Sciencespeaking topic
How did Carson's book Silent Spring, exposing the harm of pesticides to nature, launch the modern environmental movement?
— Rachel Carson, 'Silent Spring' (1962)
practice with this topic
Set the timer (5-30 min), take 20 seconds of prep if you like, start talking. Jot your thoughts onto the sticky-note board.
similar topics
- A city's subway, the veins of a leaf, the bronchi of your lungs, and a bolt of lightning all draw nearly the same branching pattern. Nature seems to keep rediscovering the same solution to distribute a resource most efficiently. Why do such different systems converge on the same shape?
- What makes you panic when you hold your breath isn't running out of oxygen but the carbon dioxide building up in your blood. So the body sounds the alarm not because your oxygen is low but because your waste is piling up. The feeling of suffocation is really the panic of excess, not of lack.
- In a school of fish the one on the outside carries the greatest risk of being eaten but also reaches food first. No one is guaranteed the middle; everyone constantly changes places. Are safety and opportunity always opposites?
- Your breath probably contains a few molecules from Cleopatra's last breath. Over thousands of years air molecules have mixed across the whole world. Is the past, quite literally, circulating in our lungs?
- In dreams you see faces you don't recognize, but the brain can't invent a new face; they're all people you saw somewhere in your life and thought you'd forgotten. So the 'strangers' in your dreams come from your own archive. Why does the brain keep what you thought it had deleted?