Archaeologist Stefani Crabtree writes about her work to reconstruct Indigenous food and use networks for the National Park Service: Traditional Ecological Knowledge gets embedded in the choices that people make when they consume, and how TEK can provide stability of an ecosystem. Among Martu, the use of fire for hunting and the knowledge of the […]
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Craig Childs chronicles the last millennia of the Ice Age, the violent oscillations and retreat of glaciers, the clues and traces that document the first encounters of early humans, and the animals whose presence governed the humans chances for survival. With the cadence of his narrative moving from scientific observation to poetry, he reveals how
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Jim Cooke / Gizmodo Gizmodo asks half a dozen natural historians to speculate on who is going to be doing what jobs on Earth after the people disappear. One of the streams that runs wide and deep through this series of fun thought experiments is how so many niches stay the same through catastrophic changes
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Michelle Swanson, an Oregon-based educator and educational consultant, has written a blog post on the Internet Archive on the increased importance of digital librarians during the pandemic: With public library buildings closed due to the global pandemic, teachers, students, and lovers of books everywhere have increasingly turned to online resources for access to information. But as
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Samuel Velasco/Quanta Magazine Living in a world with multiple spatiotemporal scales, the very small and fast can often drive the future of the very large and slow: Microscopic genetic mutations change macroscopic anatomy. Undetectably small variations in local climate change global weather patterns (the infamous “butterfly effect”). And now, one more example comes from a
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Human history in the Americas may be twice long as long as previously believed — at least 26,500 years — according to authors of a new study at Mexico’s Chiquihuite cave and other sites throughout Central Mexico. According to the study’s lead author Ciprian Ardelean: “This site alone can’t be considered a definitive conclusion. But
For everyone who cannot see the Comet Neowise with their own eyes this week — or just wants to see it from a higher perch — this video by artist Seán Doran combines 550 NASA images from the International Space Station into a real-time view of the comet from 250 miles above Earth’s surface and 17,500 mph.
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Pleistocene dormouse Leithia melitensis was the size of a house cat. New computer-aided reconstructions show a skull as long as an entire modern dormouse. It’s a textbook example of “island gigantism,” in which, biologists hypothesize, fewer terrestrial predators and more pressure from predatory birds selects for a much larger body size in some island organisms.
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Illustration: Tom Lee at Rocket Visual Human beings have an astonishing evolutionary gift: agile imaginations that can shift in an instant from thinking on a scale of seconds to a scale of years or even centuries. Our minds constantly dance across multiple time horizons. One moment we can be making a quickfire response to a text
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“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” – Alan Kay The Long Now Foundation has partnered with Avenues: The World School to offer a program on the past, present, and future of innovation. A fully online program for ages 17 and above, the Avenues Mastery Year is designed to equip aspiring
