Intelligent Plant Life

On certain small planets, drenched with light and heat from a near or a great sun, evolution took a very different course from that with which we are familiar. The vegetable and animal functions were not separated into distinct organic types. Every organism was at once animal and vegetable. Many species, of course, developed predatory habits, and special organs of offense, such as muscular boughs as strong as pythons for constriction, or talons, horns, and formidable serrated pincers. In the...

 Gamification Stock Holding Mechanic

Mrs. Lazarus has some experience with games such as this and decides to construct a blank environment (a planet without biomes) with a 10 × 10 grid, thereby creating a board with 100 squares. Before play, each student is given three different animals or plants (one with a broad tolerance for several different habitats, one that is a bit more particular, and one that is very fussy indeed). The players then use their numbered tiles and shares to shape and manipulate this blank environment to t...

 Cultural Homogenization Makes Travel Pointless

But she thought of Kuno as a baby, his birth, his removal to the public nurseries, her own visit to him there, his visits to her-visits which stopped when the Machine had assigned him a room on the other side of the earth. "Parents, duties of," said the book of the Machine," cease at the moment of birth. P.422327483." True, but there was something special about Kuno - indeed there had been something special about all her children - and, after all, she must brave the journey if he desired it. ...

 Giordano Bruno Observations of the Sun

The meaning is the more excellence, as it is the less vulgar, and you will see that it is single, unified, and not strained. You must consider that although the sun appears different with respect to different regions of the earth according to time and place, nevertheless with respect to the entire globe it acts always and everywhere in the same way, for in whatever point of the ecliptic it may find itself, it causes winter, summer, autumn, and spring, and the entire earthly globe receives the...

 Geological and Social Impact of the Himalayas

When you look at the planet from low orbit, the impact of the Himalayas on Earth’s climate seems obvious. It creates the rain shadow to beat all rain shadows, standing athwart the latitude of the trade winds and squeezing all the rain out of them before they head southwest, thus supplying eight of the Earth’s mightiest rivers, but also parching not only the Gobi to the immediate north, but also everything to the southwest, including Pakistan and Iran, Mesopotamia, Saudi Arabia, even North...