Word: planetful
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...City's American Museum of Natural History and Washington's Smithsonian Institution, has been eclipsed according to Hoffman by a preoccupation with molecular biology. "It's a sad situation," he says. "We're coasting on the glamour of biodiversity but losing the ability to identify the creatures on this planet." Even the ones in a big city park...
...different from any other single-celled organism that scientists have created a new biological kingdom, called Archaea (from archaic), to accommodate them. As the name suggests, Archaea may be similar to the very first organisms that populated the earth billions of years ago. The implication: life on our planet may first have arisen, not in a warm tidal pool as Darwin and others theorized, but under conditions of sulfurous, searing heat...
...photosynthesis, using sunlight as a primary energy source. (Even cave-dwelling or deep-water creatures who never see the sun eat organic matter that ultimately originates from photosynthesis.) But if life could thrive without even indirect contact with sunlight, the amount of potentially habitable real estate on the planet would expand considerably...
That really should not be surprising. Most types of animals--monkeys, whales, cats, apes--come in multiple varieties. As recently as 30,000 or 40,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens was sufficiently evolved to make jewelry and paint hauntingly evocative drawings on cave walls, we shared the planet with a second hominid species, the Neanderthals. And although it seems natural to us that only one species of hominid lives today, it is in fact an exception to nature's way of doing things...
...movement may also have something to do with the glacier itself - the distribution of its ice mass and its underground water pressure. Regardless of what is behind the Macugnaga incident, most scientists agree that the state of glaciers is an indication of the overall health of the planet. "It's hard to say how much is due to natural forces and how much human activity is to blame," says Luca Mercalli, an Italian climatologist monitoring Macugnaga. "But melting glaciers are a symptom, a warning that we need to pay attention...