Word: phenomena
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...that has become a minority viewpoint. Explains Alan Beck, an animal ecologist at Purdue: "There are undoubtedly still scientists out there who question the intelligence of dogs and cats because they don't have the hard data. They feel it's unscientific to acknowledge phenomena we can't prove." But the majority of Beck's colleagues, he says, now accept the notion that animals have, for lack of a better phrase, an emotional and intellectual life. "I am absolutely convinced, for example, that my dog feels guilty when he defecates on the rug," says Beck. "A blind observer could...
...Earthwatch plans to sponsor 165 projects ranging form studying geological phenomena to understanding the human impact on ecosystems. To date, the program has trained more than 3,075 students and 2,625 teachers...
Complexity theory and chaos theory share more than the attention of enterprising writers; they are scientific first cousins. The essence of chaos theory is that certain phenomena involve so many factors that they are inherently unpredictable; although a scientist may be able to project the pattern of a swinging pendulum or a flying cannonball, it is impossible to determine how far apart two leaves will be after they go through a waterfall or exactly what the weather will be a month from now. Reason: in systems governed by the mathematics of chaos, small events have big consequences. For instance, even...
Complexity theorists believe more sophisticated phenomena follow the same pattern. The stock market can, without outside direction, hum along on an upward course for years and then crash 500 points in a single day. A species can survive for millions of years and then abruptly die out -- or conversely, evolve almost all at once into something entirely new. And self-reproducing organisms can somehow arise, against all odds, from a soup of simple organic chemicals...
...Farmer gets rich, there will be skeptics who dismiss the idea that complexity is the scientific revolution its proponents claim. The critics, writes physicist and sometime Santa Fe Institute visitor Daniel Stein in the December issue of Physics Today, can rightly ask, "Why is it necessary to force ((these phenomena)) under a single umbrella?" Yet there can be no doubt that investigations of complexity and chaos have at least made things more interesting. Comments Rockefeller University physicist Mitchell Feigenbaum: "Now we see things we didn't notice before, and we ask questions we didn't know...