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Flower

Tropical Birds & Quantum Physics

Life Cycle of a Ladybug

Best & Most Beautiful State Parks in Missouri

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Issue 2 Green Today | Friday, November 25, 2011

Your News on Sustainability | www.greentoday.com

FlowerA flower, also known as a bloom or blossom, is the reproductive structure found in flowering plants.The flower structure contains the plant’s reproductive organs, and its function is to produce seeds through repro-duction.For the higher plants, seeds are the next generation, and serve as the primary means by which individuals of a species are dispersed across the landscape.After fertilization, portions of the flower develop into a fruit con-taining the seeds. Many flowers in nature have evolved to attract animals to pollinate the flower, the movements of the pollinating agent contributing to the opportunity for genetic recombination within a dispersed plant popula-tion.

In the summer of 1973 sun flowers appeared in my father’s vegetable garden. They seemed to sprout overnight in a few rows he had lent that year to new neighbors from California. Only six years old at the time, I was at first put off by these garish plants. Such strange and vibrant flowers seemed out of place among the respectable beans, peppers, spin-ach, and other vegetables we had always grown. Gradually, however, the brilliance of the sunflowers won me over. Their fiery halos relieved the green monotone that by late summer ruled the garden. I marveled at birds that clung upside down to the shaggy, gold disks, wings fluttering, looting the seeds. Sunflowers defined flowers for me that summer and changed my view of the world.

Flowers have a way of doing that. They began changing the way the world looked almost as soon as they appeared on Earth about 130 million years ago, during the

recent in geologic time: If all Earth’s history were compressed into an hour, flowering plants would exist for only the last 90 sec-onds. But once they took firm root about 100 million years ago, they swiftly diversified in an explosion of varieties that established most of the flowering plant families of the modern world.

Today flowering plant species outnumber by twenty to one those of ferns and cone-bearing trees, or conifers, which had thrived for 200 million years before the first bloom appeared. As a food source flowering plants provide us and the rest of the animal world with the nourishment that is fundamen-tal to our existence. In the words of Walter Judd, a botanist at the University of Florida, “If it weren’t for flowering plants, we humans wouldn’t be here.”

From oaks and palms to wild-flowers and water lilies, across the miles of cornfields and citrus orchards to my father’s garden, flowering plants have come to

rule the worlds of botany and agriculture. They also reign over an ethereal realm sought by artists, poets, and everyday people in search of inspiration, solace, or the simple pleasure of beholding a blossom.

“Before flowering plants appeared,” says Dale Russell, a paleontol-ogist with North Carolina State University and the State Museum of Natural Sciences, “the world was like a Japanese garden: peaceful, somber, green; inhabited by fish, turtles, and dragonflies. After flowering plants, the world became like an English garden, full of bright color and variety, visited by butterflies and honeybees. Flowers of all shapes and colors bloomed among the greenery.”

That dramatic change represents one of the great moments in the history of life on the planet. What allowed flowering plants to dom-inate the world’s flora so quickly? What was their great innovation?

Issue 2 Green Today | Friday, November 25, 2011

How Tropical Birds Use Quatum PhysicsAs I noted yesterday, one of the central features of condensed matter physics is the existence of band gaps, ranges of energy that no electron can possibly have inside a solid. This arises from the wave nature of electrons, and has a bunch of applications in the electronics industry. The emission of light as an electron drops from a state above the gap to one below it is the basis of LED’s and diode lasers, and manipulation of band gaps in different materials is critical for making diodes and transistors on computer chips

The core physical idea, though, it is not restricted to electrons inside solids, and very closely related physics shows up in some surprising places. Such as, for example, the feathers of tropical birds, which wouldn’t have their brilliant colors without the physics responsible for band gaps. People are often surprised to learn that many of the colors we see in bird feathers are not, in fact, due to colored pigments, but a result of the wave nature of light. The iridescent colors you see in peacocks and humming-birds, for example, are produced by thin overlapping layers of nearly-transparent material.

Light reflecting off one layer will interfere with light from a deeper layer, either reinforcing the wave or wiping it out depending on the wavelength and the angle of reflec-tion. That’s what gives these colors a sort of shimmery effect, shifting as you move around to different angles. Other birds, however, have blue feathers that contain no blue pigment, but do not shift color as you change the angle. Those feathers, if you look closely enough– like, scanning-elec-tron-microscope close– turn out to be made of a spongy network of rod-like filaments. Which gives rise to a sort of band gap, only for light, not electrons. Understanding these “photonic band gaps” was one of the subjects of the March Meeting talk by Eli Yablonovitch of UC-Berkeley, whose research group has been working on these materials for a long time in a more physics-y context.

Life Cycle of a LadybugThe ladybug life cycle is not much different from the life cycle of a butter-fly. The ladybug goes through the same four stages as a butterfly, the egg stage, the larvae stage, the pupa stage, and the adult ladybug stage. You know what adult ladybugs look like, but you wouldn’t even recognize them before they get to that final stage of their lives.

Female ladybugs lay their eggs on the underside of leaves. This is to protect them from being seen by flying predators as well as from the weather. A mother ladybug will lay from ten to fifteen eggs in one place and she will make sure that it is a place where the babies can find food when they hatch. The ladybug eggs look similar to yellow jellybeans, except that they are tiny. The next time you are in the park in springtime, carefully look under some plant leaves and see if you can pick out some ladybug eggs, but don’t touch them because you could kill the babies. Once the eggs hatch, the larvae will come out and start looking for some-thing to eat. They will look for tiny mites or aphids and they should find plenty because the mother found the perfect leaf to lay her eggs under because of the abundance of food for the larvae to find. Newborn larvae look sort of like tiny alligators. After only a few days, the larvae will be large enough to begin to molt (shed their skin), and they keep molting for as long as they are growing. You can find the molted skins on leaves if you look very hard.

Best & Most Beautiful State Parks in MissouriIf you’re looking for State Parks in Missouri, come to the Arcadia Valley Region and Black River Recreation Area in Iron and Reynolds Counties in MO, where these Missouri Natural Wonders are all within minutes of each other, and are near St. Louis ~ just 80 miles! Come to Missouri to explore Precambrian era geology.

Taum Sauk Mountain State Park, Elephant Rocks State Park, John son’s Shut-ins State Park are just a short 80 mile drive from St. Louis. These spectacular Missouri natural geologic wonders are located in the St. Francois Mountains Region of the Missouri Ozark Plateau. You will see and experience a landscape unique on the earth. Learn about Missouri geology and the Parks and find links to lodging, campgrounds and other recreational activities nearby.

St. Francois Mountains Geology. The precambrian St. Francois Moun-tains were formed through volcanic and intrusive activity nearly 1.5 billion years ago. By comparison, the Appalachians started forming about 460 million years ago and the Rockies a mere 70 million years ago. When the Appalachian Mountains started forming, the St. Francois range was already twice as old as the Appalachians are today. This range is one of the oldest exposures of igneous rock in North America.

Whether you enjoy photography, geology, camping, hiking, backpacking, picnicking, bird watching or mountain biking, there is no other region of Missouri that has this much to offer the avid outdoorsman. If you’re a “rock hound” you need to visit this unique area. If you long to see and experience a special place where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, containing ecological, geological, or other features of scientific, educational, scenic or historical value, make your plans to visit this unique area of the United States now. We look forward to your visit to the most beautiful place in Missouri.

Taum Sauk Mountain State Park - Want to hike to the top of a mountain? Just park in the lot of Taum Sauk Mountain State Park and walk a mere 1,000 feet on a paved path to Missouri’s highest point. Here, an elevation marker sits, guiding visitors to the mountain’s 1,772 foot summit. If that’s not enough, the hike to Mina Sauk Falls will take your breath away.

Elephant Rocks State Park - A train of circus elephants dance trunk-to-tail to form an awe-inspiring sight to the young and to the young at heart. This is the appeal of Elephant Rocks State Park, named for a train of gi-gantic pink granite boulders perched atop a hill, just like circus elephants!

Johnson’s Shut-ins State Park - Nearly 1.5 billion years ago, violently ex-plosive volcanoes hurled hot gasses and ash into the air. The ashes and gas fell and cooled, forming rhyolite rock. A billion years later, shallow inland seas swallowed the ancient, worn-down mountains, burying the igneous rock under thousands of feet of sedimentary rock such as limestone,