Word: sunlight
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...Margulis believe this regulation is achieved through the simple mechanism of feedback. For instance, in a hypothetical scenario, Lovelock shows that a planet covered simply by light- and dark-colored daisies could control the sun's heat. In this self-regulating model, dark daisies would absorb sunlight and warm the planet, until it became too warm for the dark daisies and instead favored the proliferation of light-reflecting daisies. That would have the effect of cooling the planet until the cycle reversed itself again...
Call up Eddie Adams' 1968 photo of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the police chief of Saigon, firing his snub-nosed revolver into the temple of a Viet Cong officer. Bright sunlight, Saigon: the scrawny police chief's arm, outstretched, goes by extension through the trigger finger into the V.C.'s brain. That photograph, and another in 1972 showing a naked young Vietnamese girl running in arms-outstretched terror up a road away from American napalm, outmanned the force of three U.S. Presidents and the most powerful Army in the world. The photographs were considered, quite ridiculously, to be a portrait...
Education efforts, both in Africa and in ivory-consuming nations, should emphasize just how crucial elephants are to African ecosystems. Elephants not only inhabit but also shape their habitat. In their search for food, they uproot and topple trees, allowing grasses and shrubs to take root and sunlight to reach the ground. By digging with their tusks, the great beasts bring underground pools to the surface, creating water holes that sustain a host of thirsty creatures. Warns a May 1989 study by a consortium of conservationists: "The elephant's extermination will lead to biological impoverishment and domino-like extinctions over...
Perhaps these feverish pennant races are baseball's way of recompensing its loyal fans for the disgrace of Pete Rose and the specter of a strike next spring. But for the moment, the game is glittering like the Wrigley Field diamond in sunlight, as the schedule decrees that the season ends with the Cubs playing the Cardinals, the Giants taking on the Padres and the Orioles trying to knock the Blue Jays off their perch. It is enough to make even skeptics worship at the Church of Baseball...
...forest functions like a delicately balanced organism that recycles most of its nutrients and much of its moisture. Wisps of steam float from the top of the endless palette of green as water evaporates off the upper leaves, cooling the trees as they collect the intense sunlight. Air currents over the forest gather this evaporation into clouds, which return the moisture to the system in torrential rains. Dead animals and vegetation decompose quickly, and the resulting nutrients move rapidly from the soil back to growing plants. The forest is such an efficient recycler that virtually no decaying matter seeps into...