Word: botanists
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...BOTANIST "pilobolus" is a kind of fungus that ejects its spores. It might seem a poor choice for the name of a dance troupe, but in an odd way "pilobolus" does suggest their style. Departing from classical ballet form, where the body moves with a fluid grace. Pilobolus has choreographed dances that stress the interaction of human bodies. By contorting their backs and intertwining their limbs these six dancers' can arrange themselves in a staggering number and variety of patterns. The dancers bodies often mingle in such complex and intriguing ways that their limbs and extremities seem extensions...
Though Leonardo was, as everyone knew, chemist and physicist, mechanical engineer, musician, architect, anatomist and botanist as well as painter, it is not wholly possible to draw a dividing line between art and science in his work. Painting was to him a method of inquiry into the world's structure; it was the empiricism of sight itself. He tended to regard it as the queen of the sciences. His scientific work (on water, wind and their catastrophic powers, for instance) was presented in drawings of ravishing subtlety. Their purely descriptive intent in no way affects their aesthetic power...
...gardens. In his 1922 volume The Coming of the Fairies, Doyle reproduced photographs of a tiny goblin and elves caught by a child's camera. The pictures were manifestly staged; the entire project made all but the blindest believers wince. One who did not was a young American botanist named J.B. Rhine. After an inspiring Doyle lecture on spiritualism, Rhine and his wife Louisa immersed themselves in literature published by the Society for Psychical Research. When Rhine later joined the faculty of Duke University, he began a lifelong devotion to psychic research. It was he who coined the terms...
Jesuit achievements were as often secular as spiritual. French Jesuit Jacques Marquette paddled down the Mississippi in the first European expedition to explore that river. Brother Jiri Kamel, a Moravian botanist at the Jesuits' College of Manila in the 17th century, gave Europe the camellia. A German mathematician and astronomer of the Society of Jesus, Christoph Klau, contributed to the Gregorian calendar and gave his Latinized name, Clavius, to a lunar crater that he discovered...
...pious legend? Not necessarily, says Israeli Botanist Yehuda Feliks. Writing in a monumental new set of reference books called the Encyclopedia Judaica, Feliks identifies Jacob's secret as a keen perception of the laws of heredity. (The peeled branches were just window dressing.) Jacob apparently knew from a dream that the hybrids (white sheep and black goats that carried recessive genes of "spottedness") matured sexually earlier than the pure monochromes in the flock. He mated the hybrids, and their recessive genes emerged to produce a maximum of spotted offspring in each generation. He set aside the pure monochromes, unbred...