Word: grasslands
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...possible reason the Mongolians don’t maintain their paved roads, or build new ones, is that they still hold onto the steppe-nomad mentality. Getting from place to place is a matter of getting on your horse and setting out across the grassland. It’s a free good, and who would ever think to pay money...
...right—a time machine. But Hartdegan learns that the past cannot be changed, and consequently decides to check out what the future holds. A few plot twists later and we’re 800 centuries in the future. New York City has become a grassland inhabited by two races of people, the nature-loving Eloi and their cannibalistic hunters, the Morlocks, who periodically capture and feed on them...
...chlorophyll (the green pigment) lived. Once the grass died, so did the chlorophyll and the image would fade in a relatively short period of time, several months at most. So Ackroyd and Harvey teamed up with scientists to overcome the fading problem. Working at the institute of Grassland and Environmental Research, they found the gene for greenness grass, the “Green Forever” gene. Using this discovery they were able to engineer “stay-green” grass, that remains green after drying and for lengths of several years...
What's been much tougher to pin down is just why two-leggedness arose. The conventional wisdom has long focused on the fact that eastern Africa became significantly dryer about the time that humans first evolved. The change would have tended to favor grasslands over forests, and, so went the theory, our ancestors changed to take advantage of the new conditions. We learned to walk upright so that we could see over the tall grasses to spot predators coming; an upright posture, moreover, would offer a much smaller target for the oppressive heat of the grassland sun, and a larger...
Meave Leakey, head of paleontology at the National Museums of Kenya and a member of the world's most famous fossil-hunting family, suspects the change in climate rewarded bipedalism for a different reason. Yes, the dryer climate made for more grassland, but our early ancestors, she argues, spent much of their time not in dense forest or on the savannah but in an environment with some trees, dense shrubbery and a bit of grass. "And if you're moving into more open country with grasslands and bushes and things like this, and eating a lot of fruits and berries...