Sublime

Pister collected all the Owens pupfish left at Fish Slough, with the intention of moving them to a nearby spring. They fit into two buckets. “I distinctly remember being scared to death,” he would later write. “I had walked perhaps fifty yards when I realized that I literally held within my hands the existence of an entire vertebrate species.” Pist

The fact is, Maples have a far more sophisticated system for detecting spring than we do. There are photosensors by the hundreds in every single bud, packed with light-absorbing pigments called phytochromes. Their job is to take the measure of light every day. Tightly furled, covered in red-brown scales, each bud

Human beings were never meant to participate in a worldwide social network comprised of billions of people. We were designed by evolution to be hunter-gatherers, with the mental capacity to interact and socialize with the other members of our tribe—a tribe made up of a few hundred other people at most. Interacting with thousands or even millions of

It doesn’t seem particularly compelling. One source of evidence is work by Suzana Herculano-Houzel, a neuroscientist who has dissolved the brains of many creatures to determine how many neurons are present. She’s found a lot of interesting scaling laws. She has a paper discussing the human brain as a scaled-up primate brain.60 Across a wide variety

Each of them knows innumerable minute, local truths.

Perception Space—The Final Frontier,” by Lars Chittka and Axel Brockmann, PLoS Biology 3 (2005), no.

This “prey-switching” behavior is common to generalist predators and turns out to be ecologically stabilizing for the whole food web. As generalists turn their attention to different prey species, the species that were getting depleted get a chance to recover, reducing the risk of extinction.

The new flagella join together, tethering millions of bacteria into a single seething mass. Instead of swimming, they swarm across a surface, squirting out molecules that soak up water and create a carpet of slime.