“Located in southeastern Ecuador, near the Peruvian border, the Nangaritza River valley is mountainous, heavily forested and relatively inaccessible to most people. The upper river valley is known for its Tepuyes, or tabletop mountains, which are home to many species that are found nowhere else on earth, as well as other species whose populations are threatened in other locations but remain plentiful here.
Nangaritza’s isolation has not only helped to protect the mountain ecosystem from destruction, it has also long posed a challenge to detailed scientific study. Part of the region is under the protection of the Nangaritza Protected Forest, but wildlife experts believe that more land must be protected for this unique environment to thrive.
The Shuar indigenous association and a local farming organization have been granted management over much of the protected forest, but these groups are proposing that the lands be upgraded to a higher protection status, where they will be more sustainably managed. Before this step can be taken, however, more scientific data is needed.”
“The countries of the world in their own languages and scripts; with official names, capitals, flags, coats of arms, administrative divisions, national anthems, and translations of the countries and capitals into many languages”) to get to the meat of the site, a collection of links to various pages: Days, Months, Planets, Mountains, etc.; a huge list of languages with each name given in the original (with transliteration where appropriate); various other random items (including a small set of famous people: it’s fun to see the varying forms of Charlemagne); an Alphabets section; and finally a set of Glossaries, with a few hundred English words translated into, well, everything (divided into manageable sets: Albanian|Greek|Armenian, American|Polynesian, Asian, Balto-Slavic, Basque|Caucasus, Celtic, Constructed, etc.). http://www.geonames.de/
This is a tiny area from a large piece of a wonderfully-named American Flame-tail Rooster Agate. The brilliant-red ‘vegetation’ is the source of its generic name, moss agate, and is formed by crystalline growths of impurities such as iron oxide. Size: 3cm.
This image, scanned with transmitted light from the perimeter of a banded agate, shows an island of quartz framed by the concentric rings of agate ‘eyes’, which are generally the result of slicing through hemispherical formations that typically develop near the outer surface. Size: 3cm.
This Madagascan agate shows many classic features: concentric banding; ‘eyes’ sliced through hemispherical formations; the ends of hollow tubes that formed around inclusions of other minerals such as rutile or geothite; and areas of crystalline quartz. Size: 7cm.
Agate frequently frames a quartz-filled void, but here this is reversed. The whole slice consists of a very narrow band of agate framing a large area of quartz at the centre of which is this exquisite formation, seen in more detail in AG170. Size: 10cm
All photographs and captions are copyright by Professor Richard Weston of Earth Images.
Professor Richard Weston is a renowned architect and author as well as Professor of Architecture at Cardiff University, UK.
As part of the FutureWorld exhibition, he designed and built Radiant House, which was conceived as an inhabitable walled garden with a plywood roof floating on structural glass. He has also designed a wonderfully original Triangular House, and many of his works have been exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition. His books include Modernism, winner of the International Book Award of the American Institute of Architects, and what has been described as possibly the finest monograph ever produced about an architect, on the work of Jørn Utzon, architect of Sydney Opera House.
His passion for mineral images began when he bought an ammonite that cost more than his scanner: the results were dreadful – and the scanner now used cost rather more than many ammonites – but the results are wonderful. They often demand a great deal of time to produce: preparing the minerals, taking scan after scan, and then digitally removing blemishes left by polishing powder and dust. Only a tiny minority have made it into his online collection and without his passion, Richard could not possibly have amassed such a large collection of world class images for you to enjoy. He invites you to his website to view an online collection of 200 mineral images. (thanks to Geology.com)
You’ve read the news—everyone wants to be green now. But do you really know how your personal choices are adding up? What about the choices of your fellow citizens? How well are people around the globe adopting behaviors that can make the world a more environmentally sustainable place? How have they changed over the past year? National Geographic and the international polling firm GlobeScan have just conducted their second annual study measuring and monitoring consumer progress toward environmentally sustainable consumption in 17 countries around the world.
Why? We wanted to give people a better idea of how consumers in different countries are doing in taking action to preserve our planet by tracking, reporting, and promoting environmentally sustainable consumption and citizen behavior.
This quantitative consumer study of 17,000 consumers in a total of 17 countries (14 in 2008) asked about such behavior as energy use and conservation, transportation choices, food sources, the relative use of green products versus traditional products, attitudes towards the environment and sustainability, and knowledge of environmental issues. A group of international experts helped us determine the behaviors that were most critical to investigate. (text by Greendex)
At 18.00 on Tuesday 26th May, Weather Projection will commence transmission of the rest of the world.
Light from the Americas will be piped into Sydney’s dome and then retransmitted live by the webcam. An online roll-call clarifies the schedule, highlighting the chronographic star of the moment, shifting start time minutely with each new day.
As Smart Light Sydney begins, the sun first hits landmass in remote north-eastern Canada and the eastern shores of Brazil, slowly sweeping across the Americas until its sole terrestrial glint is seen at the western tips of Alaska and a few sparse Pacific islands. This sparsity is infilled by a review of the evening – a final rapid uber-time-lapse playing back the whole evening’s activity, crescendoing at midnight.
http://www.weatherprojection.co.uk/
On January 19, 2009, the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured an image of Chaitén Volcano. Two versions of the image appear here: a close-up view of the caldera (top) and a view of the surrounding area (bottom). These false-color images include visible and infrared light. Vegetation is red, bare (possibly ash-covered) ground is brown, and water is deep blue. The plume from the volcano appears off-white, and it is thick enough to completely hide the land surface below. (NASA text)
Not to eco-friendly but here we go: Ten tons of cement were poured into this grass-cutters ant colony, revealing a subterranean structure of 8 meters / 26 feet deep. ‘Ant-City’ was built including circulating ventilation shafts and fungi gardens interconnected through pipelines.
“There is a constant flux and metaphysical connection throughout the natural and industrialized infrastructures. A network of energy that enables life through quantum activities which I have yet to physically see, yet continue to imagine.” - Cristopher Cichocki
Etymology: From the Greek “oneiros” meaning dream and “gen” meaning to create, describes that which produces a dream-like state of consciousness.
Silene capensis (syn. Silene undulata) (also known as African Dream Root) is a plant native to the Eastern Cape of South Africa, where is regarded by the Xhosa people as a sacred plant. Its root is traditionally used to induce vivid (and according to the Xhosa, prophetic) lucid dreams during the initiation process of shamans, classifying it a naturally-occurring oneirogen similar to the more well-known dream herb Calea zacatechichi.
Calea zacatechichi, also known as Dream Herb, Cheech, and Bitter Grass, is a plant used by the indigenous Chontal of the Mexican state of Oaxaca for oneiromancy (a form of divination based on dreams.) The plant naturally occurs from southern Mexico to northern Costa Rica. It has been scientifically demonstrated that extracts of this plant increase reaction times and the frequency and/or recollection of dreams[1] versus placebo and diazepam. It is also employed by the Chontal people as a medicinal herb against gastrointestinal disorders, and is used as an appetizer, cathartic anti-dysentery remedy, and as a fever-reducing agent.
Entada rheedii is a large woody liana or climber. It is also known as African Dream Herb and Snuff Box Sea Bean. It is often spelled as Entada rheedei, though initially published as E. rheedii. The alternate spelling is to correctly honour Hendrik Adriaan von Rheede tot Draakestein (1637-1691).
Its leaves are dried and smoked to induce vivid dreams. Its seeds are found on east and southern African beaches, having grown on river and estuary banks and in swamp forest. They have thick and durable seed coats and can survive lengthy periods of immersion in sea water. These seeds are sought after as pieces of jewelry and as good-luck charms. As a result of its ready dispersal by sea, Entada rheedii is widely distributed in tropical and subtropical countries bordering the Indian Ocean.
Information here obtained from Wiki, inspired on the research of Krystle Cole from Neuro Soup. Someone to meet….Really pleasant gal, and lots of juicy (literally) information for the neuro-travelers.
In the Netherlands, every square meter of ground is a man-made landscape: original nature is nowhere to be found. The Oostvaardersplassen – which make up one of the Netherlands’ most important nature reserves – were, after the land was reclaimed, originally an industrial site; they were only turned into a nature reserve later. Even the ‘Green Heart’ at the center of the most densely populated part of Netherlands is in actual fact a medieval industrial area, which was originally reclaimed for turf-cutting. Our ‘nature reserves’ are thus in fact ‘culture reserves’ shaped by human activity. “God created the world, with the exception of the Netherlands. That the Dutch created themselves”, as Voltaire put it in the eighteenth century. And ever since, we have been doing everything we can to live up to his pronouncement. Today, we even actively design and build nature in the Netherlands. Prehistoric forests are being planted in locations designated by bureaucrats: our image of Nature is being carefully constructed in a recreational simulation (a ‘regeneration of our lost heritage’, as the nature-builders call it themselves [1]). Traditional cattle breeds are even being placed in this so-called ‘new nature’ [2]. The original wild ox unfortunately became extinct in 1627, but the Scottish Highlander is an acceptable alternative. These cattle know what they’re supposed to do: graze, under orders of the forestry service. Thanks to them, the landscape stays clear instead of becoming overgrown (we find this attractive, as it reminds us of famous 17th-century landscape paintings). In theory, the animals are supposed to look after themselves, but in winter the forestry service is willing to give them a bit of extra food. It also removes dead animals, lest walkers be offended by a cow rotting on the footpath. In our culture, nature is continually presented as a lost world. It is associated with originality, yet appears only once it has disappeared. Our experience of nature is a retro effect [3].
This is the central parts of our galaxy, the Milky Way, as observed in the near-infrared with the NACO instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. By following the motions of the most central stars over more than 16 years, astronomers were able to determine the mass of the supermassive black hole that lurks there. (Image: NASA/CXC/MIT/F K Baganoff et al)
By watching the motions of 28 stars orbiting the Milky Way’s most central region with admirable patience and amazing precision, astronomers have been able to study the supermassive black hole lurking there. It is known as “Sagittarius A*” (pronounced “Sagittarius A star”). The new research marks the first time that the orbits of so many of these central stars have been calculated precisely and reveals information about the enigmatic formation of these stars — and about the black hole to which they are bound.
“The centre of the Galaxy is a unique laboratory where we can study the fundamental processes of strong gravity, stellar dynamics and star formation that are of great relevance to all other galactic nuclei, with a level of detail that will never be possible beyond our Galaxy,” explains Reinhard Genzel, leader of the team from the Max-Planck-Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching near Munich. (text by Physorg)
Ten Technologies to Save the Planet, a new book by businessman and climate-change commentator Chris Goodall, says climate change can be overcome if we adopt the following energy sources and technologies. (text by New Scientist)
Wind power – Solar energy – Power from the oceans – Combined heat and power – Super-efficient homes – Electric cars – Second-generation biofuels – Carbon capture – Biochar – Biogas stoves.
The Naica Mine of Chihuahua, Mexico, is a working mine that is known for its extraordinary crystals. Naica is a lead, zinc and silver mine in which large voids have been found, containing crystals of selenite (gypsum) as large as 4 feet in diameter and 50 feet long. The chamber holding these crystals is known as the Crystal Cave of Giants, and is approximately 1000 feet down in the limestone host rock of the mine. The crystals were formed by hydrothermal fluids emanating from the magma chambers below. The cavern was discovered while the miners were drilling through the Naica fault, which they were worried would flood the mine. The Cave of Swords is another chamber in the Naica Mine, containing similar large crystals.
The Naica mine was first discovered by early prospectors in 1794 south of Chihuahua City. They struck a vein of silver at the base of a range of hills called Naica by the Tarahumara Indians. The origin in the Tarahumara language seems to mean “a shady place”. Perhaps here in the small canyon there was a grove of trees tucked away by a small canyon spring.
It’s “the Sistine Chapel of crystals,” says Juan Manuel García- Ruiz. The geologist announced this week that he and a team of researchers have unlocked the mystery of just how the minerals in Mexico’s Cueva de los Cristales (Cave of Crystals) achieved their monumental forms. Buried a thousand feet (300 meters) below Naica mountain in the Chihuahuan Desert, the cave was discovered by two miners excavating a new tunnel for the Industrias Peñoles company in 2000. To learn how the crystals grew to such gigantic sizes, García-Ruiz studied tiny pockets of fluid trapped inside.
The cave contains some of the largest natural crystals ever found: translucent gypsum beams measuring up to 36 feet (11 meters) long and weighing up to 55 tons.The crystals, he said, thrived because they were submerged in mineral-rich water with a very narrow, stable temperature range – around 136 degrees Fahrenheit (58 degrees Celsius). At this temperature the mineral anhydrite, which was abundant in the water, dissolved into gypsum, a soft mineral that can take the form of the crystals in the Naica cave. (text by Discovery News and National Geographic)
Recently Manuel Pinho, Portugal’s Economy Minister visited the Aguçadoura wave farm in a ceremony to officially inaugurate the project. He travelled to the site on the Portuguese Naval Frigate “Corte Real” where a helicopter was launched to film the Pelamis machines and the raising of the Portuguese flag on one of the machines. Pelamis Wave Power Ltd is the manufacturer of a unique system to generate renewable electricity from ocean waves. The Pelamis Wave Energy Converter is a revolutionary concept, the result of many years of engineering development by PWP. It was the world’s first commercial scale machine to generate electricity into the grid from offshore wave energy and the first to be used in commercial wave farm projects.
The Pelamis Wave Energy Converter is a semi-submerged, articulated structure composed of cylindrical sections linked by hinged joints. The wave-induced motion of these joints is resisted by hydraulic rams, which pump high-pressure fluid through hydraulic motors via smoothing accumulators. The hydraulic motors drive electrical generators to produce electricity. Power from all the joints is fed down a single umbilical cable to a junction on the sea bed. Several devices can be connected together and linked to shore through a single seabed cable.
Some readers might still remember the website “An Atlas of Cyberspaces” at cybergeography.org, now unfortunately only available as a static online archive. Back in the days, it was a very inspirational site that collected various “information maps” that explored the realm of graphical representations of “cyberspace”, and of Internet networks in particular.
Now imagine a website in early 2000 that contains “visualizations” ranging from geographical ISP backbone networks, over 3D virtual worlds, to screenshots of the movies Johnny Mnemonic and The Matrix. Imagine a website that featured Brad Paley’s textarc, Judith Donath’s PeopleGarden, as well as Ben Fry’s master thesis Tendril. It blew my mind. In fact, it was one of the main influencing factors for my own growing interest towards design and visualization. And it probably was the predecessor of the very weblog you are reading right now.
Gunilla Elam, Ericsson Medialab
Anyway, connected to this website was a book that originally appeared in 2002. Its contents are now freely available as a series of high resolution (228MB) PDF sections available here [kitchin.org]. The book gives an interesting overview of the early years of (more “popular” forms of) data visualization, including chapters about mapping Internet infrastructure and traffic flows, mapping the Web, mapping online conversation and community, imagining cyberspace in art, literature, and film. It comes highly recommended. (text by Infosthetics)
Christopher Herwig is a Canadian travel photographer/photojournalist currently based in Monrovia, Liberia, having spent 3 years in Almaty, Kazakhstan, putting together a collection of images on Central Asia. He completed photo projects for international organizations including several UN agencies, the Red Cross and the British Council , as well as commissions from magazines and newspapers in worldwide. He explored the Central Asian region and estimates that he covered over 40,000 km on foot, horseback and back-country skis, by boat, car, 4×4 and train.
Although his earlier work experience was primarily commercial, he has concentrated on travel photography. The photographs of Central Asia on his website are a mix of mainly portraits as well as landscapes, city and industry to illustrate where people live and work.(text by The Travel Photographer)
Iceberg 2025 is an architectural interactive installation proposed to be installed in the heart of the city. This installation is about giving people a different perspective and perception about global warming. We perceive global warming as an issue but we might not be able to experience the affect of it in our time. Perhaps this installation will be able to let people experience and understand the issues we are facing right now. (text by SUPERNATURE)
Socotra or Soqotra (Arabic سقطرى ; Suquṭra) is a small archipelago of four islands and islets in the Indian Ocean off the coast of the Horn of Africa some 190 nautical miles (220 mi/350 km) south of the Arabian peninsula, belonging to the Republic of Yemen. It has long been a part of the ‘Adan Governorate, but in 2004 became attached to the Hadhramaut Governorate, which is much closer to the island than ‘Adan (although the closest governorate would be Al Mahrah).
Socotra is considered the “jewel” of biodiversity in the Arabian sea. The long geological isolation of the Socotra archipelago and its fierce heat and drought have combined to create a unique and spectacular endemic flora (which may, therefore, be vulnerable to introduced species such as goats and to climate change). Surveys have revealed that more than a third of the 800 or so plant species of Socotra are found nowhere else. Botanists rank the flora of Socotra among the ten most endangered island flora in the world. The archipelago is a site of global importance for biodiversity conservation and a possible center for ecotourism.
One of the most striking of Socotra’s plants is the dragon’s blood tree (Dracaena cinnabari), which is a strange-looking, umbrella-shaped tree. Its red sap was the dragon’s blood of the ancients, sought after as a medicine and a dye. Another unusual plant is Dorstenia gigas.
The island group also has a fairly rich bird fauna, including a few types of endemic birds, such as the Socotra Starling Onychognathus frater, the Socotra Sunbird Nectarinia balfouri, Socotra Sparrow Passer insularis and Socotra Grosbeak Rhynchostruthus socotranus.
As with many isolated island systems, bats are the only mammals native to Socotra. In contrast, the marine biodiversity around Socotra is rich, characterized by a unique mixture of species that have originated in farflung biogeographic regions: the western Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, Arabia, East Africa and the wider Indo-Pacific.
This is a tiny area from a large piece of a wonderfully-named American Flame-tail Rooster Agate. The brilliant-red ‘vegetation’ is the source of its generic name, moss agate, and is formed by crystalline growths of impurities such as iron oxide. Size: 3cm.
This image, scanned with transmitted light from the perimeter of a banded agate, shows an island of quartz framed by the concentric rings of agate ‘eyes’, which are generally the result of slicing through hemispherical formations that typically develop near the outer surface. Size: 3cm.
This Madagascan agate shows many classic features: concentric banding; ‘eyes’ sliced through hemispherical formations; the ends of hollow tubes that formed around inclusions of other minerals such as rutile or geothite; and areas of crystalline quartz. Size: 7cm.
Agate frequently frames a quartz-filled void, but here this is reversed. The whole slice consists of a very narrow band of agate framing a large area of quartz at the centre of which is this exquisite formation, seen in more detail in AG170. Size: 10cm
Silene capensis (syn. Silene undulata) (also known as African Dream Root) is a plant native to the Eastern Cape of South Africa, where is regarded by the Xhosa people as a sacred plant. Its root is traditionally used to induce vivid (and according to the Xhosa, prophetic) lucid dreams during the initiation process of shamans, classifying it a naturally-occurring oneirogen similar to the more well-known dream herb Calea zacatechichi.
Calea zacatechichi, also known as Dream Herb, Cheech, and Bitter Grass, is a plant used by the indigenous Chontal of the Mexican state of Oaxaca for oneiromancy (a form of divination based on dreams.) The plant naturally occurs from southern Mexico to northern Costa Rica. It has been scientifically demonstrated that extracts of this plant increase reaction times and the frequency and/or recollection of dreams[1] versus placebo and diazepam. It is also employed by the Chontal people as a medicinal herb against gastrointestinal disorders, and is used as an appetizer, cathartic anti-dysentery remedy, and as a fever-reducing agent.
Entada rheedii is a large woody liana or climber. It is also known as African Dream Herb and Snuff Box Sea Bean. It is often spelled as Entada rheedei, though initially published as E. rheedii. The alternate spelling is to correctly honour Hendrik Adriaan von Rheede tot Draakestein (1637-1691).
This is the central parts of our galaxy, the Milky Way, as observed in the near-infrared with the NACO instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. By following the motions of the most central stars over more than 16 years, astronomers were able to determine the mass of the supermassive black hole that lurks there. (Image: NASA/CXC/MIT/F K Baganoff et al)
CREDIT: I. Rodrigues and I.F. Mirabel, Space Telescope Science Institute, NRAO/AUI/NSF.
