thu, 29 Sep 2005 18:46:54 +0000 schulte http://whyfiles.org/?p=847 The solar clock doesn’t quite line up with the atomic clock. We use leap seconds to make them match. Should we dump the leap second?

]]> http://whyfiles.org/2005/time-to-consider-the-leap-second/feed/ 0 http://whyfiles.org/2003/forensic-anthropology/ http://whyfiles.org/2003/forensic-anthropology/#comments Tue, 16 Dec 2003 21:21:02 +0000 schulte http://whyfiles.org/?p=532 http://whyfiles.org/2003/forensic-anthropology/feed/ 0 http://whyfiles.org/2000/a-letter-from-archimedes/ http://whyfiles.org/2000/a-letter-from-archimedes/#comments Mon, 24 Jul 2000 19:18:32 +0000 schulte http://whyfiles.org/?p=821 Ancient mathematician’s writing found, restored, after 22 centuries.

]]> http://whyfiles.org/2000/a-letter-from-archimedes/feed/ 0 http://whyfiles.org/2000/mad-science/ http://whyfiles.org/2000/mad-science/#comments Thu, 30 Mar 2000 18:57:06 +0000 schulte http://whyfiles.org/?p=761 A MAD look at science. Science fair projects we’d like to see, weird wonk words, and creative uses for radioactive waste.

]]> http://whyfiles.org/2000/mad-science/feed/ 0