Merde is an unusual (very unusual) and witty investigation into a subject you may always have wondered about--but didn't know quite what to ask.
History, biology, anthropology, culture, animal behavior--all of these are the real subjects of Merde. Why can some animals do it on the run, and others can't? Why does camel dung make good fires? What are the fascinating stories of the dung beetles?
Myths and legends, physical features, health and disease, uses for construction and as fertilizers--even nutritional values --Ralph Lewin writes about them all in the most ingratiating and...

Origins of Plastids looks at symbiosis and symbiogenesis as a mechanism of evolution. This theory of endosymbiotic evolution postulates that photosynthetic prokaryotes living as endosymbionts within eukaryotic cells gradually evolved into the organelle structures called chloroplasts. The theory is controversial but has been strongly advocated by Lynn Margulis. Based on a colloquium held at the Bodega Bay Marine Laboratory of the University of California at Davis, Origins of Plastids reviews recent data on this most basic problem in plant evolution. In it, leading researchers in the field...

Origins of Plastids looks at symbiosis and symbiogenesis as a mechanism of evolution. This theory of endosymbiotic evolution postulates that photosynthetic prokaryotes living as endosymbionts within eukaryotic cells gradually evolved into the organelle structures called chloroplasts. The theory is controversial but has been strongly advocated by Lynn Margulis. Based on a colloquium held at the Bodega Bay Marine Laboratory of the University of California at Davis, Origins of Plastids reviews recent data on this most basic problem in plant evolution. In it, leading researchers in the field...

Ralph A. LewiQand Lanna Cheng In physics, the discovery of new (more properly, hitherto undetected) particles has often resulted from a search: like the discovery of America, their existence had been postulated but their actual existence awaited confirmation. In biology, new discoveries are rarely made in this way. The existence of an alga like Prochloron, as a putative ancestor of chloro- plasts, had been postulated, but in fact its discovery was a consequence of fortuitous events. Green algal symbionts in didemnid ascidians had been known for decades to a few marine zoologists who had...