the adventures of alexander von humboldt

You’re thinking Charles Darwin, right? Sounds like him. Making countless observations, he develops a new theory about the interrelationship of the natural world. Along the way, he collects countless specimens, scales mountains, describes everything he encounters. An inquisitive European naturalist boards a ship, sets sail for South America. Later in the hour, what can artificial intelligence learn from a real brain? Scientists hooked up the two together, and they found some really interesting stuff that we’ll talk about a bit later.īut first, here’s a story that may sound familiar. Read an excerpt of the new book, The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt.Watch a SciFri Macroscope video about how one scientist was inspired by von Humboldt’s electric eel observations.Find out more about Alexander von Humboldt’s early observations on climate change in National Geographic.Listen to a 2015 interview about Alexander von Humboldt’s adventures with Andrea Wulf on Science Friday.Read an excerpt of the new book The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt. Wulf and Melcher will discuss why they think his legacy should be better known in the modern fight against a changing climate. In the process, he also described human-induced climate change-and was perhaps the first person to do so.Īuthor Andrea Wulf and illustrator Lillian Melcher retell the voyages of Alexander von Humboldt in a new, illustrated book that draws upon Humboldt’s own journal pages. There, he would climb volcanoes, collect countless plant and animal specimens, and eventually come to the conclusion that the natural world was a unified entity-biology, geology and meteorology all conjoining to determine what life took hold where. On the Spanish ship Pizarro, he set sail for South America with 42 carefully chosen scientific instruments.

In 1799, the Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt embarked on the most ambitious scientific voyage of his life.

A scene from Andrea Wulf’s new book “The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt,” which depicts how Alexander von Humboldt was able to obtain electric eels to study their leaping attack behavior.

The adventures of alexander von humboldt