Search results for: feed
Habitat Me
… microbes can get itself going. The colonizer microbes find a devastated, undefended landscape, and they move in and multiply. “Miracle” recoveries are mounting up.
Microbial massacres of course produce drug resistance. We now have bacteria that actually feed on antibiotics. Routine use of antibiotics in chicken feed, cattle feed, and pig feed, not to …
Fungus, Fried
… species of fungi, with about a thousand new ones coming into ken each year. Fungi serve other life forms: if it weren’t for herds of fungi feeding, when trees died, the dead trunks and branches would just stack up.
And think of the leaves. In wooded areas, how many fall leaves fall? About a …
A Cocktail Conundrum
… wanted to know was what participants would do the next time around: Would they alter their speech in response to the feedback?
It turns out that the speakers did compensate—they shifted their own vowels in the opposite direction (pronouncing “head” slightly more like “hid”) such that, with the altered feedback, “head” actually sounded the
St. Augustine and the Hall of Memory
… born. She never worked again. Her husband died early. She spent her life in a small town in western Wisconsin. She watched the finches at the bird feeder, and wrote about them in letters. She died.
Memory for my aunt was not just recollection of the past; it was all of experience, all of herself …
S. faux
… meal and the walk to the hall and Martin’s thoughtful introduction and finally the speech, the guest was then free to drench his liver and force-feed his arteries at an abundant reception. And then, back at the house, he could drink Martin’s excellent Scotch until it was time to be helped upstairs …
Read MoreThe Witch Temple of Mehandipur
… that the priests had touched against the altar and returned. Some people squashed the ash-smeared balls between the lips of relatives too weak or disoriented to feed themselves. The god on the altar was Balaji himself: a stele painted a gleaming ocher with a monkey’s mouth below two black eye-dots. Hanuman in …
Read MoreWhat Do Worms Want?
It’s an autumn day in Seattle, but not raining, not cold, and I’m out in my tiny back yard holding a bucket of worm dinner for my pet worms. Pet because they are incarcerated in a large perforated-for-air plastic bin. If I don’t feed them, they die. I worry for …
Read MoreWriter’s Block
… version of an event from my own life: the divorce of the parents who lived next door as I was growing up. The situation fascinated me, perhaps feeding into fears about my own family. I had written it as I had experienced it, from a distance. This was not, I sensed, the most dramatic perspective …
Read MoreOcean
… shuddered at the image of an albatross feeding her chicks bottle caps or a seal trying to extricate her pup from a plastic grocery bag? Who has not cringed at news of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where circular patterns of currents have formed a vortex of trash the size of Texas, not even …
Read MoreDogs and Us
… diverging from wolves as long as 100,000 years ago.
Dogs no doubt evolved from follower wolves, wolves that hung around human camps, perhaps sharing kills, perhaps feeding on cast-off scraps. Follower wolves and their dog descendants were, by far, the first domesticated animals.
We human hunters and wolf hunters had much in common …