This weekend (February 15-17) marks the 16th annual Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC)!
The GBBC is a joint partnership between Audubon and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, with Bird Studies Canada as the official Canadian partner. It is open to birders of all ages and abilities, and helps provide researchers with citizen science data about where birds are each February.
Last year’s unseasonably warm weather and lack of snow and ice in some regions led to more than two million Snow Geese being reported in two counts at Squaw Creek National Wildlife Refuge, Missouri. In Ruskin, Florida, participants reported more than one million Tree Swallows, vaulting the species to the GBBC top-ten list of the most numerous birds for the first time ever.
Scientists use the GBBC information to get the “big picture” about what is happening to bird populations. The longer these data are collected, the more meaningful they become in helping scientists investigate far-reaching questions, like what kinds of population shifts and changes can be expected from future climate change.
Please visit www.ebird.org for more information or to download a checklist and participate! Also, make sure to snap some great photos to upload for the National Audubon Society website to be entered for some great prizes!
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How James Clerk Maxwell changed the world.
The Economist
2011 is awash with anniversaries of notable events from the annals of the physical sciences. […] Worthy intellectual accomplishments, all. Yet they pale in comparison with Maxwell’s. This is not just because, unlike a lot of subsequent theoretical advances, his insight has already yielded a century’s worth of tangible results, from radio to mobile phones. (Only a century because it took scientists several decades before they grasped the theory’s full significance and put it into practice.) Nor is it because he championed the abstract idea of fields, a fecund notion that underpins much of modern physics.
No, Maxwell’s greatness lies elsewhere still. He showed that nature ought not to be taken at face value, and that she can be cajoled into revealing her hidden charms so long as the entreaties are whispered in mathematical verse. In doing so he paved the way for the pursuit of physicists’ holy grail: the grand unified theory, a set of equations which would explain all there is to know about physical reality. As tends to be the case with grails, this one, too, may prove unattainable.
Unless there are inherent limits on human understanding—itself an unfathomable premise—there will always be more apparently disparate phenomena to explain at one fell swoop.
Maxwell remains the great unsung hero of human progress, the physicists’ physicist whose name means little to those without a scientific bent. His life’s work, which also includes remarkable contributions to thermodynamics (not to mention taking the world’s first colour photograph, also 150 years ago) is among the most enduring scientific legacies of all time, on a par with those of his more widely acclaimed peers, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein.
It deserves to be trumpeted.
So much love for Maxwell.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lmpty1Tkoz1qz8hy0o1_500.jpg)
