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Closer examination reveales the Fortingall Yew is a male tree. Yews are normally either male or female and in autumn and winter sexing yews is generally easy. Males have small spherical structures that release clouds of pollen when they mature. Females hold bright red berries from autumn into winter. It was, therefore, quite a surprise to me to find a group of three ripe red berries on the Fortingal yew this October when the rest of the tree was clearly male. Odd as it may seem, yews, and many other conifers that have seperate sexes, have been observed to switch sex. Normally this switch occurs on part of the crown rather than the entire tree changing sex. In the Fortingall Yew it seems that one small branch in the outer part of the crown has switched and now behaves as female.Yew trees, specifically the species Taxus baccata, are usually considered dioecious, meaning trees are either male or female only. But under rare circumstances they can become monoicous, having both pollen and egg-bearing structures on one plant.
Finding unseen meteorsand
The Leonid meteor shower of Nov. 18, 1999, gave researchers an ideal opportunity to test Keay's hypothesis. Colin Price and Moshe Blum of Tel Aviv University found that Leonid meteors produced distinct VLF electromagnetic pulses.
Additionally, they discovered that there were many meteors that were not visible to observers — they were detected only by the VLF radiation they emitted. Finding meteors solely by their VLF signatures "detected nearly 50 times more meteors than the optical method," Price and Blum wrote.
Can You Hear a Meteor?
Because sound travels so much more slowly than light does, the rumblings of a particularly large meteor shouldn't be heard for several minutes after the meteor's sighting. A meteor 100 kilometers high would boom about five minutes after it appears. Such an object is called a "sonic" meteor. The noise it makes is related to the sonic boom caused by a faster-than-sound aircraft.
Can you hear meteors?
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