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New facets of Martin Puryear's inspiration explored in ‘Multiple Dimensions' at American Art

Martin Puryear, “Drawing for Untitled,” 2009, about 2009, compressed charcoal on paper, Courtesy of the artist. © Martin Puryear, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

From the repetition of vaguely familiar human shapes to his copious use of warm-colored woods and matte metals, Martin Puryear's sculptures are known for their high attention to craft and allusions to a common human experience.

Yet rarely has this Washington, D.C. native's art been displayed as a collection and never has it been shown together with the paper-based prints and sketches he still produces as part of his creative process.

Martin Puryear, “Maquette for Bearing Witness,” 1994, pine, Courtesy of the artist. © Martin Puryear, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery. (Photography by Jamie Stukenberg, Professional Graphics)

A new exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) changes that dynamic, covering 50 years of the artist's labors for the first time in a way that gives a glimpse into his artistic approach and influences.

The Smithsonian is the final venue of “Martin Puryear: Multiple Dimensions,” an exhibition that opened first at its organizing museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and then the Morgan Library and Museum in New York.

For SAAM, Karen Lemmey, the museum's curator of sculpture, chose to focus on the importance of Puryear's public art. Several of Puryear's most recent works happen to be public sculptures—“Big Bling” in New York's Madison Square Park, “Memorial to Slavery” commissioned by Brown University, and a monument for the Deichman Library in Oslo. All three, along with his older monument “Bearing Witness” for Federal Triangle, are referenced in the exhibition at SAAM.

Puryear's maquettes, which are small-scale models of a full-sized work, and drawings for “these monumental outdoor sculptures are never just preparatory models. Each one stands alone as a finished artwork while adding to our understanding of his creative process,” Lemmey says. “Seeing these models and drawings together in our exhibition gives us an opportunity to recognize continuities in commissions he completed at different times for sites around the world. His work often invites thought and discourse on important civic concerns, and what better place to do this than through public sculpture?”

Martin Puryear, “Maquette for Big Bling,” 2014, birch, plywood, maple, and 22k gold leaf, Courtesy of the artist. © Martin Puryear, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery. (Photograph by Jamie Stukenberg, Professional Graphics)

Puryear may be best known in his hometown of Washington, D.C. for “Bearing Witness,” a 40-foot-tall sculpture made of panels of hammered bronze standing guard outside the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center. The exhibition features maquettes and drawings for several of his major outdoor public sculptures, including “Bearing Witness,” and the artist's new 40-foot-tall “Big Bling,” which debuted May 16 in Madison Square Park in New York City. That colossal work features a large, gold-leaf shackle and is on display throughout 2016.

Another large-scale work featured in the exhibition is “Vessel,” created from curving ship-sized timbers.

Puryear earned his undergraduate degree in fine arts at Catholic University in 1963, then joined the Peace Corps as a volunteer in Sierra Leone from 1964 to 1966. Without a camera in Sierra Leone, Puryear instead produced faithful drawings of villages and their inhabitants, which he sent along with letters home to family.

“For someone who is known for his public monuments, this exhibition is a rare opportunity to see some early drawings from the artist's personal collection made while he was in Sierra Leone, works he created for himself or for his family,” Lemmey says.

After the Peace Corps, Puryear began his training at the Swedish Royal Academy of Art in Stockholm. His works shift to become less of a mirror, and more of a lens through which he projects experiences in a way that evokes his memories and encounters.

“These prints show Puryear's origins before he became a sculptor,” says Joann Moser, who helped bring the exhibition to SAAM before she retired as the museum's senior curator of graphic arts and deputy chief curator. Despite a fire in 1977 that damaged or destroyed many of his early works, the pieces that survive show how some of Puryear's ideas got started.

“Bower,” a bent-wood object from SAAM's collection on display only in Washington, echoes the shape of a Phrygian cap, a garment that dates from the fourth century B.C. that became popularized as a symbol of liberty during the French and American revolutions and at times was also a symbol adopted by abolitionists. While “Bower” was made in 1980, Puryear revisited the shape again nearly 20 years later, from 2001 to 2003, on three untitled prints, and again in 2012.

“This exhibition provides an exciting look at the persistence and evolution of ideas in Puryear's work going back to the early 1960s,” Lemmey says. “I am particularly delighted to see ‘Bower,' one of Puryear's acknowledged masterpieces from the museum's collection, situated with works on paper from other collections so we can see how Puryear returned to latticework forms and ideas about shelter across the decades.”

Another form repeated often throughout Puryear's art is a kidney-shaped ellipse, sometimes looking more like a human head and neck, sometimes more like a teardrop. “Bearing Witness” and “Vessel” both recall this shape, as does “Big Bling” and a smaller, all-iron work, “Shackled,” where the shape appears as a negative space.

Martin Puryear, “Vessel,” 19972002, eastern white pine, mesh, and tar, Courtesy of the artist. © Martin Puryear, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Through the familiarity of the forms and materials he uses, Puryear aims to open up discourse about the meaning of the shapes he uses without dictating any concrete meaning.

“I tend not to tell people what they're looking at when they're in the presence of my work,” Puryear said at the dedication of his Madison Square Park piece. “I trust people's eyes. I trust their imagination. I trust my work to declare itself to the world.”

“Martin Puryear: Multiple Dimensions” is on view through Sept. 5, 2016.

The post New facets of Martin Puryear's inspiration explored in ‘Multiple Dimensions' at American Art appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

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Sustainable Fisheries: OneHealth of Future Food

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As a benefit to human and environmental health, sustainable and not linear fisheries must be employed to feed a shrinking world. We must utilize economic stimulus, more regulation in developing world fisheries, and a higher barrier to entry for susceptible categories of farm raised fish to preserve sea protein as a cornerstone of survival. The window to act lies squarely in our laps despite the recourse, potentially catastrophic, being primed for adoption by our kids.

2.9 Billion people around the Globe are reliant on seafood as a main source of nourishment. Now, fished at unmitigated scale - the same practices used in harvesting this crop from once bountiful Oceans are depleting stocks and biodiversity at an alarming rate. The backlash to this will have drastic impact on us in the United States whether you like it or not! This production model of food is not much different than the hunter-and-gather approach employed by our a primal ancestors. Not many give thought as they wolf down their sashimi that fishing the Oceans has seen limited large scale systems innovation, and is based the falsehood that Oceans are an inexhaustible resource. Modern fishing technologies focus on easier and faster methods to take, but not replenish a required ecosystem balance that depleting practices have greatly disrupted.

VIDEO: Sustainable Fisheries: Part 1

Overexploitation is a constant for in global fisheries for how long? In 2012, 80 million tons of sea protein was landed, and but a fraction was replenished through our assistance. The solution is pretty straightforward - despite being a monumental task. We must partake in being part of natural order by giving back to the sea simply so it can continue to sustain our species, and more broadly, to maintain a stable environment. Long horizon economics present a pretty clear value proposition. And, similarly to addressing climate change and sea level rise (directly correlated initiatives to sustainable fisheries), if we do not heed the warnings we're destined catastrophic backlash of epic proportion. But, there's opportunity to better connect immediate impact to economic stimulus through focus on a Blue economy streamlined in the developed world. The only future for future fisheries is a more sustainable one, and that must now be instigated by us; it's mankind's duty and opportunity.

In 2010, a significant threshold was crossed when more than 50% of total fish consumed was farm raised. With total volumes doubling since the mid-90s - the virtue of this is a bit of a falsehood often used to justify broader unsustainable methods in all sea protein production. A large portion of farm-raised come from pillaging natural fish stocks of young and/or roe without replenishment with diverse ecological footprint. What's proving worse, the vast majority of feedstuff provided to these farm raised fish, especially those higher on the food chain, come from detrimental fishing practice with no mind of sustainable practice in feeding carnivore, omnivore or herbivore alike. Furthermore, the vast majority of fisheries and hatcheries farm raising sea proteins employ deplorable and unhealthy living conditions for the fish they raise.

VIDEO: Sustainable Fisheries: Part 2

Equivalent to terrestrial animal CAFO (feedlot environments) conditions, fish live in disease infested waters teeming fecal matter and no biomimetic method of cleaning. Instead of evolving the system to make living conditions better and healthier for the animals - fisheries and material providers have instead focused on using antibiotics or genetic engineering to build resistance to current unhealthy farm environments. Similar to the concept of OneHealth discussed in the Resilient Agriculture section, even if the inhumane treatment of fish is not top on your priority list - since we are what we eat - you should care about the integrity of the stock, and equally how that protein is raised as it has immediate impact on your wellbeing.

Embracing our mounting waste-streams and that of the imprint on planetary boundaries through changing shortcut practices putting us in harm's way in the first place, we must adopt an evolution in fishery practice as a necessity. If not, markets reaching globally will lay witness to the impact of diminishing ecological capacity and environmental instability on polluted or sterilized waters. With this as an inevitable reality to be incurred within the next few decades, and probably expedited if generations to come continue with our business-as-usual approach, it's nearly impossible to call the current broadly used sea-caught and farm raised models a sound economic play.

Hailing from the Northeast United States, I live in a bellwether of global sustainable fisheries. But even there, where only 10% of seafood consumed in the region comes from local waters, there's immediate opportunity to decommoditize sea proteins coming from the thriving waters of the North Atlantic. Ripe and ready for new business and technology, focus on a better and future Blue Economy that services the 35mm populous of New England and New York already increasingly engaged in the provenance of the food they consume is a pragmatic model to gain more attention to the importance of sustainable fisheries. Methods of sharing best practices and developing greater mindshare through economic development affords insight in dealing with the inevitability on a shared horizon. Effectively, how we sustain ourselves on a shrinking planet needs numerous perspectives, but creative economic drivers now will have broad impact on future sustainable seafood production continuing to feed half the world's population.

www.AaronNiederhelman.com

Photo credits: Melissa DiPalma and Byron Niederhelman

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Brexit Of Champions: If You Don't Set The Menu, You're On The Menu
Our poor British comrades, caught between nostalgia and exasperation, democracy and inequity (sound familiar?). The Brexit vote shows why politicians who call for these referendums try to avoid actually holding them: people tend to see it as a chance to punish the otherwise unaccountable political class. The new global normal of mass migrations, debt, low wages, stagnant economies and the steady hemorrhaging of the middle class might be easier for voters to bear if the pain was not accompanied by the greatest concentration of wealth in the history of capitalism.

The masses are pissed off.

Ever since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher teamed up to destroy our public sphere, liberals and conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic have doggedly obeyed the neoliberal measures called for by the massive monopolies controlling the world's "free trade." This has earned politicians the distrust and disgust of most of the citizenry, pretty much everywhere. Far right parties are on the rise, offering up an intoxicating cocktail of bigotry and nationalism to blunt the hangover from a three decade binge on globalization. The day of the Brexit, Donald Trump channeled Europe's far-right discourse:

People want to take their country back. They want to have independence, in a sense. You see it with Europe, all over Europe. You're going to have more... many other cases where they want to take their borders back, they want to take their monetary back, they want to take a lot of things back. They want to be able to have a country again. So I think you're going to have this happen more and more... I think it's happening in the United States.

Trump supporters tend to see career politicians and big government as keeping America from being "great again." Those supporting Bernie Sanders see the entire plutocracy as the problem. Clinton's supporters are mostly scared of Trump.

What does all this men for the food insecurity now affecting 1 in 7 people?

Because the root cause of hunger and food insecurity is poverty it means that the candidate that has the most coherent anti-poverty platform will do the most to end hunger in the richest, most productive country in the world. Of course, neither Trump, Bernie nor Hillary is campaigning on a pro-poverty platform. But how will their policies (or lack of them) affect the poor?

For a Trump presidency, the indicator is Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan. Despite his bluster, it is very unlikely that Donald Trump has the congressional connections or political acumen to do anything structurally original once he's in the White House. Even if Trump actually does convince the Mexican government to pay for a Great Wall, the policy default will be Ryan, whose regressive views on welfare, healthcare and the poor are well known. Hillary has, well, a spotty record on these issues. While she is backing away now, her support for free trade agreements has done little to support local economies. It is unlikely she will advance a pro-poverty agenda if it means compromising her Wall Street connections. Bernie Sanders is clearly pro-poor and anti-rich. However, none of the candidates has specifically addressed the issue of hunger or food.

There is a campaign to address the plight of the US's food insecure called Plate of the Union that petitions the next president to ensure healthy food access to all people living in the US. While the petition does not indicate what specific food policies the president should pursue--nor does it indicate which policies are pro-poor--it is an important initiative because it calls for citizens to engage politically in the food system. Why is this important?

Because despite its stridence, the populism of the far right is essentially against politics--thus leaving our society open to even more manipulation by the plutocracy. If, we want to end hunger, political engagement is essential. This is true for a Trump presidency (that will greatly increase the power of Speaker of the House Paul Ryan), or a Clinton presidency (that will require enormous pressure to keep her compass firmly on the poor rather than on Wall Street). Because Sanders is basically out of the running, his value is in politicizing the issues--especially poverty and food.

Unless we "set the menu" by engaging politically to change our food system, we will find ourselves on the menu of either the regressive politics of the far right or the neoliberal politics of the established Democratic party. Let the Brexit be warning.

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Juno, Jupiter And The Battery Dude
** HOO-RAY! JUNO ARRIVING AT JUPITER ON JULY 4th !!! **

What's all the jubilation about? Well, for one of the last people who touched the little spaceship's battery before it left the earth in 2011, it's a time for joyous celebration. That would be Mike Surline, a guy who knows batteries. He makes, breaks and tests them. Batteries are the power that makes rocket science go. Without the best-tested batteries, space vehicles would not be able to sustain long missions, like Juno's.

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Arthur C. Clarke (author of 2001: A Space Odyssey) said: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Well, what is a battery? People may not consider the skills and time it takes to create one, or they may think of a battery as a vague, magic box. If the latter, Clarke might have likened Mike to a magician.

He performs his magic in a giant laboratory of the highest hi-tech nature. It's got all the bells & whistles and electronic gadgets that any battery guy or gal could wish for, including environmental test chambers, cabling, coolers, and crane operations. For Mike, it's like Christmas every day, opening up his boxes of tinker-toy tricks.

On Independence Day while Americans are enjoying barbecues and fireworks, Juno - the spacecraft designed by NASA and Lockheed Martin Corporation - will insert itself into polar orbit to study the composition, gravity and magnetic field of the solar system's largest planet. Juno's purpose is to uncover secrets about Jupiter's formation, including whether it has a rocky core, the amount of water present in the atmosphere, how its mass is distributed, and its ferocious winds. Mike and his band of battery experts will be looking forward to celebrating Juno as another success story in their team's long list.

A multi-million dollar spacecraft without battery power is simply several hundred pounds of junk. Today's interplanetary spacecraft require between roughly 300 watts and 2.5 kW of electrical power to supply all the computers, radio transmitters and receivers, motors, valves, thrusters, data storage devices, instruments, hosts of sensors and other devices. The batteries must weigh as little as possible and be able to sustain varying temperature extremes. So they're packed in boxes made of beryllium, a lightweight metal used in cell phones and aircraft.

Juno, on its 5-year cruise to Jupiter, will travel nearly two billion miles. "Mike's battery" will power the orbit insertion burn, on July 4th, to slow the spacecraft enough to allow capture into the planet's gravity. It will do two 53-day orbits before a subsequent burn in October that will lower it into a 14-day polar orbit.

In the polar orbit, the battery will power the infrared and microwave instrumentation to measure thermal radiation emanating from Jupiter's atmosphere. From this data, combined with that from previous missions, will come insight into the mysteries of the planet's origins.

Because Jupiter lacks a solid surface, Juno won't end up there, to live for eternity like a flag planted on the moon. It will be de-orbited and burned up in Jupiter's outer atmosphere to avoid any contamination, or impact with one of Jupiter's moons. However, Mike did admit that one of his batteries - he wouldn't say which - is now (or will be) out there in space somewhere, forever, with this message carved inside the box: "MIKE WAS HERE". How utterly cool is that?

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In addition to Juno, Mike has worked on the Mars Odyssey, Phoenix, Orion, Space-Based Infrared Radar, Joint Strike Fighter Raptor, Advanced High-Frequency and other military satellite programs. Although Juno was one of his most challenging, he said his favorite was the Odyssey - a Mars lander, one of the first to test for water on the Red Planet. In 2001 he worked on its power sequencer board, wiring components every day for nine months - and it worked, the very first time. Amazing!

Mike isn't the only rocket scientist in his family, a bunch of space cadets. His father worked as a manager on Titan rocket programs, the Space Shuttle, and before that, the first Mars lander, the Viking. His mother worked on satellite programs, warfighter tactical communications and space defense studies. Mike's step-father was a computer engineer on the first Apollo mission to the moon, as well as Venus Radar Mapper, and other rocketry and planetary science projects, including Viking. His uncle developed Orion rocket propulsion hardware and parts of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. His brother-in-law supported enterprise data systems. Maybe the whole family is extra-terrestrial and they're trying to 'go home'.

Mike's mom said he started young in electronics, always tinkering in his room with wires and tiny radio or flashlight batteries. She would wake up in the night and see his light on and knew he was trying out some new experiment. Mom wished he would sleep more, like other boys, but didn't think much about his obsession - until he came home from high school one day saying a fellow student in auto mechanics had blown off a finger and lost an eye in an exploding battery accident. Because of that, she doesn't worry much about him now that he works with more complex batteries. He learned great appreciation and respect for battery safety.

Mike configures and tests all kinds, but primarily lithium batteries. I asked him why lithium ion batteries are so ubiquitous now. He said: "They're lighter, low maintenance, small, with high-energy density power that delivers more payload." Yes, we all need to deliver more payload - in our rockets, planes, cars, phones, computers, drones and personal robots!

Batteries were invented in 1800, and they're still a bit mysterious. They have their own "charisma" and eccentricities. Building these magic boxes of energy requires a person with a passion for detail and a brave soul, one who understands them. The payoff? That person will be thrilled to gaze into outer space and know their work is there, helping discover answers about our Last Frontier. Mike is all these things, including being a single parent of two boys for much of his demanding career. His mother is very proud of him, The Battery Dude.

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Breaking News: Perdue Announces Major Reforms For chickens; Progress Spotlights Poultry Problems, Solutions
As we begin our launch of a major campaign to improve the lives of chickens raised for meat, I'm happy to report one of the biggest brand names in the world of chicken production is announcing promising reforms.

The HSUS has helped set veal crates, gestation crates, and battery cages on a trajectory toward extinction in the United States, through our corporate, legislative, litigation, and investigative efforts (which are partly chronicled in a feature piece this week in CQ Roll Call and also in Sunday's column by Rekha Basu in the Des Moines Register). While we're keeping the heat on to ensure the finality of outcomes (including through our Massachusetts ballot measure), many are asking, "What's next for corporate animal welfare improvements?"

The answer is clear: improving the lives of chickens in meat production. And today marks a pivotal moment in the early stages of our making that issue top-of-mind for the food industry: Perdue, the country's fourth-largest poultry producer, has announced a series of meaningful and precedent-setting reforms to improve the lives of the roughly 700 million birds it raises and slaughters each year.

According to its new policy, which came after a series of meetings we had with the company, Perdue will:

◾switch all its slaughterhouses away from shackling live animals and toward controlled atmosphere stunning -- a method of slaughter long recognized by scientists and advocates alike as being far less cruel;
◾start installing windows to provide birds natural light and add enrichment (like hay bales and perches);
◾start testing slower-growing birds (typical growth occurs so fast that it causes immense suffering); and
◾start providing more space per bird.

We'll continue to work with Perdue toward ensuring the company adds timelines for accomplishing these important steps. Coupled with Whole Foods' and Bon Appétit Management Company's announcements earlier this year on this topic, Perdue's decision shows even more clearly that while the poultry industry needs much reform, change on this issue is gathering momentum.

It also shows how key actors within animal agriculture and animal protection can join together to make progress on big problems -- even when those involved are former foes. The HSUS previously sued Perdue for false labeling around animal welfare claims and yet the company now has positioned itself at the head of the pack on the very issue we battled on. Perdue certainly deserves credit for the being first major company to begin addressing these issues, as do Compassion in World Farming and Mercy For Animals, for their work with us and Perdue on this policy.

We're now calling on all other major poultry producers -- including Tyson, Pilgrim's Pride, and Sanderson Farms -- to follow Perdue's lead and take steps to address these key issues. Change for the birds cannot come soon enough.

Will other producers try and fight the future? Or will they be proactive in creating policies like Perdue's that mirror the broad increase in calls for a more morally alert and improved food system? Whichever path they decide on, we'll be there to propel and demand change for the better. With nine billion chickens caught up each year in food production in our country, this is perhaps one of the most important things we can do to reduce animal suffering.

This article first appeared on Wayne Pacelle's blog, A Humane Nation.

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It's Not Easy Being -- Or Using -- Green

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Yesterday, I was part of an experiment -- one that I did not like.

I picked up a salad at Sweet Green, and was told when I went to pay that they didn't take cash. No cash? It's not like I was trying to use Pounds Sterling before their value declines post Brexit; these were good ol' American dollars. Regardless of the fact that it says right on the money that "this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private," at Sweet Green, it wouldn't get me a salad. Money is no good there.

Being the activist consumer that I am, I promptly tweeted about this shift in policy. I found a little press coverage on this, but not the groundswell of WTF coverage that I expected. Sweet Green tweeted back that they "traded cash for quicker lines." If you've left your plastic at home and haven't embraced Apple Pay yet, that line will grind to a halt, but at least a woman named Jen had the courtesy to reply to me.

HT: @SweetGreen.

Then I heard from someone in Sweet Green's Operations department -- turns out, she's overseeing the cashless pilot and was interested in my feedback. Could we talk?

I was impressed that she reached out to me. "I speak with every customer that provides feedback on the cashless pilot," she told me. Impressive.

There's more to the no-cash story than meets the eye. Sweet Green strives to "think sustainably" as a key element of its culture. This isn't about greenbacks; it's about going green. Giving up cash means giving up multiple armored-car pick-ups each week at restaurants across the country. This is a legitimate exercise about lowering Sweet Green's carbon footprint and making a better, cleaner world. It's about being "forward thinking."

No wonder The Atlantic called Sweet Green the ultimate millennial brand -- the company lives its values, well beyond mere marketing lip service. And maybe millennials don't carry cash -- using cash must be a sign of age, like still putting two spaces after a period.

If I have to give up cash to make life easier for some corporate overlord, that's something I'll rebel against. But, could I give up cash to make a greener world? Sure I could.

I applaud Sweet Green for thinking creatively and bringing an innovative approach to its Green efforts. The company is setting the pace that other restaurants will likely follow. And, in a rare and rapid turnabout, I'm warming up to the idea of going cashless -- sure beats global warming caused by the ease of a few bucks.

Nice job, Sweet Green -- for reaching out to me, for trying something new, for living your commitment to good corporate citizenship. On the company website, it says "We exist to create experiences where passion and purpose come together." In this instance, they succeeded in accomplishing that, and in flipping my skepticism for support. A tall order, indeed.

Follow me @JosefBlumenfeld

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Complete Gardening Guide For First Time Gardeners
So, one fine morning you decided to set up a garden on your own. To do so you are now looking for some good gardening tips to start with. Gardening is not all about growing plants. If you don't know how to nourish your plants then they can die. You certainly don't want to pour some cold water on your hard work. It is not that gardening is very tough. Gardening can be most rewarding if you do it right.

If you want to maintain good garden, then you should follow some tips. Gardening is not a simple task. You should have gardening as a hobby so that you can maintain garden in best mannerism. You need to invest your time on gardening for few hours daily in such a way that you can use some new methods to improve their presence or growth. When you follow several methods for their growth, you will be resulted in good garden. When you bring down best implementation to improve the garden's presence, you can see them and their growth in impressive way. Here are few easy but effective tips for you to begin with your new hobby.

Tips To Maintain Your Garden:

Check the type of soil: Soil is the important part of gardening. Different kinds of soil grow different plants. You should test the type of soil of your garden so that you can grow suitable plants there. If you know that the soil is clay soil or silty soil then you can plan your gardening likewise. You can use a soil test kit to test the soil as well.

Choosing plants for garden: After knowing the soil type, you need to decide the kinds of plant you want to grow. If you love flowers to beautify your garden then you can go for perennials. Plants like Garden phlox, Blue Lobelia, Virginia Blue Bells are few excellent perennials to grow in gardens. You can also grow vegetables in your garden to make it more useful for your kitchen. It is best start with easy to harvest vegetable plants like tomato, carrot, beans, radish, and few more salad greens like Lettuce.

Prepare a layout: You should have good plan to grow a good plan. You need to select the space for gardening; buy pots, plants or seeds, pots, equipments, fertilizers, and other ingredients. One should know which place is suitable for which plant. To know all these important facts you should read and research to shape up your thoughts. Keep a scrapbook or a simple notebook to take notes. This will help you to prepare a plan.

Create No Stick Shovel: Shovel is a great tool for gardening. You can dig soil or can move stuffs using it. A Non stick shovel is very easy to use. Spray your favorite garden shovel with a silicone lubricant to make it a non stick one. A good coating will make any kind of soil right off the shovel.

Lighten Heavy Pots: You should take step to reduce the strain. When you are using pots, you can fill pots as one third to one half full with peanuts. You should ensure to place a piece of landscape fabric on the top of packing peanuts and then layer on your potting soil. In order to reduce weight of pot further, you can use potting mix with lot of vermiculite and peat miss.

Transfer Your Plants: If you are planning your next trip to local nursery, then you should line them back of your car with a plastic tarp and place a small step ladder on top of tarp. The slots between the rungs of ladder will serve as perfect compartments to protect your fragile plants during driving. You don't need to worry about spilled plants.

Easy Read Rain Gauge: You can do this trick with your rain gauge. Just use a dye and during next rainfall, the water will combine with dye and water level will obtain bright red and so they will be easy to read.

Limit Aggressive Plant: Aggressive plants grow with a rapid speed hence they are tough to control them. First of all identify them and then in order to limit their rapid growth, you should cut down the bottom with a knife.

Guide Your Root Bounded Plants: One issue associated with buying potting plants is that they will often goes bounded with their root. The problem is this will prevent water and essential nutrients from moving to leaves and also to other portion of plant. In order to solve this issue quickly, you should help the roots to go outward by using your fingers. If they are really tough, you should carefully make vertical cuts in the root ball with a knife.

Protect Your Bulbs: You should maintain bulbs by staking netting over bed of flowers. During spring season, you should remove netting in cloth and let plants grow through.

Use these tips and jump into it. Gardening is a great hobby and you should nourish this hobby for good.

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gaia

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science

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A sea slug changed my life

This underwater photo of a sea slug was captured with a close-up lens in Monterrey, Calif., by my first SCUBA instructor, Thomas Chapin circa 1985.

At 8 p.m. after a long day of work in the Houston humidity, Derek Rutavic, manager of the NASA Gulfstream-III that will head back to Greenland this fall, and I were in the back of the plane singing One Direction's "Drag Me Down" over the high frequency radio system. It was stifling hot, getting dark and we were tired and hungry.

But Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) Principal Investigator Josh Willis and Project Manager Steve Dinardo, too busy to take off their sweaty fire retardant flight suits, were troubleshooting electronics at two racks of computers, and they'd asked Rutavic to get on the headset to find out if the headset noise was interfering with the high radio frequency data signal the ocean science probes were sending back to the plane. Rutavic sat on an empty science probe container, while I lounged on one of the sofas singing along in awe of the amount of hard work this team was putting in.

We'd been up early, flown multiple test flights, worked through lunch. And all of this after days and days of maintenance, and weather delays, and more hard work after more hard work. Earlier in the day, NASA T-38 supersonic jet pilot Bill Rieke flew mind-bogglingly close to the G-III to photograph the science probe deployment and determine if the technique of launching the probes through a hole in the bottom of the plane would succeed. And yes, it did. But that success merely signaled the OMG team to continue working.

And I understood exactly why this team kept going, kept moving, kept pushing on into the evening, regardless of being tired and hot and hungry. I knew exactly why they decided to keep working on the challenge. They chose to push through because they'd found something to care about, and that's always more important than our difficulties and problems. When we focus on what we really care about, we get busy doing something, even in the face of trouble. And that's how science works.

Lessons from a sea slug

I first learned to care about the natural world around me during my junior year in college. I was in an oceanography course and we were studying sea slugs. (Yes, sea slugs.) A sea slug changed my life. Before then, I'd been, like many people, disengaged and uninterested in science. In third grade, someone came to our classroom and told us we could be the first female astronaut, and I remember thinking, "No, I couldn't, not me."

And now? Even though I have a job at NASA, I still feel like I don't belong in the world of science. I feel more comfortable around athletes and artists than I do with a bunch of Ph.D.s. Maybe it's some poorly defined stereotype that I've somehow bought into or some preconceived notion of how someone who does science is supposed to behave.

But those sea slugs taught me that I cared more about the natural world than I cared about the struggle of not fitting in or the challenge of the work. They appeared so delicate, small and defenseless, and I identified with that. They helped me feel connected. Noticing them forced me to wonder what else I'd start to notice if I slowed down enough to pay attention. And that connection to the natural world helped me stay committed to science, even when it was hard, even when there were problems, even when I felt like running away.

Sure, scientific experimentation, just like much of real life, includes problems, troubles, obstacles and difficulties almost every day. And while it's true that someone, somewhere has to troubleshoot something every step of the way, we can also be excited about the effort. The OMG team understands that problems and hard work are not the exception, they are the norm. They are part of accomplishment. And it's totally possible to thrive on these difficulties and challenges.

Look, we could be setting the world on fire right now, not by burning fossil fuels, but by our burning desire to understand our environment. Because the whole point of this experimental mission is to find out how quickly the warmer waters around Greenland are melting the second-largest ice sheet on the planet. It's major; it's dire; it's intense. It's one of the most important issues of our time.

And sitting there in the back of that plane made me think about how we, as individuals and as a society, have to find something in this world to care about. We have to find something in this world that is more important than our challenges and problems.

And you? I hope you decide to find something to care about. I hope you find something that's important enough that you're willing to push through your struggles, your fears and your problems to just do the work.

Find out more about Oceans Melting Greenland.

View and download OMG animations and graphics.

Thank you,
Laura

Oceans Melting Greenland is part of NASA Earth Expeditions, a six-month field research campaign to study regions of critical change around the world.

This post originally appeared on NASA's Earth Right Now blog.

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science

1467046936000

science

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Why Every Society Needs a Cartman
South Park is on the threshold of its 20th season: what is the source of its staying power? As with most universal human behaviors, satire can be productively understood in light of the adaptive problems faced by our ancestors--in this case, the challenges presented by cooperation. One thing that distinguishes humans as a species is the degree to which we help each other. Our ancestors didn't just hunt and gather wild foods, they brought them back to camp and shared them. This behavior ensured that a person who had a run of bad hunting luck or couldn't go foraging due to sickness or injury would still get something to eat. Our ancestors also cooperated to build shelters, raise children, provide health care, engage in trade, arrange marriages, form political alliances, and share information. By pooling their labor, they reduced their risk of dying from hunger, illness, injury, exposure, and predation. In short, humans are designed to make a living by cooperating: our survival depends on being part of a society.

Thus, it's in everyone's interest to maintain harmony among their group members. Conflict jeopardizes group cohesion because, when two members fight, others take sides, and the group may fission. Fissioning reduces the size of the cooperative network, which in turn increases risk: the smaller your cooperative network, the fewer people you can call on in time of need. In ancestral environments, smaller groups would have been more vulnerable to starvation, predation, and attack. Alas, cooperation is difficult to sustain. Inevitably, someone will put their own interests before those of others, which incites anger and fighting. Our ancestors thus needed effective means of mitigating conflict.

Enter storytelling. In modern hunter-gatherer societies and, presumably, ancient human groups, storytelling is used as a means of discouraging antisocial behavior and consequent conflict. The Trickster character is a prime example: across forager cultures, he is widely regarded as a model of bad behavior. Lazy, stingy, and gluttonous, he always wants something for nothing. He thus uses deception rather than cooperation to accomplish his ends: he fools people into to helping him, but never returns the favor. Impulsive and irresponsible, he doesn't think about the possible consequences of his actions, which often end up hurting him and others. He is also callous and incorrigible: he never learns from his mistakes, never heeds warnings, and when others suffer as a result of his rash behavior, he doesn't care. Unscrupulous and exploitative to the point of being a sociopath, he uses people and will do anything to get what he wants. In short, Trickster is unremittingly selfish: he always puts his needs before those of others, and holds himself above the rules. In so doing, he perpetually jeopardizes the security of his fellow group members, thereby destabilizing the cooperative network. He is the embodiment of behaviors that tick people off and lead to conflict.

If this sounds familiar to South Park fans, it should: Eric Cartman is a modern incarnation of the trickster. Greedy, lazy, unscrupulous, and manipulative, Cartman cares only about himself and will stop at nothing to get what he wants. So why have we tuned in for twenty years to watch him?

The answer is social sanctioning. Trickster stories discourage antisocial behaviors by vividly modeling the bad things that happen to people who engage in them. Trickster is sanctioned using a variety of tactics, chief of which is ridicule: his tricks typically backfire on him, making him an object of scorn. Although seemingly mild, this punishment packs a big punch, because in forager societies people dread public disapproval. For example, as anthropologist Frederica de Laguna notes, the Dena people "are very sensitive to what others may say . . . [and] the unwritten laws of the people are enforced through the strength of public opinion." Shaming works because it's a veiled threat: it hints that, if the behavior doesn't stop, more forceful sanctions will follow. Sterner sanctioning takes the form of ostracism: when people discover that Trickster has been free riding, they punish him by refusing to cooperate with him anymore. In extreme cases, he's kicked out of the group. Because the sanctioning tactics used against Trickster mirror those used in real life, the genre serves as a means of moral strong-arming: "straighten up and fly right, or what happened to Trickster will happen to you." In hunter-gatherer societies, expulsion from the group is a death sentence. In modern environments, it bodes a friendless existence. No one likes Cartman: he survives socially by bullying people into associating with him.

Trickster stories--and satire in general--are an important means of policing society. If the audience bears in mind the consequences of Trickster's antisocial behavior, they will be less inclined to behave inappropriately themselves. Storytelling is thus used proactively to discourage proscribed behavior and lessen the risk of conflict. It's also used post hoc to discipline those who stray. Punishing transgressors is tricky because a person confronted with his/her crime may become angry and aggressive. Storytelling enables discipline to be effected non-confrontationally by making a character rather than the wrongdoer the target of judgement. A pointed story told in a public forum enables people to criticize the transgression without revealing the identity of the transgressor, which reduces the risk of conflict. David Sedaris uses this tactic in Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk. As he explains: "There was something liberating about writing a story about a squirrel and a chipmunk because I didn't have to worry about the chipmunk coming to me and saying, 'Thanks a lot for telling the world about me and that squirrel.'" The key to satire's effectiveness as a policing tactic is humor: Trickster's schemes typically backfire on him in comical fashion. His humiliation is thus served with a heaping helping of laughter, making the pill of shame easier to swallow for the target of the story, and reminding the rest of the audience to keep their inner Cartman in check, or they too might find themselves the butt of society's joke.

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science

1467046933000

science

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THE SINGAPORE RESEARCH STORY
THE SINGAPORE RESEARCH STORY: edited by Hang Chang Chieh, Low Teck Seng, and Raj Thampuran; World Scientific Publishing, Inc. 2016

Reviewed by Don C. Reed

Disclaimer: World Scientific published one of my books, "STEM CELL BATTLES: Proposition 71 and Beyond", so I am perhaps biased on their behalf.

Question: could a small island nation, endowed with few natural resources or financial backing-- become a world leader in biomedical research?

Answer: "In little more than a decade, Singapore established a thriving biomedical industry from scratch...In 2000, it started to invest in a Biomedical Sciences initiative... by 2012, this industry had grown to more than...$24 billion (US) dollars ...."

"Many leading ...companies (including Pfizer, Abbott, GlaxoSmithKline, Lonza, MSD, Novartis, and Sanofi-Aventis) have made Singapore their global manufacturing base..."

When Singapore became independent in 1965, it was a third world country with few advantages. It could easily have been a country with cheap labor as its only edge, taken advantage of by other nations. Instead, it became a prosperous country whose population is well-educated, and with an economy based on information, science--and jobs.

Today, Singapore's unemployment rate is less than 2%.

In a series of densely-packed chapters, we see the transformation of a nation.

A key policy was a willingness to seek out information from outside experts first, and then adapt their suggestions to fit Singapore.

For instance, in 1970, an Israeli scientist, Dr. Meir Ben Zvi, offered a detailed plan to develop Singapore's "qualified scientific... personnel" by sending students overseas to study.

A civil servant, Philip Yeo, developed that concept, which he called "guppies and whales", sending out "guppies", students to learn, and bringing in "whales", international experts.

Yeo worked closely with the visionary Finance Minister Goh Keng Swee, who gave him considerable leeway.

Look anywhere in Singapore's research world, and you will see both men's fingerprints. Yeo brought change, the Finance Minister backed him up. If anyone complained, Goh Keng Swee would say "What can I do? That's Philip!"

A small but telling example: Yeo changed the name of Singapore's biomedical division, from something people could not remember, the National Science and Technology Board (NSTB) to Agency for Science, Technology and Research-- A*STAR-- because A*STAR is the top grade every student can achieve in a Singapore school.

One tragic but inspirational story concerned a brilliant young scientist, Tsao Chieh, who developed a life-threatening disease. Yeo arranged for therapy from outside Singapore to be brought in--but Tsao had an immunity to the cure itself, and died.

"Here I was, watching a young life die before my eyes," said Philip Yeo, "And there was nothing I could do..."

In 1983, Nobel laureate Dr. Sydney Brenner gave a hugely influential series of lectures about biomedicine. Goh Keng Swee arranged for those lectures, and worked to make their message become real. Working with Dr. Brenner, Philip Yeo made a list of 100 top scientists and tried to bring them to Singapore.

"The first top scientist he attracted to Singapore to be Genome Institute of Singapore's founding executive director was Dr. Edison Liu...

Remember the bird flu epidemic? Called SARS, the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, "It was a global epidemic...controlling the spread of this highly communicable disease became paramount."

Dr. Liu mobilized the scientists.

"I am calling on everyone to drop what they are doing to work on this problem.... In the morning we met with the team leaders and said, 'Okay, what are you going to do today?' At the end of the day, we met with the team leaders again and said, 'What happened today?' The gene sequencing team worked 24/7. I mean, they slept in the hallway."

Singapore developed a testing kit for SARS, and was "cited by the World Health Organization as an exemplary country in its response.

"...that experience made it obvious to all the decision-makers that their investment in the biomedical sciences was not just to get cash return in the stock market, it was (also) for national security..."
Hepatitis B? Thanks to Singaporean efforts, that condition can now be diagnosed in two days instead of two weeks.
Another biomed champion is A*STAR Chairman Lim Chuan Poh, formerly a Lieutenant General in the Singapore military.

At the agency's 20th anniversary, he said:

"...In the biomedical effort, we (built) capabilities for one big industry cluster. This was a new approach, a new strategy. That was how the research landscape changed...conceptually."

The visual reality of the "one big industry cluster" was a series of 13 incredible buildings, Biopolis and Fusionopolis, designed by one of the world's greatest architects, the late Iraqi-Brit designer Zaha Hadid.

"2016-06-25-1466856083-9201983-biopolispic.jpg"

Two million square feet of shining steel, seeming to touch the sky, but designed to both meet the needs of science and to be inviting as a living space; so that scientists could get up in the morning, have breakfast, kiss the family goodbye--and be at work in 30 minutes!

Like Biopolis, "The Singapore Research Story" is both practical and visionary: it belongs on the shelves of college, governmental, and public libraries, wherever students want to know: what can happen to a country, when science is respected.

Don C. Reed is the author of "STEM CELL BATTLES: Proposition 71 and Beyond: How Ordinary People Can Fight Back Against the Crushing Burden of Chronic Disease--with a Posthumous Foreword by Christopher Reeve".

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science

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science

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SETI, Imagining Extraterrestrial Civilizations, and War
I've often thought it interesting that when SETI scientists imagine extraterrestrial civilizations, they usually think in terms of unified worlds that have one civilization. The image is very much unlike our world, in which we have multiple civilizations that are fractured and in conflict with other societies. The Brexit event of the past couple of days is a good example of just how fractured our world is as well as representing some solid data not in support of the idea that humans are becoming increasingly unified.

When we imagine other worlds, we tend to take a distant view and create images that reflect a fictionalized, romanticized representation of life right here on Earth. Rather than fractured worlds with many civilizations like the one on which we actually live, many SETI scientists think in terms of what I call the Star Trek Imaginary, in which each world forms a civilization equivalent to a geopolitical unit on Earth. In other words, we think of alien worlds as unified political states or countries.

There is a good chance that this is an inaccurate view of civilizations on other planets, but it still may be a useful way to think about extraterrestrial intelligence if only to deconstruct our assumptions about life on other worlds. Indeed, one way to use this image is to turn it around and think about Earth from the perspective of an alien world. This makes for an interesting thought experiment.

Suppose ET planted some sort of observational device near Earth, say, 6,000 years ago. Somehow, they had noticed that there seemed to be an emerging civilization and thought it would be interesting to study how things evolved. ET doesn't have a lot of time to spend on watching Earth and the observational device isn't sensitive enough to show all the nuances of political machinations throughout human history. So the data are limited in detail. The result is a wide-angle picture of Earth throughout history that gives a general sense of what cultural evolution on Earth is like. ET will have learned quite a bit, actually, about how humans evolve and form societies over time, but a lot of the detail will be left out. They probably won't get the nitty-gritties about the Brexit.

So what would such a device tell ET? As I thought about this, I realized there would be one overwhelming image ET would get about Earth. And it's an image we here--with our close-up picture of our own history--don't usually associate with civilization on this planet.

I think what ET might conclude is that Earth has been at war for about 5,000 years--pretty much non-stop. The first war in recorded history seems to have been in Mesopotamia around 2,700 BCE between Sumer and Elam, and from the outside it might look like it never stopped. Since that time, if one were to stand back a bit from Earth, there is a pretty good chance that warfare would be the dominant feature of human civilization. There is always war going on somewhere on Earth. It ebbs and flows in intensity. Sometimes it's regional; sometimes it covers most of the planet. But it is always there and it might look like one long war from an outside perch. If you didn't know all of the political and historical details, there would be no reason to assume that our history had been an endless string of wars rather than simply one really long one.

From our perspective, this would not be a very accurate picture. Different societies have had on-and-off periods of war and peace. And we don't tend to think about our civilization(s) as being characterized by a single war lasting 5,000 years, because we understand the geopolitical details in which there have been lots of wars over that time, not just one war. But if you look at Earth from the outside and treat human societies as a civilization, then it's probably a reasonable conclusion about us. From the external--or in anthropology what we would call etic--perspective, human civilization might appear to be based on and characterized by a single war that has spanned almost 5,000 years.

This raises the importance of seeing the difference between proximate and distant perspectives and the difficulties in imagining intelligent life and civilizations on other worlds when we don't have a lot of data to work with (or in our current situation, without any data at all). SETI scientists often tend to impose their own assumptions about intelligence and civilization on imagined extraterrestrial worlds and those assumptions are shaped by ideas about the way our world is that: 1) may not be empirically accurate, and 2) are unlikely to reflect how we would look to outsiders.

The devil is in the details, and we don't have any of those, since we have no evidence of alien intelligence. But even if we do get evidence sometime, we probably won't have much detail and we will need to be very careful to avoid imposing the Star Trek Imaginary--or any other set of assumptions--on what little data we receive. Standing back and trying to imagine what our world would look like to distant outsiders is a useful way of trying to control this tendency to imagine alien others in terms of romanticized images of ourselves.

Perspective is important. It may well be that characterizing our world as being at war for 5,000 years is accurate, but it isn't how we see ourselves and that, too, is an important piece of data about humans. Recognizing the potential disjuncture between how we see ourselves and how others might see us is a key component of trying to deflect, to the extent possible, our tendencies to infuse assumptions about intelligence and civilization drawn from our proximate understanding of and imagination about life on Earth into our speculations about intelligent life on other worlds.

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science

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science

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Weekend Roundup: When Politics Fails, Look to Unifiers Like Pope Francis and Yo-Yo Ma
When politics divides instead of unites, walls off instead of embraces, what, or who, can bind fractured societies? Spiritual authority and the arts step into the breach when political leaders fail.

Pope Francis has become, in effect, the planet's pastor and reconciler-in-chief, washing the feet of the poor and incarcerated, taking in refugees at the Vatican, meeting with Muslim clerics, venerating China's long civilizational heritage and declaring that climate change and inequality are moral issues. Above all, his humility challenges the example of power through the power of example, exhibiting a reverence for human dignity in all its diversity.

The cellist Yo-Yo Ma is the pope's spiritual cousin in this cause, sounding the healing chord of fellowship instead of enmity. More than a musician, he, too, is a guiding spirit who rises to the challenge of a world unraveling. His Silk Road Project, started in 1998, brings "the music of strangers" -- also the title of his just-released documentary -- together to show the common humanity of diverse traditions from around the globe.

The film is about art for life's sake, as Yo-Yo Ma likes to say. It doesn't shy away from political turmoil -- the Syrian civil war and refugee camps, the Iranian Revolution, China's Cultural Revolution -- that turns the lives of musicians, like everyone else, upside down, but shows how the human spirit perseveres in the face of tribulation. As one of the musicians says in "The Music of Strangers," the Silk Road Ensemble reveals the possibility of a profound correspondence behind differences -- and where there is possibility, there is hope.

There could be no more urgent message today than this. And no one puts it better than Yo-Yo Ma himself. "To be able to put oneself in another's shoes without prejudgment is an essential skill," he once told The WorldPost. "Empathy comes when you understand something deeply through arts and literature and can thus make unexpected connections. These parallels bring you closer to things that would otherwise seem far away. Empathy is the ultimate quality that acknowledges our identity as members of one human family."

The historic rupture of the Brexit vote this week, in which the "leave" camp closely defeated the "remain" camp, typifies the split societies we see today across Europe as well as in the U.S. and elsewhere. WorldPost Fellow Jesselyn Cook outlines how immigration and the fear of losing control of borders is a core concern of British voters, a reminder that empathy is just a starting point that is only a meaningful value when matched with a realistic capacity to integrate newcomers. World Reporter Charlotte Alfred outlines what's next for the U.K. after Brexit.

Writing from Paris, Geoffroy Clavel describes how the French National Front sees the Brexit vote as proof that the European Union will, and should, "disintegrate." And, indeed, as Anne Sinclair also writes from Paris, the Brexit is likely only the first in a series of defections from the European Union. Writing from Germany, Konstantin Kuhle argues that the EU must immediately take steps to reassure voters on the continent, including moving toward direct election of the EU Commission president. Howard Fineman worries that the Brexit vote presages the victory of Trump populism in the United States. In a losing appeal to voters ahead of the referendum, Richard Branson, the Virgin entrepreneur who is in many ways the face of a globally-oriented Britain, warned that jobs and investment opportunities that depend on the link with Europe would be at risk if the U.K. left the EU.

Turning to another instance of political paralysis in another divided country, Guillermo Rodriguez reflects on the situation in Spain ahead of elections Sunday. "Spanish people are drained," he writes from Madrid. "It feels like Spain is the main character in the movie Groundhog Day: Everything starts fresh with each new round of elections."

Writing from Beirut, former MI6 agent Alastair Crooke sees all the hopeful agreements of recent months among Russia, the U.S. and Iran unwinding, particularly with respect to the Syrian cease-fire, which he now sees as having "failed." In a special series launched this week on female journalists in Afghanistan -- "Sahar Speaks" -- we profile 12 women and the challenges they've faced in that country's male-dominated culture. Writing from Bisada, Uttar Pradesh in India, Betwa Sharma chronicles the breakdown of decades of conviviality between Hindus and Muslims after a villager was lynched for allegedly slaughtering a cow.

Writing from Cape Town, South Africa, gay imam Muhsin Hendricks says that, after the Orlando massacre, it is time for Muslims to reassess their stance on sexual orientation: "The orthodox belief that homosexuality is a sin -- based on the story of Sodom and Gomorrah -- is what leads to the nuances of homophobia around the massacre in Orlando."

Writing from Vladivostok, Artyom Lukin and Rens Lee argue that Russia can play a key role alongside the U.S. and China in helping curb North Korea's nuclear program. A ruling is due soon from a tribunal under the aegis of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea on a territorial dispute over islands between the Philippines and China. China's high profile ambassador to the United Kingdom, Liu Xiaoming, argues the court has no proper jurisdiction, the issue should be resolved bilaterally and that China has no intention of "ruling the waves." Writing from Manila, Richard Javad Heydarian calls the case before the tribunal the "trial of the century." "What is at stake here," he says, "is no less than protecting global commons under the auspices of international law. The alternative is the tragedy of great power politics and the rule of the jungle in high seas."

Tensions also mounted further in the South China Sea this week when the U.S. sent two aircraft carriers to patrol the zone between China and the Philippines. Just when it is most needed, the region has lost one of its leading voices for restraint and reconciliation. Wu Jianmin, among China's most prominent senior diplomats and a partner in the Berggruen Institute's "Understanding China" dialogues, was killed this week in a car accident near Wuhan, sparking a debate over the direction of China's foreign policy.

"wu

Wu Jianmin (left) with Mohamed el-Erian (right) at the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council meeting in Paris, October, 2011. (Berggruen Institute)

"Recently, nationalism and populism have been expanding around the world, becoming a global phenomenon," Wu said in a speech on June 6. "....Nationalism has two connotations. First, love for your own country, which is not wrong. Second, exclusion of others and pushing the blame for your country's problems onto other countries. I am good, others are bad. This is problematic. ... Nationalism and populism are also very dangerous in China. Nationalism often flies under the banner of 'patriotism,' which is innocent. Populism can dress up as 'appealing on behalf of the people.' But both are very deceptive. We need to see that the essence of populism goes against reform, and the essence of nationalism goes against opening up."

Eric Olander and Cobus van Staden ask whether China's heavy investment in South Sudan is "naked imperialism in pursuit of the country's vast oil reserves or a genuine effort to bring peace to help end a brutal conflict." This amazing video was taken by a drone flying around inside a Byzantine-era church in France. These dazzling photos display the diversity of Mexico's indigenous cultures.

Writing from Tambopata, Peru, Next Gen Scientist's Aaron Pomerantz discovers a remarkable collaboration between ants and butterflies in bamboo stalks in the remote Amazon jungle. In a separate video post, he also explains something we've all wondered about: how do butterflies create color in their wings? Finally, our Singularity series this week explores how understanding human learning can make artificial intelligence smarter.

WHO WE ARE

EDITORS: Nathan Gardels, Co-Founder and Executive Advisor to the Berggruen Institute, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost. Kathleen Miles is the Executive Editor of The WorldPost. Farah Mohamed is the Managing Editor of The WorldPost. Alex Gardels and Peter Mellgard are the Associate Editors of The WorldPost. Katie Nelson is the National Editor at the Huffington Post, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPost's editorial coverage. Charlotte Alfred and Nick Robins-Early are World Reporters. Rowaida Abdelaziz is Social Media Editor.

CORRESPONDENTS: Sophia Jones in Istanbul

EDITORIAL BOARD: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Arianna Huffington, Eric Schmidt (Google Inc.), Pierre Omidyar (First Look Media) Juan Luis Cebrian (El Pais/PRISA), Walter Isaacson (Aspen Institute/TIME-CNN), John Elkann (Corriere della Sera, La Stampa), Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera), Dileep Padgaonkar (Times of India) and Yoichi Funabashi (Asahi Shimbun).

VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS: Dawn Nakagawa.

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Moises Naim (former editor of Foreign Policy), Nayan Chanda (Yale/Global; Far Eastern Economic Review) and Katherine Keating (One-On-One). Sergio Munoz Bata and Parag Khanna are Contributing Editors-At-Large.

The Asia Society and its ChinaFile, edited by Orville Schell, is our primary partner on Asia coverage. Eric X. Li and the Chunqiu Institute/Fudan University in Shanghai and Guancha.cn also provide first person voices from China. We also draw on the content of China Digital Times. Seung-yoon Lee is The WorldPost link in South Korea.

Jared Cohen of Google Ideas provides regular commentary from young thinkers, leaders and activists around the globe. Bruce Mau provides regular columns from MassiveChangeNetwork.com on the "whole mind" way of thinking. Patrick Soon-Shiong is Contributing Editor for Health and Medicine.

ADVISORY COUNCIL: Members of the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council and Council for the Future of Europe serve as the Advisory Council -- as well as regular contributors -- to the site. These include, Jacques Attali, Shaukat Aziz, Gordon Brown, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Juan Luis Cebrian, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, Francis Fukuyama, Felipe Gonzalez, John Gray, Reid Hoffman, Fred Hu, Mo Ibrahim, Alexei Kudrin, Pascal Lamy, Kishore Mahbubani, Alain Minc, Dambisa Moyo, Laura Tyson, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Raghuram Rajan, Nouriel Roubini, Nicolas Sarkozy, Eric Schmidt, Gerhard Schroeder, Peter Schwartz, Amartya Sen, Jeff Skoll, Michael Spence, Joe Stiglitz, Larry Summers, Wu Jianmin, George Yeo, Fareed Zakaria, Ernesto Zedillo, Ahmed Zewail, and Zheng Bijian.

From the Europe group, these include: Marek Belka, Tony Blair, Jacques Delors, Niall Ferguson, Anthony Giddens, Otmar Issing, Mario Monti, Robert Mundell, Peter Sutherland and Guy Verhofstadt.

MISSION STATEMENT

The WorldPost is a global media bridge that seeks to connect the world and connect the dots. Gathering together top editors and first person contributors from all corners of the planet, we aspire to be the one publication where the whole world meets.

We not only deliver breaking news from the best sources with original reportage on the ground and user-generated content; we bring the best minds and most authoritative as well as fresh and new voices together to make sense of events from a global perspective looking around, not a national perspective looking out.

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science

I like to mod by bicycle, I like to drive my bike

Nowt wrong with Theranos, except, you know, everything

Good idea, LIGO. Definitely better than throwing cans at cars from the overpass