Globalife

  Northern and eastern sections of North America will experience a weird and dramatic event next Thursday (June 10).  A partial  solar eclipse  will be visible, and for many, it will more or less coincide with sunrise. Only for places north of a line running roughly from Churchill, Manitoba, to Halifax, Nova Scotia, will the entire eclipse be visible from start to finish after the sun rises. Elsewhere, depending on where you are, if your sky is clear toward the east-northeast, the rising sun will appear slightly dented, deeply crescent shaped, or even ring shaped.  Across a swath of central and eastern Canada — encompassing the provinces of western and northern Ontario and a slice of northwest Quebec, as well as eastern Nunavut, Canada's newest territory — viewers living within a path averaging about 390 miles (630 kilometers) wide will have a front-row seat to witness the rare and exciting spectacle of an annular or  "ring of fire" solar eclipse .  Because the moon will

  Growing up in the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest, I often grieved that their beauty — sky-high Douglas firs, rustling alders, sword ferns draped across the slopes — was born of a brutal battle for light, water and nutrients. So I thought. In 1997, ecologist Suzanne Simard made the cover of  Nature  with the discovery of a subterranean lace of tree roots and fungal filaments, or hyphae, in British Columbia ( S. Simard  et al. Nature   388 , 579–582; 1997 ). It was “a network as brilliant as a Persian rug”, she recalls in her memoir  Finding the Mother Tree  — a network through which multiple tree species were exchanging carbon. The trees were cooperating. The discovery of this fungal network, or ‘wood wide web’, as it came to be known, upended a dominant scientific narrative — that competition is the primary force shaping forests. Forest ecology is instead a much more nuanced dance, in which species sometimes fight and sometimes get along. This calls into question the way that m