Abies nordmanniana: O Christmas Tree!

Fir (abeto) is the common name for the genus (género) Abies, which belongs to the pine family (Pinaceae), of coniferous trees. One of the differences between firs and spruces (picea or falso abeto in Spanish) is that spruces differ from firs in having pendulous cones.

         Cones of genus Abies                                  Cones of genus Picea

Abies nordmanniana, Caucasian fir  

                                   (abeto del Cáucaso o abeto de Normandía)

                                    is one of the most beautiful firs.

The Caucasian fir comes originally from the Caucasus region. It has a regular conical shape and dark green needles. It is used for Christmas trees.

I hope you enjoy this evergreen and "entrañable" German Christmas carol:

My Family and Other Animals (Mi familia y otros animales)

A Spanish edition of Gerald Durrell´s book               A recent English edition

I would like to recommend you this book. It might be a good choice for a Christmas present. The author of the book, Gerald Durrell, was a famous naturalist who wrote a number of books about animals in a funny and entertaining way, because he was, above all, an animal lover. He also presented some television series. The book tells us the childhood of Gerald Durrell with his family in Corfu island and his early love for animals. This created some problems for his family, because Durrell used to fill his room with every kind of local fauna: scorpions, toads, octopuses, etc. Durrell also writes about some people of the island and criticizes some members of his family from a point of view of a child who simply loves animals...

Gerald Durrell was also a pioneer in captive breeding. Here you have the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust website: http://www.durrell.org/

A new form of life

NASA scientists have discovered mysterious bacteria that can live on arsenic. It is the first organism able to substitute one of the six chemical elements crucial to life (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur and phosphorus)."This is just a weird branch on the known tree of life," said Paul Davies, the Arizona State University and Nasa Astrobiology Institute researcher. "We're interested ultimately in finding a different tree of life... that will be the thing that will have massive implications in the search for life in the Universe.

The following video talks about the discovery ( I hope you understand more or less).

Climate change

What is climate change?

According to the NASA website, the difference between weather and climate is a measure of time. Weather is what conditions of the atmosphere are over a short period of time, and climate is how the atmosphere "behaves" over relatively long periods of time. So weather changes all the time and climate usually stays pretty much the same for centuries if it is left to itself. However, people are taking actions that can change the earth and its climate in significant ways.

Energy from the sun warms the earth's surface and, as the temperature increases, heat is radiated back into the atmosphere as infra-red energy. Some of the energy is absorbed within the atmosphere by 'greenhouse gases'.However, human activities are adding greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, to the atmosphere, which are enhancing the natural greenhouse effect and making the world warmer.  

This man-made extra warming is called the "enhanced" greenhouse effect.

Home: A film by Yann Arthus-Bertrand

Yann Arthus-Bertrand (born March 13, 1946 in Paris) is a French photographer, journalist, reporter and environmentalist. He is perhaps the best known aerial photographer on the planet.
"Home" is a Yann Arthus Bertrand's Documentary. It is a collection of unique aerial footage from over 50 countries, which will try to show the state of the planet in natural and urban areas with the goal of inciting people to act. "Home" is available free on the Internet.

This is the Home´s trailer film with subtitles in Spanish:



You can find the whole film on youtube with subtitles in English: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqxENMKaeCU

Pale blue dot ( punto azul pálido )

The Pale Blue Dot is the image of the Earth taken in 1990 by Voyager 1 from more than 4 billion miles.

 The following video is a beautiful excerpt from Carl Sagan´s Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. Listen to the thoughtful words of Carl Sagan.

Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan ( 1934-1996) was an American astronomer and science popularizer. He is world-famous for his popular science books and the television series Cosmos.

The following video shows the opening introduction of the first episode of Cosmos.

Ginkgo Biloba

A tree from the time of dinosaurs

Ginkgo´s leaves:

The Ginkgos had survived in China and there they were mainly found in monestaries in the mountains and in palace and temple gardens, where Buddhist monks cultivated the tree from about 1100 AD for medical reasons and its good qualities. This tree belongs to a group of plants called gymnosperms ( do you remember ? ). Gymnosperms means "naked seeds" ( from Greek: gymnos = naked and sperma = seed ). These plants´ seeds are not enclosed in a ripened fruit but are protected by cones. However, a few gymnosperms, such as ginkgo, produce seed-bearing structures that actually do look "fruity". The seeds are surrounded by flesh. In fact, they look like plums. Look at them in the images below:

                                                                                                               

The ripened fleshy seedcoat when falling on the ground and decaying has a 'disagreeable' odour. Nevertheless people from  Korea, Japan and China appreciate the nuts. Most gymnosperms have both sexes on the same plant, but  the Ginkgo is dioecious ("two houses" in Greek), which means there are separate male and female trees. The female trees are less popular for planting in the Western countries due to the smell of its seeds.

This is a film that I found in youtube:

And finally this amusing video with music by Georges Brassens:

Marie Curie

 

"Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood" 

She was one of the greatest women scientists of all time and probably the most famous.She was born in Poland but enrolled at the Sorbonne ( a well-known university in Paris ) in 1891.She discovered the radioactive elements polonium and radium. Her work not only influenced the development of fundamental science but also opened a new era in medical research and treatment. Marie Curie was the first person to win two Nobel prizes.

Picture from the Curie museum in Paris:

Quotes by Marie Curie:

Do you know what CERN is ?

CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The name is derived from the acronym for the French Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire. It is one of the world’s largest and most respected centres for scientific research. Its business is fundamental physics, finding out what the Universe is made of and how it works. At CERN, the world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments are used to study the basic constituents of matter — the fundamental particles. By studying what happens when these particles collide, physicists learn about the laws of Nature.

This video explains to you how CERN works in three minutes:

Where the web was born:

In 1990, CERN scientist Tim Berners-Lee invents the Web, as the video told us. He defined the Web’s basic concepts, the URL, http and html, and he wrote the first browser and server software.The Web ( World Wide Web ) was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automatic information sharing between scientists working in different universities and institutes all over the world.

DARWIN

The famous British biologist Richard Dawkins talks about Darwin. It is worth seeing.

The Olm Salamander

Here you have the salamander which I talked you about in the classroom, the Olm Salamander:

The Olm Salamander lives under water in some caves. It has no eyes or colour. But it can live to be 100 years old. It is an example of cave adaptation.

Hello everybody and welcome to my blog ! I would like to share with you, in English, some news and information about natural science and mathematics. My purpose is that you learn all ( or almost everything ) about science in the language in which many scientists write and speak nowadays.
The man in the image is Gauss. He was one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, as you know.
I hope you enjoy it !