How A Woodpecker Pecks Wood

If you’ve heard the hammering of a woodpecker in the woods, you might have wondered how the birds can be so forceful. What does it take to whack your head against a tree repeatedly, hard enough to drill a hole? A team of researchers wondered that too and set out to investigate, by putting tiny muscle monitors on eight downy woodpeckers and recording them with high-speed video as they pecked away in the lab. Science Friday

A team of researchers at Brown has pecked away at the mysterious force of woodpeckers, revealing how the birds combine breathing and whole-body coordination to drill into trees with extraordinary force. “I think one of the most stunning things that we found in this study was that… they’re engaging everything from head and neck muscles, which you might expect, all the way down to muscles in their tail and hips as they push forward during these strikes,” said lead author Nicholas Antonson, a postdoctoral research fellow in ecology, evolution and organismal biology at Brown. 

finiamo l'anno con notizie curiose 

Death of a Tree

Some years ago I published a book called New York City of Trees. On facing pages of photographs and text, it presented portraits of fifty-five trees in the city’s five boroughs. One was of a Callery pear in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. A mid-sized tree covered in white blossoms each spring, glossy green leaves in the summer, and a mass of orange-yellow leaves in the fall, the species is a familiar sight in cities across the US. At the time of my book’s publication it was the second most widely planted species in Manhattan, after the honey locust. [...]

As I noted in my book, one day in 2008 I drove by and the Callery pear was gone. From friends at the Parks Department I learned that it had been cut down at the request of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority as part of the planned extension of the 7 subway line to Hudson Yards, then in development. Three new buildings necessary for the subway would be built on the lot behind the tree. The Parks Department had approved the removal in exchange for a restitution payment of $22,500, which would cover the cost of planting thirty new trees elsewhere in the neighborhood. Benjamin Swett, The New York Review of Books

 

John le Carré visto da John Banville

David Cornwell, aka John le Carré, was tall, muscular, and physically forceful, even into old age, and possessed of what used to be called film-star good looks. He seemed, on the face of it, wholly at ease with the world and with himself. But what the camera so often revealed, behind the confidently winning smile, was the wounded man whose mother, when he was five, abandoned him without even saying good-bye, and who after he had become the successful novelist John le Carré was asked by his father to reimburse him for the cost of his education. The New York Review of Books

e anche, sempre sulla New York Review of Books, un interessante articolo sul nuovo libro di Adam Kirsch, The Revolt Against Humanity (Columbia Global Reports)

If humanity were to disappear from the Earth, what would be lost? On the human scale, the answer is everything; but on a planetary scale, it’s tempting to concede that such a loss might amount to a net gain. It is probably not necessary to enumerate the various ways that humanity has been unambiguously bad for the planet and pretty much every other living creature on it. But we tend not to think of our species, and the prospect of its extinction, in such bluntly utilitarian terms. We’d rather we weren’t so terrible, but we’d also like to think, even if it means fooling ourselves, that we might in time become less terrible—and either way, an enthusiastic embrace of our extinction would surely be taking things a bit far.

Or would it? This is the question that animates The Revolt Against Humanity, a brisk and bracing new book by the poet and critic Adam Kirsch. NYRB

 

The Draw of the Sea

It was a tragedy that sent novelist Wyl Menmuir to the “demi-island” of Cornwall, with its long and sinuous shoreline. In 2011, his first child was stillborn and he went with his wife down to the wild north coast of the county to escape. It was winter, and cold, and yet he walked into the ocean. “And for a few moments the grief wasn’t silenced so much as confronted by a wall of deafening white noise muting its constant scream. The sea’s great indifference was a comfort in a way I can’t easily explain and it continues to play its part.” Alex Preston, The Guardian

What will we be reading next year?

 

Five biggest trends from the London book fair. [...]

1. Celebrity-authored fiction is on the up
2. Books about Ukraine are in demand
3. Greek myths rumble on
4. Women’s stories are getting darker
5. Self-help books are taking on new relevance. Sarah Shaffi, The Guardian

e anche:

Top 10 books about gardening
Going beyond how-to guides, these books encompass fiction, history, poetry and ecology to show how gardens can be places of liberation as well as beauty. Lulah Ellender, The Guardian

 

Landspeak

Aiuto! Stiamo perdendo il vocabolario della natura.
"The substitutions made in the dictionary—the outdoor and the natural being displaced by the indoor and the virtual—are a small but significant symptom of the simulated life we increasingly live. Children are now (and valuably) adept ecologists of the technoscape, with numerous terms for file types but few for differ-ent trees and creatures. A basic literacy of landscape is falling away up and down the ages. And what is lost along with this literacy is something precious: a kind of word magic, the power that certain terms possess to enchant our relations with nature and place. As the writer Henry Porter observed, the OUP deletions removed the “euphonious vocabulary of the natural world—words which do not simply label an object or action but in some mysterious and beautiful way become part of it.” Robert MacFarlane, orionmagazine.

Autumnal Tints

E' un bellissimo saggio scritto da Thoreau 150 anni fa, mentre stava morendo di tubercolosi. Ne parla John-Manuel Andriote, "First published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1862, Autumnal Tints is a naturalist's guide to truly seeing nature. "We have only to elevate our view a little," wrote Thoreau, "to see the whole forest as a garden." Those who merely look will observe a maple, while those who see will marvel at "a living liberty-pole on which a thousand bright flags are waving." theatlantic.