- Branche: Biology
- Number of terms: 15386
- Number of blossaries: 0
- Company Profile:
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 ...
Anything that eats or damages what we eat. Too many pests mean not enough predators, like fish or birds for mosquitos and gopher snakes for gophers, who also avoid daffodils, elderberry cuttings, and castor beans. Teas made of chamomile, stinging nettle, comfrey, or horsetail discourage harmful fungi. Marigolds control whiteflies, spearmint, tansy, and pennyroyal control ants, Mexican marigold controls nematodes and root pests, as do French marigolds; yellow nasturtiums decoy black aphids, which are repelled by spearmint, stinging nettle, southernwood, and garlic, and borage repels tomato worms while attracting helpful bees.
Industry:Biology
Growing different crops close to each other, as with pole beans at the base of corn stalks, early peas followed by lettuce, and sweet corn with bush beans. When done properly interplanting provides a natural mulch or ground cover and inhibits pest infestations.
Industry:Biology
The atmosphere consists of several layers of colorless gases such as hydrogen and helium. From lower to higher, the layers are:
* troposphere: from the planet surface to roughly 7-17 kilometers up. It makes up about 75% of the atmosphere. Weather occurs here, through exchanges of heat. The outer boundary is called the tropopause;
* stratosphere: reaches up to about 50 kilometers, where the stratopause is. Includes the ozone layer;
* mesosphere: 50-85 kilometers up to the mesopause. Meteorites break up here;
* thermosphere: to 640 kilometers up. Auroras appear here. The layer of molecules broken up--ionized--by particles from the sun is the ionosphere that makes radio work by bouncing radio waves back to the Earth;
* exosphere: merges with space.
Industry:Banking
Flowering plants that place their seeds in fruits. The monocots have an embryo with a single cotyledon (seed leaf), three-part flowers, parallel leaf veins, and adventitious root growth. Dicots have two cotyledons, four- or five-part flowers, and net leaf vein patterns. Monocots include grasses, orchids, palms, and cattails, and dicots include oaks, sycamores, and maples. Compare gymnosperms.
Industry:Biology
The flushing or percolation of chemicals, minerals, or other substances through soil. Pesticides, fertilizers, poisons from mines or feedlots, and wastes from industrial plants sometimes leach into groundwater. Leaching also refers to washing the salt from soil to increase its fertility.
Industry:Biology
An artificially created animal composed of mixed DNA. A human with a mouse's brain would be an example, as would Frankenstein's angry monster. In Greek mythology the Chimera--a fire-breather who was part lion, part goat, and part dragon--devastated the land until finally slain by a hero. Nevertheless, certain enthusiastic biologists are more eager to create chimeras than to read hints and warnings from ancient mythology.
Industry:Biology
The inability to digest lactose, or milk sugar, due to insufficient lactase enzymes in the small intestine. Symptoms include bloating, stomach cramps, diarrhea, and nausea. People of Northern European descent tend to suffer it less because of an evolutionary transformation brought about by milk-drinking, a practice other humans have traditionally given up after infancy.
Industry:Biology
The segment of the gene that codes proteins (not all segments do). Each exon codes for a specific part of the protein to be created. Not to be confused with Exxon, whose extra x symbolizes what it codes: dangerously unpredictable environmental hazards due to petroleum products burned or spilled into the biosphere.
Industry:Biology
Deep ecologist George Sessions’ term for the ideological turn of mind Western civilization has taken, accompanied by occasional opportunities to return to a less human-centered way of viewing the world (e.g., Maimonides’ belief that the world was good before humans were created, and Spinoza’s thought that mind is found throughout nature). For many deep ecologists, regarding the natural world only for what it does for us exhibits a regrettable immaturity.
Industry:Biology
Hairy, warm-blooded vertebrates that nourish their young with milk (hence the name). About 5,500 species in all, and all descended from a common ancestor of the anteater, platypus, marsupials like the kangaroo, and placentals. The extinction of the dinosaurs 65. 5 million years ago made way for the growth of large mammals. 40% are rodents.
Industry:Biology
