In Service of the Wild begins and ends on the author's home ground, thirty-five acres of farmed-out land now planted in Scotch pine monoculture. Mills imagines her northern Michigan landscape from its barren glaciated past to its climax as maplebeech hardwood forest to the ways in which logging, slash fires, and agriculture transformed the Northwoods ecology. With her trademark humor and humility, Mills invites the reader along as she learns to dig up, plant anew, and generally to assist the regenerative processes of time and nature.

Includes two supplements a year, 1997-

Publishes refereed research papers in all aspects of the biological sciences. As a fast track journal, it specialises in the rapid delivery of the latest research to the scientific community.

A collection of thrilling excursions from aviation including paragliding, hang-gliding, paramotoring and micro-lighting. Soaring over forest fires, a moonlight New Year’s Eve flight over the Pennines, bungee-jumping from a paraglider as a birthday celebration, jumping off Mount Everest, or numerous several-hundred-mile flights over open country and on different continents. This book covering many exhilarating and enthralling stories from New Aviation – including paragliding, hang-gliding, paramotoring and micro-lighting – has them all. There is even the story of a pilot using flexwings to teach geese how to migrate – and of a marriage proposal at 500 feet. The challenges explored by the renowned New Aviation expert Brian Milton includes Rich Pfieffer’s legal charges of assault with a deadly weapon for flying a hang-glider over California’s Rose Bowl American College Football competition, or Judy Leden’s balloon drop from 40,000 feet over Jordan, with Israel on one side and Saudi on the other, despite her eyes being frozen shut. Along with this latter story, the author also discusses how women overcame prejudice and scorn to take on the men in the deathly arid wastes of Owens Valley, and the ways in which eagles and vultures – and sometimes crows – reacted violently to humans flying in their air and at their speed. The author describes the return to competitions in which the original British innovators lost their dominant status and how new champions emerged. A chapter is also devoted entirely into the tragedies that have befallen some pilots. This includes a chilling account of the Great Italian Killer Storm of 1989 when six top pilots lost their lives in just one day. As well as relating the dramatic stories about those that died, the author explains why, despite the risks, the New Aviators keep flying. The final story is about the Beau Ideal, the great Swiss pilot Didier Favre, ‘Vagabond of the skies’, who traveled 1,111 kilometres from Monaco to Slovenia. Brian Milton also explains how the ultimate ambitions of the best flyers is to learn how to migrate, using only the power of the wind and the sun. The author concludes this book by exploring what the future might hold for the various forms of New Aviation and those who enjoy the thrills that they create.

A single species of fly, Drosophila melanogaster, has been the subject of scientific research for more than one hundred years. Stephanie Elizabeth Mohr explains why this tiny insect merits such intense scrutiny, and how laboratory findings made first in flies have expanded our understanding of human health and disease.