Tundra Dry, Cold, and Windy Tundras are among Earth's coldest, harshest biomes.

Tundra ecosystems are treeless regions found in the Arctic and on the tops of mountains, where the climate is cold and windy and rainfall is scant. Tundra lands are snow-covered for much of the year, until summer brings a burst of wildflowers. Mountain goats, sheep, marmots, and birds live in mountain, or alpine, tundra and feed on the low-lying plants and insects. Hardy flora like cushion plants survive on these mountain plains by growing in rock depressions where it is warmer and they are sheltered from the wind. The Arctic tundra, where the average temperature is 10 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit (-12 to -6 degrees Celsius), supports a variety of animal species, including Arctic foxes, polar bears, gray wolves, caribou, snow geese and musk-oxen. The summer growing season is just 50 to 60 days, when the sun shines 24 hours a day. The few plants and animals that live in the harsh conditions of the tundra are essentially clinging to life. They are highly vulnerable to environmental stresses like reduced snow cover and warmer temperatures brought on by global warming. The Arctic tundra is changing dramatically due to global warming. Already, more southern animals like the red fox have moved onto the tundra. The red fox is now competing with the Arctic fox for food and territory, and the long-term impact on the sensitive Arctic fox is unknown. It is the Arctic's permafrost that is the foundation for much of the region's unique ecosystem, and it is the permafrost that is deteriorating with the warmer global climate. Permafrost is a layer of frozen soil and dead plants that extends some 1,476 feet (450 meters) under the surface. In much of the Arctic it is frozen year round. In the southern regions of the Arctic, the surface layer above the permafrost melts during the summer and this forms bogs and shallow lakes that invite an explosion of animal life. Insects swarm around the bogs, and millions of migrating birds come to feed on them. With global warming, the fall freeze comes later and more of the permafrost is melting in the southern Arctic. Shrubs and spruce that previously couldn't take root on the permafrost now dot the landscape, potentially altering the habitat of the native animals. Another major concern is that the melting of the permafrost is contributing to global warming. Estimates suggest that about 14 percent of the Earths carbon is tied up in the permafrost. Until recently, the tundra acted as a carbon sink and captured huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as part of photosynthesis. This process helped keep the amount of this greenhouse gas from accumulating in the atmosphere. Today, however, as the permafrost melts and dead plant material decomposes and releases CO2, the tundra has flipped from a carbon sink to a carbon contributor.

Best and brightest Only a few countries are teaching children how to think

The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way. BAMA Companies has been making pies and biscuits in Oklahoma since the 1920s. But the company is struggling to find Okies with the skills to fill even its most basic factory jobs. Such posts require workers to think critically, yet graduates of local schools are often unable to read or do simple maths. This is why the company recently decided to open a new factory in Polandits first in Europe. We hear that educated people are plentiful, explains Paula Marshall, Bamas boss. Poland has made some dramatic gains in education in the past decade. Before 2000 only half of the countrys rural adults would finish primary school. Yet international rankings now put the countrys students well ahead of Americas in science and maths (the strongest predictor of future earnings), even as the country spends far less per pupil. What is Poland doing right? And what is America doing wrong? Amanda Ripley, an American journalist, seeks to answer such questions in The Smartest Kids in the World, her fine new book about the schools that are working around the globe. Though Americas grim education results come in for special drubbing in this book, the country is not alone in failing to teach its children how to think critically. This, at least, is the view of Andreas Schleicher, the educational scientist behind what is known as the Program for

International Student Assessment, or the PISA test. If most exams quantify students ability to memorise material, this one aims to assess their effectiveness at problem-solving. Since 2000 it has been administered to millions of teenagers in more than 40 countries, with surprising results. Pupils in Finland, Korea, Japan and Canada consistently score much higher than their peers in Germany, Britain, America and France. The usual explanations for these achievements, such as wealth, privilege and race, do not apply. To understand what is happening in these classrooms, Ms Ripley follows three American teenagers who spend a year as foreign-exchange students in Finland, Poland and South Korea. Their wide-eyed observations make for compelling reading. In each country, the Americans are startled by how hard their new peers work and how seriously they take their studies. Maths classes tend to be more sophisticated, with lessons that show the often fascinating ways that geometry (hnh hc) , trigonometry and calculus (gii tch) work together in the real world. Students forego calculators, having learned how to manipulate numbers in their heads. Classrooms tend to be understated, free of the high-tech gadgetry of their schools back home. And teachers in every subject exhibit the authority of professionals held in high regard. Ms Ripley credits Polands swift turnaround to Miroslaw Handke, the former minister of education. When he entered the post in 1997, Polands economy was growing but Poles seemed destined for the low-skilled jobs that other Europeans did not want. So he launched an epic programme of school reforms, with a new core curriculum and standardised tests. Yet his most effective change was also his wooliest: he expected the best work from all of his pupils. He decided to keep all Polish children in the same schools until they were 16, delaying the moment when some would have entered vocational tracks. Polands swift rise in PISA rankings is largely the result of the high scores of these supposedly non-academic children. This is a lesson Ms Ripley sees throughout her tour of the smart-kid countries. Children succeed in classrooms where they are expected to succeed. Schools work best when they operate with a clarity of mission: as places to help students master complex academic material (not as sites dedicated to excellence in sport, she hastens to add). When teachers demand rigorous work, students often rise to the occasion, whereas tracking students at different cognitive levels tends to diminish learning and boost inequality. Low expectations are often duly rewarded. In Helsinki Ms Ripley visits a school in a bleak part of town, where classrooms are full of refugee immigrants.I dont want to think about their backgrounds too much, says their teacher, wary of letting sympathy cloud his judgment of his students work. Its your brain that counts. She marvels at how refreshing this view is when compared with that of teachers in America, where academic mediocrity is often blamed on backgrounds and neighbourhoods. And she laments the perverse sort of compassion that prevents American teachers from failing bad students, not least because this sets these youths up to fail in a worse way later on.

Not every story of academic success is a happy one. In South Korea Ms Ripley finds a culture of educational masochism, where pupils study at all hours in the hope of securing a precious spot in one of the countrys three prestigious universities. The country ma y have one of the highest school-graduation rates in the world, but children appear miserable. Even so, South Korea offers some good lessons for how quickly a country can change its fate. Largely illiterate in the 1950s, it is now an extreme meritocracy. Americas classrooms do not fare well in this book. Against these examples of academic achievement, the countrys expensive mistakes look all the more foolish. For example, unlike the schools in Finland, which channel more resources to the neediest kids, America funds its schools through property taxes, ensuring the most disadvantaged students are warehoused together in the worst schools. Ms Ripley packs a startling amount of insight in this slim book. She notes that Finland, Poland and South Korea all experienced moments of crisiseconomic and existentialbefore they buckled down and changed their stories. America, she observes, may soon reach a similar moment. She cites the World Economic Forums most recent ranking of global competitiveness, which placed America seventh, marking its third consecutive year of decline. Meanwhile Finland, that small, remote Nordic country with few resources, has been steadily moving up this ladder, and now sits comfortably in third place. From the print edition: Books and arts

20/08/2013 The future of transport

No loopy idea
Elon Musk, electric-car entrepreneur and proponent of private colonies on Mars, now plans to redesign the railway

Aug 17th 2013 |From the print edition

HALF a century after they were pioneered in France and Japan, could high-speed trains be coming to America? Last year Californias legislators gave $7.7 billion to a project called California High Speed Rail (CHSR). If and when it is completed it will connect San Francisco to Los Angeles, with branch lines to Sacramento and San Diego. This first slice of what the budget suggests will eventually be a bill for $68 billion will be used to construct 210km (130 miles) of track between Fresno and Bakersfield. But just because the money has been allocated does not mean the line will actually get built. It is far from universally popular. Besides the estimated price (and even this is probably a shot in the dark, for big infrastructure projects are hardly known for coming in on budget), it may not even be that fast. The short distances between many of its stations mean trains will rarely be able to reach their planned top speed of 350kph. Fortunately, California is home to many clever people. One of them is Elon Musk, the hyperactive boss of Tesla Motors, an electric-car company, and SpaceX, a rocketry business (he also sits on the board of Solar City, a solar-energy firm). There is nothing Mr Musk likes more than revolutionising high-tech industries. And he thinks he has come up with a better way to get California moving than a standard high-speed train. Mr Muskwho is as good at PR as he is at

engineeringfirst mentioned his idea, called Hyperloop, last year, prompting excited speculation about what he might have had in mind. Mr Musks atmospheric caper On August 12th, in a short document published on the websites of Tesla and SpaceX, all was revealed. Essentially, Mr Musk proposes to revive an old science-fiction idea called the vac-train (short for vacuum train), albeit with a few important tweaks. The Hyperloop would carry passengers across California at more than 1,200kphfaster than a jet airlinerallowing them to zoom between San Francisco and Los Angeles in little over half an hour, compared with more than two-and-a-half hours for CHSR. It would be solar-powered, would take less land than a high-speed railway, and would be cheaper to boot. Mr Musks notional budget is around $6 billion, less than a tenth of what the high-speed train is supposed to cost. Vac-trains, as first described in the 1910s by Robert Goddard (better known as a pioneer of rocketry), would send rolling stock (or hovering stock, perhaps) hurtling through hermetically sealed tubes from which the air has been evacuated. The trains would thus encounter no drag, and be able to reach immense speeds. Goddard reckoned his designwhich also proposed magnetic levitation instead of wheelswas good for about 1,600kph. This and other designs for transporter tubes inspired much futuristic art, as the illustration above suggests. But none was ever built because maintaining a vacuum in a long tunnel is difficult. Pumps must work exponentially harder as the pressure falls, to evacuate the few air molecules that remain. And even a small leak would scupper a full-fledged vac-train, which relies on no air at all being able to build up in front of it, and thus slow it down. For that reason, the Hyperloop is not actually a true vac-train. Instead, Mr Musk plans to remove sufficient air from the tubes to give them a pressure roughly a sixth of that on the surface of his beloved Mars, or a thousandth of that on Earth at sea level. This would keep the air resistance low enough to deal with in other ways. The chief of these would be to suck up the air that did accumulate in front of the tubes rolling stock (putatively, individual pods that could hold 28 people each) using a fan, and then expel most of it from the pods rear end. Some of this air, though, would be diverted out of the sides through special skis, to create a cushion that would stop the pod touching the tunnel walls. Each pod would be launched by a linear-induction motor (such motors are also being tested for use as catapults on aircraft carriers), and booster motors every 110km would keep its speed up. On reaching its destination, the pod would pass through a motor that worked in reverse, converting its kinetic energy back into electricity for storage in batteries or use in motors up the line. And, this being California, the whole thing would naturally be powered by solar panels mounted on the roof of the tube.

Loop the loop That, at least, is the theory. There are doubters, of course. Some worry that passengers will not like the prospect of hurtling through a steel tube, in a cramped capsule, at almost the speed of sound. And there are inevitable questions about safety, though the pods would have wheels that could be deployed if needed, allowing them to limp to their destinations using batteries if the power failed. But, its breathtaking audacity aside, the thing does look feasible as an engineering project. The tube would be held above ground, on pylons, reducing the amount of land it consumed, and would follow existing roads, which should simplify construction and make maintenance easier. The proposed route features only gentle curves. And the air cushion surrounding each pod should ensure that the ride is smooth. Moreover, although unexpected engineering problems would be bound to crop up, Mr Musks experienceand that of his engineerswith space flight and car design would bode well for overcoming them. With projects like this, though, good engineering is never enough. Politics and economics are more forbidding obstacles. Being new, the Hyperloop is risky. Also, the CHSR has a tortuous history going back decades. Much political and reputational capital is invested in it. To replace it now with a completely different design would require an agility that Californias government is almost certainly incapable of. Nor is there any reason to believe that Hyperloop would be immune to the hypertrophication of cost that every other grand infrastructure project seems doomed to suffer. Building it alongside existing roads would certainly cheapen things as well as simplifying them, but critics who are poring over Mr Musks cost estimates, for everything from land permits to the construction itself, doubt the numbers stack up (though to be fair, both his electric cars and his space rockets have come in on budget). A few, presumably not Californian patriots, have even suggested that somewhere like Texaswhere the bureaucracy is less stiflingmight be a more feasible place to try the idea out. Lastly, it is not clear just how serious Mr Musk really is. In the past he has said that, given his other commitments, he lacked the time to try to build the Hyperloop himself. The reason for putting it into the public domain was therefore to give someone else the chance to take it up. But it is hard to think of anyone else who has both his deep pockets and his technical track record. Or at least, that was the case before August 12th. In a conference call that day discussing the idea, he admitted that his thinking may be changing, at least a little. I think it might help if I built a demonstration article, he mused. So I think I probably will do that, actually.