Smoke Break #956: Cool Animation Of How Scientists Measure The Vastness Of Space
May 23, 2012
Narration and space nerditude by the lovely and talented Dr. Olivia Johnson. Cool (via). Of course Flyer’s goalie Ilya Brygalov still does a better job.
TAKE ANOTHER BREAK
New Guinea’s “Hooded Pitohui” Is The 1st Known Poisonous Bird…
March 26, 2010
This is for my friend Artie, a bird nerd who goes to Herculean lengths to document his sightings on the few field trips he undertakes (for R&R) each year. For example, last Fall he spent his “alone time” on a boat trip way off the coast to confirm the presence of a South Pacific seabird that had never been photographed off North America (and yes, he found one). The video I present to him shows Jack Dumbacher, a researcher at the California Academy of Sciences, talking about his recent brush in Papua New Guinea with the Hooded Pitohui. It is the first ever poisonous bird to be discovered by science.
Smoke Break #684: Cruising The Rocky Candor Chasma Of Mars…
March 23, 2010
Well this is pretty much amazing:
This is an animation flying over southwest Candor Chasma on Mars. It was created from NASA’s HiRISE DTM and image data. The spatial resolution is 1 meter for the altimetry data and 0.25 meters for the image data. There is no vertical exageration. The animation was created using Mars Explorer and was captured in realtime.
It needs a Jean Michel Jarré soundtrack. If you overlap them it’s like sensory gravy.
Science & Nature Icons Remixed In “The Unbroken Thread” Video
January 7, 2010
Just when you thought it wasn’t possible to appreciate science and nature legends Carl Sagan, Sir David Attenborough, and Jane Goodall (everyone’s surrogate 1970′s parent threesome) any more without snapping the universe like a balsam twig, as of this morning you can, thanks to the star-gazing, auto-tuning, masterful mash-up nerditrons over at SymphonyOfScience.com:
The themes presented in “The Unbroken Thread” attempt to explore the wild diversity of life on our planet, the intricacy and origin of its mechanisms, and its close relation to all other life forms.
Word is born.
New Species Of Crab Discovered Just Before Going Extinct
January 5, 2010
The saddest story in the world as of 2pm today comes to us via the Huffington Post:
“A marine biologist says he has discovered a new crab species off the coast of southern Taiwan that looks like a strawberry with small white bumps on its red shell.
National Taiwan Ocean University professor Ho Ping-ho says the crab resembles the species living in the areas around Hawaii, Polynesia and Mauritius. But it has a distinctive clam-shaped shell about 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) wide, making it distinct.
Taiwanese crab specialist Wang Chia-hsiang confirmed Ho’s finding.
Ho said Tuesday his team found two female crabs of the new species last June off the coast of Kenting National Park, known for its rich marine life. The crabs died shortly thereafter, possibly because the water in the area was polluted by a cargo ship that ran aground.”
And just like that, the strawberry crab enters and exits. No word yet on what the researchers ate instead.
Vancouver’s 2.5 Hectare “Living Roof” Mimics BC Grasslands…
August 4, 2009
Landscape architect Bruce Hemstock takes filmmaker Dave Budge on an explanatory tour of the living roof on top of the new Vancouver Convention Centre. Pretty amazing…
Icarus Shrugged: Could Risky Science Defeat Global Warming?
April 22, 2009
Is your house under water?
Let’s say for the sake of bumming you and me out that we’ve passed the point of no return with global warming. Many scientists believe we already have, that even if every nation on earth immediately curbed their greenhouse gas emissions by 100% it wouldn’t make a difference. The back door to salvation thus shut, what would we do? Aside from moving inland away from the coasts and toasting goodbye to Shanghai, LA, Cape Town, New York, Montevideo, and…gulp…quite a bit of the Lower Mainland, we’d probably fight amongst ourselves, blame everyone but ourselves, and generally embarrass ourselves like we haven’t done as a species since Read more
The Guiltless T-Bones of 2022
October 28, 2008
Tired of angry hippies accosting you when you go into your favourite dining establishment? Sick of hearing about how delicious animals had to die just so you could feed yourself? Frustrated that despite your best efforts you can’t make everything you eat taste like bacon?
The time has come, people, and the revolution is starting.
New Harvest, an organization devoted to the creation of cultured meat products, has been formed to rescue all of us who just can’t bear to eat anything that ‘has a face’. The group’s founder, Jason Methany, a biologist at Johns Hopkins University, has been following in the footsteps of NASA and the Dutch government who’ve have been working on bringing us our favourite meats without the messy cleanup and moral hang-ups.
Leaving all the science to the geeks, I skimmed the website and besides all the mumbo jumbo on building a better planet the only real hangup was that it uses stem cells. Which is good, because if they ever decided to make cultured “people meat” it would be illegal. But imagine if they did, and it was really good?
Soylent Green, baby. Soylent Green!
