I Got Hearing Aids For The First Time — And There Was 1 Surprising Side Effect
“I can actually see the shapes of the leaves on the trees!” I exclaimed to my doctor while gazing out the window. I was 12 years old and just got my first pair of glasses. My vision had been impaired long enough for me to not realize what I was missing. The same thing happened […]
Drought alters Mammoth Mountain’s carbon dioxide emissions
Thirty years ago, on the flanks of a volcano in California’s Sierra Nevada range, trees began to die en masse, suffocated at their roots by carbon dioxide seeping up from the mountain’s depths after a swarm of small earthquakes. The wave of tree deaths on Mammoth Mountain, which lies within one of the nation’s largest […]
Listening to the leaves: Adding bioinspired veins to foamed polymers
Many lessons learned in life are learned from trees. Stand firm. Good things take time. Bend, don’t break. But metaphors aside, our stately arboreal neighbors offer a wealth of scientific wisdom — and we have a lot to learn. Simply by existing, trees are nature’s first materials scientists. Like many plants, they have vascular systems, […]
Epicenter of major Amazon droughts and fires saw 2.5 billion trees and vines killed
A major drought and forest fires in the Amazon rainforest killed billions of trees and plants and turned one of the world’s largest carbon sinks into one of its biggest polluters. Triggered by the 2015-16 El Niño, extreme drought and associated mega-wildfires caused the death of around 2.5 billion trees and plants and emitted 495 […]