Author: evangelia baka

It doesn’t look like much from the outside, especially cloaked in Seattle’s typical gray mist. But inside the three-story warehouse that contains Living Computers: Museum + Labs is a unique convergence of new and old technology that shows in a fun, hands-on way how ideas can improve and evolve over time. This may be the only place in the world where one can take a virtual ride in a 3-D-printed, self-driving car, then head upstairs to play Space Invaders on a wood-veneer Atari 2600 console while reclining on a plaid chair. The museum began in 2012 as a modest...

The Amazon and the adjacent Andean slopes in South America host an astonishing richness of plants and animals. These species have been sources of food, shelter and medicine since the arrival of humans and a target of scientific curiosity since the days of the earliest European naturalist explorers. What processes produce such hot spots of species richness, and why does biodiversity gradually decline towards higher latitudes and drier climates? Scientists have proposed many competing explanations, but there is no easy way to test them. As biogeographers, those of us who study the geography of life on the planet, we do not have the option of...