- Industry: Biology
- Number of terms: 15386
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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 ...
Digging soil to a certain depth--12 inches, say, and in rows--and loosening the soil to a certain depth (often another 12 inches) below that before filling back in. Used to prepare soil beds where plants have not been grown. See French Intensive.
Industry:Biology
A site where seawater is boiled to separate steam from salt; the steam condenses into fresh water. Because this requires a large amount of energy--normally provided by burning coal or oil--desalinization is normally used only in very dry areas.
Industry:Biology
Species that survive through low death rate, relatively little colonization or expansion, moderately frequent reproduction cycles, and other steady-state patterns of adaptation. Tends to be the larger animals. See Opportunistic Success Strategy.
Industry:Biology
A unit of cultural, as opposed to genetic, inheritance. Recent research supports Susan Blackmore's theory that the human brain evolved rapidly to make itself a better habitat for human memes. Such memes would be available for sexual selection.
Industry:Biology
An element variant in which the number of neutrons does not equal the number of protons. U-235 has the same number of protons, but not neutrons, as U-238, but U-238 will not fission itself into an atomic chain reaction when lumped together.
Industry:Biology
The brief conversion of saturated soil into a structureless mass that flows like fluid. When earthquakes trigger it, walls, dams, buildings, and foundations are liable to collapse. Frequent near coastal developments and areas of poor drainage.
Industry:Biology
Buddhist theory of mutual causality, which in practice means the interdependency of personal and social activity. Joanna Macy links this to a sense of environmental responsibility: consciousness (not ego) and world rise and fall together.
Industry:Biology
The steepest angle that slope, rock, or detritus material settles into without toppling. Builders of flood-prone roads and sliding hillside homes in California ignore the angle of repose so often that it could be renamed the angle of depose.
Industry:Biology
A type of chemical weathering in which carbonic acid (carbon dioxide dissolved in rainwater) reacts with the magnesium, potassium, sodium, or calcium in rocks like limestone and feldspar and thereby dissolves them, sometimes forming caves.
Industry:Biology
Six geographical animal realms: Nearctic, Palaearctic, Neotropical, Ethiopian, Oriental, and Australasian. They roughly outline the breakup of the supercontinent Pangaia into continents on which different kinds of fauna lived and evolved.
Industry:Biology
