Six on Geography and Science:Trump Wants Wall Along New Mexico-Colorado Border; A Macabre Menagerie; How the plastic bottle went from miracle container to hated garbage; Timelapse Footage of a Giant Caterpillar Weaving Its Cocoon; GMOs Are Making a

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 Six on Geography and Science: Trump Wants Wall Along New Mexico-Colorado Border; A Macabre Menagerie; How the plastic bottle went from miracle container to hated garbage; Timelapse Footage of a Giant Caterpillar Weaving Its Cocoon; GMOs Are Making an Agricultural Crisis in India Even Worse; "Not Everybody’s Bestiary (Yet)"

Trump Wants Wall Along New Mexico-Colorado Border

Alan Singer, Director, Secondary Education Social Studies 
Teaching Learning Technology
290 Hagedorn Hall / 119 Hofstra University / Hempstead, NY 11549
(P) 516-463-5853 (F) 516-463-6196

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A Macabre Menagerie

As a biologist, however, I’m no fan of typecasting local wildlife species as mere spooky stereotypes. Owls aren’t portenders of doom, but precision predators who’d be delighted to help you with your mouse problem. Bats aren’t demons with wings, but devoted mothers and important allies in the fight against mosquito-borne illness – and, for the most part, tucked snugly away in their winter hibernacula by the time Halloween rolls around in New England. Spiders? Underappreciated fiber artists.

That said, there are species whose appearance or actions border on the macabre. In the spirit of the season, I hereby offer this brief introduction to a few who haunt the Northeast:

Ghost Plant. Also called corpse plant, ghost pipe, or Indian pipe (Monotropa uniflora), this forest dweller takes on a ghostly pallor as it rises, white and sometimes nearly translucent, out of the leaf litter in summer and early autumn. Its spectral appearance stems from a lack of chlorophyll, the pigment responsible not only for photosynthesis but also for the green hue found in most other plants. True to its name, the ghost plant shirks sunlight and survives by feeding off the energy of the living – in this case by sapping nutrients from mycorrhizal fungi associated with the roots of nearby trees. ...

Butcher Birds. Northern shrikes (Lanius borealis), whose grisly dining habits have earned them the nickname “butcher birds,” breed in the taiga of the far North, wintering in southern Canada and the northern U.S. In the words of Michelle Donahue, who wrote about shrikes for Audubon in 2016: “Shrikes are sweet-looking songbirds [who] rip their prey to shreds and festoon their territory with their mutilated corpses.” Technically speaking, these collections of mutilated corpses are called “larders,” and they may contain up to a dozen vertebrate prey (mice, shrews, voles, other songbirds) at a time, impaled on sharp objects in conspicuous places. Predated birds are generally hung by their neck, head, or shoulders, mammals by their forelimbs. Invertebrate prey, such as grasshoppers, are sometimes speared while still alive."

A Macabre Menagerie | The Outside Story

A Macabre Menagerie | The Outside Story Last year, I showed up to work on October 31 in one of my old park ranger’s uniforms, torn to fake-bloody shreds...

How the plastic bottle went from miracle container to hated garbage

The evolution of the plastic bottle from amazing to scourge of land and sea has played out inside of a generation.

How the plastic bottle went from miracle container to hated garbage

How the plastic bottle went from miracle container to hated garbage Image by Hannah Whitaker, National Geographic The evolution of the plastic bottle from amazing to scourge of land and sea has played out inside of a generation.

 Timelapse Footage of a Giant Caterpillar Weaving Its Cocoon

Timelapse Footage of a Giant Caterpillar Weaving Its Cocoon

Timelapse Footage of a Giant Caterpillar Weaving Its Cocoon For six weeks, luna moth caterpillars gorge themselves on the leaves of the marula tree. Then, when they're read...

GMOs Are Making an Agricultural Crisis in India Even Worse

GMOs Are Making an Agricultural Crisis in India Even Worse

GMOs Are Making an Agricultural Crisis in India Even Worse Erik Thurman Droughts and monsoons are exacerbating an already tenuous situation.

"Not Everybody’s Bestiary (Yet)" by Rebecca Morgan Frank

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend Support Poem-a-Day                                      October 29, 2019   Not Everybody’s Bestiary (Yet)   Rebecca Morgan Frank

Then came the soft animals, the snake and octopus, slinking along. You’ve seen the octopus as escape artist, sneaking out of cracks and holes, hiding in a tea pot, plotting the big adventure. Now she moves through chemical reaction, the first soft robot, taking to the sea. Remember that the real thing once disassembled her own aquarium, waiting, bemused, in the remaining puddle, for her custodian to come. They say it was simply curiosity. Now imagine her robot double dismantling at will. That which we have tried to contain, swimming off into the deep, re-emerging like the snake that slithers into your garden; its trapezoidal kirigami cuts in plastic skin keep it crawling through bursts of air. An innocuous slinky in colorful garb, this robot can sidewind anywhere. Now ask why everything now harbors a weapon in your mind—do you dread the snake under your own bed? Is it the real tooth and venom you fear, or this programmed body double here? We’re told of a fall, a fault built on flesh— the flesh of a fruit, the flesh of a woman— now this manmade flesh, a reptilian test of applied knowledge. Industrial sin co-starring the latest sensation: a running cockroach robot, sliding through cracks to get to you, away from you, through your walls. Extinction now eradicated, bought: replacements on order. Enter “Robotanica”—the world of the wild robot— woodpecker, dragonfly, kangaroo, child— unborn, they can all do the job. Two by two, battery-powered to keep the world moving, replacing their organic prototypes. Centipedes, spiders, ants, termites, and robobees, these are just the beginning of the evolving nation, as if someone has decided to revise, start over. This time using human labor, invention.            Copyright © 2019 by Rebecca Morgan Frank. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 29, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.  About this Poem   “I had been writing poems about medieval automata when a friend introduced me to an award-winning roboticist who kindly invited us over to dinner with his family. He showed me videos of his research and introduced me to the existence of soft robots of the sea. I began to imagine a 21st century bestiary, one populated by the strange new robot versions of natural creatures. This poem marks just the beginning—for poet, for roboticist, for the world of the future.” —Rebecca Morgan Frank   Rebecca Morgan Frank is the author of Sometimes We’re All Living in a Foreign Country (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2017). She is the 2019/2020 Distinguished Visiting Writer in Poetry at Bowling Green State University, and lives in Chicago, Illinois. “The Radio Animals” by Matthea Harvey “Vestigial Bones” by Rajiv Mohabir “Fast” by Jorie Graham