The whole subject reduces to one comparison: which rock resisted and which did not. Everything projecting is what held out, everything indented is what did not, and every feature between…
There is a small category of materials obtained from a living organism without killing it, and a smaller category still where the organism replaces what was taken.
Cork belongs to…
There is a common assumption about concealment that is intuitive and mostly wrong.
The assumption is that hiding means matching — that the way to be invisible is to be…
There is a plant that behaves so differently from a tree that most of what people assume about it is wrong, starting with what it is.
Bamboo is a grass.…
Three variables produce nearly every dune shape there is: how much sand there is, how many directions the wind blows from, and whether vegetation is holding anything down. Here are…
There is a way of thinking about disturbance that treats it as damage — something that happens to an ecosystem and that the ecosystem then recovers from.
That framing works…