chandrasekaran a 34 lakhs views Thanks to all posted a photo:
We really dug the Xbox One S, calling it "svelte and good-looking". The latest update to Microsoft's flagship gaming console is a very pretty box, and now we know why: Andrew Kim was part of the design team.
In case the name doesn't ring a bell, Kim is a "visual and product" designer who came to work for Microsoft after making a splash when he put together his own design concepts for the company's rebranding in 2012. After seeing his designs, the company hired him to work within their design department. His first assignment was to work on the Xbox One S, and he is currently working on the company's HoloLens project.
On his website, Kim noted that the Xbox One S was his first big project, and the design team was tasked with creating "a...
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In a few days, one of the world's largest cruise ships, the Crystal Serenity, will visit the tiny Inuit village of Ulukhaktok in northern Canada. Hundreds of passengers will be ferried to the little community, more than doubling its population of around 400. The Serenity will then raise anchor and head through the Northwest Passage to visit several more Inuit settlements before sailing to Greenland and finally New York.
It will be a massive undertaking, representing an almost tenfold increase in passenger numbers taken through the Arctic on a single vessel and it has triggered considerable controversy among Arctic experts. Inuit leaders fear that visits by giant cruise ships could overwhelm fragile communities, while others warn that the Arctic ecosystem, already suffering the effects of global warming, could be seriously damaged.
Related: Time to listen to the ice scientists about the Arctic death spiral
Continue reading...Joe Dunckley posted a photo:
London, England - July 19, 2016: The Trellick Tower housing block and Westway road flyover are reflected in the waters of the Grand Union Canal at sunset in west London.
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Lovely evening light as this 787 departs London.
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Moments from landing at Heathrow.
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Experts have long warned that America's patchwork of old and unsecured voting systems leaves votes vulnerable to tampering — and in ways that wouldn't have to involve a foreign attack.
Nearly a million embryos are in frozen storage in the U.S. Some couples feel ambivalent, even after their family is complete, so put off deciding what to do with what some call their 'maybe babies.'
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London Bridge, Portsea, Mornington Peninsula, Victoria, Australia
Larry Woods goes by the name “Mr. Sunshine,” and he shines shoes for a living. It wasn't always this way, though. “Back in the 80s, I was made,” he reminisces on his previous wealth. “My head was stuck up so high, I thought everybody had to jump for whatever I said.” After a consequential interaction on the streets, he decided it was time to change. In this short documentary, Woods tells a story about how he began to preach goodwill and kindness on the streets of Auckland, New Zealand.
This film comes to us from the Loading Docs initiative, which supports 10 filmmaking teams to create three-minute, creative documentaries that tell New Zealand stories. This year's theme is change.
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με μια βαθειά αναπνοή σε κλείνω μέσα μου
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Five effigies of the Republican nominee were installed across the US with satiricial intent that looks more like unfunny revulsion toward bodily differences
What has been seen, the saying goes, cannot be unseen, and for Indecline, a self-professed “anarchist art collective”, that was surely the point: on Thursday, the group installed five life-size effigies of Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, in five cities across the US that left nothing to the imagination.
If you have none yourself, the title helped you out. The Emperor Has No Balls, the group gleefully dubbed it, stealth-installing duplicates of the naked Trump in New York, San Francisco, Cleveland, Seattle and Los Angeles. Each lasted barely an hour before being removed, but in an era where viral image-sharing precludes the fact of actually being there, that was more than long enough. The thousands of naked Trump selfies pinging around the social mediasphere made avoiding the gruesome spectacle impossible. Naked Trump is a part of us now, a perpetual presence forever an ill-fated Google image search away.
Continue reading...Bronx Museum, New York
Aids hit America's artist community hard, and the suffering of the plague years of the 1980s is brought vividly to life in a flawed but vital exhibition
At first they called it Grid: a “gay-related immunodeficiency”, which started to appear in New York and California in 1982. That year 853 Americans, mostly gay men, died of a syndrome that President Reagan's spokesman publicly dismissed as a joke. The next year it killed 2,304 people, and then 4,251. In the year 1985, more than 5,000 Americans died from complications from Aids, while a small group of activists and artists faced down governmental, medical and public indifference. “There are,” said one exhausted volunteer, “no success stories.”
No one has a fully convincing theory as to why gay men are so overrepresented among artists, writers and performers. But we are and, in the 1980s and early 1990s, Aids scythed through the American cultural landscape, wiping out a generation of creators and inspired others to mourn, memorialize, organize and fight back. Art Aids America, an exhibition on view at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, revisits those harrowing, death-trailed years, and argues that Aids changed the course of art history, not only through its casualties but through the response it galvanized. (The show was first seen at the Tacoma Art Museum, in Washington state.) It is far from a perfect exhibition, but it is a powerful one.
Continue reading...Discworld drawings, summertime skinnydipping and Willem Dafoe's experimental film for audiences of one all in your weekly art dispatch
Dinh Q Lê The Colony
Piles and piles of poo accumulate in the Vietnamese artist's latest work, but don't worry, it's a video piece, which focuses on the historic trade in guano the fertile faeces of the Peruvian booby birds, which colonise the remote Chincha islands off Peru's south-west coast. Artangel's commission premiered at Birmingham's Ikon gallery earlier this year. Now Londoners can get a whiff too.
• 133 Rye Lane, London, 25 August-9 October.
Remains on display at the Our Buried Bones exhibition in Glasgow include those of two women 1,000 years and miles apart, from different social classes, both with evidence of poor diets
The skeletons of two women who died more than 1,000 years and miles apart, but who shared conditions which would have filled their short lives with pain, go on display in an exhibition opening in Glasgow this week.
One was a tiny teenager who died in the early 19th century, and was given a pauper's funeral in a densely packed south London cemetery reserved for what the exhibition curator, Jelena Bekvalac, called “the abject poor” including many workers in the Southwark brothels.
Related: Mass grave reveals prehistoric warfare in ancient European farming community
Continue reading...a dark-vision of altered perception, the nightmarish maze explores uncertainty, claustrophobia, visual distortion, and anxiety, amongst others.
The post claustrophobic house of mirrors debuts at dark mofo festival in tasmania appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.
Pakui Hardware
http://www.ofluxo.net/vanilla-eyes-by-pakui-hardware-mumok/
Ivana Basic
http://www.ofluxo.net/ivana-basic-and-antoine-renard-gillmeir-rech/
Discworld drawings, summertime skinnydipping and Willem Dafoe's experimental film for audiences of one all in your weekly art dispatch
Dinh Q Lê The Colony
Piles and piles of poo accumulate in the Vietnamese artist's latest work, but don't worry, it's a video piece, which focuses on the historic trade in guano the fertile faeces of the Peruvian booby birds, which colonise the remote Chincha islands off Peru's south-west coast. Artangel's commission premiered at Birmingham's Ikon gallery earlier this year. Now Londoners can get a whiff too.
• 133 Rye Lane, London, 25 August-9 October.
Simon & His Camera posted a photo:
The last remnants of some christmas lights, saw the sunset sky and had to take it quick even with a building in the way. Colours are natural.
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Mesh web weaver (Emblyna cruciata) collected in Georgian Bay Islands National Park, Ontario, Canada, and photographed at the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics (sample ID: BIOUG09833-E09; specimen record: http://www.boldsystems.org/index.php/Public_RecordView?processid=CNGBE773-14; BIN: http://www.boldsystems.org/index.php/Public_BarcodeCluster?clusteruri=BOLD:ACL5913)
Design Week: Where do you find inspiration?
Fred Gelli: Nature has been my source of inspiration since I was 19 years old. All the time, nature is trying to do more with less and I think that's the way the world needs to go.
There's a very famous Brazilian designer called Aloísio Magalhães who died 20 years ago. He designed some of our most emblematic logos, and our currency, in very simple, clean and direct forms, and was very inspiring for me.
DW: What do you think are the current trends in logo design?
FG: The design of logos is going in two directions either becoming more sensory, with movement, 3D forms and sounds, or being completely cleaned up. I like both, but the better solution is the most appropriate solution for the situation. Nowadays, everybody wants to have simple logos but that's just fashion, It's superficial.
When the International Olympic Committee saw our Paralympic logo which uses sound and movement, they wanted us to do this for the Olympic logo too but to use sound for the Olympic logo wouldn't have been appropriate. I try to find the most natural solution. The best logos are the ones which connect deeply with the soul of the business. We try to materialise this, and recreate the ideas through expressions and symbols.
DW: How do you bring a logo to life?
FG: We live in a digital world where logos mostly appear on screens. With this idea that “everything must be flat”, you can lose the capacity to convey personality, because you're using less resources. It's much more complicated to design a very simple logo, than a complex logo. I think that providing direct information is really important. Take away everything extra, and keep only what is necessary. Also remember than an identity is more than just a logo it's an attitude. This is much more subtle and complex, but getting this right will also help with brand recognition. Brands must be authentic in their relationship with people, and create an experience. That's much more important than a graphic symbol.
DW: How did you discover what the soul of the Olympic and Paralympic branding is?
FG: Before the expression, we look at brand direction. That's our compass. One of our methods was conducting loads of interviews, and incorporating design thinking into our process you don't design for someone, you design with someone. We try to delve deep into the universe of our clients. Our work is just to materialise the meanings and ideas that already exist of that brand. I don't draw a single line on a piece of paper without an idea behind it.
The Olympic and Paralympic logos are living brands. When you put something in the world, you are not its owner. Its relationship with other people is the most interesting part. You discover new meanings that you didn't imagine in your design process.
DW: How do you get around the sensitivities of creating a Paralympic logo, and make it accessible for people with disabilities?
FG: This was our first challenge. All the Paralympic logos before ours were flat and not 3D. There are so many blind athletes, and these people who have connected with a sport their entire life need to experience that identity. I decided to create something that could be experienced by everyone. We used a heart icon because everybody has a heart. We wanted to use things that people had in common, rather than things that make us different.
Something really special happened in the creative process when we invited some partially sighted people to give their opinions on the sculptural logo. One of them touched the logo, and asked what the hole was on top, where the ellipses symbol was. That was something we couldn't see, but he could, and was totally reactive. We decided to flip the symbol, solving the problem of the hole and giving us the infinite symbol we ended up with. This was exactly what we wanted to represent from the beginning this infinite energy.
DW: How did this idea carry over to the Olympic logo?
FG: We used the same strategy for the Olympic logo, by using archetypes and symbols that could be understood by everyone. The icon of people in a big hug it's so simple and has good associations of inspiration and people coming together.
DW: What would be your dream project to work on?
FG: I'd like to work for people and brands who really believe that they can change the world. This is part of my personal purpose. Each brand can be a protagonist to create a better future. For example, we worked with Natura, one of the biggest, eco-friendly cosmetics companies in Brazil. This is something that really makes a difference. I'd like to work with brands which are connected with our future, not our past.
DW: Do you have any advice for young designers?
FG: To understand that design or branding is much more than just creating beautiful stuff. It's also much more than claiming prizes. Think about how to connect with the soul of a brand, and about originality and what makes it unique from the beginning. That is much more important than following fashion. The result is part of the process you don't need to search for it, it will come. It's a little bit of a romantic view.
The post Fred Gelli on creating the Rio 2016 Olympic and Paralympic branding appeared first on Design Week.
XL-Muse's Yangzhou bookstore is inspired by classic Chinese literature
The Government is putting together a new framework of suppliers, which is worth between £1.8-3.5 million and covers creative, strategy and digital.
The re-rostering process is being run by the Crown Commercial Service and it is expected that 20 consultancies at most will be included in the new framework.
The roster is called the Campaign Solutions Framework and although it broadly calls for “advertising and marketing services”, design also falls under its banner, according to a Cabinet Office spokeswoman who confirms there is no separate design framework.
Crown Commercial Service says that the purpose of its four-year framework “is to deliver fully integrated end-to-end campaign solutions”.
As such, a range of suppliers is sought with experience in strategy development, creative for campaigns, digital marketing and social media, public relations, direct marketing and partnership marketing.
Applicants are allowed to enter as individual consultancies or as a consortium and will need to show that they can deliver “end-to-end campaigns” using their own “resources, experience and capability”.
Clients will include central government departments and their “arms length bodies and agencies”, non departmental bodies, NHS bodies and local authorities.
You can find information on how to apply here.
The post Government announces £3.5 million creative roster appeared first on Design Week.
The New York Times Company has acquired US-based design studio Fake Love, as it looks to expand its native advertising and creative services offering.
Fake Love, which specialises in creative programmes, live experiences and virtual and augmented reality, will be incorporated into the media company's existing marketing services agency, T Brand Studio.
Currently, T Brand Studio focuses largely on creating native advertising and branded content for clients including Emirates, Ford, Goldman Sachs, Philips and Toyota. It now has offices in New York and London following its initial launch in 2014.
Acquiring Fake Love will allow The New York Times' marketing arm to grow its experiential marketing, virtual reality and augmented reality capabilities, according to the company.
“We've worked with Fake Love on projects in the past and have been very impressed with their experiential and creative skills,” says Sebastian Tomich, senior vice president of advertising and innovation at The New York Times Company.
“We're now very excited to pair their capabilities with our ad products on The Times, with T Brand Studio, as we expand into producing campaigns off of The Times and into the fast-growing worlds of VR and AR.”
Fake Love is the media company's second marketing agency acquisition in six months, after buying social media marketing agency, HelloSociety, in March.
The post The New York Times acquires design studio Fake Love appeared first on Design Week.
NASA Goddard Photo and Video posted a photo:
Several thousand years ago, a star some 160,000 light-years away from us exploded, scattering stellar shrapnel across the sky. The aftermath of this energetic detonation is shown here in this striking image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3.
The exploding star was a white dwarf located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of our nearest neighboring galaxies. Around 97 percent of stars within the Milky Way that are between a tenth and eight times the mass of the sun are expected to end up as white dwarfs. These stars can face a number of different fates, one of which is to explode as supernovae, some of the brightest events ever observed in the universe. If a white dwarf is part of a binary star system, it can siphon material from a close companion. After gobbling up more than it can handle — and swelling to approximately one and a half times the size of the sun — the star becomes unstable and ignites as a Type Ia supernova.
This was the case for the supernova remnant pictured here, which is known as DEM L71. It formed when a white dwarf reached the end of its life and ripped itself apart, ejecting a superheated cloud of debris in the process. Slamming into the surrounding interstellar gas, this stellar shrapnel gradually diffused into the separate fiery filaments of material seen scattered across this skyscape.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Y. Chu
Text credit: European Space Agency
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NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA's mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA's accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency's mission.
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"Aside from the shapes of the continents, geologists had paleontological evidence that fossil plants and animals in Africa and South America were closely related, as well as unique volcanic rocks suggestive of a common spatial origin. The problem was that the broad community of earth scientists could not come up with a physical mechanism to explain how the continents could plow their way through Earth's mantle and drift apart. It seemed impossible. The missing component was plate tectonics," he says. "In a possibly similar way, we are missing something important about Mars."
"We have tended to think of Mars as being simple," observed John Grotzinger, Caltech's chair of the Division of Planetary and Geological Sciences and former Curiosity Mission project Scientist. "We once thought of the earth as being simple, too. But the more you look into it, questions come up because you're beginning to fathom the real complexity of what we see on Mars. This is a good time to go back to reevaluate all our assumptions. Something is missing somewhere."
As climatologists try to develop new atmospheric models about the Red Planet, help should be coming from the continuing explorations by Curiosity. "There are still many kilometers of Mars history to explore," says Fischer. He thinks that some of the most exciting data yet may come in the next few years as Curiosity climbs higher on Mount Sharp. "The strata will reveal Gale's early history, its story. We know there are rocks that were deposited underwater, in the lake. What is the chemistry of these rocks? That lake represented an interface between the water and the atmosphere, and should tell us important things about the environment of the time."
The mismatch between the predictions of Mars's ancient climate that arise from models developed by paleoclimatologists and indications of the planet's watery past, as interpreted by geologists, bears similarities to a century-old scientific conundrum about Earth's ancient past. At the time, geologists first began to recognize that the shapes of the continents matched each other, almost like scattered puzzle pieces, explains Grotzinger.
A lingering question surrounds the original source of the water that carried sediment into the Gale Crater Curiosity landing site (image above). For flowing water to have existed on the surface, Mars must have had a thicker atmosphere and warmer climate than has been theorized for the time frame bookending the intense geological activity in Gale Crater.
Evidence for this ancient, wetter climate exists in the rock record. However, current models of this paleoclimate—factoring in estimates of the early atmosphere's mass, composition, and the amount of energy it received from the sun—come up, quite literally, dry. Those models indicate that the atmosphere of Mars could not have sustained large quantities of liquid water.
Yet the rock record discovered at Gale Crater suggests a different scenario. "Whether it was snowfall or rain, you have geologic evidence for that moisture accumulating in the highlands of the Gale Crater rim," Grotzinger says. In the case of Gale Crater, at least some of the water was supplied by the highlands that form the crater rim, but groundwater discharge—a standard explanation to reconcile wet geologic observations with dry paleoclimatic predictions—is unlikely in this area.
"Right on the other side of Gale's northern rim are the Northern Plains. Some have made the argument that there was a northern ocean sitting out there, and that's one way to get the moisture that you need to match what we are seeing in the rocks."
Pinpointing the possible location of an ocean, however, does not help to explain how that water managed to exist as a liquid for extended periods of time on the surface.
In a new paper published October 2015 in the journal Science, the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) team presents recent results of its quest to not just follow the water but to understand where it came from, and how long it lasted on the surface of Mars so long ago.
The story that has unfolded is a wet one: Mars appears to have had a more massive atmosphere billions of years ago than it does today, with an active hydrosphere capable of storing water in long-lived lakes. The MSL team has concluded that this water helped to fill Gale Crater, the MSL rover Curiosity's landing site, with sediment deposited as layers that formed the foundation for the mountain found in the middle of the crater today.
Gale Crater, the landing site of the Mars Curiosity rover, has long been hypothesized to have once held a large standing body of water. The scientific findings from the MSL support that claim, and suggest that it may existed for millions of years — potentially long enough for life to have formed. NASA artist rendition of how the "lake" at Gale Crater on Mars may have looked millions of years ago (credit and copyright: Kevin Gill).
Curiosity has been exploring Gale Crater, which is estimated to be between 3.8 billion and 3.6 billion years old, since August 2012. In mid-September 2014, the rover reached the foothills of Aeolis Mons, a three-mile-high layered mountain nicknamed "Mount Sharp" in honor of the late Caltech geologist Robert Sharp. Curiosity has been exploring the base of the mountain since then.
"Observations from the rover suggest that a series of long-lived streams and lakes existed at some point between 3.8 billion to 3.3 billion years ago, delivering sediment that slowly built up the lower layers of Mount Sharp," says Ashwin Vasavada (PhD '98), MSL project scientist. "However, this series of long-lived lakes is not predicted by existing models of the ancient climate of Mars, which struggle to get temperatures above freezing," he says.
This mismatch between the predictions of Mars's ancient climate that arise from models developed by paleoclimatologists and indications of the planet's watery past, as interpreted by geologists, bears similarities to a century-old scientific conundrum—in this case, about Earth's ancient past.
At the time, geologists first began to recognize that the shapes of the continents matched each other, almost like scattered puzzle pieces, explains John Grotzinger, Caltech's Fletcher Jones Professor of Geology, chair of the Division of Planetary and Geological Sciences, and lead author of the paper. "Aside from the shapes of the continents, geologists had paleontological evidence that fossil plants and animals in Africa and South America were closely related, as well as unique volcanic rocks suggestive of a common spatial origin. The problem was that the broad community of earth scientists could not come up with a physical mechanism to explain how the continents could plow their way through Earth's mantle and drift apart. It seemed impossible. The missing component was plate tectonics," he says. "In a possibly similar way, we are missing something important about Mars."
As Curiosity has trekked across Gale Crater, it has stopped to examine numerous areas of interest. All targets are imaged, and soil samples have been scooped from some; the rocks in a select few places have been drilled for samples. These samples are deposited into the rover's onboard laboratories. Using data from these instruments, as well as visual imaging from the onboard cameras and spectroscopic analyses, MSL scientists have pieced together an increasingly coherent and compelling story about the evolution of this region of Mars.
Before Curiosity landed on Mars, scientists proposed that Gale Crater had filled with layers of sediments. Some hypotheses were "dry," implying that the sediments accumulated from wind-blown dust and sand, whereas others focused on the possibility that sediment layers were deposited in ancient streams and lakes. The latest results from Curiosity indicate that these wetter scenarios were correct for the lower portions of Mount Sharp. Based on the new analysis, the filling of at least the bottom layers of the mountain occurred mostly by ancient rivers and lakes.
"During the traverse of Gale, we have noticed patterns in the geology where we saw evidence of ancient fast-moving streams with coarser gravel as well as places where streams appear to have emptied out into bodies of standing water," Vasavada says. "The prediction was that we should start seeing water-deposited, fine-grained rocks closer to Mount Sharp. Now that we've arrived, we're seeing finely laminated mudstones in abundance." These silty layers in the strata are interpreted as ancient lake deposits.
"These finely laminated mudstones are very similar to those we see on Earth," says Woody Fischer, professor of geobiology at Caltech and coauthor of the paper along with Grotziner. "The scale of lamination—which occurs both at millimeter and centimeter scale—represents the settling of plumes of fine sediment through a standing body of water. This is exactly what we see in rocks that represent ancient lakes on Earth." The mudstone indicates the presence of bodies of standing water in the form of lakes that remained for long periods of time, possibly repeatedly expanding and contracting during hundreds to millions of years. These lakes deposited the sediment that eventually formed the lower portion of the mountain.
"Paradoxically, where there is a mountain today there was once a basin, and it was sometimes filled with water," says Grotzinger. "Curiosity has measured about 75 meters of sedimentary fill, but based on mapping data from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and images from Curiosity's cameras, it appears that the water-transported sedimentary deposition could have extended at least 150200 meters above the crater floor, and this equates to a duration of millions of years in which lakes could have been intermittently present within the Gale Crater basin," Grotzinger says. Furthermore, the total thickness of sedimentary deposits in Gale Crater that indicate interaction with water could extend higher still—up to perhaps 800 meters above the crater floor, and possibly representing tens of millions of years.
But layers deposited above that level do not require water as an agent of deposition or alteration. "Above 800 meters, Mount Sharp shows no evidence of hydrated strata, and that is the bulk of what forms Mount Sharp. We see another 4,000 meters of nothing but dry strata," Grotzinger says. He suggests that perhaps this segment of the crater's history may have been dominated by eolian, or wind-driven, deposition, as was once imagined for the lower part explored by Curiosity. This occurred after the wet period that built up the base of the mountain.
The image at the top of the page was taken in February 2014 by Curiosity's MastCam instrument. The picture shows the rover tracks across a dune located in an area dubbed “Dingo Gap.”
"Given the recent Curiosity findings, past Martian life seems possible, and we should begin the difficult endeavor of seeking the signs of life," says Jack Mustard, chairman of the Science Definition Team and a professor at the Geological Sciences at Brown University. "However, no matter what we learn, we would make significant progress in understanding the circumstances of early life existing on Earth and the possibilities of extraterrestrial life."
Today's Most Popular in 2016
The Daily Galaxy via Caltech
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
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French grande for A TASTE OF HONEY (Tony Richardson, UK, 1961)
Artist: Gilbert Allard
Poster source: Heritage Auctions
Long ago, one great ocean flowed between North and South America. When the narrow Isthmus of Panama joined the continents about 3 million years ago, it also separated the Atlantic from the Pacific Ocean. If this took place millions of years earlier, as recently asserted by some, the implications for both land and sea life would be revolutionary. Aaron O'Dea, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), and colleagues writing in Science Advances firmly set the date at 2.8 million years ago.
“Recent scientific publications proposing the isolation of the two oceans between 23 to 6 million years ago rocked the generally held model of the continental connection to its foundations,” said Jeremy Jackson, emeritus staff scientist at the Smithsonian. “O'Dea and his team set out to reevaluate in unprecedented, rigorous detail, all of the available lines of evidence—geologic, oceanographic, genetic and ecological data and the analyses that bear on the question of when the Isthmus formed.”
“The timing of the connection between continents and the isolation of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans is important for so many reasons,” O'Dea said. “Estimates of rates of evolutionary change, models of global oceans, the origin of modern-day animals and plants of the Americas and why Caribbean reefs became established all depend upon knowing how and when the isthmus formed.”
Split by the Isthmus of Panama: Species of butterfly fish, sand dollar and cone snail that today live on the Pacific and Caribbean coasts of Central America are very closely related. Genetic sequencing shows that only 4 to 3 million years ago, each pair was a single species, demonstrating that marine connections between the oceans must have existed until that time. (Image courtesy Simon Coppard, Alexander Medvedev, Ross Robertson, Shellnut, Bob Fenner)
The team of researchers from 23 institutions, including nine current or emeritus staff scientists from STRI and the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and 13 current or previous Smithsonian post-doctoral fellows concluded that records from marine and terrestrial fossils, volcanic and marine rocks and the genes of marine animals split by the formation of the Isthmus all tell the same story.
The study used three key pieces of evidence defined when the land bridge was finally in place:
Snapping shrimp species on either side of the Isthmus of Panama are morphologically and genetically similar. Shallow water dwelling species are more closely related than deep dwellers, as would be expected by a slowly emerging isthmus. (Image by Arthur Anker)
The first paper to propose an earlier connection, published by Camilo Montes, professor at the Universidad de los Andes, and STRI staff scientist Carlos Jaramillo in 2015, asserted that tiny particles called zircons found in northern Colombia arrived there 15 million years ago via rivers from the Panama Arc along a land bridge. The authors of the new paper reveal that, in fact, there are several possible sources for these zircons, all of which require less convoluted travel to arrive at their resting place in the Magdalena basin.
The second paper to propose an earlier isthmus by Christine Bacon, post-doctoral fellow at the University of Gothenburg, suggested that molecular data from terrestrial animals and plants corresponded with geographic splits in marine animals, assuming the correspondence must have been due to a land bridge. The new study questions their use of a universal rate of evolution—“different species evolve at different rates,” Harilaos Lessios, a coauthor, said. They also question their use of genetic splits for land animals as evidence of the continental connection because “a land bridge would not cause genetic divergence, but would, on the contrary, allow greater genetic mixing between the continents.”
Miocene basalts emerge from the ocean along the Pacific coast of the Isthmus of Panama. (Photo by Aaron O'Dea)
In addition, the new paper mentions that Bacon et al.'s study omitted several important published genetic analyses, which skewed their results and when included, eliminate the main line of evidence that marine and terrestrial events coincided.
The authors concluded, “Our review and new analyses aims to clarify the issue by bringing together expertise from a wide array of different lines of evidence. Given all the available evidence, we strongly caution against the uncritical acceptance of the old isthmus hypothesis.”
Reconstruction of a river delta in northwest Venezuela 9 million years ago. Fossils uncovered in the Urumaco Formation show the delta was home to a wide variety of animals, many of whom were giants, such as sloths, rodents, armadlillos and crocodiles of immense proportions. All of the land animals found so far disocvered in the Urumaco have a south American affinity demonstrating no land bridge with North America at this time. Only later, after three million years ago when the land bridge formed did the Great American Biotic Interchange take place. (Image by Jorge Gonzalez)
The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, headquartered in Panama City, Panama, is a part of the Smithsonian Institution. The Institute furthers the understanding of tropical nature and its importance to human welfare, trains students to conduct research in the tropics and promotes conservation by increasing public awareness of the beauty and importance of tropical ecosystems.
The post Recent Connection Between North and South America Reaffirmed appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.
Step outside your house in the morning and one of the first things you will hear or see is a bird. They are such a ubiquitous part of our lives that most of the time we don't even notice them. Yet the truth is that their numbers are declining. According to the State of North America's Bird Report 2016, more than one-third of North American bird species are at risk of extinction without significant conservation action.
The issue of conservations is not, in fact, for the birds. This week the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center is hosting the largest-ever North American Ornithological Conference, which brings together thousands of ornithological professionals to address the question of bird conservation.
Birds are indicators of environmental health. They are the canary in the coal mine (pun intended) that let us know when something is not right in our ecosystem.
The post Why Birds Really Matter: Keith Gagnon appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.
Jerry Fryer posted a photo:
Haven't been out much this week - up late watching the Olympics
Can Little Britain really be 2nd in the medals table?
Must be something in the water!
One of my favourite views of London from Waterloo Bridge
I'm not a massive fan of very wide panoramas but there are so many great buildings here it's difficult to leave any out
Best to approach this from the South Bank
If like me, you park near the Embankment - better hold your breath as you walk up the stairs - I always find myself singing The Message by Grandmaster Flash to myself for some reason - if you follow my drift!
If you go to the Golden Jubilee bridges further down next to the Hungerford bridge there's a better view of Big Ben but it's a bit bouncy for longer exposures (unless your a fan of unintentional ICM)
(or known unknowns!) :)
Nick-Weedon posted a photo: