Slavenka & Obi

Tuesday, November 3, 2015

Bird Love

Australian portrait photographer Leila Jeffreys does an uncanny job of capturing her subjects’ personalities. Her subjects just happen to be the feathered kind.

Monday, November 2, 2015

"The Rebuild" a new mural by Fintan Magee

Russia Wants to Send Monkeys to Mars and Women to the Moon

Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, has had a busy few weeks, first announcing a new partnership with the European Space Agency to send a lunar rover to search for water at the Moon’s south pole by 2020. But now, Roscosmos has announced it wants to go a bit further first by sending a team of trained rhesus monkeys to the red planet. Right now, a squad of future monkey cosmonauts are training three hours a day at the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow, learning how to operate controls and solve simple math problems. Scientists prize rhesus monkeys for their intelligence and because they can live for up to 25 years, Kozlovskaya and her team hope that their furry students will quickly learn how to survive a six-month-long mission to Mars.
While Kozlovskaya works on training her monkeys for Mars, a crew of six Russian women are spending this week locked inside a mock spaceship to see how well a team of all-female astronauts might handle the upcoming Moon mission in 2029. continue

Gone in the Fog

The View from The Shard

Photograph: Jacques Brinon/AP

Giant Pterosaur with Huge Fangs Found in Utah Quarry

A little more than 200 million years ago, a four-fanged pterosaur flew over the vast desert of Triassic Utah snagging other reptiles with its toothy mouth, until it met its untimely end on the banks of a dried-up oasis, new research finds.

Olé!

This cheeky pelican on a beach in Australia could have a future career as a matador.

Snowy Departure

Jose Albero

Life in a Land of Disappearing Ice

“How do you photograph climate change?”

This question is the driving force behind Ciril Jazbec’s photography. It’s what first took him in 2013 to the tiny island town of Uummannaq on Greenland’s west coast—a town where decreasing sea ice has rapidly altered traditional hunting culture and community life. The changing traditions and declining population of the village fascinated Jazbec, and he’s since returned to Uummannaq (and the surrounding fjord that shares its name) three times. This story turned into his first assignment for National Geographic magazine, appearing in the November 2015 issue on climate change.
In this video, Jazbec reflects on his experiences in Uummannaq, where he strove to illustrate the often abstract issue of climate change with the real experiences of the people it affects … and how he accidentally let a few sled dogs loose in the process.

Reef Refuge

A goby is nearly imperceptible, camouflaged against a gorgonian in the waters of the Republic of Palau—but it didn’t escape the lens of National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Enric Sala.

Who is George Boole?

George Boole, the British mathematician whose work on logic laid many of the foundations for the digital revolution, has been honoured on the 200th anniversary of his birth with a special Google Doodle.

The Lincolnshire-born academic is widely heralded as one of the most influential mathematicians of the 19th century, devising a system of logic that aimed to condense complex thoughts into simple equations. His legacy was Boolean logic, a theory of mathematics in which all variables are either "true" or "false", or "on" or "off". The theory preceded the digital age, with American Claude Shannon applying Boolean logic to build the electrical circuits in the 1930s that led to modern computers. continue

Sunday, November 1, 2015

Well, another Halloween has come and gone.

Calvin and Hobbes

November - Thomas Hood, 1844

No sun - no moon!
No morn - no noon -
No dawn - no dusk - no proper time of day.
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member -
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds! -
November!