Everyone talks about the weather, but how many really understand how it actually functions. How do temperature and pressure influence the planet’s weather systems? How is weather different from climate? Storm Dunlop (yes, that is his given name) takes up these and a number of other related questions in his new “Weather; A Very Short Introduction.”
As I lay on the dark blue lounge chair at the Portland Red Cross, quietly contemplating my blood flowing through the 16-gauge needle inserted into my median cubital vein, through the tube taped to my forearm, and down into the bag suspended just beside the chair, like any good naturalist I began to wonder just […]
As both a naturalist as well as someone for whom the substance looms unusually large in daily life, the recent publication by Oxford University Press of Blood; A Very Short Introduction is an occasion that was awaited with particularly high interest. Now that a copy has reached my desk, no time has been wasted in exploring what its author Christopher Cooper has written about his subject.
With the recent publication of Tim Lenton’s “Earth System Science; A Very Short Introduction,” I was made aware that there was a field of study that sought to explain the proverbial big picture in a perspective so large and all-encompassing that even ecology is only a part.