- Settore: Biology
- Number of terms: 15386
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Terrapsychology is a word coined by Craig Chalquist to describe deep, systematic, trans-empirical approaches to encountering the presence, soul, or "voice" of places and things: what the ancients knew as their resident genius loci or indwelling spirit. This perspective emerged from sustained ...
Energia rilasciata dalla fissione (scissione) o fusione di nuclei atomici: in effetti strazianti il tessuto stesso della materia. Il calore risultante unità generatori elettrici. Anche se la media centrale nucleare crea 20-30 tonnellate di sottoprodotti altamente tossici e rifiuti un anno, nessuno ha pensato un modo sicuro per occuparsi di esso (il plutonio ha un tempo di dimezzamento di 24.400 anni).
Industry:Biology
Hydrocarbon and sedimentary rock composed of compacted plant remains, mostly ancient club moss trees sitting above tropical swamps. Mined coal provides most of the world's electrical energy. A popular compound in hell, it was once carried by thieves and cutpurses to avoid apprehension.
Industry:Biology
An east-west measurement of position on the Earth. Measurements of longitude range from 0° at the Prime Meridian at Greenwich to + 180° West and - 180° East of it. A line connecting places of the same longitude is a meridian. It is measured in degrees, minutes, and seconds. Unlike latitude, longitude cannot take the poles and equator as fixed points of reference. It must rely more on time, which is why accurate long-voyage navigation had to await the invention of an accurate timepiece. See Latitude.
Industry:Biology
Large-scale cultivation of the land, with resulting specialization of labor, domestication of plants and animals, identification with one’s sedentery social group, and a radical separation from the natural world. The Agricultural (Neolithic) Revolution began ten thousand years ago in the Fertile Crescent, where extensive irrigation turned once-fertile croplands into barren salt pans. (By some accounts, the now-denuded Zagros Mountains in western Iran hosted this revolution. "Zagros" is thought to derive from Zagreus, the Greek son of Zeus who was dismembered and eaten and later merged with Dionysus. ) Modern agriculture largely relies on keeping ecosystems in perpetually immature states of succession in which chemically stimulated productivity remains high until the soils are too depleted to grow anything.
Industry:Biology
The transformation of a rock (called a protolith before the change) subjected to pressure, fluid, or heat into a different kind of rock. (Called prograde metamorphism when the change agents are intensifying, and retrograde when they are decreasing. ) A frequent occurrence below the Earth's surface. Metamorphic rocks make up most of the planet's crust.
Industry:Biology
Coal, oil and natural gas geologically transformed from ancient beds of plant matter into burnable hydrocarbons. All told, these industries put 800 tons of carbon dioxide into the air every second: a sobering number given that oxygen-breathing life on Earth depends on carbon remaining locked in the ground. Although none of these fuels carries much, if anything, left from the dinosaurs, these now-extinct saurons have come to symbolize them with an eerie persistence.
Industry:Biology
Growing and harvesting fish and shellfish in land-based ponds. Relative protein yields often exceed those of land cropping by 4-20 times. Ponds attract beneficial wildlife, cool the surrounding areas, reflect sunlight, draw birds, and make convenient places for growing rice and other moisture-loving plants. See also Hydroponics.
Industry:Biology
A derogatory anthropological term for what most human cultures have believed throughout prehistory: that the Earth is alive and reactive, as are its many places. Greeks and Romans once thought a "genius loci" or spirit of place inhabited every hill, grove, and stream. Such beings still live in all human mythologies. The modern counterpart is panpsychism, the idea that all things possess qualities of mindfulness or psyche. With the coming of heavy industry, such ideas gave way to the financially convenient reduction of the Earth to the status of a lifeless resource.
Industry:Biology
Winds that blow toward the equator from the high-pressure horse latitudes, those bands of air above and below the equator that blow into the doldrums. From there it rises to the poles and returns. The trade winds blow from the northeast in the northern hemisphere (the Northeast Trades) and from the southeast in the southern (the Southeast Trades).
Industry:Biology
The habit of certain birds--egrets, swallows, herons--to build concentrated colonies. (Historical note: One year a radio microphone was set up at Mission San Juan Capistrano to convey the flappings of departing swallows to listeners all over heavily colonized Orange County, but the inconsiderate avians flew off ahead of schedule. The missionaries had done something similar in 1834 when the mission was secularized. )
Industry:Biology
