Science for people who never knew it could be interesting
May 14th, 2008
Last week’s (mostly) science-related blog carnivals for your reading enjoyment:
Carnival of Space « Space Cynics
Encephalon #45 - Life Is Good, Brains Are Better
Gene Genie #31: Capitalists, Genetic Tests and Your DNA
Grand Rounds 4:34 at the Health Business Blog
May Scientiae Carnival: Career paths, perspective, and changing self-image
May 13th, 2008
This week’s picture comes from Mesa Verde National Park in the southwestern corner of Colorado, USA.
The ancestral puebloan (nee “Anasazi“) people that once lived in this area developed a number of ways to support an agricultural lifestyle in an arid environment. The ancestral puebloan version of terrace farming was one of the more interesting ones.
Farming on terraces was hardly unique to this ancient society — a number of other cultures have used some version of them over the centuries. What is different about many of the terrace fields in Mesa Verde is that they are built in dry washes, essentially the beds of seasonally flowing creeks.
As a result, these terraces had a number of functions in addition to their usage as farmland. For starters, they helped slow runoff from snow melt and thunderstorms, reducing or avoiding damage that would otherwise be caused by erosion. In the process, they also trapped sediment that could have been washed away with the water. By slowing water flow and capturing sediment, the terraces helped what little water they saw to soak into the soil — allowing it to be used rather than lost.
If they were built in the same fashion as their more modern counterparts in the same part of the country, many were constructed not as dams, but as simple lines of rocks. One layer of rock is set down at a time, not to stop and block water from flowing through, but to slow it. As silt slowly builds up behind the stones, another layer is added, then another — with possibly just a few layers being added in a generation.
After careful tending of the land over centuries, the local population apparently reached some sort of breaking point around 1300 AD. A number of things have been suggested for the relatively rapid depopulation of the area. Maybe a change in the local climate made agriculture unworkable, or religious and political changes damaged the formerly cohesive social network of the inhabitants. In any event, the mesa’s villages were completely abandoned within a generation as their former inhabitants moved down-river to settle the pueblos now home to their descendant tribes.
May 12th, 2008
Just wanted to let folks know that I upgraded the site’s Wordpress software over the weekend. This should be entirely transparent to you, but if you find SOS behaving oddly in any way, please drop me a line and let me know…
May 9th, 2008
OK, I’ll admit that this video has really been making the rounds this week. But I’ll just pile on anyway, and present to you this very good video explaining the evolutionary process behind the eye:
May 7th, 2008
The past week’s crop of (mostly) science-related blog carnivals:
Cancer Research Blog Carnival #9
Carnival of Education #169: Road Trip!
The Carnival of Space - the anniversary edition
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