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"Environments"
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Extreme places : could you live here?
Describes inhabited locations on Earth with some of the most extreme climates and weather patterns, including the coldest place on Earth and the most polluted city.
Book
Making Virtual Worlds
The past decade has seen phenomenal growth in the development and use of virtual worlds. In one of the most notable, Second Life, millions of people have created online avatars in order to play games, take classes, socialize, and conduct business transactions. Second Life offers a gathering point and the tools for people to create a new world online.
Too often neglected in popular and scholarly accounts of such groundbreaking new environments is the simple truth that, of necessity, such virtual worlds emerge from physical workplaces marked by negotiation, creation, and constant change. Thomas Malaby spent a year at Linden Lab, the real-world home of Second Life, observing those who develop and profit from the sprawling, self-generating system they have created.
Some of the challenges created by Second Life for its developers were of a very traditional nature, such as how to cope with a business that is growing more quickly than existing staff can handle. Others are seemingly new: How, for instance, does one regulate something that is supposed to run on its own? Is it possible simply to create a space for people to use and then not govern its use? Can one apply these same free-range/free-market principles to the office environment in which the game is produced? \"Lindens\"-as the Linden Lab employees call themselves-found that their efforts to prompt user behavior of one sort or another were fraught with complexities, as a number of ongoing processes collided with their own interventions.
InMaking Virtual Worlds, Malaby thoughtfully describes the world of Linden Lab and the challenges faced while he was conducting his in-depth ethnographic research there. He shows how the workers of a very young but quickly growing company were themselves caught up in ideas about technology, games, and organizations, and struggled to manage not only their virtual world but also themselves in a nonhierarchical fashion. In exploring the practices the Lindens employed, he questions what was at stake in their virtual world, what a game really is (and how people participate), and the role of the unexpected in a product like Second Life and an organization like Linden Lab.
eBook
Extreme animals : the toughest creatures on Earth
Animals adapt to their surroundings for survival. Learn how they survive in conditions that humans never would. Are you ready for the competition? From the persevering emperor penguins of the South Pole to the brave bacteria inside bubbling volcanoes, from the hardy reptiles of the driest deserts to the squash-proof creatures of the deepest seabeds, animals have adapted to survive in conditions that would kill a human faster than you can say \"coffin.\" Discover how they do it in this amazing natural history book from a celebrated team - and find out who wins the title of the toughtest animal of them all!
Book
Biodegradability of dissolved organic carbon in permafrost soils and aquatic systems: a meta-analysis
As Arctic regions warm and frozen soils thaw, the large organic carbon pool stored in permafrost becomes increasingly vulnerable to decomposition or transport. The transfer of newly mobilized carbon to the atmosphere and its potential influence upon climate change will largely depend on the degradability of carbon delivered to aquatic ecosystems. Dissolved organic carbon (DOC) is a key regulator of aquatic metabolism, yet knowledge of the mechanistic controls on DOC biodegradability is currently poor due to a scarcity of long-term data sets, limited spatial coverage of available data, and methodological diversity. Here, we performed parallel biodegradable DOC (BDOC) experiments at six Arctic sites (16 experiments) using a standardized incubation protocol to examine the effect of methodological differences commonly used in the literature. We also synthesized results from 14 aquatic and soil leachate BDOC studies from across the circum-arctic permafrost region to examine pan-arctic trends in BDOC. An increasing extent of permafrost across the landscape resulted in higher DOC losses in both soil and aquatic systems. We hypothesize that the unique composition of (yedoma) permafrost-derived DOC combined with limited prior microbial processing due to low soil temperature and relatively short flow path lengths and transport times, contributed to a higher overall terrestrial and freshwater DOC loss. Additionally, we found that the fraction of BDOC decreased moving down the fluvial network in continuous permafrost regions, i.e. from streams to large rivers, suggesting that highly biodegradable DOC is lost in headwater streams. We also observed a seasonal (January-December) decrease in BDOC in large streams and rivers, but saw no apparent change in smaller streams or soil leachates. We attribute this seasonal change to a combination of factors including shifts in carbon source, changing DOC residence time related to increasing thaw-depth, increasing water temperatures later in the summer, as well as decreasing hydrologic connectivity between soils and surface water as the thaw season progresses. Our results suggest that future climate warming-induced shifts of continuous permafrost into discontinuous permafrost regions could affect the degradation potential of thaw-released DOC, the amount of BDOC, as well as its variability throughout the Arctic summer. We lastly recommend a standardized BDOC protocol to facilitate the comparison of future work and improve our knowledge of processing and transport of DOC in a changing Arctic.
Journal Article
Long-distance electron transport occurs globally in marine sediments
Recently, long filamentous bacteria have been reported conducting electrons over centimetre distances in marine sediments. These so-called cable bacteria perform an electrogenic form of sulfur oxidation, whereby long-distance electron transport links sulfide oxidation in deeper sediment horizons to oxygen reduction in the upper millimetres of the sediment. Electrogenic sulfur oxidation exerts a strong impact on the local sediment biogeochemistry, but it is currently unknown how prevalent the process is within the seafloor. Here we provide a state-of-the-art assessment of its global distribution by combining new field observations with previous reports from the literature. This synthesis demonstrates that electrogenic sulfur oxidation, and hence microbial long-distance electron transport, is a widespread phenomenon in the present-day seafloor. The process is found in coastal sediments within different climate zones (off the Netherlands, Greenland, the USA, Australia) and thrives on a range of different coastal habitats (estuaries, salt marshes, mangroves, coastal hypoxic basins, intertidal flats). The combination of a widespread occurrence and a strong local geochemical imprint suggests that electrogenic sulfur oxidation could be an important, and hitherto overlooked, component of the marine cycle of carbon, sulfur and other elements.
Journal Article
Why do glaciers grind? : all about extreme environments
This volume introduces readers to the idea of extreme environments.
Book
The metaverse : and how it will revolutionize everything
\"From the leading theorist of the Metaverse comes the definitive account of the next internet: what the Metaverse is, what it will take to build it, and what it means for all of us. The term \"Metaverse\" is suddenly everywhere, from the front pages of national newspapers and the latest fashion trends to the plans of the most powerful companies in history. It is already shaping the policy platforms of the US government, the European Union, and the Chinese Communist Party. But what, exactly, is the Metaverse? As pioneering theorist and venture capitalist Matthew Ball explains, it is a persistent and interconnected network of 3D virtual worlds that will eventually serve as the gateway to most online experiences, and also underpin much of the physical world. For decades, these ideas have been limited to science fiction and video games, but they are now poised to revolutionize every industry and function, from finance and healthcare to education, consumer products, city planning, dating, and well beyond. Taking us on an expansive tour of the \"next internet,\" Ball demonstrates that many proto-Metaverses are already here, such as Fortnite, Minecraft, and Roblox. Yet these offer only a glimpse of what is to come. Ball presents a comprehensive definition of the Metaverse before explaining the technologies that will power it-and the breakthroughs that will be necessary to fully realize it. He addresses the governance challenges the Metaverse entails; investigates the role of Web3, blockchains, and NFTs; and predicts Metaverse winners and losers. Most importantly, he examines many of the Metaverse's almost unlimited applications. The internet will no longer be at arm's length; instead, it will surround us, with much of our lives, labor, and leisure taking place inside the Metaverse. Bringing clarity and authority to a frequently misunderstood concept, Ball foresees trillions of dollars in new value-and the radical reshaping of society\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Comparative phylogeography of the ocean planet
Understanding how geography, oceanography, and climate have ultimately shaped marine biodiversity requires aligning the distributions of genetic diversity across multiple taxa. Here, we examine phylogeographic partitions in the sea against a backdrop of biogeographic provinces defined by taxonomy, endemism, and species composition. The taxonomic identities used to define biogeographic provinces are routinely accompanied by diagnostic genetic differences between sister species, indicating interspecific concordance between biogeography and phylogeography. In cases where individual species are distributed across two or more biogeographic provinces, shifts in genotype frequencies often align with biogeographic boundaries, providing intraspecific concordance between biogeography and phylogeography. Here, we provide examples of comparative phylogeography from (i) tropical seas that host the highest marine biodiversity, (ii) temperate seas with high productivity but volatile coastlines, (iii) migratory marine fauna, and (iv) plankton that are the most abundant eukaryotes on earth. Tropical and temperate zones both show impacts of glacial cycles, the former primarily through changing sea levels, and the latter through coastal habitat disruption. The general concordance between biogeography and phylogeography indicates that the population-level genetic divergences observed between provinces are a starting point for macroevolutionary divergences between species. However, isolation between provinces does not account for all marine biodiversity; the remainder arises through alternative pathways, such as ecological speciation and parapatric (semiisolated) divergences within provinces and biodiversity hotspots.
Journal Article