(Courtesy of Gabriella Garcia)
Living in the year 2020 was like living in a dystopian society, one in which social and environmental injustices reigned supreme. Being in a world engulfed in so much darkness it’s hard to see the light, or in the case of my generation, be that light of hope for the future. My name is Gabriella Garcia, and through my internship at the California Academy of Sciences my peers and I were able to advocate for an issue we believe in through the KQED Let’s Talk about Election 2020 Youth Media Challenge. The internship that I am a part of is the Careers in Science internship program, which is a multi-year, year-round program that offers amazing opportunities for youth that come from underrepresented communities in San Francisco to immerse themselves in STEM fields.
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India Currents, in collaboration with bioGraphic and the California Academy of Sciences, is publishing a 3 part series on Chennai’s relationship with water. Find Part 1 here!
The Eris System
The people of Chennai don’t have to look far for inspiration on how to work with nature to finesse water cycles. Starting at least 2,000 years ago, ancient Tamil people ensured that they had water year-round by building a series of connected ponds on a slope from the Eastern Ghats (“mountains” in Hindi) east to the Bay of Bengal. These
eris, the Tamil word for tanks, are open on the higher side to catch water flowing downhill, while the lower side is closed with an earthen wall called a bund. An overflow divet in the top of the bund gives excess water a path to continue on to the next eri downhill. “System eris” were built off of rivers and creeks to capture their peak flows, while “non-system eris” were dug in areas without natural waterways to capture rainfal
This story contains spoilers for Ammonite
Palaeontologist Mary Anning is known for discovering a multitude of Jurassic fossils from Lyme Regis on England’s Dorset Coast from the age of ten in 1809.
Her discoveries included the first complete
Icthyosaurus (although it was her little brother who first stumbled across the skull, Anning spent the next year excavating and preparing the rest of the fossil), the first complete
Plesiosaurus and subsequent plesiosaur species, a perfectly preserved belemnite complete with anterior sheath and inkbag, and the first pterodactyl Duria Antiquior (A more Ancient Dorset), watercolour by geologist Henry De la Beche, 1830, based on fossils found by Mary Anning.
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Bill Newman, a world-renowned La Jolla biologist who helped show that lowly barnacles are wonderfully diverse creatures that can be widely used to track whales and turtles and monitor ocean pollution, died at home on Dec. 26. He was 93.
His passing was announced by UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where he was on the faculty for nearly 60 years and contributed to its rise as a mecca for marine science.
For the record:
4:00 PM, Jan. 13, 2021In an earlier version of this story, a caption misidentified Bill Newman. It has been corrected to say he is the person on the left in the photo.