Environment

Butchery on Wings

Anyone that has seen Alfred Hitchcock's “The Birds” should have a healthy fear of crows. Even to someone who has never enjoyed the glorious spectacle of crows pecking people's eyes out in black and white, crows are unsettling. They are a large menacing black bird with a blood-curdling caw; add the fact that a group

Poison ivy's chemical curse

by Uma Nagendra, Athens Science Café Ah, summer in the American South: the air is abuzz with cicadas, air conditioning, and aerosol bugspray. For many, it's a season equally beloved and reviled. Everyone seems to have their favorite griping point:  the relentless humidity, the constant threat of mosquitoes, or my personal nemesis—poison ivy. Although poison

Spring Ephemerals in Your Backyard: A Webcomic

Written and Illustrated by Uma Nagendra Uma Nagendra is a PhD Candidate at the University of Georgia and became interested in studying natural disasters since Hurricane Katrina hit her hometown of New Orleans.  She enjoys finding creative ways to demonstrate complicated ecological concepts—preferably if it involves running around outside or drawing pictures.  When not crawling over downed

Crop Domestication: From the Wild to the Grocery Store

Links: Sunflower Domestication, Corn Domestication, Wayne Parrott’s GMO Talk, Scientific Article 1, Scientific Article GMO and Crop Domestication, Scientific Article 3 (paywall),UN Food and Agriculture Organization Book Chapter, Nonfiction book partially covering this topic Rishi R. Masalia is a Ph.D graduate student in the Department of Plant Biology at the University of Georgia studying the

Biofuel ethics: food versus fuel

Is it right to allocate a portion of our food crops for producing fuel? What the problem really boils down to is energy. In the past decade or so, worldwide biodiesel and bioethanol production have increased fivefold. Worryingly the vast majority of that biofuel originated from ethanol was obtained from corn in the US. This

Why are some species so invasive? [Invasive Species, Part 1]

If you drive longer than five miles in the South, you'll undoubtedly see an abandoned lot covered in kudzu. Up until the 1950s, farmers transplanted the fast-growing vine from Asia to the U.S. to stop soil erosion along roads. Individual kudzu vines can grow more than 100 feet per growing season, easily spreading over the

The Herd at work

Restoration with Goats: Ruminating on the Reasons

I will attempt to graze over a topic ubiquitous in the southeast: invasive plants. With over 5,000 nonnative plant species in the U.S., you could say that this is no small problem, whether it is in our hands or not. You may ask yourself: Why should I care about the spread of some obnoxious, ugly

Are all forest fires bad?

Around mid-summer each year, stories about wildfires, especially in the Western United States begin to dominate the news. Since 2000, there have been between 40,000 to 100,000 wildfires in the U.S. each year that are responsible for an average of 19 fatalities and 7 million burned acres (about the size of Massachusetts). When humans live

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