life
grrlscientist | May 16, 2010tags: Helsinki Complaints Choir, complaints, silly, humor, funny, offbeat, weird, life, life isn't fair, choir, streaming video
This amusing video is a bit of a departure from my usual Sunday morning god-mocking, but since I am in Helsinki right now, I thought you'd appreciate this. Finnish artists Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen collected the pet peeves and angst-ridden pleas of people in Helsinki and then composed this choral work around the list of complaints. Music composed by Esko Grundström.
sciencepunk | May 10, 2010NPR reports on the discovery of a bee that builds tiny, multi-coloured nests out of flower petals. The rare solitary bee Osmia avoseta creates the cocoons out of a mixture of mud, flower petals and nectar. Each case holds a single egg.
The discovery by a group of scientists in Turkey co-incided with that of another team in Iran; the two groups published their findings together in the American Museum Novitae. More pictures and info on NPR.org.
grrlscientist | March 21, 2010tags: Life, Discovery Channel, Reptiles and Amphibians, Waterfall Toad Leap from Danger, animals, mammals, birds, BBC, television, streaming video
Gail Weiswasser at the Discovery channel emailed a few days ago to tell me about TONIGHT's premiere on the Discovery Channel of BBC's LIFE, the 11-part follow up to PLANET EARTH (the most successful natural history documentary of all time). While PLANET EARTH told the story of the natural world through the framework of our planet's ecosystems and regions, LIFE takes us on a more intimate journey, introducing different animal and plant groups, using…
laelaps | March 20, 2010
The Brazilian pygmy gecko is mind-bogglingly small. As this clip from the recent BBC documentary Life illustrates, it is so minuscule that it is effectively watertight and can rest effortlessly on the surface of the water. It still amazes me that vertebrates can be that tiny.
LIFE will air starting Sunday night on the Discovery Channel (though, as it is narrated by Oprah in the US, I suggest you pick up the David Attenborough-narrated version on DVD instead).
grrlscientist | March 20, 2010tags: Life, Discovery Channel, Reptiles and Amphibians, Komodo Dragons Hunt Buffalo, animals, mammals, birds, BBC, television, streaming video
Gail Weiswasser at the Discovery channel emailed a few days ago to tell me about the upcoming March 21 premiere on the Discovery Channel of BBC's LIFE, the 11-part follow up to PLANET EARTH (the most successful natural history documentary of all time). While PLANET EARTH told the story of the natural world through the framework of our planet's ecosystems and regions, LIFE takes us on a more intimate journey, introducing different animal and plant…
cevans | March 19, 2010
I'm flying out to New York City on Sunday to participate in the very exciting BRAINWAVE series at the Rubin Museum of Art. BRAINWAVE, which is in its third year, brings thinkers from different disciplines to sit down with scientists to wrap their (and our) minds around the things that matter. Past pairings include Composer Philip Glass and astronomer Greg Laughlin, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and physicist Brian Greene, and performance artist Laurie Anderson with astrophysicist Janna Levin. Needless to say, it's a fascinating series, and I'm honored to be involved.
I'll be talking with…
grrlscientist | March 19, 2010tags: Life, Discovery Channel, BBC, Challenges of Life, Stalk-Eyed Fly, animals, mammals, birds, television, streaming video
Gail Weiswasser at the Discovery channel emailed a few days ago to tell me about the upcoming March 21 premiere of BBC's LIFE on the Discovery Channel. LIFE is the 11-part follow up to PLANET EARTH (the most successful natural history documentary of all time). While PLANET EARTH told the story of the natural world through the framework of our planet's ecosystems and regions, LIFE takes us on a more intimate journey, introducing different animal and plant groups, using…
grrlscientist | March 18, 2010tags: Life, Discovery Channel, Challenges of Life, Cheetas Hunting Ostrich, animals, mammals, birds, television, BBC, streaming video
Gail Weiswasser at the Discovery Channel emailed a few days ago to tell me about the upcoming March 21 premiere of BBC's LIFE, the 11-part follow up to PLANET EARTH (the most successful natural history documentary of all time). While PLANET EARTH told the story of the natural world through the framework of our planet's ecosystems and regions, LIFE takes us on a more intimate journey, introducing different animal and plant groups, using the latest in HD filming…
cevans | February 25, 2010
The Evolution of Life in 60 Seconds is an experiment in scale: by condensing 4.6 billion years of history into a minute, the video serves as a self-contained timepiece. Like a specialized clock, it gives a sense of perspective. Every eventâ--âfrom the formation of the Earth, to the Cambrian Explosion, to the evolution of mice and squirrelsâ--âis proportionate to every other, displaying humankind as a blip, almost indiscernible in the layered course of history. This is useful, largely, for the sake of humility.
Each event in the Evolution of Life fades gradually over the course of the minute…
laelaps | February 25, 2010
When it comes to nature documentaries the BBC's natural history unit is the best of the best. Over and over again they have produced top-notch programming, and their new multi-part series Life is perhaps the best I have ever seen. The series contains some familiar moments, such as a sengi running down its carefully-groomed pathways, but the bulk of the series consists of vignettes that I have never seen on screen before. One of the most compelling is the story of the slow death of a water buffalo at the jaws of a horde of patient Komodo dragons, a portion of which I have posted above.
I know…
grrlscientist | September 6, 2009tags: nature, natural selection, evolution, The Tree of Life, BBC One, David Attenborough, streaming video
This streaming video is a beautiful animated clip describing the Tree of Life. Evolution shows how life diverged into the myriad life forms that we see today, and that we know existed in eons past. "The Tree of Life" was part of Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, which was broadcast on BBC1 on Sunday 1 February 2009. Narrated by the incomparable David Attenborough (you lucky, Brits, I am so jealous). [Although, I am told you can supposedly download it for free]. If you can, watch this…
edyong | May 17, 2009
Say the word iceberg, and most people are likely to free-associate it with 'Titanic'. Thanks to James Cameron (and, well, history too), the iceberg now has a reputation as an cold murderous force of nature, sinking both ships and Leonardo DiCaprio. But a new study shows that icebergs are not harbingers of death but hotspots of life.
In the late 1980s, about 200,000 icebergs roamed across the Southern Ocean. They range in size from puny 'growlers', less than a metre long, to massive blocks of ice, larger than some small countries.
They may be inert frozen lumps, but icebergs are secretly in…
grrlscientist | December 7, 2008tags: birds, hatching chick, streaming video
This is a really interesting little video that features a chick hatching out of its egg. It also includes some really fun banjo playing as background music [1:17]
cevans | November 16, 2008
Science, as a discipline, is driven by the desire to understand everything. The immensity of such a project necessitates that science be undertaken not by one group of men and women in one time, but all men and women for all time. However, the final goal always eludes us: to understand this, we must first understand this, but to understand that, we must understand this, ad infinitum. In fact, the very notion of there being a final point in science has become so abstract as to be almost irrelevant; the more we know, the more we know that we do not know, and the end of the game is nowhere to…
esiegel | May 23, 2008Brought to you by Max Cannon, creator of Red Meat and also the dude who helps run the awesome independent Loft Cinema here in Tucson:
Hilarious...
Also, if you haven't caught it yet, don't forget to check out this week's Carnival of Space, where we have an entry about actually seeing a supernova go off.
esiegel | May 14, 2008Good news for science from... the Vatican? No joke. Father Gabriel Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory and chief astronomer for the Pope, has just issued a public statement stating the following things:
Intelligent beings could exist in outer space.
Life on Mars cannot be ruled out.
The search for extraterrestrial life does not contradict belief in God.
Next year, the Vatican is organizing a conference to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin.
Whoa. And whoa's wobbly cousin, woah. Did I just step into the 21st century? After my post last week on what Americans don'…
chaoticutopia | May 11, 2008Let’s finish this weekend of red, orange, and yellow, with some flowers for Mom. And a honeybee. The blossoms are more pink than red, but the bee definitely has the orange/yellow look going for it.
Moms like bees, right? Consider this: if it wasn’t for the bees, fertilizing everything from almond and cherry trees to rose blossoms, Mother’s Day gifts would be pretty lame--no flower bouquets, no boxes of fancy filled chocolates. See? Moms love bees... at least indirectly.
So, here are some flowers for Mom... with a bee:
Honeybee Pollinating a Prairie Fire Crabapple Blossom
Personally (…
esiegel | May 7, 2008The American Association of Physics Teachers just published a study of 1,000 likely U.S. voters about science, religion, evolution, and creationism. The results are frightening. Here are some of the "highlights" of their study:
38% of Americans are in favor of the teaching of religion in public school science classrooms.
65% of Americans do not think that it is an important science goal to understand the origin and diversity of biological life on Earth.
47% of Americans believe that the earliest humans lived at the same time as the dinosaurs.
21% of Americans do not believe that the…
esiegel | April 27, 2008Dear Reader(s):
This is Ethan, and I'm writing this to you to let you know that I owe you an apology. I have gotten so excited with the idea of bringing the story of the Universe to you -- to tell you how we got from the birth of the Universe to the present day, to tell you what the world, galaxy, and Universe is like and how it got to be that way -- that I've gotten carried away.
You deserve the story, because it's wonderful and beautiful. You deserve the story, because it's something specialized and complicated, and it's something that I happen to have studied, hard, for the last seven…
esiegel | April 17, 2008What is the future of this website? I'm going to be creating videos for the web about the Universe. I'll be answering questions ranging from what the Universe is like today to how it got to be that way. I'm going to address every step that we know of, from the Big Bang up to the present day.
And I'm going to do it naturally, by telling the story as the Universe tells it directly to us. I call this project Genesis. Check out the teaser trailer below, and tell your friends, because this is coming in January.