Restoring the Broken Prairie

Restoring Tallgrass Prairie and Grassland Bird Populations in Tall Fescue Pastures With Winter Grazing

Restoration of grasslands dominated by tall fescue (Schedonorus phoenix [Scop.] Holub) to native tallgrass prairie usually requires burning, herbicides, or reseeding. We tested seasonal grazing by livestock in winter, combined with cessation of fertilization, as a restoration tool for modifying the competitive dynamics among herbaceous plants to restore tallgrass prairie communities in southeas...

Broken heart: Broken mind.

The increased frequency of sudden cardiac death after earthquakes and bombings has long proposed that emotional distress plays a role in acute coronary syndromes and arrhythmias. Since the 1960s, several controlled, prospective, epidemiological studies have reported emotional distress as a major risk factor for the onset and worsening of coronary heart disease (CHD) [1]. The Interheart study, a...

Restoring the balance.

The Broken Spaghetti Noodle

A popular question in recreational mathematics is the following: If we drop a spaghetti noodle and it breaks at two random places, what is the probability that we can form a triangle with the three resulting segments? See for example [2, chap.1, sec.6], [3, p.6], [4, p.31], or [7, p.30-36]. This is an elementary problem in geometric probability. Clearly the length of the noodle (or equivalently...

Family Life on the Prairie

The prairie vole has become a flagship species for the biomedical exploration of the neurobiology of social bonding (Carter et al., 1995; Young et al., 2005). It is a species native to the prairies of Midwest North America, and adults show social “ monogamy” – a suite of behaviors including the formation of an emotional pair-bond with an adult partner; shared care of offspring including male ca...