This was pretty cool - art and the science combined. Created by SumoScience and Aardman,
The animation was filed using a Nokia N8 smart phone equipped with a CellScope, a diagnostic-quality microscope that was invented by Daniel Fletcher at the University of California, Berkeley. The CellScope allows a doctor working anywhere there is a phone service to capture and transmit images of blood samples anywhere in the world. The technology could help diagnose disease in developing countries where medical doctors and labs are few and far between.
~ Discovery News
Be sure to watch the credits - they really bring the whole size issue into focus.
Back in 1985, the Venezuelan government flooded the small village of Potosi to create the Uribante-Caparo water reservoir. The only structure visible after the flooding was the steeple of the 82 foot church that stood in the center of the village. The image above was taken in January 2009.
Venezuela generates almost 70% of it's energy from hydroelectric power plants and this reservoir provided some of that power for the area.
Unfortunately, Venezuela has been experiencing a drought brought on by the effects of El Nino and Global warming. This is what the reservoir looked like in February 2010:
Back in the 1960's, the town of Sant Roma in the Catalonia region was flooded to create a water reservoir. Severe drought drained the reservoir in 2008 and the region was forced to import drinking water from France. They are working to address the problem with a desalinization plant but the drought, and the lack of water, continues. Barcelona ran out of water earlier this year, resulting in the closing of all city fountains and the implementation of strict water usage requirements.
So at least 2 huge reservoirs, both full of water for the last 25 years (40 years in Spain), now completely dry. But that whole "Global Warming" theory? Yeah, that's just a bunch of hooey.
By now I'm sure you've seen these electricity generating windmills - they seem to be all over the place these days. Popping up wherever there's a stretch of empty rural land, like majestic alien sentinels. I kind of like them. In addition to the 'alternative energy' perspective, I think they look cool.
Of course, I don't have to live next to them. Although I like they way they look, I can see how folks might feel that they spoil the scenery on the wide open range or the cosy family farm.
Imagine the response to these guys:
From Choi + Shine Architects, these one hundred fifty foot tall electricity pylons were designed for use in Iceland. The towers can be configured to respond to their environment, arms up for height, in a crouch to get low, side by side or in single file.
Regardless of configuration, these pylons would definitely add something to the scenery.
I would say click to enlarge but that probably won't help
We've had some violent weather here in Chicago this summer. First it was the micro bursts that took down trees and littered the streets with debris. It's kind of spooky when you hear tornado sirens in the city.
Lately it's been heavy storms. I can't remember a week without a major storm coming through, often more than one. The folks in the burbs know all about this - flooding has been rampant.
I don't have to worry about flooding here at the White House, but I am having some issues keeping the balcony plants happy. It's so hot that they wilt unless I water daily. Unfortunately, I water in the morning and the storms seem to be coming through in the evenings, resulting in drowned parsley, basil and tomatoes. If only there was a way to know ahead of time if it was going to rain...
According to this Infographic, all I need to do is keep an eye on the cats - apparently their ears need cleaning when it's going to rain.
btw, if you want to actually read the Infographic above, go to Marisys
I've mentioned before that I truly love trees - everything from the majestic Redwoods on the California coast to the humble Maple growing on a suburban parkway. Trees make me happy.
Turns out I'm not imagining that good feeling - studies show scientific evidence that
Forests...can reduce stress, improve moods, reduce anger and aggressiveness and increase overall happiness.
Remember when you were a kid in grade school and your class took a field trip to the Museum of Science and Industry? You spent the day marching in a group from exhibit to exhibit, holding hands with your 'field trip buddy' so you wouldn't get lost, eating your smushed PB&J sammich and drinking your lukewarm can of pop downstairs in the museum cafeteria during lunch break? You got to climb around in an old submarine, take a ride in a coal cart down a mine shaft, see some really gross anatomical stuff and explore Colleen Moore's Miniature Fairy Castle. If your 'trip buddy' was a boy, you usually didn't get to spend much time looking at the fairy castle...
Was it just me or did every kid want to somehow get left behind (for at least one night) so you could explore the place completely on your own? Well now's your chance. The Museum of Science and Industry is looking for someone
...to take on a once-in-a-lifetime assignment: spend a Month at the Museum, to live and breathe science 24/7 for 30 days. From October 20 to November 18, 2010, this person's mission will be to experience all the fun and education that fits in this historic 14-acre building, living here full-time and reporting your findings to the outside world.
~ Month at the Museum
This innovative experiment by the largest science museum in the Western Hemisphere is a science lover's dream come true - plus, the person selected will walk away at the end of the month with some technical goodies and $10,000.
The selection process includes submittal of a 60-second video, a 5x7 photo, a 500-word essay; and a detailed application. There are a number of requirements (including, for some reason, the ability to lift up to 40 lbs) and restrictions, like no smoking and no guests after the Museum is closed to the public.
And they plan to put the winner to work - meeting and interacting with Museum visitors, performing science demonstrations and reporting daily (via some type of computer journal) on his/her experiences at the Museum. Did I mention that the winner will also have access to his/her own 'home' within the Museum? That woud be the glass cube up there, designed by CB2 for the 'chic science geek'.
At least the winner will have somewhere comfy to sleep once the novelty of sleeping on the Zephyr or in the U-Boat wears off.
Get your application going now - all entries must be submitted by August 11th.
We don't have an electric car, in fact, we don't have a car of any kind. Nor, being city dwellers, do we have anywhere to put the nifty PHATPort 350. I wish we did - solar energy has gone from panels set on top of roofs to free standing structures.
The 350 will be capable of supporting a 2.5 kW solar array, which is more than what is needed to fuel an electric car, or make a significant difference in the power needs of a typical home.
~Phat Energy
The PHATPort can be used as a carport, a covered patio, a pool cabana, any residential structure that would normally be covered or shaded. Only instead of just getting a covered space, you're also harvesting the energy of the sun - doing your bit to reduce carbon emissions as well as your energy bill.
Our government is making alternative energy sources and energy efficiency attractive to the end user via tax credits and rebates. The guys at Phat Energy are making solar power easier to install as well as good looking. Put them together and there's no reason this kind of structure shouldn't be a part of every suburban home.
A creative advertising campaign from DDB China and the Chinese Foundation of Environmental Protection that encourages people to walk instead of drive.
A large canvas silkscreened with a leafless tree was laid down at a busy pedestrian intersection. Large sponges saturated with environmentally friendly and easily washable green paint lined the crossing points.
As pedestrians crossed the street, their green footprints filled the tree with leaves and sent the message: every step you take helps create a greener planet.
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete” ~ Buckminster Fuller
Mr. Fuller, inventor of the geodisic dome, was a wise man, we could use this kind of thinking now in just about every aspect of life on this planet.
And that's exactly what the Buckminster Fuller Challenge is all about - providing “a workable solution to one of the world’s most significant challenges such as water scarcity, food supply, and energy consumption.”
Six entries have been selected from a pool of more than 200 in this year's contest. The winner will be announced on June 2nd in Washington DC where he/she will be awarded a $100,000 prize. My vote for the winner: Eco-Boulevards, of course
Chicagoans discard over one billion gallons of Great Lakes water per day. This “wastewater” never replenishes one of the world’s most vital resources. As a remedy, this project re-conceives the Chicago street-grid as a holistic Bio-System that captures, cleans and returns wastewater and storm-water to the Lakes via “Eco-Boulevards.”
Get more detail and watch a slide show at Urbanlabs
Quick - what color comes to mind? If you're American or from a Western culture, you're likely thinking green right now. But if you're Chinese or African, Good Luck comes in red and you don't really have a color for Jealousy or Nature.
What am I talking about? The graphic below by David McCandles is a cultural color wheel - a depiction of how various cultures associate color with different concepts.
click to enlarge
I found two things interesting - first, it seems that we Westerners associate color with just about everything. 54 of the 84 listed concepts have a color assigned to it in our culture. The culture with the next highest color association? The Japanese with 50. The Hindu culture, which appears to be far more colorful in everyday life (have you ever seen a Bollywood movie?) than either the Western or the Japanese, comes in a distant 3rd with only 30.
The second thing I found interesting - who do you think we overlap with most often, from a color/concept perspective? Once again, it's the Japanese - we connect on 21 different points. The next closest culture is the Eastern European with 8 match ups. I'm not really sure what this means - are the American/Western and Japanese cultures really that similar?
I bet you think that plants have it easy - hanging out in the sun, drinking in the rain, photosynthesizing.
Well think again, it's not all gentle breezes and pollination. In fact, the life of a plant is downright dangerous, what with drought, insect abuse, failure to propagate. No wonder it's survival of the fittest.
Still think living the plant life is child's play? Lucky for you, Darwin Today has developed a short game to test your plant survival skills.
Check out Extinct! But don't feel too bad when you don't make it - Remember, 100% success is virtually impossible in nature
Tonight at 8:30 pm (local time) is the 2010 celebration of Earth Hour.
It's easy to participate, just turn your non-essential lights off for 60 minutes starting at 8:30 pm.
Although probably not as noticeable in non-urban areas, if you happen to live in a city, take a look out your window - the impact is pretty amazing.
On Earth Hour, hundreds of millions of people around the world will come together to call for action on climate change by doing something quite simple—turning off their lights for one hour. The movement symbolizes that by working together, each of us can make a positive impact in this fight, protecting our future and that of future generations...
Earth Hour is the largest climate event in history. In 2009, more than 4,000 cities in 87 countries went dark. Here in the United States, an estimated 80 million Americans participated, along with 318 cities and 8 US states. ~ EarthHour.org
The first Earth hour took place in Sydney Australia in 2007 and was conceived by WWF (World Wildlife Fund) and The Sydney Morning Herald - 2.2 million residents of Sydney participated by turning off all non-essential lights in this inaugural event, the world joined in the following year.
Join the rest of the world - be a part of Earth Hour 2010!
This video of participating cities from 2009 is pretty amazing -
And check out this series of photos from the Boston Globe of the impact on some iconic monuments from last year's Earth Hour post on the White House blog.
If you’re like me, you probably haven’t given much thought to exactly how your email messages, tweets, text messages, phone calls, etc. travel across time and space. I know that things like satellites and cell towers are involved, but the whole wireless aspect of communication (not to mention radio and television) has always seemed somewhat like magic to me.
Apparently I am not alone in my lack of satellite knowledge and it seems that the folks at Astra (manufacturers of satellites) want to remedy this situation. They’ve worked with This is Real Art to prepare a series of short videos that give an easy to understand lesson in how satellites work and how we use them.
The seven videos cover History Physics Control Launch Why we need Satellites Business The Future
Parts 2 and 5 are below, you can find all of them at This is Real Art. Just a heads up, the site is very minimalist. To view a video, use the arrows at the top to select the video and then click the arrow at the bottom to start the show.
Now here’s an idea for the ecologically minded who happen to live in a really warm location – build your house out of used plastic bottles.
The Alfredo Santa Cruz family in Puerto Iguazu, Argentina did just that using a process that they developed that fuses the bottles together. In addition to the house, they have also made furniture (beds, couch, etc) and a playhouse for their daughter. Interested in putting one of these up? Start saving your trash – La Casa de Botellas used:
1200 PET plastic bottles in the walls 1300 milk and wine Tetra Pack containers in the roof 140 compact disk boxes in the doors and windows 120 PET plastic bottles in the couches 200 PET plastic bottles in the bed
I was driving back from my parents' the other day and happened to see a flock of birds wheeling across the sky alongside Interstate 88. Not in any way unusual but it got me to wondering, as it does every time I see it, how a group of individual birds can move like a single entity. Are they somehow communicating with each other to determine the next turn, dive or swoop?
Turns out that there’s no communication going on at all, the birds are merely following some basic rules related to interactions with other birds in the flock:
Separation - avoid crowding neighbors Alignment - steer towards average heading of neighbors Cohesion - steer towards average position of neighbors
Measurements of bird flocking have been made using high-speed cameras, and a computer analysis has been made to test the simple rules of flocking ... It is found that they generally hold true in the case of bird flocking, but the long range attraction rule (cohesion) applies to the nearest 5-10 neighbors of the flocking bird and is independent of the distance of these neighbors from the bird… ~Wikipedia
Do you want to know something really freaky? Humans flock too. Yep, it seems that we’ll follow anyone if they seem to know where they’re going and we don’t have our own route planned. A study conducted in Cologne Germany by two biologists from the University of Leeds demonstrated a flock like behavior in humans.
Professor Krause, with PhD student John Dyer, conducted a series of experiments where groups of people were asked to walk randomly around a large hall. Within the group, a select few received more detailed information about where to walk. Participants were not allowed to communicate with one another but had to stay within arms length of another person.
The findings show that in all cases, the ‘informed individuals’ were followed by others in the crowd, forming a self-organizing, snake-like structure.
“We’ve all been in situations where we get swept along by the crowd,” says Professor Krause. “But what’s interesting about this research is that our participants ended up making a consensus decision despite the fact that they weren’t allowed to talk or gesture to one another. In most cases the participants didn’t realize they were being led by others.”
Other experiments in the study used groups of different sizes, with different ratios of ‘informed individuals’. The research findings show that as the number of people in a crowd increases, the number of informed individuals decreases. In large crowds of 200 or more, five per cent of the group is enough to influence the direction in which it travels. ~PsychCentral
Video filmed by Dylan Winter at an RSPB reserve called Otmoor near Oxford England. Check this link for more information about what you are watching.
Does anyone else think that the creators of “Lost” have spent some time in Oxford?
I'm not a huge fan of fog - it's cold and wet and it makes driving dangerous.
But it's also a key component of the ecosystem that makes Redwood trees possible. Redwoods, the tallest and one of the most massive tree species on Earth, grow only in the Pacific northwest of the United States, primarily in northern California.
The weather on the coast here ranges between 40 and 60 degrees Farenheit all year round.
Redwoods mostly grow a mile or two...from the coast, but never more than 50 miles...from it. In this temperate but humid coastal zone, the trees receive moisture from both heavy winter rains and persistent summer fog. The presence and consistency of the summer fog is actually more important to overall health of the trees than heavy precipitation. ~ Wikipedia
So, fog: not so good for driving, necessary for happy Redwoods. The problem?
Per Wired, a recent study shows that "Over the past 58 years, the coastal fog has decreased by about 1.3 hours a day...[and] by about 3.5 hours a day over the last century from 13.5 hours to about 10 hours."
The study did not identify a specific cause for the drop in fog levels but indicated that climate change might be responsible.
But that's just crazy talk. My bet is on huge, ravenous, fog eating sea monsters from off the coast.
Bobby McFerrin demonstrates the power of the pentatonic scale, using audience participation, at the event "Notes & Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus", from the 2009 World Science Festival.
Scientists have come up with a useful invention: an adhesive device that may allow humans to WALK ON WALLS.
Not only is the device farily simple (it's based on the concept of water surface tension), it turns out that they got the idea from a beetle that resides in Florida. Could it get any easier for scientists these days?
