- Industrie: Biology
- Number of terms: 15386
- Number of blossaries: 0
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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 ...
Secondary tropical or subtropical vegetation planted in forests in order to regenerate the soil between crops. In places like western Sudan, this traditional practice has been subverted by a Western emphasis on cash-producing monocrops in disregard of cultural or ecological consequences.
Industry:Biology
Declination, the angular distance north or south from the celestial equator (the imaginary sky curve projected upward from the Earth's equator), combines with right ascension (measurement along hour circles circling like meridians between the celestial poles) to plot sky objects in a grid similar to that of longitude and latitude. Because the Earth spins in space, right ascension is measured in time intervals rather than degrees of arc.
Industry:Biology
Pesticides, fertilizers, wastes, erosion dust, runoff from fields, and animal infections are a few of the varieties. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, half the water pollution in the U. S. Is agricultural. (Most of the other half is industrial. )
Industry:Biology
Saprophytic (decay-fed), spore-making plants without chlorophyll: rusts, molds, smuts, mildews, mushrooms, and yeasts. Their long hyphae filaments aerate and bind soils, aid water transport, cycle nutrients, decompose organic matter, and allow roots to absorb nutrients from the ground.
Industry:Biology
A sterile philosophical dilemma given its first modern expression by mathematician and swordsman Rene Descartes. Its basic question: how do the mind and the body relate to one another? Which implies that the two are as separate as self and world were thought to be (another Cartesian gem). A more profound philosopher spoke to this centuries before Descartes and his coordinate-plane approach.
Industry:Biology
A chunk of DNA that allows organisms to pass on adaptations and acquired features by making a protein through codon sequences. DNA duplication errors often create new genes. Gregor Mendel discovered genes and wrote about them--he called them "factors"--in 1865, but his work was ignored for 45 years. See DNA.
Industry:Biology
A hooved mammal that eats its food, regurgitates it (cud), and eats it again, a procedure made possible by a four-chambered stomach. Ruminants include cattle, bison, sheep, deer, goats, elk, giraffes, antelopes, and camels. Their specialized stomach evolved to extract the maximum of nutrients from low-quality food.
Industry:Biology
Cycling of nitrogen from the air and soil to plants, animals, and then back to the environment. Bacteria, legumes, and algae convert atmospheric nitrogen into nitrates that enter plant roots before turning into protoplasm that decomposers eventually break down again.
Industry:Biology
A small ink container, but also a term of sarcasm directed at scholarly pedants who insisted on bringing long, Latinized terms--inkhorn terms--into English, a practice deplored in Shakespeare's day and even by Shakespeare. Thomas Wilson's rant appeared in 1553, his cry unheeded by generations of researchers who emulated a Latin-speaking priesthood by locking away their concepts in sacred verbal sacristies:
Industry:Biology
English evolved from the Anglo-Saxon tongues spoken by the Germanic tribes--Angli, Saxons, Frisians, Jutes--whose conscripts among the Roman legions had visited Britain (later, Angleland, or England) and found it inviting. They came around 410, the year Rome fell to the Visigoths and the Emperor Honorius decided from the safety of Ravenna that outposts like Britain were on their own. With the Romans gone, the incoming Germanics blended with the indigenous Celts, and so did their languages: into Old English and its earthy words ("dream," "water," "strong," "today," and "bread" derive from OE). So matters stood until William the Conqueror invaded in 1066 and brought along a language spoken at court: Anglo-Norman, a dialect of French nobilityspeak thick with Latin words transplanted from the Roman Empire and its warlike clerics. Eventually Anglo-Norman mixed with Old English to make Middle English (the language of Chaucer), but during the Renaissance, renewed interest in classical science and scholarship summoned another wave of Latinisms. With these and an infusion of Greek terms in place, English grew standardized with help from the printing press. Today only about one-sixth of it is homegrown, the rest imported from other languages. Surrounded by the cogs and wheels of the Industrial Revolution, capitalists and scientists coined more new words from Greek and Latin formations that lent themselves to abstraction, classification, and measurement. Hence the need for glossaries like this one. (For one more item, see Inkhorn. )
Industry:Biology
