- Settore: Biology
- Number of terms: 15386
- Number of blossaries: 0
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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 ...
Masanobu Fukuoka's method for letting roots till the soil instead of machines. Decrease cultivation and you decrease weeds. Leguminous cover crops and mulching instead of fertilizer. Fukuoka practices what he calls the "no-plowing, no-fertilizing, no-weeding, no-pesticides, do-nothing method of natural farming. " To him the idea that people can grow crops is egocentric, for it is nature that grows crops. His rice yields have been impressive. (He reads like kind of a nut: lots of “man in his arrogance” soliloquizing reminiscent of Roger Payne in the seventies. )
Industry:Biology
The gradual replacement of one plant community by another. Brought about by changes in climate, in environment, or in the community (climatic succession, physiographic succession, biotic succession), and most frequently by erosion, dropping water levels, or invasion by another species. Succession due to external forces is allogenic, and autogenic when self-prompted. Overall, succession starts with pioneer species and proceeds to those more mature and longer lived (climax). Example: an empty lot taken over by weeds, then bushes, then flowering plants and finally trees.
Industry:Biology
A two-stage type of cell division that creates gametes (sex cells). Because each must contain half a future offspring's DNA (one set from the father and one from the mother), the kind of cell division (mitosis) used elsewhere will not work--it would double the amount of DNA needed. To prevent this, meiosis turns a cell containing 46 chromosomes into four sex cells containing 23 chromosomes each (haploids) through an initial extra stage that mixes chromosomes. Aside from that stage, meiosis is like Mitosis.
Industry:Biology
Sulfur oxides and particulates from industrial plants burning fossil fuels are the current worst forms of air pollution. Auto emissions run a close second. Most air pollution derives in one form or another from the use of petroleum products, oil in particular. See Oil below.
Industry:Biology
A versatile nucleic acid that combines with a protein to make ribosoomes, the site of protein assembly (ribosomal RNA); copies genetic information from DNA for transformation into proteins (messenger RNA), and incorporates animo acid combinations into developing proteins (transfer RNA). The RNA molecule is identical to DNA (from which it is made) except for the sugar ribose instead of deoxyribose and uracil for thymine. At one time RNA might have been the only form of life (the RNA World hypothesis): it can replicate without a cell nucleus or even any DNA.
Industry:Biology
The force that pushes an orbiting object out of its circular path. "Force" is a misnomer, however, because without the centripetal force, the object would naturally straighten its course in accordance with Newton's First Law of Motion, which states that objects tend to move in a straight line through space unless acted upon by an outside force.
Industry:Biology
A catastrophic reduction in species population. The mass extinction now underway threatens more than half the animals on Earth, some of whom have already vanished; others, like the great apes, are about to. For a tribute to what no longer lives, see the Altars of Extinction project online.
Industry:Biology
A scale that measures the vast amounts of time over which geological changes occur. Divided into eons, eras, periods, and epochs. We are now in the Phanerozoic Eon that started 543 million years ago when animals began to fossilize in large numbers, the Cenozoic Era (started 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs blew out), Quaternary Period (roughly 2 million years ago, when pre-humans appeared), Holocene Epoch (10,000 years ago, when the last Ice Age ended).
Industry:Biology
Gardening; growing fruits, vegetables, and ornamental plans. Indigenous societies once believed on the brink of starvation until "civilized" by monoculturalists (e. G. , the California Indians and the Spanish Mission System) are now known to have supported themselves with food grown horticulturally in mixed crops similar to those now studied by permaculture.
Industry:Biology
Transition zone between air masses. Types include cold fronts (cold air pushing back warm air--often bringing stormy weather), warm fronts, stationary fronts, dry lines (air barriers separating moist from dry air--very common in the American Midwest), and occluded fronts (when a cold front catches up with a warm one; the resulting rotations of air can generate cyclones).
Industry:Biology
