Fire tornado photos

David Pescovitz at 9:57 AM Wed 

This is a fire tornado that emerged from a brush fire on Sunday near Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano. National Geographic posted a gallery of amazing shots of these strange blazing whirlwinds. "Fire-Tornado Pictures: Why They Form, How to Fight Them"

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The beauty and wonder of a squid's eyeball

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 5:09 PM Tue 

Look at this squid's eye. Just look at it. See anything eerily familiar?

Squid, along with the rest of the family Cephalopoda, haven't shared a common ancestor with us vertebrates in some 500 million years—long before the evolution of our camera-like eyes. And yet, there the cephalopods are, flagrantly swimming about with eyes that use a lens to project an image onto a retina. Call it Squid Eye for the Vertebrate Guy. So, how's it work?

Convergent evolution, my friends. Convergent evolution. We happened to hit on similar solutions to the same problem of sight, even though the eyes of vertebrates and cephalopods evolved separately, in very different ways, at different times. Today, we can see that legacy in cephalopod and vertebrate fetal development. With vertebrates, the eyes grow on stalks, reaching out from the brain. In cephalopods, the eyes start as a clumping of cells on the surface of the skin and reach backwards, into the head, to make brain contact. Similar destinations. Very different road maps.

This lovely illustration—featuring dissections of the head, funnel, mantle and eye of a Thaumatolampas diadema—comes from The Cephalopoda Part I: Oegopsida and Part II: Myopsida, Octopoda Atlas written in 1910 by zoologist Carl Chun following a German expedition to the Indian, Atlantic and Great Southern oceans.

You can see more of Chun's detailed, passionate illustrations at the BibliOdyssey blog.

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I, for one, welcome the dawn of our new Frankensalmon overlords. (via LA Weekly) — Xeni • Comments: 21

What are your favorite physics websites?

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 10:36 AM Mon 

Physics.org is looking for the best physics-centric sites on the Web, and they need your help. The first ever Physics.org Web Awards is now open for nominations.

We're looking for great sites suitable for a non-specialist audience in the following categories:

• * Best blog
• * Best news site / online magazine
• * Best podcast
• * Best Q&A / ask the expert site
• * Best revision site
• * Best kids' site
• * President's prize (anything which doesn't fall under any of the categories above)

You can nominate sites until the 10th of October and there's several ways to nominate. On Twitter, you can send a message to @dotrythisathome or make a general tweet using the #pwa10 hashtag. There's a Facebook page. Or you can just send an email. Winners will be announced just as soon as the judging panel—which includes yours truly—reaches a decision.

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Adorable alternative energy

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 1:25 PM Sun 

Gaia Vince explains how a sustainable farm in Peru runs on guinea pig power.

No, it does not involve hundreds of tiny exercise wheels. (Although that would be pretty damn cute, too.)

Instead, every month, the farmers process more than 400 pounds of guinea pig poop into combustible gas—and a liquid byproduct that works as plant food—by allowing bacteria to break the waste down in a warm, oxygen-free environment. It's called anaerobic digestion, and it's a process that's increasingly popular on American farms, as well. Dairy farms—with their easy access to lots of consolidated cow shit—in particular.

What's cool about this Peruvian model is that it shows you don't necessarily need fancy, expensive equipment to make anaerobic digestion work. The process can be applied at different levels of tech intensity, depending on resources, location and how much energy you actually want to produce. This Peruvian family makes enough gas for themselves, plus a little extra. Meanwhile, a dairy farm in Wisconsin uses the gas to make electricity that they sell back to the utility company. All told, there's enough to power 70 households.

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Snakebot inspires dreams, haunts nightmares

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 12:51 PM Sun 

Built by robotics students at Carnegie Mellon, Uncle Sam the Snakebot is simultaneously horribly awesome, and awesomely creepy.

Uncle Sam is programmed with a variety of different "gaits", or types of movement patterns, which are based on the real-life behavior of real-life snakes. The goal is to create a modular—and, thus, relatively simple to produce and scale—robot that can get to and through places where people, and less-willies-inducing robots, can't maneuver.

Via Switched

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Grains of pollen as seen by an electron microscope

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 12:35 PM Sun 

Behold, the face of the enemy.

(Why, yes, my nose is rather runny, why do you ask?)

Urge to vengeance aside, my main reaction while flipping through this gallery of pollen images was wonder at the intense variety of sizes, shapes, textures and tricks floating through the microscopic world of plant pollen. This group shot ranges from the (relatively) giant orb of pumpkin pollen in the center, to the teensy blue dot that belongs to the forget-me-not. Some of the grains seem like completely alien things, but others bear a striking resemblance to the plants they help create—for instance, I guessed that Venus fly trap pollen went with the Venus fly trap before I read the caption.

All these shots are the work of Swedish Swiss scientist Martin Oeggerli, who makes amazing art using a scanning electron microscope. The images actually start out in black and white, with Oeggerli going back and adding color, pixel by pixel. The colors can, but don't necessarily, reflect reality, but they do help make textures stand out and make the form more easily readable by your eye.

The Telegraph: Full pollen image gallery

Martin Oeggerli explains the technology behind his photos, from microscope, to sample preparation, to coloration.

Image: Martin Oeggerli/Micronaut

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Sailing the Northwest Passage at night

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 4:12 PM Sat 

Polar explorer Børge Ousland (How'd you like to have that as your job title?) is on a sailboat making its way through the Arctic Ocean. This has never been an easy place for boats, and this video gives you a good idea of why. The captain of Ousland's boat explains the hazards of this area a little more in-depth, while simultaneously making an important point—thanks to warming trends, traversing the Northwest Passage isn't has hard as it used to be.

It is obvious that the conditions met by the early explorers such as Vitus Bering, Fridtjof Nansen, Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld and Roald Amundsen no longer exists. We passed through in a few weeks, while our predecessors were forced to overwinter once or even twice. Still, it is not an easy passage for any kind of boat or vessel. There is still ice, although not to the extent there used to be, but plenty to make conditions unpredictable for ships. In addition many of the seas you have to pass are very shallow. In the East Siberian Sea, the shipping lane is located 50 nautical miles off the coast, in order for there to be sufficient depth for bigger ships. Lights, buoys and nautical markings are scarce.

You can follow Ousland's progress on his blog. Today, he reached American waters and changed his underpants, and we learn that changing your underpants on special occasions is a fine, old Norwegian tradition. To which I can only say, "Good."

Via Climate Progress

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From the BB Archives: Charting The Frozen Continent

David Pescovitz at 10:20 AM Sat 

As summer draws to close, I suggest a trip to Antarctica in this lovely Boing Boing special feature from our archives, Maggie Koerth-Baker's "Charting The Frozen Continent." When you get there, be sure to also scroll right to explore the photos! An excerpt:

"Oh, it's 32 and sunny here," says Claire Porter, a University of Minnesota graduate student working on the ostensibly frozen continent. "We spent the whole day outside hiking and playing around."

Antarctica, as it turns out, defies all sorts of expectations. Far from a blank, white canvas, the bottom of the world is a beautiful place, full of breathtaking peaks and stark, rock-strewn valleys studded with cerulean lakes. But the things that make Antarctica so fascinating—and such an important center for scientific research—also make it a difficult place to work. Porter is part of a team of scientists whose job is to make other scientists' jobs easier.

For more Boing Boing features, click here!

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Mary Roach: Death In Space

David Pescovitz at 4:38 PM Fri 

For some uplifting weekend reading, I suggest Mary Roach's excellent Boing Boing special feature "Death In Space." From the intro:

The U.S. has plans for a manned visit to Mars by the mid-2030s. The ESA and Russia have sketched out a similar joint mission, and it is claimed that China's space program has the same objective. Apart from their destination, all these plans share something in common: extraordinary danger for the explorers. What happens if someone dies out there, months away from Earth?

Swedish ecologists Susanne Wiigh-Mäsak and Peter Mäsak are the inventors of an environmentally friendly alternative to cremation and burial, called Promession. The technique entails freezing a body, vibrating it into tiny pieces, and then freeze-drying the pieces, which can then be used as compost to grow a memorial shrub or tree.

Adorable baby octopuses, living happy and free

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 3:16 PM Fri 

To make up for the research kittens.

Note: This starts out somewhat depressingly, with the body of a female octopus that died after reproducing—as all octopuses, male and female, do. But it quickly gets past that, and on to the wee, baby octopuses, floating around the sea. Turn off the sound to block out the sad song, and focus on that.

From jenniel, via Submitterator

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Research on horribly cute kittens is kind of horrible looking

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 2:50 PM Fri 

"In order to study the way that experience can influence the brain, there has been a great deal of research done on the visual cortex of the kitten."

Oh, this is going to end badly, isn't it?

This short documentary from the 1970s explains, in depth, some research that I mentioned earlier this year in a BoingBoing article on fetal senses. Long story short: Kittens are born blind and do a lot of their sight-linked brain development in the first few weeks after birth. Because of this, they make a handy model for studying how the brains of human fetuses form neural connections and how our sense of sight develops in the womb. It's important research that has helped medical science better understand how to care for premature human babies, besides adding valuable details to our understanding of the brain, in general.

Unfortunately, because kittens are adorable, said very important research looks almost comically evil when filmed. Seriously, this video is one "Thittens" joke away from working as a segment of Look Around You.

So, thanks, blorgggg (Thorgggg?), for sending this video in via Submitterator. I'm sure the Moderators will be thanking you (and me) as well. I do ask that, as we get into the inevitable discussion on animal research, you remember that the scientists involved did not raise kittens in completely dark rooms for sociopathic shits and giggles, but because they thought the potential benefits of the research outweighed the (mostly temporary) damage done to the kittens' visual abilities. You may disagree with that calculation—and you're welcome to do so. In fact, I think that complex discussion about ends and means in specific studies is valuable. And interesting. Far more so (on both counts) than simply labeling anyone who uses animals for research as a for-kicks abuser of fluffy baby kitties.

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