My Blogs

I'm not what people call "a language person". I speak English fluently because it's my mother tongue.  I had trouble learning Spanish in high school and college, but I know enough to get by when I travel to Mexico or other Spanish-speaking countries. I learned some Hebrew, too, but my memory only holds a few traces of the content I learned from 10 years of Hebrew school (purple, king, money, bird, and dog, and the numbers 1-10 are the only words I could recite to you now).

I've been hearing reports about it on the news, and soon I will be hearing the hum live: the cicadas are coming! Specifically, Magicicada brood II, the 17-year brood, which is emerging or about to emerge along the East Coast of the US.

The University of Connecticut is tracking their emergence, and a Cicada Tracker Web page is helping them out. If you live in range of this brood, you can help track the cicadas.  UPDATE I heard my first cicada this year, at about noon on May 20th.

The Magicicada is very striking to look at, with red eyes and glossy wings.

The New York Times from last Saturday (May 11) had an important article about global warming. The Earth has passed an average daily level of 400 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide. CO₂ is the gas that does the most damage as far as global warming is concerned, because it traps the heat in the Earth's atmosphere.

This is very bad news for our planet, most immediately for people who live on the coastlines, which will be more prone to flooding.

The time is now to make personal changes and to make larger changes.

Please read this article I found on the world's tallest freestanding rock in Mexico.

The Article is from Live Science.

Written by: Crystal Gammon, OurAmazingPlanet Contributor | Livescience.com - Thu, May 9, 2013 10:08am EDT