Crazy gorgeous.
Once again, science is really cool and you really should spend hours on this.
The Where, the Why, and the How?
This looks to be a very cool science/art intersection, with 75 artists interpreting 75 great scientific questions in their own styles. From “What’s the structure of water?” to “What drives plate tectonics?”, it’s at least a strong contender for a spot on the coffee table.
Of course, these aren’t detailed and technical scientific illustrations, which seemed to piss off a couple of Amazon reviewers, but rather a more creative turn on scientific mysteries, accompanied by simple explanations. Check out more at Discover’s Visual Science.
(credits and captions for the artwork above are in the slideshow)
There’s no landscape quite like the Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument in New Mexico. This Veterans Day weekend, go explore your public lands — BLM-managed lands are fee-free this weekend. Better yet, take a veteran outside to explore the land he or she defended. Photo by Bob Wick
This blog is great, you should follow it if you like seeing pictures of beautiful places.
V.S. Ramachandran once asked American college students and Tamil speakers in India to each interpret these shapes. He wanted to know which one they thought was “bouba” and which one they thought was “kiki”.
98% of them said that bouba was round and kiki was spiky. Later studies showed that even young children who hadn’t yet learned to read assigned the same names to the shapes.
It appears there’s something about the evolution of language that says names for objects are not arbitrary.
Check out this TEDx talk about the life of the mind lived through noise. Very cool stuff.
(via Science-Based Life)
How Do Animals Become Zombies?
Zombie-like phenomena are not only the stuff of horror movies. There’s several examples in nature of freakish brain and body infections that take over a creature’s behavior, forcing them to amble off to an untimely death or causing them to birth Alien-like parasites from within.
it’s pretty creepy-crawly stuff.
From zom-bees to feline phantoms, Scientific American presents How Animals Become Zombies.
Bonus: Planet Earth creeps you out with a fungal/ant mind-takeover freak show. Cordyceps give me the willies in the best way.
More proof that cats are evil.
The Song of the Dunes Deciphered
Desert sand dunes, blown by merciless desert winds, have been known to “sing”, often loud enough to be heard for miles. New research of dunes in Morocco and Oman has figured out why it happens.
It’s not a trapped genie, unfortunately. But the reason might be just as cool. Similarly-sized grains of sand, blown by a wind of pretty steady velocity, create sound waves thanks to small avalanches of these almost identical sand grains.
Peacefully haunting sound, and some pretty cool science to go along with it.
(via ScienceNOW)
Geology
Insecurity has become the largest issue for many Venezuelans- with kidnappings, robberies, and murders commonplace, many citizens have opted out of withstanding another 6 years and are heavily considering moving out of the country.
This guy is an Italian Wall Lizard, Podarcis sicula. This species gained media attention in 2008 as an example of rapid macroevolution. In 1971, five females and five males were moved from the tiny island Pod Kopište to the even tinier island Pod Mrčaru, both in the Croatian Adriatic. When researchers returned in the mid-2000s, the insect-eating, territorial lizards had turned into veggie-munching hippies. Well. To be more precise, their diet had consisted of only 4-7% plant material on Pod Kopište, but on Pod Mrčaru, this varied seasonally between 34 and 61%. In changing their diet, population density went up, and the lizards gave up defending territories. In addition, their heads had become larger and changed shape; they had evolved harder bites, in order to chew tough plant material; and finally, the pièce de résistance: they had evolved cecal valves. These valves slow down the passage of food through the system, creating fermentation chambers. In these chambers, microbes not usually found in P. sicula break down the otherwise undigestible cellulose.
All this in approximately 30 generations.
