Thẻ: History of the earth

The Pitfalls and Promise of America’s Founding Myths

~ Trần Đình Hoành ~ Bình luận về bài viết này

Maintaining a shared sense of nationhood has always been a struggle for a country defined not by organic ties, but by a commitment to a set of ideals

Smthsonian

Westward Course of Empire
For generations, Americans have sought to understand the sense of shared destiny—or perhaps, civic obligation—that forged the nation. (Emanuel Leutze via Wikimedia Commons under Public domain)

By Colin Woodard SMITHSONIANMAG.COM
FEBRUARY 22, 202122332

Alexander Hamilton had no illusions about what would happen to Americans if the United States collapsed.

If the newly drafted Constitution wasn’t ratified, he warned in Federalist No. 8, a “War between the States,” fought by irregular armies across unfortified borders, was imminent. Large states would overrun small ones. “Plunder and devastation” would march across the landscape, reducing the citizenry to “a state of continual danger” that would nourish authoritarian, militarized

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In Defense of Bảo Tàng Địa Chất, Saigon’s Most Neglected Museum

~ Đào Thu Hằng ~ Bình luận về bài viết này
saigoneer.com
Wednesday, 12 February 2020.
Written by Paul Christiansen. Photos by Alberto Prieto.
By (un)conventional standards, Saigon’s Geological Museum may warrant a score of 1.3/9, but if one considers it as a source of whimsy, it’s a solid 8.2/9.For years, Saigoneer’s editorial staff has discussed visiting and writing about the Geological Museum (Bảo tàng Địa chất), but it never got done. I’ve lived here for half a decade, and when I moved to a new neighborhood a year ago my daily walk to the office took me past the museum; yet I still had never entered. Then, on a whim, one random Tuesday morning several weeks ago, I went. The result? I didn’t think I could love Saigon more than I already did, and yet…

The Collection

When a meteor, a hulking hunk of prehistoric mass, shreds through Earth’s atmosphere and slams into the surface, the impact vaporizes terrestrial scraps of minerals and sends debris into the sky. The molten globs float like glassy raindrops and fall thousands of kilometers away. Buried under layers of rock laid over millions of years, occasionally the shiny shards work their way to the surface; shimmering examples of Earth’s immensity and the intensity of time. Have you ever seen one? If not, you can.

A case filled with these tektites awaits in District 1 alongside literal pieces of lava, impressions made by long-extinct sea creatures straight out of a science-fiction movie, and wood transformed to stone. Can you imagine, wood to stone! What was once a tiny seed and then a towering tube of pulp pumping sap to a canopy of soft leaves made into solid rock by the geological machinations of our exceedingly strange planet. No one seems to care. Tiếp tục đọc “In Defense of Bảo Tàng Địa Chất, Saigon’s Most Neglected Museum” →

Scientists pull living microbes, possibly 100 million years old, from beneath the sea

~ Đào Thu Hằng ~ Bình luận về bài viết này

sciencemag.org

Microbes buried beneath the sea floor for more than 100 million years are still alive, a new study reveals. When brought back to the lab and fed, they started to multiply. The microbes are oxygen-loving species that somehow exist on what little of the gas diffuses from the ocean surface deep into the seabed.

The discovery raises the “insane” possibility, as one of the scientists put it, that the microbes have been sitting in the sediment dormant, or at least slowly growing without dividing, for eons.

The new work demonstrates “microbial life is very persistent, and often finds a way to survive,” says Virginia Edgcomb, a microbial ecologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who was not involved in the work

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