Hothouse Catalysis

Southeast Texas: Hothouse of Zydeco

The neighboring states of Texas and Louisiana share much history and culture, yet in popular consciousness they often seem to be drastically different places. Media-perpetuated stereotypes—such as the Lone Star cowboy riding the open prairie or the savvy Creole paddling through the swamp—are obviously not entirely representative, past or present. Yet they persist, and such public images surely ...

Polar wildfires and conifer serotiny during the Cretaceous global hothouse

Several highly effective fire-adaptive traits first evolved among modern plants during the mid-Cretaceous, in response to the widespread wildfires promoted by anomalously high atmospheric oxygen (O2) and extreme temperatures. Serotiny, or long-term canopy seed storage, is a fire-adaptive strategy common among plants living in fire-prone areas today, but evidence of this strategy has been lackin...

Homogeneous Catalysis Homogeneous Catalysis

Eocene El Niño: evidence for robust tropical dynamics in the "hothouse".

Much uncertainty surrounds the interactions between the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and long-term global change. Past periods of extreme global warmth, exemplified by the Eocene (55 to 35 million years ago), provide a good testing ground for theories for this interaction. Here, we compare Eocene coupled climate model simulations with annually resolved variability records preserved in la...

Microheterogeneous catalysis.

The catalytic effect of micelles, polymers (such as DNA, polypeptides) and nanoparticles, saturable receptors (cyclodextrins and calixarenes) and more complex systems (mixing some of the above mentioned catalysts) have been reviewed. In these microheterogeneous systems the observed changes in the rate constants have been rationalized using the Pseudophase Model. This model produces equations th...