Not far from Seattle skyscrapers live 150-year-old clams, more than 250 species of fish, and underwater kelp forests as complex as any terrestrial ecosystem. For millennia, vibrant Coast Salish communities have lived beside these waters dense with nutrient-rich foods, with cultures intertwined through exchanges across the waterways. Transformed by settlement and resource extraction, Puget Sound and its future health now depend on a better understanding of the region's ecological complexities. Focusing on the area south of Port Townsend and between the Cascade and Olympic mountains, Williams uncovers human and natural histories in, on, and around the Sound. In conversations with archaeologists, biologists, and tribal authorities, Williams traces how generations of humans have interacted with such species as geoducks, salmon, orcas, rockfish, and herring. He sheds light on how warfare shaped development and how people have moved across this maritime highway, in canoes, the mosquito fleet, and today's ferry system. The book also takes an unflinching look at how the Sound's ecosystems have suffered from human behavior, including pollution, habitat destruction, and the effects of climate change. Witty, graceful, and deeply informed, Homewaters weaves history and science into a fascinating and hopeful narrative, one that will introduce newcomers to the astonishing life that inhabits the Sound and offers longtime residents new insight into and appreciation of the waters they call home. A Michael J. Repass Book

From trilobites near the Idaho border and primitive horses on the Columbia Plateau to giant bird tracks near Bellingham and curious bear-like beasts on the Olympic Peninsula, fossils across Washington State are filled with clues of past life on Earth. With abundant and well-exposed rock layers, the state has fossils dating from Ice Age mammals only 12,000 years old back to marine invertebrates more than 500 million years old. In Spirit Whales and Sloth Tales, renowned paleontologist Elizabeth A. Nesbitt teams up with popular science writer David B. Williams to offer a fascinating, richly illustrated tour through more than a half billion years of natural history. Following an introduction to key concepts, twenty-four profiles—each featuring a unique plant, animal, or environment—tell the incredible stories of individual fossils, many of which are on display in Washington museums. The spectacular paleontology of Washington is brought to life with details of the fossils' discovery and extraction, their place in geological time, and the insights they provide into contemporary issues like climate change and species extinction.

From its early days in the 1950s, the electron microanalyzer has offered two principal ways of obtaining x-ray spectra: wavelength dispersive spectrometry (WDS), which utilizes crystal diffraction, and energy dispersive spectrometry (EDS), in which the x-ray quantum energy is measured directly. In general, WDS offers much better peak separation for complex line spectra, whereas EDS gives a higher collection efficiency and is easier and cheaper to use. Both techniques have undergone major transformations since those early days, from the simple focusing spectrometerand gas proportional counter of the 1950s to the advanced semiconductor detectors and programmable spectrometersoftoday. Becauseofthesedevelopments, thecapabilities and relative merits of EDS and WDS techniques have been a recurring feature of microprobeconferences for nearly40 years, and this volume bringstogetherthepapers presented at the Chuck Fiori Memorial Symposium, held at the Microbeam Analysis Society Meeting of 1993. Several themes are apparent in this rich and authoritative collection of papers, which have both a historical and an up-to-the-minute dimension. Light element analysis has long been a goal of microprobe analysts since Ray Dolby first detected K radiation with a gas proportional counter in 1960. WDS techniques (using carbon lead stearate films) were not used for this purpose until four years later. Now synthetic multilayers provide the best dispersive elements for quantitative light element analy sis-still used in conjunction with a gas counter."

This spectacularly illustrated book celebrates the structural beauty of everyday materials and the space-age technologies used to probe their surface features and internal structures. It introduces the reader to the various instruments and their uses: scanning electron, ion, and tunneling microscopies, acoustic microscopy and transmission electron microscopy. The book describes how images are processed and analyzed, and how modern materials science is based on these techniques and their ability to "see" materials at the atomic level. The book includes hundreds of illustrations and 32 pages of beautiful color plates depicting the complex microscopic realm within such everyday materials as the metals used in cars and planes, polymer fabrics, ceramics, and the ubiquitous silicon semiconductors, without which society today would fall into disarray and confusion. The many full-color and black-and-white illustrations make this book a pleasure for the eye, in addition to being a useful resource for scientists, students, researchers, and engineers involved in solid-state physics, materials science, geology, and chemistry.

Not far from Seattle skyscrapers live 150-year-old clams, more than 250 species of fish, and underwater kelp forests as complex as any terrestrial ecosystem. For millennia, vibrant Coast Salish communities have lived beside these waters dense with nutrient-rich foods, with cultures intertwined through exchanges across the waterways. Transformed by settlement and resource extraction, Puget Sound and its future health now depend on a better understanding of the region’s ecological complexities. Focusing on the area south of Port Townsend and between the Cascade and Olympic mountains, Williams uncovers human and natural histories in, on, and around the Sound. In conversations with archaeologists, biologists, and tribal authorities, Williams traces how generations of humans have interacted with such species as geoducks, salmon, orcas, rockfish, and herring. He sheds light on how warfare shaped development and how people have moved across this maritime highway, in canoes, the mosquito fleet, and today’s ferry system. The book also takes an unflinching look at how the Sound’s ecosystems have suffered from human behavior, including pollution, habitat destruction, and the effects of climate change. Witty, graceful, and deeply informed, Homewaters weaves history and science into a fascinating and hopeful narrative, one that will introduce newcomers to the astonishing life that inhabits the Sound and offers longtime residents new insight into and appreciation of the waters they call home. A Michael J. Repass Book

From its early days in the 1950s, the electron microanalyzer has offered two principal ways of obtaining x-ray spectra: wavelength dispersive spectrometry (WDS), which utilizes crystal diffraction, and energy dispersive spectrometry (EDS), in which the x-ray quantum energy is measured directly. In general, WDS offers much better peak separation for complex line spectra, whereas EDS gives a higher collection efficiency and is easier and cheaper to use. Both techniques have undergone major transformations since those early days, from the simple focusing spectrometerand gas proportional counter of the 1950s to the advanced semiconductor detectors and programmable spectrometersoftoday. Becauseofthesedevelopments, thecapabilities and relative merits of EDS and WDS techniques have been a recurring feature of microprobeconferences for nearly40 years, and this volume bringstogetherthepapers presented at the Chuck Fiori Memorial Symposium, held at the Microbeam Analysis Society Meeting of 1993. Several themes are apparent in this rich and authoritative collection of papers, which have both a historical and an up-to-the-minute dimension. Light element analysis has long been a goal of microprobe analysts since Ray Dolby first detected K radiation with a gas proportional counter in 1960. WDS techniques (using carbon lead stearate films) were not used for this purpose until four years later. Now synthetic multilayers provide the best dispersive elements for quantitative light element analy sis-still used in conjunction with a gas counter.

Naturalist and Seattle native David Williams offers his original perspectives on the wonder and resilience of nature in and around the Northwest's greatest population center. Illustrated by hand-drawn maps, Williams's writings are interesting, intelligent, and challenging at a personal level. He approaches the notion that his beloved city, as hip and urbane as it is, remains a wild place on the Northwest landscape-in the quarried rock of the historical buildings, in the branches of a pocket-sized city park, in the twists and turns of a stream that has been abused by polluters, hedged in by lawns, and buried under expressways. And yet it is a living thing, worthy of rescue. Williams looks beyond the skyline, beyond the postcard views of the Emerald City, and into its wild heart. Praise for The Seattle Street-Smart Naturalist: Like suddenly acquiring X-ray vision . . . Who knew that there was so much fascinating natural history crawling, flying, sprouting, flowing, drizzling, cawing, accreting, and sliding within the city limits of Seattle? Every page, every paragraph of Williams's book brought me revelations-not to mention the sheer pleasure of keeping company with such a sharp and enthusiastic writer. - David Laskin Author of The Children's Blizzard and Braving the Elements A passion for nature and the love of a chosen city combine seamlessly in David Williams's sharp-eyed ramble through Seattle. These beautifully told "field notes" of this inspired urban naturalist bring to life our streets and hills, our downtown edifices and suburban green pockets, on levels infinitely more profound than the everyday. - Ivan Doig Author of This House of Sky Raised in Seattle, David Williams is a general naturalist with a bachelor's degree in geology. As a Park Ranger and educator, he has taught natural history both in the field and in the classroom and has written widely on the topic for the last decade. He has written for Sunset, the Seattle Times, High Country News, National Parks, and Geotimes. Other books include A Naturalist's Guide to Canyon Country and Grand Views of Canyon Country, and he has contributed to Insight Guides: Seattle and Caves, Cliffs, and Canyons.

During the last four decades remarkable developments have taken place in instrumentation and techniques for characterizing the microstructure and microcomposition of materials. Some of the most important of these instruments involve the use of electron beams because of the wealth of information that can be obtained from the interaction of electron beams with matter. The principal instruments include the scanning electron microscope, electron probe x-ray microanalyzer, and the analytical transmission electron microscope. The training of students to use these instruments and to apply the new techniques that are possible with them is an important function, which. has been carried out by formal classes in universities and colleges and by special summer courses such as the ones offered for the past 19 years at Lehigh University. Laboratory work, which should be an integral part of such courses, is often hindered by the lack of a suitable laboratory workbook. While laboratory workbooks for transmission electron microscopy have-been in existence for many years, the broad range of topics that must be dealt with in scanning electron microscopy and microanalysis has made it difficult for instructors to devise meaningful experiments. The present workbook provides a series of fundamental experiments to aid in "hands-on" learning of the use of the instrumentation and the techniques. It is written by a group of eminently qualified scientists and educators. The importance of hands-on learning cannot be overemphasized.

Most people do not think to observe geology from the sidewalks of a major city, but all David B. Williams has to do is look at building stone in any urban center to find a range of rocks equal to any assembled by plate tectonics. In Stories in Stone, he takes you on explorations to find 3.5-billion-year-old rock that looks like swirled pink-and-black taffy, a gas station made of petrified wood, and a Florida fort that has withstood three hundred years of attacks and hurricanes, despite being made of a stone that has the consistency of a granola bar. Williams also weaves in the cultural history of stone, explaining why a white fossil-rich limestone from Indiana became the only building stone used in all fifty states; how in 1825, the construction of the Bunker Hill Monument led to America's first commercial railroad; and why when the same kind of marble used by Michelangelo clad a Chicago skyscraper it warped so much after nineteen years that all 44,000 panels of it had to be replaced. This love letter to building stone brings to life the geology you can see in the structures of every city.