Amazon jungle

The rubber industry has a long and colorful history. Natural rubber is produced from latex, a milky fluid found in cells that lie between the bark and the wood of many plants. You may have seen latex flow from the broken stalks of milkweed plants, but the source of commercial rubber is the Hevea tree, a native of Brazil. When the bark of this tree is slashed, its milky white sap oozes out and can be collected in cups mounted on the tree s trunk. The people of the Amazon jungle made bouncing balls, shoes, and water Jars out of rubber, and Portuguese explorers sent waterproof boots and a rubber-coated coat back to their king. The first commercial exports included some rubber shoes shipped to Boston in 1823. 

In which our cast of characters, including a mushroom, are introduced, and their peculiar interests sketched. The Amazon jungle is invoked and the descent of one of its rivers undertaken. 

To get an idea of just how big a hundred billion is, the Amazon rain forest offers an appropriate analogy. The Amazon rain forest stretches for 2 700 000 square miles and contains a hundred billion trees. There are about as many trees as neurons in the brain. Considering the huge number of connections between neurons, there are about as many as the leaves on the trees in the Amazon jungle. 

And what of the primitive peoples of the earth, those of the Amazon jungle and the wilds of New Guinea There exists a vast wealth of untapped information of which only the shamans, curanderos and medicine men and women are aware. Native American Nations are credited with using intravenous injections long before its formalized introduction around the time of the Civil War. How... 

We discussed this entity in terms of a giant insect and, through the insect trill of the Amazon jungle at midday, seemed able to discern a deeper harmonic buzz that somehow signified the unseen outsider. This sense of the presence of an alien third entity was sometimes very intense, most intense in early March and from there fading off gradually. 

Seubert, C. E., P. A. Sanchez, and C. Valverde. 1977. "Effects of land clearing methods on soil properties of an ultilsol and crop performance in the Amazon jungle of Pem." Tropical Agriculture. 54 307-321. 

Seubert CJE., Effect of land clearing methods on crop performance and changes in soil properties in an Ultisol of the Amazon Jungle of Peru. MS Thesis, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, N.C., p. 152 ((Quoted in Sanchez, 1976) (1975). 

This farmer in Peru harvests coca leaves, the base ingredient in cocaine. Cocaine production has a negative effect on the environment 5.7 million acres of rainforest have been cleared to grow coca over the last 30 years in Peru alone, and 14,800 tons of toxic chemicals used in the production of cocaine paste have been dumped into the Amazon jungle. 

The concentration of vapour phase organic carbon in surface air over the oceans is 5-10 fig m-3 STP. The corresponding range over non-urban North America was found to be 10-50 fig m 3 STP. It should be noted, however, that much higher continental concentrations were measured in the Amazon jungle of Brazil. 

Lamb, F. Bruce. 1985. Rio Tigre and beyond the Amazon jungle medicine of Manuel Cordova. North Atlantic, 256 p. ISBN 0-938190-59-8 (describes the life of Cordova after he escaped from the Indians)... 

It is usually very difficult to obtain data showing exactly what you are looking for. Data on the failure rate of needle valves using hydraulic fluids on drilling rigs in the Amazon jungle probably do not exist or, at the very least, are proprietary. Of course, data do exist on the reliability of needle valves. The problem is to use that... 

Drugs that interfere with the metabolism of serotonin have a profound effect on mental state. For example, bufotenin, isolated from Bufo toads from the Amazon jungle, and psilocin, iso-... 

Archey et al. (Chapter 6) outline a pedagogieal approaeh whieh introduces general chemistry concepts through consideration of environmental issues such as carbon dioxide uptake by the Amazon jungle. Application of concepts such as stoichiometry, molarity, solubility, and graph interpretation to the carbon footprint discussion of global sustainability exemplifies the utility of context-based pedagogy. 

Reis, E., Margulis, S. (1991). Options for slowing Amazon jungle clearing. In R. Dombusch J. M. Poterba (Eds.), Global wanning Economic policy responses (pp. 335-375). Cambridge, MA MIT Press. 

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