Month: January 2018

When we review a car, we often find ourselves at the mercy of the elements. In the case of the 2018 BMW X3, that turned out to be a good thing. A rapid succession of bitter cold, unusual warmth (for Chicago), rain, ice, snow, and then more bitter cold over a period of seven days taught me that the X3 is an excellent cold-weather car. The interior warms up very quickly for a car of its size (with a heated steering wheel that becomes hot to the touch), the handling in snow and ice is exemplary, and it's a great car if you need to give someone a jump start. But that's just part of the picture for the X3.

Generation next

Eric Bangeman

The 2018 model year marks the beginning of the third generation for BMW's mid-sized crossover-slash-SUV. And the X3, with its high driving position, definitely feels like more of an SUV than a crossover.

Enlarge / Mars, the fourth rock from the Sun. (credit: NASA)

As philosopher-mathematician Jeff Goldblum once said, “life, uh, finds a way.”

To phrase that more scientifically, evolution has had billions of years of trial and error to produce species that are well adapted chemically and physically. Many human researchers want to imitate that adaptation, turning lessons from the natural world into practice in engineering, technology, and architecture. The entire venture goes under the name “biomimicry.”

“I think biomimicry is really beautiful,” says Ariel Ekblaw, a student at MIT’s Media Lab, who founded and leads the Media Lab’s Space Exploration Initiative. “It’s both a framework and... a set of tools or learnings from nature that can inform modern engineering and science research projects.”

Enlarge / At Ash Cave in Ohio, archaeologists discovered an enormous cache of seeds from lost crops, including domesticated native goosefoot (similar to quinoa). These seeds were so far from their wild habitats that they had clearly been domesticated. (credit: Natalie Mueller)

Adventurers and archaeologists have spent centuries searching for lost cities in the Americas. But over the past decade, they’ve started finding something else: lost farms.

Over 2,000 years ago in North America, indigenous people domesticated plants that are now part of our everyday diets, such as squashes and sunflowers. But they also bred crops that have since returned to the wild. These include erect knotweed (not to be confused with its invasive cousin, Asian knotweed), goosefoot, little barley, marsh elder, and maygrass. We haven’t simply lost a few plant strains: an entire cuisine with its own kinds of flavors and baked goods has simply disappeared.

By studying lost crops, archaeologists learn about everyday life in the ancient Woodland culture of the Americas, including how people ate plants that we call weeds today. But these plants also give us a window on social networks in the ancient Americas. Scientists can track the spread of cultivated seeds from one tiny settlement to the next in the vast region that would one day be known as the United States. This reveals which groups were connected culturally and how they formed alliances through food and farming.