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11 Things We Learned This Week

This week, we learned …

… 112 years after the great quake, San Francisco is still taking seismic risks. Read of the week!

The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and subsequent fire destroyed hundreds of buildings, including those downtown on Post and Grant Avenues, above.
Photograph by H.D. Chadwick, U.S. Department of War, courtesy National Archives

Explore the science behind San Francisco’s Earthquakes … and make one of your own with our Forces of Nature interactive.

 

 

… how a marine biologist is sticking her neck out for geoducks and making waves at the forefront of a new Native American STEM movement.

Hozoji Matheson-Margullis is a Puyallup tribal native, globally recognized musician, and marine biologist. (The geoduck is a big, burrowing clam.) Photograph by Brian Anderson/Motherboard

How is National Geographic Education fostering STEM education? With all sorts of resources.

 

 

… seas may be rising too fast to save the Mississippi Delta.

A new study reports that wetland loss in Louisiana’s Mississippi Delta is about 45 square kilometers (almost 10 square miles) a year, or more than one acre an hour (an acre is close to the size of a football field).
Photograph courtesy USGS, NASA

What have previous Mississippi deltas looked like? Download our beautiful map to find out.

 

 

… eroding mountains could release, not trap, greenhouse gases.

Yushan is part of the Central Mountain Range in Taiwan, one of the most quickly eroding mountain ranges in the world.
Photograph by Kailing3, courtesy Wikimedia. CC-BY-SA-3.0

If mountains aren’t a carbon sink, where are they? Use our activity to find out.

 

 

… “sea nomads” may be genetically adapted to diving.

The Bajau people have lived on and around the South Pacific waters of the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei for thousands of years.
Photograph by Matthieu Paley, National Geographic

How might the Bajau lifestyle contribute to their diet? Find out with our lovely video.

 

 

… Minnesota has a runaway bog, and is seeking solutions.

What’s a bog? What’s a floating island?

 

 

… the lost language of the American logger.

Loggers show off a felled giant sequoia around 1900.
Photograph by the National Park Service, courtesy National Geographic

Can you think of another popular 19th-century profession with a vanished vocabulary? Look to the seas.

 

 

… whatever happened to One Laptop Per Child.

This $100 “green machine” of One Laptop Per Child promised to have all the features of an ordinary computer but require so little electricity that a child could power it with a hand crank, be rugged enough for children to use outside schools, and have mesh networking to allow one laptop extend its internet connection to many others.
Photograph by Renee Comet, National Geographic

How are laptops and innovative educators bringing education to refugees in Africa? Join Project Kakuma to find out.

 

 

… how the “first ethnographer of the Americas” brought his own perspective to ancient Mexico.

Reports of the scale of human sacrifice among the Mexica leaves one archaeologist to say “we may never truly fathom other cultures.”
Illustration from theCodex Magliabechiano, courtesy Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc. (FAMSI) and Wikimedia

What is ethnography? Use our resource to introduce students to anthropology.

 

 

… that dirt might save the Earth.

A new type of “carbon farming” aims to use plants to increase the amount of carbon in the soil.
Image provided by City Compost

How can you get dirty and save the planet?

 

 

… the Kingdom of Swaziland is now the Kingdom of eSwatini.

We’re going to have to remake our map!

What is a kingdom?

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