Explore the vast range of titles available.

Six ice cores from Kilimanjaro provide an ~11.7-thousand-year record of Holocene climate and environmental variability for eastern equatorial Africa, including three periods of abrupt climate change: ~8.3, ~5.2, and ~4 thousand years ago (ka). The latter is coincident with the \"First Dark Age,\" the period of the greatest historically recorded drought in tropical Africa. Variable deposition of F- and Na+ during the African Humid Period suggests rapidly fluctuating lake levels between ~11.7 and 4 ka. Over the 20th century, the areal extent of Kilimanjaro's ice fields has decreased ~80%, and if current climatological conditions persist, the remaining ice fields are likely to disappear between 2015 and 2020.

Gentlemen Volunteers: The Story of the American Ambulance Drivers in the Great War When you think of the advent of modern warfare, World War I rumbles to mind - the first tanks, the first planes, the first massive reliance on automatic weapons, and, of course, poison gas. Yet there was another facet to early mechanized warfare: not only the use of machines to slaughter soldiers, but also their use to remove the wounded from the battlefield. A few highly motivated - and sometimes highly prideful - upper-crust Americans assumed the organizational responsibilities. Most prominent: Herman Harjes, a banker working in Paris when war broke out, whose ambulance unit was known as the Harjes Formation; Richard Norton, who formed the American Volunteer Ambulance Corps; and A. Piatt Andrew, who headed the American Ambulance Field Service (after the war transformed into the AFS student foreign-exchange program).

Stripey the great horned owl should take his - oops, make that \"her\" - place among literature's memorable animal protagonists. Not that Max Terman's account of an intimate relationship with one of nature's less sociable creatures is a \"story,\" in the fictional sense. This is a meticulously recorded scientific observation. But it's one appealingly interwoven with emotion and sentiment. In a word, it's readable, for ornithologist and layman alike. The saga begins with the discovery near the Hillsboro, Kan., campus of Tabor College - where Terman teaches - of a deserted and starving owl chick. Terman, an ecologist with a heart and a curiosity as wide as the surrounding prairie, decides to adopt the orphan. Thus starts an experiment in understanding the life choices of an \"imprinted\" wild animal - that is, one so marked by human contact that a normal life in the woods and fields may be out of the question.

That might be the reaction to another look at one of America's classic tales of heroism. But Stephen Ambrose tells the familiar story with a zest for detail and a feel for the humanity of Meriwether Lewis and his patron, President Thomas Jefferson, that make the history sing and sigh, groan and breathe. The frailties come to light most obviously in the schemes Lewis and Jefferson cooked up to involve the Indians of the upper Missouri River and the Pacific Northwest in a commercial empire based on the fur trade. The idea was to get across to the tribes that their new \"father\" in Washington could be both very generous and very strict with \"his red children.\" And American intentions were conveyed in just those patronizing terms, both by Lewis on the trail and by Jefferson when chiefs from the Mandans, Hidatsas, Osage, and other peoples visited the US capital at Lewis's behest. But Jefferson and his messenger of empire, Lewis, had little capacity to appreciate that the Indians had a history too, which taught them to be suspicious of white men coming with an offer of friendship and a desire to foster reconciliation among all tribes. The latter purpose, a foundation stone of the commercial enterprise Lewis and Jefferson envisioned, flew in the face of generations of hostilities between rival tribes.

This book is about a few of those NFL wannabes - promising young players recruited to Florida State University's Seminole squad in the early 1980s. High school athletes good enough to be wooed by a football powerhouse like FSU may have reasonable hopes for a pro career, but life usually lands them elsewhere, with regrets that their college years yielded little in the way of academic or intellectual benefits. Caroline Alexander chronicles those regrets, and more. She had gotten to know these men when they were starry-eyed lower classmen and she was their English tutor, hired by the university to help them pass academic muster. What emerges from her extensive interviews 10 years later are individuals who defy the \"dumb jock\" stereotypes. They recognize how ill-prepared they were to do college work, how their motivations were skewed by the deception that they could ride their football skills to success, and how important it is to give their own kids a more realistic view of life. Their eventual careers ranged from prison guard to car salesmen to convicted criminal to (yes, one made it) NFL wide receiver.

Bruce Feiler must have been riveted by a recent news item about circus elephants breaking free in Forest Park in New York. A good part of his book, \"Under the Big Top,\" is devoted to just such happenings. In Feiler's account, however, the elephant escapade was much darker than the minor panic in Forest Park. An elephant crushed an intruder who climbed into its compound and surprised the huge beast. Many of the circus vignettes painted by Feiler are, in fact, dark-hued: human failings and ego-driven rampages as well as the more predictable lapses of half-domesticated wild animals. Feiler, a sure-handed writer with an obvious attraction for the direct, face-to-face entertainment exemplified by the circus, decided to take a year and experience this world from the inside. His ticket to a season with the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus - billed as the globe's largest tented circus - was his willingness to learn the clown's stock in trade.

I AN Frazier treats the Great Plains as a vast canvas--2,500 miles long, 600 wide --splashed with memories of men like Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Custer. He paints their shimmering afterglow, bringing color to an endless, grassy horizon.

Jane Smiley has written an alternative to \"Huckleberry Finn,\" focusing the discussion of slavery in a way Huck never does. Lidie (Newton) marries an activist in the abolition movement and finds herself in the Kansas Territory on the eve of the Civil War. The tale is full of remarkable characters, particularly the narrator, whose descriptions of life strip away romantic notions of simpler times. Through the story of a courageous woman who flees her abusive husband, Anna Quindlen deftly explores the rocky emotional terrain of love and marriage, choices and consequences. With the help of an underground network, Fran secretly takes her 10-year-old son to a small Florida town, where she gradually learns to overcome the isolation of her new fugitive life. Its aching sadness is redeemed in part by its tender portrait of indomitable maternal love. Thirtysomething Londoner Bridget Jones is desperate to lose weight, stop smoking, and find a man. A year of dryly witty diary entries follow her through a series of disastrous dates, family crises, and work fiascos. This is light satire at its best. Bridget's diary lets us into the head of a self-obsessed yet appealing woman and her struggle to be self-confident and independent.

Transposon-directed insertion site sequencing (TraDIS) is a high-throughput method coupling transposon mutagenesis with short-fragment DNA sequencing. It is commonly used to identify essential genes. Single gene deletion libraries are considered the gold standard for identifying essential genes. Currently, the TraDIS method has not been benchmarked against such libraries, and therefore, it remains unclear whether the two methodologies are comparable. To address this, a high-density transposon library was constructed in Escherichia coli K-12. Essential genes predicted from sequencing of this library were compared to existing essential gene databases. To decrease false-positive identification of essential genes, statistical data analysis included corrections for both gene length and genome length. Through this analysis, new essential genes and genes previously incorrectly designated essential were identified. We show that manual analysis of TraDIS data reveals novel features that would not have been detected by statistical analysis alone. Examples include short essential regions within genes, orientation-dependent effects, and fine-resolution identification of genome and protein features. Recognition of these insertion profiles in transposon mutagenesis data sets will assist genome annotation of less well characterized genomes and provides new insights into bacterial physiology and biochemistry. IMPORTANCE Incentives to define lists of genes that are essential for bacterial survival include the identification of potential targets for antibacterial drug development, genes required for rapid growth for exploitation in biotechnology, and discovery of new biochemical pathways. To identify essential genes in Escherichia coli , we constructed a transposon mutant library of unprecedented density. Initial automated analysis of the resulting data revealed many discrepancies compared to the literature. We now report more extensive statistical analysis supported by both literature searches and detailed inspection of high-density TraDIS sequencing data for each putative essential gene for the E. coli model laboratory organism. This paper is important because it provides a better understanding of the essential genes of E. coli , reveals the limitations of relying on automated analysis alone, and provides a new standard for the analysis of TraDIS data. Incentives to define lists of genes that are essential for bacterial survival include the identification of potential targets for antibacterial drug development, genes required for rapid growth for exploitation in biotechnology, and discovery of new biochemical pathways. To identify essential genes in Escherichia coli , we constructed a transposon mutant library of unprecedented density. Initial automated analysis of the resulting data revealed many discrepancies compared to the literature. We now report more extensive statistical analysis supported by both literature searches and detailed inspection of high-density TraDIS sequencing data for each putative essential gene for the E. coli model laboratory organism. This paper is important because it provides a better understanding of the essential genes of E. coli , reveals the limitations of relying on automated analysis alone, and provides a new standard for the analysis of TraDIS data.