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"Smithsonian Institution"
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Official guide to the Smithsonian
The Smithsonian Institution holds more than 142 million artifacts and specimens in its trust. This colorful guide to the museums and galleries on the National Mall, in the Washington metropolitan area, and in New York City presents an enormous amount of history and pertinent museum information, ensuring a rewarding visit. Each detailed section presents the history of the museums and offers a fully illustrated, gallery-by-gallery tour. All the practical information--location, hours, phone numbers, public transportation, services, tours, dining, gift shops, special attractions for children, web site addresses--is also included. With so much to see and do, this is the definitive source of all the information in one place. -- Publisher.
Book
The roots of the drought: Hydrology and water uptake strategies mediate forest-wide demographic response to precipitation
1. Drought-induced tree mortality is expected to increase globally due to climate change, with profound implications for forest composition, function and global climate feedbacks. How drought is experienced by different species is thought to depend fundamentally on where they access water vertically below-ground, but this remains untracked so far due to the difficulty of measuring water availability at depths at which plants access water (few to several tens of metres), the broad temporal scales at which droughts at those depths unfold (seasonal to decadal), and the difficulty in linking these patterns to forest-wide species-specific demographic responses. 2. We address this problem through a new eco-hydrological framework: we used a hydrological model to estimate below-ground water availability by depth over a period of two decades that included a multi-year drought. Given this water availability scenario and 20year long-records of species-specific growth patterns, we inversely estimated the relative depths at which 12 common species in the forest accessed water via a model of water stress. Finally, we tested whether our estimates of species relative uptake depths predicted mortality in the multi-year drought. 3. The hydrological model revealed clear below-ground niches as precipitation was decoupled from water availability by depth at multi-annual scale. Species partitioned the hydrological niche by diverging in their uptake depths and so in the same forest stand, different species experienced very different drought patterns, resulting in clear differences in species-specific growth. Finally, species relative water uptake depths predicted species mortality patterns after the multi-year drought. Species that our method ranked as relying on deeper water were the ones that had suffered from greater mortality, as the zone from which they access water took longer to recharge after depletion. 4. Synthesis. This research changes our understanding of how hydrological niches operate for trees, with a trade-off between realized growth potential and survival under drought with decadal scale return time. The eco-hydrological framework highlights the importance of species-specific below-ground strategies in predicting forest response to drought. Applying this framework more broadly may help us better understand species coexistence in diverse forest communities and improve mechanistic predictions of forests productivity and compositional change under future climate.
Journal Article
Train : the definitive visual history
Featuring amazing images of trains, virtual tours of engines, and profiles of key innovators, designers, and engineers, Train: The Definitive Visual History traces the history of the railroad and the role of trains, from the first steam engines to today's high speed bullet trains.
Book
Science for all children
Remember the first time you planted a seed and watched it sprout? Or explored how a magnet attracted a nail? If these questions bring back memories of joy and wonder, then you understand the idea behind inquiry-based science-an approach to science education that challenges children to ask questions, solve problems, and develop scientific skills as well as gain knowledge. Inquiry-based science is based on research and experience, both of which confirm that children learn science best when they engage in hands-on science activities rather than read from a textbook.
The recent National Science Education Standards prepared by the National Research Council call for a revolution in science education. They stress that the science taught must be based on active inquiry and that science should become a core activity in every grade, starting in kindergarten. This easy-to-read and practical book shows how to bring about the changes recommended in the standards. It provides guidelines for planning and implementing an inquiry-based science program in any school district.
The book is divided into three parts. \"Building a Foundation for Change,\" presents a rationale for inquiry-based science and describes how teaching through inquiry supports the way children naturally learn. It concludes with basic guidelines for planning a program.
School administrators, teachers, and parents will be especially interested in the second part, \"The Nuts and Bolts of Change.\" This section describes the five building blocks of an elementary science program:
Community and administrative support.
A developmentally appropriate curriculum.
Opportunities for professional development.
Materials support.
Appropriate assessment tools.
Together, these five elements provide a working model of how to implement hands-on science.
The third part, \"Inquiry-Centered Science in Practice,\" presents profiles of the successful inquiry-based science programs in districts nationwide. These profiles show how the principles of hands-on science can be adapted to different school settings.
If you want to improve the way science is taught in the elementary schools in your community, Science for All Children is an indispensable resource.
eBook
Everything you need to know about snakes : and other scaly reptiles
From speedy slithering creatures and living dragons to snakes that fly and shed skin, this volume explores the fascinating world of reptiles. Features incredible images, fun games, and shocking facts on anatomy, diet, and behavior.
Book
Drought Sensitivity of the Amazon Rainforest
Amazon forests are a key but poorly understood component of the global carbon cycle. If, as anticipated, they dry this century, they might accelerate climate change through carbon losses and changed surface energy balances. We used records from multiple long-term monitoring plots across Amazonia to assess forest responses to the intense 2005 drought, a possible analog of future events. Affected forest lost biomass, reversing a large long-term carbon sink, with the greatest impacts observed where the dry season was unusually intense. Relative to pre-2005 conditions, forest subjected to a 100-millimeter increase in water deficit lost 5.3 megagrams of aboveground biomass of carbon per hectare. The drought had a total biomass carbon impact of 1.2 to 1.6 petagrams (1.2 x 10¹⁵ to 1.6 x 10¹⁵ grams). Amazon forests therefore appear vulnerable to increasing moisture stress, with the potential for large carbon losses to exert feedback on climate change.
Journal Article
Night sky detective
\"Discover how to be an expert stargazer with more than 30 easy-to-do, fun activities-- plus stunning pictures and amazing facts. Supports the Common Core State Standards\"--P. [4] of cover.
Book
Running in circles in phylomorphospace: host environment constrains morphological diversification in parasitic wasps
Understanding phenotypic diversification and the conditions that spur morphological novelty or constraint is a major theme in evolutionary biology. Unequal morphological diversity between sister clades can result from either differences in the rate of morphological change or in the ability of clades to explore novel phenotype ranges. We combine an existing phylogenetic framework with new phylogenomic data and geometric morphometrics to explore the relative roles of rate versus mode of morphological evolution for a hyperdiverse group: cryptine ichneumonid wasps. Data from genomic ultraconserved elements confirm that cryptines are divided into two large clades: one specialized in the use of hosts that are deeply concealed under hard substrates, and another with a much more diversified host range. Using a phylomorphospace approach, we show that both clades have experienced similar rates of morphological evolution. Nonetheless, the more specialized group is much more restricted in morphospace occupation, indicating that it repeatedly evolved morphological change through the same morphospace regions. This is in agreement with our prediction that host use imposes constraints in the morphospace available to lineages, and reinforces an important distinction between evolutionary stasis as opposed to a scenario of continual morphological change restricted to a certain range of morphotypes.
Journal Article