“It is a remarkably hairy close-up. But this tiny microchip attached to a bee’s back will hopefully explain why so many honeybees are dying from disease. Professor Juergen Tautz and his team at the University of Wurzburg in Germany are studying the health of more than 150,000 bees, in the hope of halting the apparently inexorable decline in their worldwide population.

Bees have always been tricky to study individually. Each colony has around 50,000 members, all interacting simultaneously and making it near-impossible to observe them. Previously, each bee would be painted with a different-coloured dot on its back and scientists would video the colony — watching the tape endlessly, to try to work out the behaviour in each insect. But a revolutionary technology enables the study of bees at close quarters. As soon as a bee hatches, a tiny radio frequency identification (RFID) microchip is stuck to its back using a lacquer. This allows scientists to study its behaviour throughout its life.”

(via The Daily Mail)

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“Hacker and writer Joshua Klein is fascinated by crows. (Notice the gleam of intelligence in their little black eyes?) After a long amateur study of corvid behavior, he’s come up with an elegant machine that may form a new bond between animal and human.”

(via TED)

(Joshua Klein’s website)

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In an attempt to shake off a major case of cabin fever, I went to my local botanic gardens to take a walk. In their exhibition building was a pictoral showing of “The Garden of Cosmic Speculation” created by renown architect Charles Jencks and his late wife Maggie. This is an amazing piece of work and I was blown away with it’s concept and design.

“This book tells the story of one of the most original and important gardens of the 21st century, created by the internationally celebrated architectural critic and designer Charles Jencks. He and his late wife started working on a landscape, that, after her death in 1995, continued to grow into a larger project, an ongoing speculation on the basic elements of nature. Covering thirty acres in the Borders area of Scotland, the Garden of Cosmic Speculation is conceived as a place to explore certain fundamental aspects of the universe.

What are atoms made of and how should we conceive of them? How does DNA make up a living organism and why is it essential to celebrate it in a garden? In dialogue with eminent physicists, cosmologists, and biologists, including Paul Davies, Lee Smolin, and Steven Rose, Charles Jencks has created a series of new, expansive, visual metaphors that challenge misleading and frequently misunderstood concepts, such as the “Big Bang” and the “Selfish Gene.”

(Preview of the book “The Garden of Cosmic Speculation” via Google Books)

(Charles Jencks website. Article on “The Garden of Cosmic Speculation” via Recreating Eden)

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“The Snow Maiden, or Snegurochka, is a core part of winter celebrations in Russia. She partners Russia’s Santa – Father Frost – helping him with his New Year duties. Her image is familiar to everyone across the country. But her origins remain shrouded in mystery, even to Russians. The character of Snegurochka actually dates back to pagan Slavic religion. She symbolised the change of seasons, the transition from winter to spring.”

(via Russia Today)

(More links about The Snow Maiden here, here and here)

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Due to his failing sight, Western Washington geology professor David Engebretson is teaching a class he developed pioneering the study of earth science in a unique manner - using sound. He has also created audio that is analogous to the history of Earth’s magnetic field reversals. Take a listen to the short clip NPR. He talks through it, but makes insightful points about what musical patterns he can hear, and what that may mean in terms of our geological history.

Link

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From WFTV Florida’s “Strange News Photos”, check out this picture of a seven-legged lamb. The lamb was born on a farm in Metheven, on the South Island of New Zealand, where the most recent silver-screen incarnation of The Lord of the Rings was filmed after Peter Jackson decided it was the best location to emulate his vision of J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic Middle Earth. Gandalf/ Odin was quoted as saying, “The only thing worse than the stretch is the title.”

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I’m really disheartened about all this. While I don’t know a lot about elephants, I always grew up with a reverence of them. Knowing their emotional capacity and their complicated rites and dealings with their own dead, how they work as groups and families, has always enforced my empathy with them.

Lately, I’ve been coming across some very peculiar articles dealing with these noble creatures. Via The New York Times:

All across Africa, India and parts of Southeast Asia, from within and around whatever patches and corridors of their natural habitat remain, elephants have been striking out, destroying villages and crops, attacking and killing human beings. In fact, these attacks have become so commonplace that a new statistical category, known as Human-Elephant Conflict, or H.E.C., was created by elephant researchers in the mid-1990’s to monitor the problem. In the Indian state of Jharkhand near the western border of Bangladesh, 300 people were killed by elephants between 2000 and 2004. In the past 12 years, elephants have killed 605 people in Assam, a state in northeastern India, 239 of them since 2001; 265 elephants have died in that same period, the majority of them as a result of retaliation by angry villagers, who have used everything from poison-tipped arrows to laced food to exact their revenge. In Africa, reports of human-elephant conflicts appear almost daily, from Zambia to Tanzania, from Uganda to Sierra Leone, where 300 villagers evacuated their homes last year because of unprovoked elephant attacks.

(more…)

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