Stuck at your desk? Need a soundtrack to mellow out on a Monday? I have just what you need! This hour-long recording of a dawn chorus in the mountains of Costa Rica is lovely to listen to, especially as winter edges closer here in the Northern Hemisphere. You might also like an interlude ina very different sounding forest in Queensland, Australia.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology is a massive digital repository of cool stuff, and a big piece of it is the Macaulay Library of Natural Soundss audio and video recordings of wildlife all over the world. Since 1920 scientists at Cornell have been recording wildlife, at first mostly birds, and then branching out to other animals.

In early 2013, they migratedover 150,000 digital recordings online, dating from 1929 to the present. Its over 10 terabytes of data, representing more than9,000 species. This museum has thrown open the doors and invites you into rummage around their collection. Beware, thoughthis library of natural recordings is huge and addictive. Here are a few of my favorite recordings.

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Nature Zen: Audio Library of Nature

Science and Christianity are often viewed as incompatible, but they mix well for a renowned chemist who visited UW-Eau Claire Thursday.

Henry Fritz Schaefer III gave a presentation titled My Spiritual Journey to UW-Eau Claire students, faculty and staff. The former University of California, Berkeley professor who currently is director of the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry (CCQC) at the University of Georgia, also gave a talk over the dinner hour titled The Challenge of Being a Person of Faith in a Scientific World and ended his visit with a speech titled The Big Bang, Stephen Hawking and God Thursday night.

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Chemist mixes science, spirituality