Category: Published Science Articles

During St. Louis summers, people usually have no trouble answering “Yes” to the question, “Is it hot enough for you.” Even though we’ve recently had weather that reminds many of Michigan in July, our summers and especially our winters have been getting warmer, and at an accelerated pace since the 1970s. Our area has become about 0.8 degrees centigrade (about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer in the past 100 years, as has the average temperature of the globe.

The changes in temperature are much more striking other places on earth. And researchers at the Missouri Botanical Garden are trying to learn what that means for plant ecosystems in our state and around the world.

The poles show the most warming.  The Himalayas are second in rate of warming,  with glaciers melting faster than anywhere else.  Unlike the poles, the Himalayas support a complex and abundant flora, and this ecology is being affected by increasing temperature and more rain.

“Alpine meadows are being pushed off the mountaintop,” says Jan Salick of the Missouri Botanical Garden.

 

For the entire article (2.2MB PDF).
This article was originally published in the St. Louis Beacon.

If you feed them nectar, they will probably come. And if you are like many — if not most — of us, you will be enchanted by the antics of the tiniest of birds. Hummingbirds have been buzzing around St. Louis during the past month.

The ruby-throated hummingbird is the only hummer that nests in Missouri.

It is neither the biggest nor smallest of these American natives. But considering that it weighs in at about 3 grams (1/10 of an ounce), and is about the length of a finger, you won’t easily spot one unless it is sipping nectar from something close to you.

 

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This article was originally published in the St. Louis Beacon.

Madagascar. Far-away and exotic. Home of the lemur and the baobab tree. And desperately poor.

“It’s a race against the clock,” Armand Randrianasolo said when describing Missouri Botanical Garden’s research program in Madagascar. Only about 10 percent of Madagascar’s original habitat remains intact with more forests being destroyed all the time. As a result, many of the estimated 13,000-14,000 species of native plants may become extinct before they have even been identified.

 

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This article was originally published in the St. Louis Beacon.

Does the thought of whizzing through a loop-the-loop in an open car make your heart beat a little faster?  How do you feel about riding that car straight down from 150 feet above the ground?  Just gotta try it?

To millions of visitors annually, roller coasters are the highlights of theme parks.  Many of the most spectacular of those rides such as SheiKra at Busch Gardens Tampa or Dragon Kahn at Port Aventura, Spain began as designs at St. Louis architecture firm PGAV.

As explained by the designers at PGAV, successful coasters use a fiendish knowledge of psychology firmly grounded in the basics of physics.  (A bit of human physiology is also incorporated to make the rides very safe.)

Here’s how Bill Castle, vice president of PGAV, explains the psychological scripting of a “dive coaster” like SheiKra, recently named the top coaster in central Florida:

“You start out with a little fear.  Your trepidation increases as you go up—the clickety click of the lift gets on your nerves.  Then you hang at the top looking down 200 feet for about ten seconds, with the suspense constantly building.  The adrenaline is in full flower when you go down that drop, and every nerve in your body is tingling.  Time seems to slow down, and you are hyperaware.  At the bottom of the (200 foot) drop you go into a long pullout and begin another climb.  It’s all energy management—fast and slow, high and low.”

 

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This article was originally published in the St. Louis Beacon.

When Rainer Bussmann discovered a new plant species in the Andean cloud forest in Peru, he saw both opportunity for the native population and an inducement to preserve the forest where the plant grows. The seeds from that plant could be roasted and turned into a highly nutritious snack. The snack could be sold around the world and the revenue generated could improve the lives of Peruvian farmers.

Translating discovery into results is routine for Bussmann, an ethnobotanist and director of the Missouri Botanical Garden’s William L. Brown Center. “Ethnobotany is the science of how people use plants,” he explained. Since plants enter into almost every human endeavor, from sustaining life as food to giving us pleasure in gardens and wilderness, ethnobotany covers a lot of ground.

A major part of the ethnobotanist’s focus is discovery. There is a sense of urgency about finding and evaluating new plant species, because specimen-rich environments like rain forests are being destroyed constantly. Since only a small fraction of the estimated plant species have been evaluated for human use, the very plant that holds the key to curing Ted Kennedy’s type of brain cancer could be wiped out if a new gold mine is excavated in the Andean cloud forest.

 

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This article was originally published in the St. Louis Beacon.