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https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/sep/07/london-design-biennale-review-utopia
Sci-fi socialism and Soviet snowmobiles: the best of the London Design Biennale

Its presentation may seem hurried and chaotic, but the inaugural edition of this design gala brings eye-opening visions of utopia from all corners of the globe

A battered orange pickup truck stands on the stately stone terrace of London's Somerset House, parked askew like a getaway car hastily abandoned. Behind it stretches a shanty village of shawarma-sellers and juice-squeezers, backgammon players and shisha smokers, along with a barber sharpening his cutthroat razor with alarming enthusiasm.

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http://www.designboom.com/art/emmanuelle-moureaux-18000-paper-silhouettes-100-colors-i-am-here-ginza-japan-09-07-2016/
emmanuelle moureaux layers 18,000 paper silhouettes in 100 different colors

for 'I am here', the paper pieces express the non-stop flow of pedestrians that occupy the bustling district of ginza in japan.

The post emmanuelle moureaux layers 18,000 paper silhouettes in 100 different colors appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

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https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/sep/07/the-infinite-mix-review-store-hayward
The Infinite Mix review video-art medley dances madly with big ideas

The Store, London
The Hayward's new offsite show is a weird, wonderful assortment of installations featuring ghostly opera stars, dancing plant-life and a bullet-riddled tour of Kendrick Lamar's home town

Maria Callas stands in a narrow alcove beyond a barrier in a dark and resounding space. A holographic apparition, Callas is a woman in red, played by artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, lip-synching the diva's voice as she sings arias from Cherubini's Medea, Verdi's La Traviata and Ponchielli's La Gioconda.

We are in a cavernous concrete floor of Store, a brutalist office block on London's Strand, now occupied by the Hayward's The Infinite Mix, an offsite exhibition (the Hayward gallery itself is closed for a two-year refurbishment) devoted to sound and image, video and music. As well as the holographic ghost of Maria Callas, Gonzalez-Foerster gives us an aural apparition of the opera house itself, with recorded whispers from the audience and the echoey background noise of an auditorium whose volume is larger than the space we are in. There is a yearning for something always beyond reach in Gonzalez-Foerster's work that I like very much.

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http://www.designboom.com/art/yayoi-kusama-philip-johnson-glass-house-red-polka-dots-09-07-2016/
yayoi kusama dots philip johnson's glass house in a red polka pattern

the installation offers visitors the unique experience of simultaneously seeing the world through the eyes of both philip johnson and kusama herself.

The post yayoi kusama dots philip johnson's glass house in a red polka pattern appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

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How Roger Goodell And The NFL Ended Up Stronger Than Ever
The PR gauntlet the NFL has survived wasn't just about concussions. The league has stared down an extraordinary number of PR nightmares over the past few years, almost all of its own making. But the NFL just bulldozed right through them.
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Floating Dreams by Ik-Joong Kang, London, Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2016.

olliepix posted a photo:

A major installation by Ik-Joong Kang, one of South Korea's most renowned and celebrated multimedia artists, “Floating Dreams” sits on a barge on London's River Thames, Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2016, against a backdrop of the BT Tower and the Millennium Bridge, top, at sunset. Floating Dreams, is a compelling, large-scale installation situated in the centre of the River Thames by Millennium Bridge. Constructed from 500 drawings and illuminated from within, the three-storey-high lantern structure acts as a memorial to the millions displaced and divided during the Korean War (1950-53), and a poignant symbol of hope for the reunification of North and South Korea. IMG2406

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Bankside lamps, London, Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2016.

olliepix posted a photo:

The setting sun lights up the glass bowls of two lamps on the Bankside embankment, London, Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2016. IMG2291

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Floating Dreams by Ik-Joong Kang, London, Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2016.

olliepix posted a photo:

A major installation by Ik-Joong Kang, one of South Korea's most renowned and celebrated multimedia artists, “Floating Dreams” sits on a barge on London's River Thames, Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2016, against a backdrop the Millennium Bridge, and a Bankside embankment lamp at sunset. Floating Dreams, is a compelling, large-scale installation situated in the centre of the River Thames by Millennium Bridge. Constructed from 500 drawings and illuminated from within, the three-storey-high lantern structure acts as a memorial to the millions displaced and divided during the Korean War (1950-53), and a poignant symbol of hope for the reunification of North and South Korea. MG1195

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design

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https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/sep/07/london-design-biennale-review-utopia
Sci-fi socialism and Soviet snowmobiles: the best of the London Design Biennale

Its presentation may seem hurried and chaotic, but the inaugural edition of this design gala brings eye-opening visions of utopia from all corners of the globe

Continue reading...
design

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https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/sep/07/melbourne-australia-first-skyscraper-ici-orica-house
Melbourne's bold leap upwards: the inside story of Australia's first skyscraper

ICI (now Orica) House helped Melbourne throw off its Victorian dowdiness and become a modern city. Gideon Haigh tells the forgotten story of its creation

In a land boasting more skyscrapers per capita than any other country, Australians today would be pardoned for missing their first, a quarter the height of what's now the tallest. Yet no building has exerted such influence on Australian cityscapes as Orica House on Melbourne's Eastern Hill its everyday inconspicuousness attests to the ubiquity of the form it pioneered.

Stand closer to what was originally ICI House and the view changes. “I tell people I'm showing round that this was the iPhone of Australian architecture,” says Tim Leslie, a studio director at Bates Smart McCutcheon (BSM), which not only designed the building but, in a form of architectural ancestor worship, have since made it their headquarters. “It was so different to everything that had gone before.”

I tell people this was the iPhone of Australian architecture

The building swayed slightly. In the fish tank on the executive floor … the water lapped gently from side to side

Not only can you see out both sides of Orica House, but the views are … well, they're to die for

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What Kind of Person Still Traps Wild Animals?
What kind of person purposely destroys a beaver dam and sets a "wall of death" of Conibear traps, knowing that the unsuspecting beavers will return to repair their handiwork--only to be possibly smashed across their abdomens and drowned?

What kind of person watches a tethered and helpless coyote writhe in pain and distress, unable to move because of the intensely unforgiving steel jaws clamped to her paw, kicks her in the side, and then finally shoots her in the chest so that her lungs fill with blood, and she dies a miserable, suffocating death?

What kind of person knows that these atrocities occur regularly across America--still, in 2016--and does nothing?

Today, Born Free USA has revealed our second undercover investigation, Victims of Vanity II, which delves into the brutal trapping industry and fur trade in an effort to expose these grotesque and indefensible industries. Trapping, like hunting, is dominated by people engaged in "sport" and "recreation," not necessity. And, even if there is some commercial by-product--selling the furs--trapping is about vicious slaughter, not gainful employment.

Our investigator hit the traplines in New York and Iowa, and discovered beaver dams destroyed; traps and bait set illegally; traps set close to public bridges, roads, and trails; horrific drown poles deployed; trapping in protected areas; prolonged suffering; and brutal death.

What kind of person does this? A man looking for power over helpless animals to feel more manly? A small-minded person who resorts to archaic cruelty to sell a few furs and make a few dollars? A killer? A torturer?

I remember when I first started working in the animal protection movement in Washington, D.C. in 1991. For the first time, I was exposed to the horrors of trapping. "What kind of person does this?," I thought. And, how can it still be legal? Here I am, 25 years later, asking the same questions.

Thankfully, change can come. Congress has multiple means by which to tackle trapping. It could end trapping on national wildlife refuges; eliminate the interstate commerce in the most commonly used traps; and stop federal employees from using traps on federal lands.

U.S. Senator Cory Booker had it exactly right when he said that these "traps operate by slamming shut with bone-crushing force on any animal that trips the device. Terrified animals break legs, chew off limbs, dislocate shoulders, and tear muscles as they try to break free of these traps."

We need federal action and state action (and not just in New York and Iowa). We need consumer action to stop buying furs and corporate action to stop selling them. We need to abandon the concept that trapping has a place in modern society and that trapping with a device like the steel-jaw leghold trap--which has remained relatively unchanged for 400 years--is okay. We need to stop defending the indefensible.

I'm proud that we can offer this eye-opening insight into what happens on the trapline. Some people won't be able to watch it. Some in the media will think that it is too painful to show on television. I get it.

What kind of person traps? What kind of legislator or department store owner can watch just 60 seconds of a tethered, tortured, dying coyote and do nothing? You be the judge.

No more excuses. Either you defend wild furbearer torture or you work to end it. I know which side I'm on. I know what kind of person I am.

Keep Wildlife in the Wild,

Adam

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Feeding The People, Saving The Planet
If we want to save species, stop deforestation, and preserve nature for the good of biodiversity and humans, there's one thing we've got to get right above all else: where and how we produce food.

Local products in La Cocha, Colombia. Photo Credit: © Diego M. Garces / WWF

Producing food has had the biggest impact on the planet for the longest period of time than any other human activity. Food has the unique distinction of both contributing to climate change and being profoundly affected by it. And unlike any other issue conservationists work on, we've got 7.4 billion food experts on this planet, each with strong opinions and very few using science to inform their views.

Today, these 7.4 billion people are already consuming Earth's resources at a rate that is not renewable. Humanity's inexhaustible demand for certain foods drives deforestation, habitat conversion, water degradation, human rights violations, and a host of illegal activities. If this is happening today, imagine what the planet will look like in 40 years when the population is expected to be nearly 10 billion.

But this isn't just a numbers game. As important as the additional mouths to feed are what they will be eating. Incomes are on the rise, especially in developing countries, and Western diets are becoming increasingly common. Per capita consumption of animal protein, calorie-dense foods, off-season food and more fresh fruits and vegetables will increase dramatically. This increasing and shifting demand will place an even greater burden on food production and on our finite planet's dwindling resources.

On Sept. 6 at the World Conservation Congress in Hawaii, I discussed the link between biodiversity and food production, and how in order to make a real impact conserving biodiversity, we have to change how our food is produced. The link is an obvious one--at least once people remember that food isn't actually produced in the supermarket. Every calorie we consume, from fresh food to junk food, comes from ingredients that have to be grown, raised, hunted, or caught. And that all takes resources.

Food production is the largest cause of habitat conversion (including deforestation), biodiversity loss, and, depending on the source, the number one or two cause of greenhouse gas emissions. It also is the largest user of chemicals and of freshwater. In fact, producing food uses twice as much water as all other human activities combined.

The bottom line is: can we feed everyone and still have a planet? The short answer is "yes," definitely. The long answer is very long. And very complicated.

There is no silver bullet, no single strategy that will work--we will need to focus on productivity and efficiency as well as waste and consumption. And we will need everyone to pitch in. The world won't be saved by a few forward-thinking consumers, brands, NGOs or even governments.

In the last 10 years especially, food sustainability has become a marketing issue. That's the wrong approach. Sustainability needs to be considered at the beginning, with the production or raw materials. Major players in every industry need to take action to make sure that its raw materials are produced legally and sustainably.

For every crop, better producers globally are 100 times more productive than worse ones. Even within a country or region, producers can be 10 times more efficient than their neighbors. So conservation groups have to get beyond just working with the groups that are interested in sustainability or devising systems that reward the best producers. This will not make the change happen that we need either at speed or at the scale needed. The biggest impacts and the least production happen with the bad actors, the poorer performers. We gain most--in production, income and reduced impacts--by improving the poorest-performing producers not by rewarding the best.

On the consumption side, no one is able to tell 7.4 billion people what they should and shouldn't eat. But, we can make people aware of the impacts of their choices--what it means to the planet when we throw away 1 of every 3 calories produced. Even around what people eat the issue is about making informed choices and shifting your lifestyle in other ways to accommodate those choices that are the most demanding on the planet.

In addition to what we consume and what we do directly or through market signals to make our diets more sustainable, many on the planet do not have our choices. While we have enough food at the level of the planet, many do not have enough food on their plate. There are 800 million people who don't have enough to eat. The irony is that the bulk of them are from farm families. This problem can be solved but it is not just about producing more food or reducing waste. It's about inequality.

And, throw in the wrench of climate change and weather variability and we've definitely got our work cut out for us.

Feeding everyone -- while still making sure we have a planet that can sustain life -- will not be easy, but it is possible. And, we don't really have a choice. No one can do everything, but everyone can do something. Think about it, and then act on it--every day.

This post is part of a series on the World Conservation Congress taking place this week. Held every four years, it brings together about 6,000 people, including heads of state, government officials, business leaders, representatives from indigenous groups, scientists, academics, influencers, educators, artists and NGOs, from all over the world to discuss and decide on solutions to the world's most pressing environmental challenges. To read all the posts in this series click here.

Aerial view of palm oil plantation on deforested land, Sabah, Borneo, Malaysia. Photo Credit: © naturepl.com / Juan Carlos Munoz / WWF

Aerial view of oil palm plantation. Sungai Petani vicinity, Kedah, Malaysia. Photo Credit: © naturepl.com / Tim Laman / WWF

Deforestation in southern Scotland near Edinburgh, UK. Photo Credit: © Edward Parker / WWF

A farmer carrying rice to be planted in Bandung, Java, Indonesia. Photo Credit: © Rob Webster / WWF

A cereal crop growing near Jumilla in Murcia, Spain. Photo Credit: © Global Warming Images / WWF

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Standing With Standing Rock and the Right to Clean Water

By Jon Waterhouse and Mary Marshall

Examine the protests over construction of the Dakota Access pipeline with an objective mind (links below, basic facts here) and you'll arrive at the conclusion that the Native Americans gathered at Standing Rock care—and shouldn't we all.

The threat at Standing Rock is not lack of oil or loss of jobs.

The threat is to the one element that none—yes, none—of us can live without: WATER.

"(Photo — Protecting clean water isn't about scenery. It's about basic human rights. (Photo by Mary Marshall)

I realize that for most readers this is not “in your backyard,” but shouldn't you care enough to support those at Standing Rock to protect something this vital, this important to us all?

The United Nations has recognized the human right to clean water.

Ask yourself what will it take for you to engage in the protection of this resource that makes your latte, fills your pool, allows for fishing and your morning shower, is a major ingredient in beer and wine, beauty products, your supplements and medications, vital to agriculture and many forms of manufacturing … and on and on?

What will it take?

Don't leave the Native Americans to carry this by themselves.

Look around, ask yourself, ask your friends: What will it take and when will we engage?

Standing Rock Coverage From Across the Web

Dakota Access Pipeline: What You Need to Know (Nat Geo Education Blog)

Topic Page From Indian Country Today

Why is the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe trying to stop a pipeline? (Christian Science Monitor)

Showdown over oil pipeline becomes a national movement for Native Americans (Washington Post)

A Pipeline Fight and America's Dark Past (New Yorker)

Taking a Stand at Standing Rock (New York Times)

MSNBC:

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APEC Blue And G20 Green

In advance of last week's G20 economic summit, the skies over the city of Hangzhou, China, turned “APEC Blue” ― a phrase that was coined by residents of Beijing when the Asian Pacific Economic Conference was held there eight years ago. Factories were closed, traffic was restricted, and air pollution ― temporarily ― vanished. President Obama and the leaders of 19 other major global economies got to see one of China's most beautiful cities at its sparkling best.

Now that the summit is over, the pollution will return. If it's ever going to disappear for good, then the G20 leaders who met in Hangzhou will need to follow through on a commitment they made seven years ago: to stop providing subsidies for fossil fuel development.

Together, the nations that are part of the G20 are currently responsible for more than $440 billion in fossil fuel subsidies annually and account for 74 percent of global carbon pollution. To put that into perspective, the annual total of G20 subsidies to support fossil fuels is more than four times what the entire global economy is currently investing in clean energy. Given the urgency of transitioning the global economy awayfrom fossil fuels, that's counterproductive, to say the least.

Internationally, we've seen historic climate progress lately ― from the agreement between the U.S. and China to limit carbon pollution to the adoption of the Paris Agreement, which China and the U.S. both formally joined last week. But while the world moves forward toward a 100 percent clean energy economy, the G20 leaders have been all talk and no walk on ending fossil-fuel subsidies for seven years now.

That's got to stop. For our part, the Sierra Club has launched a new international campaign called Fossil-Free Finance. Our goal is to get all of the G20 countries, the World Bank, and other key international financial institutions to eliminate all fossil fuel subsidies by 2020.

This year's G20 has come and gone, but this issue isn't going anywhere. Send a message to President Obama and the other G20 leaders to let them know that the only way we'll see blue skies everywhere, all the time, is to stop investing in the dirty fuels of the past.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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This Trump Aide Stands To Profit From The Dakota Access Pipeline

Cross-Posted from DeSmogBlog

Continental Resources — the company founded and led by CEO Harold Hamm, energy adviser to Donald Trump's presidential campaign and potential U.S. Secretary of Energy under a Trump presidency — has announced to investors that oil it obtains via hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) from North Dakota's Bakken Shale basin is destined for transport through the hotly-contested Dakota Access pipeline.

Image Credit: Continental Resources

The company's 37-page September 2016 Investor Update presentation walks investors in the publicly-traded company through various capital expenditure and profit-margin earning scenarios. It also features five slides on the Bakken Shale, with the fifth one named “CLR Bakken Differentials Decreasing Through Increased Pipeline Capacity” honing in on Dakota Access, ETCOP and how the interconnected lines relate to Continental's marketing plans going forward.

In a section of that slide titled, “Bakken Takeaway Capacity” a bar graph points out that the opening of Dakota Access would allow more barrels of Continental's Bakken fracked oil to flow through pipelines.

Dakota Access is slated to carry the fracked Bakken oil across South Dakota, Iowa and into Patoka, Illinois. From there, it will connect to the company's Energy Transfer Crude Oil Pipeline (ETCOP ) line, which terminates in Nederland, Texas at the Sunoco Logistics-owned refinery.

From Keystone XL to Dakota Access

Previously, Harold Hamm was as an outspoken supporter of TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline, deploying the lobbying group he founded named the Domestic Energy Producers Alliance to advocate for KXL and a Bakken on-ramp which would connect to it. Once he realized the northern leg was doomed politically, Hamm began singing a different tune on Keystone.

“We're supporting other pipelines out there, we're not waiting on Keystone. Nobody is,” Hamm, also an energy adviser to Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign, told Politico in November 2014. “That thing … needed action on it six years ago. I just think it's too late and we need to move on.”

One of those ‘other pipelines' Hamm appears to have taken an interest in is Dakota Access (DAPL). Although to date, neither Hamm nor Trump have commented publicly on the DAPL project. Continental Resources told DeSmog that it does not comment on pipeline shipping contracts.

As The Intercept's Lee Fang pointed out in a recent article, some oil from Dakota Access could feed export markets, despite Energy Transfer's claims in a presentation that it will feature “100% Domestic produced crude” that “supports 100% domestic consumption.”

Hamm's Domestic Energy Producers Alliance, as revealed in a December 2015 DeSmog investigation, led the successful public relations and lobbying campaign charge for lifting the crude oil export ban.

The battle over the fate of Dakota Access has pitted Native American Tribes, environmentalists and libertarian private property rights supporters against Energy Transfer Partners and state- and federal-level agencies which have permitted the project.

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe awaits a decision by a Judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in its lawsuit against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, set for September 9.

“Hamm is an oil profiteer exploiting the health of the water, farmland, and communities in the Dakotas and all downstream,” Angie Carter of the Women, Food and Agriculture Network — one of the over 30 groups comprising the Iowa-based Bakken Pipeline Resistance Coalition — told DeSmog. “In Iowa, we've called upon both Trump and Clinton to speak out against the pipeline.”

Like Trump, Clinton has yet to comment on the pipeline.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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For Arthritic Elephant, National Zoo Turns To Pachyderm Pedicures And Giant Tevas

Veterinarians at Smithsonian's National Zoo have turned to an unconventional therapy for an arthritic 41-year-old Asian elephant shoes. The talented animal also knows how to play the harmonica.

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Steel HR 40mm black

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Ecomo - Water You Know, Water You Trust

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Estetica industriale e anima domestica unite sapientemente in un radiatore dal…

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Coastal Spain seen from the International Space Station (© Scott Kelly/NASA/Alamy) 2016-09-07 [www.bing.com/search]
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Apple's set to drop macOS ‘Sierra' on the world later this month

Apple's latest operating system, ‘Sierra' is set to drop September 20. Back in June, Apple dropped the OS X naming convention in favor of keeping with the naming schemes of other operating systems within its ecosystem, like watchOS and tvOS. The retirement of a name, however, didn't keep Apple from sticking with its mountain naming system, as ‘Sierra' follows its last release ‘El Capitan.' The big additions include Siri, improved iCloud performance and a universal clipboard that lets Apple users share copied items across any device in an Apple ecosystem. We'll see a handful of other updates — like ‘Continuity,'…

This story continues at The Next Web
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Apple Pay is coming to Japan with support for Transit payments next month

At its iPhone 7 keynote today, Apple announced that it will bring Felica, the Japanese version of NFC, to its iPhone 7 and 7 Plus handsets, as well as to the Apple Watch Series 2. That will enable Apple Pay to work with payment terminals in Japan, as well as with Transit terminals like those for metro trains. These features will become available late in October. Follow our coverage of Apple's iPhone 7 keynote and find the latest stories about it here.
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Nine years later, there's still something magical about an iPhone launch

In a few hours, Apple will launch the iPhone 7. It's an event that many of us, both from the journalistic side of the fence, and those who merely have an enthusiasm for Apple products, have been waiting for. There have been so many rumors that seem incredibly plausible, I'm not sure there's going to be any surprises. I don't want to add any more fuel to the flames of speculation god knows I've done that already. Instead, I want to take you back to 2007, when Steve Jobs first launched the iPhone, and changed the world. I've watched the video of…

This story continues at The Next Web
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http://thenextweb.com/google/2016/09/07/google-is-turning-its-search-engine-into-the-ultimate-lookbook-for-fashionistas/
Google is turning its search engine into the ultimate lookbook for fashionistas

Google's search engine is already a handy tool to find inspiration and ideas for your next great outfit. Now, it's looking to make it easier to shop for finds with an interesting new feature. The company describes its new Shop the Look experience as follows: When you search for an outfit with query like ‘cocktail attire', Google will surface a photo of a fashion blogger wearing a cocktail dress and accessories to go with it; you can then check out those exact products, or similar looking ones through relevant Shopping ads. Google says that the images it will feature in its…

This story continues at The Next Web
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Freemium phishing service makes stealing passwords dead simple

Stealing passwords isn't hard: just set up a fake login page and ask people to sign in. It's called phishing, and its big business in the cybercrime world. Big enough that some “entrepreneurs” in Russia are offering phishing as a freemium service. It's called “Fake-Game,” and security researchers at Fortinet point out it's been online for over a year. Over 60,000 active users have stolen nearly 700,000 passwords using the “service,” which makes stealing passwords as simple as sharing a link. Instead of creating and hosting a fake login page themselves, users can simply select a service they'd like to…

This story continues at The Next Web
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Creepy software startup attempts to algorithmically score happiness at your current job

Job searches are often done under the radar and out of the view of your current boss. A new startup wants to make your career search a bit more public, often at the detriment of current employment. The startup, Joberate, scrapes publicly available information from millions of social signals — or buys it from other parties. If a job seeker starts following company Twitter or Facebook accounts, clicks through on articles about resume writing, or even starts making professional connections outside their current employer — Joberate knows. Once Joberate builds a profile on an individual, it starts assigning it a ‘J-Score'…

This story continues at The Next Web
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Gerkin in Blue

Florian Bütow posted a photo:

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Inside the Canyon

Florian Bütow posted a photo:

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魔幻 by 肚皮小

魔幻 by 肚皮小

魔幻

肚皮小: Photos

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Blackpool illuminations: neon art lights up the seaside in pictures

From jagged geometric patterns to an anxious Snoopy, neon works by artists including Gavin Turk and Tracey Emin buzz with static in The Charged Line

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art

From jagged geometric patterns to an anxious Snoopy, neon works by artists including Gavin Turk and Tracey Emin buzz with static in The Charged Line

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http://heptagram.co/post/150053704062
shrbrrpxr: Johan Perjus

shrbrrpxr:

Johan Perjus

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https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/sep/07/you-say-you-want-a-revolution-review-v-and-a-dizzying-trip
You Say You Want a Revolution review: a dizzying trip to the heart of the 1960s

V&A, London
From CIA leaflets to Twiggy coathangers, the details matter in this sensory bombardment of a show, jam-packed with music, style and rebellious history

You might be forgiven for heaving a sigh at the subject of the V&A's attempt to come up with a blockbuster pop culture follow-up to 2013's wildly successful David Bowie Is, an exhibition still touring the world three years on. It's not that the late 1960s and their attendant counterculture represent an unfertile area for exploration. You'd have a hard time arguing the era didn't feature sufficient fantastic music, social upheaval and blue-sky fashion choices to support a major exhibition. It's that the people involved have barely shut up about it since the decade ended.

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jimlovesart: A Stone Head of a Deity, Lepinski Vir Culture,...

jimlovesart:

A Stone Head of a Deity, Lepinski Vir Culture, Middle Danube Region, Mesolithic Period, 7th/6th Millennium B.C.

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2016/sep/07/steve-bells-if-supernormal-owen-smith-daunting-obstacle-ahead
Steve Bell's If ... Supernormal Owen Smith spots a daunting obstacle ahead
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Steve Bell on Theresa May and grammar schools cartoon
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US Politics: As Low as It Gets

The story of the summer, and perhaps of the last year, has been the long wait for Donald Trump to go too far. Within weeks of the announcement of his candidacy in June 2015, seasoned observers of the political game were regularly declaring that the reality TV star had crossed the line that separates viability from oblivion, that he had broken this or that unbreakable rule and was therefore doomed.

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Hillary vs. Donald: The Benefit of the Doubt

As the months wore on, Trump went from showing tendencies toward demagogy to practicing it on a daily basis. The absence of restraint seemed part of the attraction for followers soon numbering in the millions.

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How one college student scored a design commission from the director of Broadway's hottest show

There is a fine line between perseverance and stalking in chasing what you hope to achieve in your career. Those who keep going after they've been turned down run the risk of continued rejection, but something compels them to carry on until they reach their prize. Often, the stories that end in success involve someone going nearly overboard in their pursuit: These ambitious souls just don't pitch an idea to a client they physically make the product and then send it to everyone at that company for consideration.

And that is where Dominic Grijalva's story begins. The 24-year-old Fresno State graphic design student and self-professed theater geek has been enamored with Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, so much so that he has followed Miranda's every move on social media and decided to do a personal project that paid homage to Miranda's shows. While most people would stop at completing the project, Grijalva went one step further by simultaneously connecting with Miranda on social media and sending Miranda and 50 members of his cast the final work.

The perseverance has paid off for Grijalva. He can now add freelance designer for Miranda's official artist merchandise site, Tee-Rico, to his resume.

We recently asked Grijalva about how he got Miranda's attention, the process behind this major commission, and how he balances being a full-time student with an exciting freelance design career.

How did you develop a banter with Miranda?

When I watched the 2008 Tony performance of his earlier show In the Heights, I became a Lin-Manuel Miranda fan. As a fellow Latino actor, I was inspired by his work and excited to see what he'd do next. I really liked that Miranda engaged with his social media followers, and would reply or comment to posts on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. Occasionally, he would respond to me, and I always wondered if he knew who I was.

At the end of summer 2014, Miranda reached 96,000 followers — an inside reference from In the Heights — and asked fans what he should do to mark this milestone. I Tweeted that he should do a one-man show of In the Heights and post it to YouTube. Miranda responded that he was going to follow some of his favorite fans, and the next morning I received an alert that he was following me.

A few months later, I was going to produce In the Heights in my hometown of Selma, California, and I jumped at the opportunity to tweet Miranda this question: “What's a piece of advice for someone who wants to produce In the Heights?” Miranda responded: “Cast team players. The play is about community and themes of the show need to translate into the cast.”

I took this advice to heart, and it worked. Coincidentally, my summer 2015 opening of In the Heights overlapped with the opening previews of Hamilton, and it felt very special. I had never seen Miranda perform live and hadn't been to New York in 10 years, so a friend and I bought $100 tickets to see Hamilton in the summer 2016. As Hamilton started attracting buzz, I continued to interact sporadically with Miranda on Twitter.

What inspired you to create a Dueler Eye Chart holiday card, a play on an eye chart found at an optometrist's office with references to the Hamilton song “Ten Duel Commandments” for their cast and crew?

In November 2015, I was taking a printmaking course and our assignment was to create a design to etch in metal. I was struggling for ideas, and, while listening to Hamilton's soundtrack, a lightbulb went off. An eye chart popped into my head, and I immediately went on InDesign to work on my idea for four straight hours until I was done because I didn't want to lose momentum. I ended up being terrible at working on metal, so embarrassingly enough, I failed the course — sometimes the execution doesn't work, but the idea does.

“Sometimes the execution doesn't work, but the idea does.”

I still thought the image could be something bigger, so I decided to turn the Dueler Eye Chart into a holiday card for friends and family. A close friend advised me to send the card to Hamilton's cast and crew as a thank you, and I figured I'd get a Twitter mention at most. I sent 50 copies to friends and family and 50 copies to Hamilton's cast and crew. I included a personal 4×5 placard stating my appreciation for Hamilton and what it meant to me as an artist.

College student Dominic Grijalva meets his creative hero Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Did you receive any feedback from Hamilton's cast and crew?

Mid-December, I received a Tweet from an ensemble member encouraging me on my journey to make a living as a designer. They noted that it can be difficult to have a sustainable career in the arts, so all artists must work hard to remain relevant — especially if you depend on your body as your instrument. A few days later, I watched Star Wars on opening day and took a picture of Miranda's name in the closing credits for writing the Cantina Band music. I Tweeted Miranda the picture, congratulating him, and he replied, “Hey, we love your eye chart — thanks so much!”

At this moment, I realized he actually knew who I was. In January, I started seeing pictures on social media of my eye chart popping up in dressing rooms. It was surreal.

It can be difficult to have a sustaining career in the arts, so all artists must work hard to remain relevant.

How did the commission come to be?

In March, I randomly noticed that Miranda had fiddled with his Twitter page, and it was doing something funky to his Facebook page. I took screenshots of how to correct the issue and sent Miranda a direct message with this information. A few hours later, he Tweeted, “Thanks to Dominic who helped fix this issue!” Two days later, I woke up to a barrage of Facebook and text messages, and didn't know what happened. Miranda had accidentally publicly Tweeted me when he meant to send this direct message, “Hey, I have this idea and I would like to get your brain involved. Please send me your email.”

In the middle of a two-show-day, Miranda had been brainstorming how to give back to fans and artists who were creating amazing Hamilton-inspired artwork, while expanding his brand into merchandising.

After a few email exchanges and calls with Miranda's brother-in-law, who represents him and handles merchandising, I received a proposal to create some sketches for In the Heights-inspired T-shirts.

You followed Miranda closely. At any point did it ever feel like borderline stalking?

(Laughs) I never felt like a stalker. In the past, if a celebrity favorited one of my Tweets, I would reply in all caps, “OMG!” But, that doesn't add any substance, and it's the equivalent of screaming at someone. With Miranda, I just tried to be intentional and tactful with my interactions. I was such a fan and reminded myself that I'm doing this because I respect him, and would love the opportunity to work with him someday.

“With Miranda, I just tried to be intentional and tactful with my interactions.”

What were the specific objectives of the commission?

Based upon the number of characters in the play, songs, and inside jokes and references, I was tasked to create a few sketches, which would work on apparel and could be expandable. In all, I submitted a handful of sketches and over 100 ideas. This exceeded his team's expectations, and Miranda and his team narrowed the field to seven sketches. All seven designs made the cut, and are available for purchase online.

How did you negotiate with Miranda, and what was this like?

I negotiated terms of the commission with Miranda's brother-in-law, Luis, and the process felt very natural. I receive royalties per item sold. Tee-Rico is big on promoting their artists' work, and they always include our Twitter handles and websites on their site, and tag us when customers send pictures wearing our designs. Family is very important to Miranda, and his family members work with him and help run Tee-Rico. Now, I am part of the Tee-Rico family, and it reminds me of my family. I feel safe and cared for, and it has been great connecting with other Tee-Rico artists. I know that my creative ideas are heard and valued, and I feel fortunate to work with someone I respect and admire.

“I am currently using revenue earned from Tee-Rico to pay off my student loans.”

How does this work as a business?

I am still a full-time college student and will be graduating in December 2017. Tee-Rico is understanding of my responsibilities, and I'm able to manage my course load, theater schedule, and juggle freelance projects. I am currently using revenue earned from Tee-Rico to pay off my student loans.

Walk us through a typical school week. How much time do you devote to school work and how much to your freelance design work?

Typically, I try to schedule all day classes or evening classes to block my time. All of my clients know that I'm a student, so my schoolwork comes first. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I have afternoon classes, so I'll crank out my freelance work in the evenings. On Tuesdays, and Thursdays, I take night classes, so I'll work on my freelance projects earlier in the day. At times, everything overlaps, so making lists allows me to prioritize my deliverables. I always have my laptop on me, so that I can work from anywhere! On weekends, I might catch up on some freelance work, but I spend a lot of time at the theater.

Have you ever had to juggle the deadline of a Tee-Rico project with a school project? If so, how did you deliver both on time?

I'm actually doing this right now! I just opened a show and it's consuming a lot of my time, in addition to my classes. However, on my first call with Tee-Rico, Luis said, “I know you're a student, so your schooling comes first. Work on Tee-Rico projects when you have the time.” I owe him some concepts, so I'm keeping in touch via email and phone to provide frequent updates. Open communication is key.

What's your advice to young designers looking to get their foot in the door somewhere?

If you're approachable and voice your opinion, it's easier to get noticed. Relationships and connections help as well. It's random, but I have a good friend in New York who was babysitting for the director of marketing at licensing agency, Musical Theater International. I told her I was coming to New York in June, and asked if she'd put in a good word for me, and share my website. She did, and the director of marketing agreed to meet with me while I was in town. He literally pulled up my portfolio on the spot, and I walked him through projects in my portfolio.

When he asked what my dream job would be, I named the advertising firm SpotCo, which handles marketing and branding for Broadway's hottest shows. I don't have any contacts there, so he offered to connect me with a guy who works there. We scheduled an informational call when I returned to California, and he too requested an overview of projects in my portfolio.

After graduation, I'm planning to move to New York, and the Musical Theater International director of marketing asked me to call him when I arrive. I've at least planted a seed at SpotCo., and when I do move to New York, I want to be absolutely ready.

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general

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Lessons From a Life in Two Genders

Twelve years into her marriage with her partner, Jennifer Finney Boylan transitioned to womanhood. In this interview filmed at the Aspen Ideas Festival, the author, trans advocate, and Barnard College professor discusses identity and which ones are fixed. “The thing that may have changed about me as a trans person most visibly is...how I look,” she says. “But in some ways for me the big difference in transition wasn't going from male to female, it was going from someone who had a secret to someone who didn't have a secret.”

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Root-maggot fly (Bot

Root-maggot fly (Botanophila sp.) collected in Prince Edward Island National Park, Prince Edward Island, Canada, and photographed at the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics (sample ID: BIOUG10394-F04; specimen record: http://www.boldsystems.org/index.php/Public_RecordView?processid=CNPED1574-14; BIN: http://www.boldsystems.org/index.php/Public_BarcodeCluster?clusteruri=BOLD:ACL7928)

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astronomy

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Ancient Milky-Way Star Cluster Fossil Revealed --"Unlike Any Other Known"

A fossilized remnant of the early Milky Way harboring stars of hugely different ages has been revealed by an international team of astronomers. This stellar system resembles a globular cluster, but is like no other cluster known. It contains stars remarkably similar to the most ancient stars in the Milky Way and bridges the gap in understanding between our galaxy's past and its present.

Terzan 5, 19 000 light-years from Earth, has been classified as a globular cluster for the forty-odd years since its detection. Now, an Italian-led team of astronomers have discovered that Terzan 5 is like no other globular cluster known.

The team scoured data from the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Camera 3 on board Hubble, as well as from a suite of other ground-based telescopes. They found compelling evidence that there are two distinct kinds of stars in Terzan 5 which not only differ in the elements they contain, but have an age-gap of roughly 7 billion years.

The ages of the two populations indicate that the star formation process in Terzan 5 was not continuous, but was dominated by two distinct bursts of star formation. "This requires the Terzan 5 ancestor to have large amounts of gas for a second generation of stars and to be quite massive. At least 100 million times the mass of the Sun," explains Davide Massari, co-author of the study, from INAF, Italy, and the University of Gröningen, Netherlands.

Its unusual properties make Terzan 5 the ideal candidate for a living fossil from the early days of the Milky Way. Current theories on galaxy formation assume that vast clumps of gas and stars interacted to form the primordial bulge of the Milky Way, merging and dissolving in the process.

"We think that some remnants of these gaseous clumps could remain relatively undisrupted and keep existing embedded within the galaxy," explains Francesco Ferraro from the University of Bologna, Italy, and lead author of the study. "Such galactic fossils allow astronomers to reconstruct an important piece of the history of our Milky Way."

While the properties of Terzan 5 are uncommon for a globular cluster, they are very similar to the stellar population which can be found in the galactic bulge, the tightly packed central region of the Milky Way. These similarities could make Terzan 5 a fossilised relic of galaxy formation, representing one of the earliest building blocks of the Milky Way.

This assumption is strengthened by the original mass of Terzan 5 necessary to create two stellar populations: a mass similar to the huge clumps which are assumed to have formed the bulge during galaxy assembly around 12 billion years ago. Somehow Terzan 5 has managed to survive being disrupted for billions of years, and has been preserved as a remnant of the distant past of the Milky Way.

"Some characteristics of Terzan 5 resemble those detected in the giant clumps we see in star-forming galaxies at high-redshift, suggesting that similar assembling processes occurred in the local and in the distant Universe at the epoch of galaxy formation," continues Ferraro.

"Terzan 5 could represent an intriguing link between the local and the distant Universe, a surviving witness of the Galactic bulge assembly process," explains Ferraro while commenting on the importance of the discovery. The research presents a possible route for astronomers to unravel the mysteries of galaxy formation, and offers an unrivaled view into the complicated history of the Milky Way.

The Daily Galaxy via ESO/Hubble

Star Streams of the Milky Way --"Trace of the Orbits of Ancient Globular Clusters"

Found! "The Missing Piece in a Long-Standing Milky Way Puzzle"

Six Million Years Ago Milky Way's Central Black Hole Erupted --"When First Humanoids Walked the Earth"

The Milky Way's Monster Black Hole Awakes! Fired Out a Massive Flare 300 Years Ago (Weekend Feature) - The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel

"Biggest Explosion Since the Big Bang" --From a Supermassive Black Hole a Billion Times the Mass of Our Sun

Monster Infant Star Discovered in Milky Way --"Thirty Times the Size of Our Sun"

The Milky Way's Globular Star Clusters --"Relics from the Early Universe"

Alien Invaders of the Milky Way - The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel

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astronomy

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"Far, Silent Side of the Moon" --Upcoming NASA and China Missions to "Fill a Void" in Our Knowledge of the Universe

China's increasingly ambitious space program plans to attempt the first-ever landing of a lunar probe on the moon's far side. Radio transmissions from Earth are unable to reach the moon's far side, making it an excellent location for sensitive instruments.The Chang'e 4 mission is planned for sometime before 2020, according to Zou Yongliao from the Chinese Academy of Sciences' in an interview with China's state broadcaster CCTV.

Zou said the mission's objective would be to study geological conditions on the moon's far side, also known as the dark side. That could eventually lead to the placement of a radio telescope for use by astronomers, something that would help "fill a void" in man's knowledge of the universe, Zou said.

China's next lunar mission is scheduled for 2017, when it will attempt to land an unmanned spaceship on the moon before returning to Earth with samples. If successful, that would make China only the third country after the United States and Russia to have carried out such a maneuver.

China's lunar exploration program, named Chang'e after a mythical goddess, has already launched a pair of orbiting lunar probes, and in 2013 landed a craft on the moon with a rover onboard.

China has also hinted at a possible crewed mission to the moon. China sent its first astronaut into space in 2003 and has powered ahead with a series of methodically timed steps, including the deploying of an experimental space station.

This July, NASA announced that a University of Colorado Boulder research team — led by Jack Burns of the Lunar University Network for Astrophysics Research (LUNAR) — is working on a radio telescope array that would be unfurled on the far side of the moon by an unmanned rover operated by astronauts in NASA's Orion spacecraft, which would be hovering in a gravitationally stable spot near the lunar far side called Earth-moon Lagrange Point 2.

Burn's team is evaluating how a small rover can spool out lengthy pieces of Kapton film on the lunar far side that would serve serve as a lightweight backbone for an array of low-frequency antennas that could be deployed by a simple rover, Burns said. The "arms" would be stretched out, free of the constant radio-frequency interference coming from Earth, allowing NASA scientists to study the formation of the first stars and black holes, among other cosmic phenomena.

The moon rover plans were presented during the NASA Exploration Science Forum, which was held July 21 through July 23 at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. The conference was organized by the Ames-based Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI).

The Daily Galaxy via BEIJING (AP), space.com and cbsnews.com

NASA Observes Pluto's 'Tail' --"A Complex and Fascinating World"

NASA: "We've Only Scratched the Surface of Our Pluto Exploration"

"We're Losing Control" --Chinese AI Program Defeats World Masters at Planet's Oldest Most Difficult Board Game

NASA Scientists --"Vast Ocean of Saturn's Moon Enceladus Could Be the Site of a Second Genesis"

Maven Mission Nearing Mars Orbit in Search for Clues to Fate of Ancient Oceans

NASA: Earth is Vulnerable to Invisible, Microscopic Black Holes --"Universe is Filled with Primordial Black Holes Speeding Through Space Like Bullets"

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astronomy

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"Gigantic Compared to Our Solar System" --Two Massive Holes Caused by Dark Matter Observed Just Outside Milky Way"

The discovery of two massive holes punched through a stream of stars could help answer questions about the nature of dark matter, the mysterious substance holding galaxies together. Researchers have detected two massive holes which have been ‘punched' through a stream of stars just outside the Milky Way, and found that they were likely caused by clumps of dark matter, the invisible substance which holds galaxies together and makes up a quarter of all matter and energy in the universe.

The scientists, from the University of Cambridge, found the holes by studying the distribution of stars in the Milky Way. While the clumps of dark matter that likely made the holes are gigantic in comparison to our Solar System with a mass between one million and 100 million times that of the Sun they are actually the tiniest clumps of dark matter detected to date.

“While we do not yet understand what dark matter is formed of, we know that it is everywhere,” said Dr Denis Erkal from Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy, the paper's lead author. “It permeates the universe and acts as scaffolding around which astrophysical objects made of ordinary matter such as galaxies are assembled.”

The results, which have been submitted to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, could help researchers understand the properties of dark matter, by inferring what type of particle this mysterious substance could be made of. According to their calculations and simulations, dark matter is likely made up of particles more massive and more sluggish than previously thought, although such a particle has yet to be discovered.

Current theory on how the universe was formed predicts that many of these dark matter building blocks have been left unused, and there are possibly tens of thousands of small clumps of dark matter swarming in and around the Milky Way. These small clumps, known as dark matter sub-haloes, are completely dark, and don't contain any stars, gas or dust.

Dark matter cannot be directly measured, and so its existence is usually inferred by the gravitational pull it exerts on other objects, such as by observing the movement of stars in a galaxy. But since sub-haloes don't contain any ordinary matter, researchers need to develop alternative techniques in order to observe them.

The technique the Cambridge researchers developed was to essentially look for giant holes punched through a stream of stars. These streams are the remnants of small satellites, either dwarf galaxies or globular clusters, which were once in orbit around our own galaxy, but the strong tidal forces of the Milky Way have torn them apart. The remnants of these former satellites are often stretched out into long and narrow tails of stars, known as stellar streams.

“Stellar streams are actually simple and fragile structures,” said co-author Dr Sergey Koposov. “The stars in a stellar stream closely follow one another since their orbits all started from the same place. But they don't actually feel each other's presence, and so the apparent coherence of the stream can be fractured if a massive body passes nearby. If a dark matter sub-halo passes through a stellar stream, the result will be a gap in the stream which is proportional to the mass of the body that created it.”

The researchers used data from the stellar streams in the Palomar 5 globular cluster to look for evidence of a sub-halo fly-by. Using a new modelling technique, they were able to observe the stream with greater precision than ever before. What they found was a pair of wrinkled tidal tails, with two gaps of different widths.

By running thousands of computer simulations, the researchers determined that the gaps were consistent with a fly-by of a dark matter sub-halo. If confirmed, these would be the smallest dark matter clumps detected to date.

“If dark matter can exist in clumps smaller than the smallest dwarf galaxy, then it also tells us something about the nature of the particles which dark matter is made of namely that it must be made of very massive particles,” said co-author Dr Vasily Belokurov. “This would be a breakthrough in our understanding of dark matter.”

The reason that researchers can make this connection is that the mass of the smallest clump of dark matter is closely linked to the mass of the yet unknown particle that dark matter is composed of. More precisely, the smaller the clumps of dark matter, the higher the mass of the particle.

Since we do not yet know what dark matter is made of, the simplest way to characterise the particles is to assign them a particular energy or mass. If the particles are very light, then they can move and disperse into very large clumps. But if the particles are very massive, then they can't move very fast, causing them to condense in the first instance into very small clumps.

“Mass is related to how fast these particles can move, and how fast they can move tells you about their size,” said Belokurov. “So that's why it's so interesting to detect very small clumps of dark matter, because it tells you that the dark matter particle itself must be very massive.”

“If our technique works as predicted, in the near future we will be able to use it to discover even smaller clumps of dark matter,” said Erkal. “It's like putting dark matter goggles on and seeing thousands of dark clumps each more massive than a million suns whizzing around.”

The Daily Galaxy via University of Cambridge

"Cloud D" in Nearby Dwarf Galaxy --Obscures Spectacular Cluster of Massive Stars Billion Xs Brighter Than Our Sun

"Large Chunk of Milky Way's 1st Generation Stars are Missing"

Alien Invaders of the Milky Way - The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel

NASA/Hubble: "For Far-Future Milky Way Civilizations Evidence of Big Bang and Evolution Will be Erased"

Mystery Star Clusters of Elliptical Galaxy Centaurus A --"Something Dark, Hidden and Massive"

"Milky Way Danger Zone" --Solar-System Devouring Mini Black Holes (Today's Most Popular) - The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel

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Aeolus launch contract

europeanspaceagency posted a photo:

The contract between ESA and Arianespace to launch the ADM-Aeolus satellite was signed on 22 July 2016 by ESA's Director of Earth Observation Programmes, Josef Aschbacher, (left) and CEO of Arianespace, Stéphane Israël, (right) in the presence of Jan Woerner, ESA Director General, (centre), at ESA headquarters in Paris, France. Aeolus will be launched on a Vega rocket from Europe's Spaceport near Kourou in French Guiana at the end of 2017. Using novel laser technology, this new mission will provide profiles of wind, aerosols and clouds to advance our understanding of atmospheric dynamics and to improve weather forecasts.

Read more: Vega to launch ESA's wind mission

Credit: ESANadia Imbert-Vier, 2016

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Sit! Stay! Spell!

“Alphabet” border, designed by William Wegman, distributed by A/D Gallery, New York, 1993.
Gift of A/D Gallery. 1997-108-1

William Wegman's 1993 “Alphabet” border is a charming representative of the vast body of children's wallpaper that has been around since the 19th century.

Wegman began photographing his Weimaraners in 1970, and his photographs became a favorite with adults and children alike. After all, what's not to like about a beautiful dog holding a goofy pose?

The border elevates Wegman's dogs from cute to educational by arranging them into letters of the alphabet from A to Z. It was available in white, blue and rust and each color was printed in a limited edition of 1,500, each signed and numbered by the artist.

The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum contains children's wallpapers dating back to the 1870s. While early children's wallpaper was designed to be instructional, it didn't capture the whimsy exuded by this border, for which Wegman also designed a complementary sidewall paper.

Wegman started out as a painter, receiving degrees from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 1970, he moved to southern California to teach at California State College, Long Beach. That's when he purchased his Weimaraner, Man Ray, and began photographing him in unusual poses. This photography continued in 1986 with the addition of Fay Ray, another Weimaraner, and then with her offspring. Wegman has created numerous books for children and adults, and film and video for such companies as Saturday Night Live, Nickelodeon and Sesame Street.

The post Sit! Stay! Spell! appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

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Hungarian poster for ZABRISKIE POINT (Michelangelo Antonioni,...

Hungarian poster for ZABRISKIE POINT (Michelangelo Antonioni, USA, 1970)

Designer: Laszlo Lakner

Poster source: Film/Art Gallery

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On Hirshhorn plaza, demolished '92 Dodge keeps pulling in the curious

Visitors to the Hirshhorn plaza encounter “Still Life with Spirit and Xitle.” (Photo by John Barrat)

Although it has no magnetic properties, the 9-ton red volcanic boulder on the plaza of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden keeps pulling people in from the nearby sidewalk on Independence Avenue. Perhaps it is the boulder's painted-on smirk or the fact that it sits atop a 1992 Dodge Spirit, creating, as a recent press expounds: “a slapstick disaster scene… part performance, part sculpture.”

“Joyful and cathartic,” is how Hirshhorn Chief Curator Stéphane Aquin described the sculpture “Still Life with Spirit and Xitle” on a recent August morning as he watched person after person curiously approach and then examine the artwork. Many took selfies with the smashed car and rock.

“On a very simple level, people just see a rock on a car and they say, ‘God this is fantastic,' because they wouldn't dream of wanting to see that on their car,” Aquin says. “And then some would, because they hate their car.”

Created by expatriate American artist Jimmy Durham in 2007, the Hirshhorn recently acquired the sculpture following its appearance in the 2015 Art Basel exhibition in Miami Beach. “It was truly the star of the art fair,” Aquin recalls. “I don't know if it is a sign of the quality of a work, but definitely of its public appeal, it blew up on Instagram. It was really the most spectacular thing in the fair.”

Durham's name for the sculpture refers to the ancient Mexican volcano Xitle (shy-tuhl) which means, “Spirit.” It erupted around 245-315 AD and engulfed the then-prominent city of Cuicuilco in lava. Durham had a 9-ton boulder quarried from near the buried city which was then placed by crane upon the roof of the Dodge Spirit. As a finishing touch, Durham painted a smug, cartoon-like face on the boulder.

Still Life with Spirit and Xitle” on the Hirshhorn plaza (Photo by John Barrat)

“It's sort of an open metaphor of the revenge of nature over culture,” Aquin explains. “It represents the encounter of two forms of spirit, one ancient, mythological and physical and the other—a Dodge Spirit—a car produced in Mexico.

Durham, who had lived in Mexico between 1987 and 1994, was aware of other associations with the car, Aquin says. “Because it was a powerful car undercover police would use them, as well as drug dealers…so it has associations of shady, nefarious government force.”

Although the volcanic rock appears to have landed violently upon the car, Hirshhorn staff placed it gently down with a crane. The boulder's weight had already bent the car's frame, pushing it down to the ground. “There is no car that's going to take 9 tons,” Aquin says.

Its placement on the plaza in front of the Hirshhorn's main entrance is not arbitrary, Aquin adds. Car and rock sit atop the only concrete pillar that supports the plaza from below. “We had X-rays done to locate the plaza pillar and determine the exact position where we could safely place it,” Aquin explains. “Anywhere else and it may have dropped straight down,” into the Hirshhorn's basement.

A crew of Smithsonian staff use a crane to install Jimmy Durham's sculpture “Still Life with Spirit and Xitle” on the Hirshhorn Plaza.

After numerous walks around the museum while observing the constant flow of pedestrians in the vicinity, Aquin and other HMSG staff determined that a large percentage of the Hirshhorn's visitors travel to the museum from the Air and Space Museum and L'Enfant Plaza Metro, walking west along Independence Avenue. With this in mind, the Dodge is aimed at an angle with its headlights pointing at these walkers as they approach the Hirshhorn's south plaza entrance. The sculpture is “a show stopper,” Aquin says. “Everyone stops. It's just a simple thing but no one gets over it.”

How does one preserve a demolished car? “It's complicated,” Aquin observes. As per Durham's wishes the elements will be allowed to take their toll upon the car. “We know the car is going to dilapidate over time. In 60 years it will be totally different and down the line it will disappear. Durham suggested at some point we replace the car with a typical Washington, D.C. diplomatic limousine…something like a Cadillac Escalade, a motorcade car,” Aquin says. “But if we do that then the question arises what do we do about the sculpture's title? We lose the Dodge Spirit.”

For the rock, geologists and volcanologists have been invited to assess the cracks in the rock and, as a few plants have grown on its top, a botanist also is being consulted.

“Still Life with Spirit and Xitle,” signals a new direction for the Hirshhorn more than anything else, Aquin says. “It's only one work but it has transformed the plaza and the whole look of the building. Little by little that's what we are trying to do.”

The post On Hirshhorn plaza, demolished '92 Dodge keeps pulling in the curious appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

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Three New books mark museum opening

To commemorate the opening of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture three new books have been released by Smithsonian Books: Dream a World Anew: The African American Experience and the Shaping of America; Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture; and National Museum of African American History and Culture: A Souvenir Book. Each book will be available in the museum store beginning with the museum's opening on Sept. 24. On Sept. 27 the books will be widely available elsewhere.

Dream a World Anew: The African American Experience and the Shaping of America uses objects and stories from the museum to examine the African American experience. It presents a sweeping history that includes the path from slavery to freedom, the struggle during Reconstruction and the civil rights movement, and the swell of major social, political and economic changes since 1968. The book also celebrates the achievements of extraordinary black musicians, writers, performers, athletes and artists who influenced American cultural identity.

Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture presents the long history of efforts to build a permanent place to collect, study and present African American history and culture. It traces the appointment of the director, the selection of the site and the process of conceiving, designing and constructing a public monument to the achievements and contributions of African Americans.

National Museum of African American History and Culture: A Souvenir Book showcases the treasures of the museum's collections. Highlights include a silk lace-and-linen shawl given to Harriet Tubman by Queen Victoria, Pullman Porter train cars and uniforms, the jacket and skirt worn by Marian Anderson for her 1939 Lincoln Memorial concert, Negro League baseball banners and jerseys, a Tuskegee Airman flight jacket and Chuck Berry's Cadillac. All of these objects and many more are accompanied by captions explaining their significance and role in the nation's history.

The post Three New books mark museum opening appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

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Supple Studio gives D.R.A.W interlocking “D” identity

Supple Studio has designed an identity system for D.R.A.W Recruitment using an interlocking “D' device and the strapline “The Art of the Perfect Fit”.

The new company was formed from the merger of Drummond Read Recruitment and Art//Work and specialises in sourcing talent from the fine arts, antiques and luxury markets.

Supple creative director Jamie Ellul, who was invited to tender, says: “The client had already spotted that their existing company names formed the acronym D.R.A.W; it felt like a gift of a name with a genuine back story.

“But we wanted to avoid the obvious solution of drawing things or sketching, so we took the angle of people being ‘drawn together' which led to ‘the perfect fit'.”

An interlocking D monogram was also created and Ellul says he “worked with the client to choose a range of materials that got across D.R.A.W.'s diverse client base and candidates from classic to contemporary.”

The main points of interaction for service users are the website and jobs board. Ellul, who also worked on these, says: “We've kept the design very classic using black and white throughout, with the only ping of colour being the monogram logos.

We were conscious of the fact it's a very discerning audience, so a neutral classic approach seemed to make sense. The typeface we've used is Value by Colophon, which lends a little quirkiness to the design, but still feels in keeping with the classic feel.”

The post Supple Studio gives D.R.A.W interlocking “D” identity appeared first on Design Week.

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Moves & changes industry news

People

Rebecca Kirrane has joined Decibel Digital as a UX/UI designer, moving from commerce consultancy, Salmon.

Bentley has appointed John Paul Gregory to lead its exterior design division. Gregory's first production car is likely to be the new Bentley Continental GT.

Manchester-based studio Code Computerlove has announced the appointment of Amy Robinson as customer experience consultant. The role will see Robinson help bolster the studio's content, acquisition and conversion teams.

CloudTag has appointed Peter Griffith as chief creative officer to oversee the design, aesthetics and brand messaging of Cloudtag products. Griffith was formerly head of mobile phones design at Microsoft.

Consultancies

Jaywing has announced its acquisition of Leeds-based consultancy, Bloom. The consultancy hopes to grow the development and distribution of its data science-led products.

A new consultancy has been launched after the founder of Sumo Design, Jim Richardson, closed the business to focus on a new start-up. The creative team behind Sumo Sarah Tempest and Michael Sutton have launched their own consultancy in Newcastle, called Altogether.

Contact aimee.mclaughlin@centaurmedia.com if there have been any moves and changes in your consultancy.

The post Moves & changes industry news appeared first on Design Week.

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Gordon's gin reveals new packaging design

Design Bridge and Diageo have worked together on the new packaging design for Gordon's gin, almost 15 years after the consultancy previously redesigned the gin brand's bottle.

Design Bridge's brief was to respond to the huge boom in interest in gin over the last few years, and “reassert Gordon's position as the top selling gin brand”, according to chief creative officer at Design Bridge, Graham Shearsby.

“We saw it as an opportunity to guide the packaging onto the next part of its journey,” says Shearsby. “It's always been quite a functional bottle, part of what we tried to do was bring more life to it.”

Taller, slimmer bottle

The new bottle is slightly slimmer and taller than previously, while the label has been applied to the D-shaped curved side of the bottle instead of the flat side like before.

“It was to get a bit more movement across the front label,” says Shearsby. “The bottle was a little bit too flat on the front, so this way it projects itself and will stand out on the shelf.”

Inspired by a trip to the brand's archives, which revealed an old advertising campaign with the tagline “the heart of a good cocktail”, along with heart-shaped labels from 1920s bottles, the heart symbol has become the focal point of the new design.

Hand drawn wordmark

The glass bottle itself has a heart shape with “botanical flourishes” embossed onto it, encircling the words “Estd. London 1769”.

Meanwhile, the Gordon's wordmark on the label has been redrawn by hand, and the brand's original boar logo has been made more visible, moving from the bottom to the front of the bottle.

The new design has also been introduced to Gordon's collection of flavoured gins, sloe, elderflower and cucumber, and to Gordon's Export gin. The newly designed packaging will roll out globally this month.

The post Gordon's gin reveals new packaging design appeared first on Design Week.

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Ragged Edge refreshes Deliciously Ella branding

"Deliciously-Ella-Energy-Balls-Hazelnut-and-Raisin"

Ragged Edge has redesigned the visual identity for food blogger Ella Mills, commonly known as Deliciously Ella.

The rebrand includes a new design system and updated logo shared with health food restaurant Mae Deli, co-founded by Mills and her husband as well as the packaging for the blogger's first retail product, Deliciously Ella's Energy Balls.

“Reinforce personal connection with her followers”

Based on Mills' own signature, the logo features a hand drawn typeface and a “sunburst” shape that seeks to “reinforce her personal connection with her followers”, according to Ragged Edge.

The consultancy chose a hand drawn typeface Naive Line Sans for headlines and the monospaced Elementa Regular for body copy. Ragged Edge cofounder Max Ottignon says: “Used together, these feel approachable, warm and human.”

“Natural, simple and honest”

Meanwhile, the packaging for the energy balls has been designed to reflect Mills' three core values: “natural, simple and honest”. It combines bright colours designed to make it stand out on the shelf compared to other similar products and comes in a matte texture.

Ottignon says: “Much of Ella's popularity stems from her open and honest relationship with her followers. Maintaining that level of trust as her brand grows into new areas was crucial.”

“Our strategy set out to build on her core values and create a beautifully crafted design, with substance and weight.”

The Deliciously Ella Energy Balls launched at Whole Foods this month and will also be rolled out to selected supermarkets.

The post Ragged Edge refreshes Deliciously Ella branding appeared first on Design Week.

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This new tampon brand hopes to empower women in China

Consultancy Pearlfisher has created the visual identity and packaging for a new tampon brand which looks to empower women in China.

Fémme is a new product from Chinese company Yoai, which aims to increase the presence of and education about tampons in China, and change a “patronising” tone around tampons to associations with “confidence and positivity”.

2% of Chinese women use tampons

Recent research found that only 2% of women in China use tampons, with the majority citing the reason as inexperience with the product.

The new brand aims to shift shake conservative, traditional associations with feminine hygiene care in China, says Pearlfisher creative director Natalie Chung, through a “stylish and discreet” design.

Chinese characters used in branding

The logo is composed of a Chinese character symbolising womanhood encased with a circle, within a circle, all created in a “bold” red to symbolise menstruation.

A simple, sans-serif wordmark has been used, which aims to “elevate the product from basic pharmacy to high-end premium”, says Chung.

The packaging also aims to be “elegant” through embossing, the use of a foil logo and card inserts of line-drawn female forms which replicate Chinese characters.

Pastel colour code

Packs use a pastel colour scheme of blue, pink and green to indicate different product sizes, and there is educational information included on the back which aims to “dispel cultural misconceptions” and teach women how to use tampons.

Victoria Li at Yoai says the new brand identity is “based on a modern interpretation of Chinese values” rather than something “overtly westernised”, and hopes the product will help to “liberate” and offer more choice to women in China.

The post This new tampon brand hopes to empower women in China appeared first on Design Week.

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September sunset

ArtGordon1 posted a photo:

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September sky over London

ArtGordon1 posted a photo:

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Evening falls

ArtGordon1 posted a photo:

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Golden Sunset clouds

Sculptor Lil posted a photo:

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Sunset 7 Sept 2016

Sculptor Lil posted a photo:

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Spires

Howard Ferrier posted a photo:

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1666 London

Tedz Duran posted a photo:

A 120m long wooden replica of 1666 London was floated down the River Thames between Waterloo Bridge and Blackfriars Bridge at sunset before it was set ablaze to mark 350 years since the Great Fire.

#a7rII #batis1885 #carlzeiss

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‘Things Shouldn't Be Like This': Lingering Effects of Peru's Jungle Oil Spills

"Jusoe — Jusoe Esash Unum holds leaves covered in oil near the banks of the Marañon River, months after the January Chiriaco spill. (Photo by Brett Monroe Garner)

By Rebecca Wolff, National Geographic Young Explorer Grantee

I hadn't grasped the true human consequences of oil spills until we immersed ourselves in the situation going on in Peru.

The stories our team heard of lingering illness and food insecurity were heartbreaking. “When the oil spill happened, [the doctors] arrived in the community and gave out a few medicines, and then they never came back. Things shouldn't be like this,” we were told.

By June 2016, 8000 individuals and at least 30 indigenous communities were affected. I never thought it could possibly get worse.

On August 10, the fourth oil spill since the start of 2016 was reported in the Peruvian Amazon.

At least 10 indigenous communities are impacted by the newest spill in the province of Condorcanqui, department of Amazonas. More than 20 similar spills have crippled the region over the past five years.

This latest spill has the potential to impact the Marañon River and the indigenous groups living there, including the Awajún who were affected by the January 25 spill in Chiriaco and the June 24 spill in Barranca. The Marañon is one of the most important rivers in Peru, starting in the Andes and eventually becoming a major tributary of the Amazon River.

Anger and frustration are reaching all-time highs across Peru. In February, after two spills saw over 3,000 barrels of crude oil flow into the Chiriaco and Morona Rivers, state-owned oil company Petroperú was told to cease pumping oil on their Nor Peruano pipeline. The 40-year-old pipeline is in a state of disrepair, the believed cause of the multiple spills this year.

A third oil spill in late June raised questions as to whether Petroperú had followed state orders to stop pumping oil and indicated the company had in fact been continuing to operate their faulty pipeline. One week after the June 24 spill, the Peruvian Supervisory Agency for Investment in Energy and Mining sanctioned Petroperú for pumping oil without permission. The company's president resigned during the controversy.

"Petroperuì — A Petroperuì oil cleanup crew works at site of the January Chiriaco Spill. (Photo by Brett Monroe Garner)

The cause of the newest spill has not been verified. The Agency for Environmental Assessment and Enforcement (OEFA) released a statement on August 11 saying the spill may have resulted from an intentional cut to the pipeline. However, advocates I work with in Peru feel that unconfirmed accusations like this only help shift the blame and responsibility for the spill away from Petroperú. It also remains unclear whether Petroperú ever received permission, after the June sanction, to pump oil again. People are demanding to know if Petroperú was operating illegally, once again putting the Amazon at risk.

Communities and indigenous organizations are often the first to report oil spills on their territories, yet they are not seeing swift legal action or recognition of their rights and needs in wake of these environmental disasters.

“Legal processes are often partial and incomplete. There is a major disconnect between the process and the expectations of affected communities,” anthropologist Rodrigo Lazo, one of our Peruvian collaborators told me. In the Amazon, many individuals simply feel that not enough is being done to help.

"Levitia, — Levitia, a mother affected by the Chiriaco spill stands in a field that was ruined by the oil spill. (Photo by Brett Monroe Garner)

For the past six months, my team and I have interviewed lawyers, community members, indigenous leaders, and advocates across Peru. The testimonies of those afflicted by the spills and those fighting on behalf of communities never waver. Oil spills have abruptly impacted livelihoods and health while polluting the land and rivers of the Amazon.

One mother worried about how she would feed her children when her farmland remained covered in oil, never cleaned up by Petroperú. A community leader explained the health and emergency food supplies provided in his area were not enough for the vast amount of people seeking support.

The number of oil spills occurring in the Peruvian Amazon is increasing at an alarming rate. As we wait to learn just how bad this fourth spill will be, I wonder about the countless stories never told of how oil spills impact human lives. I can only hope the inspiring indigenous leaders, communities, and organizations our team has met will keep fighting to make sure that a fair legal and social resolution is achieved for all those stricken by these tragic oil spills.

More by Rebecca Wolff and Team Member Kevin Floerke

Indigenous Amazonians Reeling From Oil Spills in the Jungle

Health Concerns, Food Insecurity Linger Months After Peruvian Oil Spills

Peru's Oil Spills Deserve the World's Attention

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Big Sunset

Alex Chilli posted a photo:

Somewhat exhausted view of Big Ben and Westminster Bridge - but couldn't resist as the sun was setting. Now for some less touristy shots I think...

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Wicked when Wet by George Benson

Wicked when Wet by George Benson

George Benson: Photos

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Photos of the Day: Sept. 7, 2016

Explore the news of the day with these images from around the world.
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Flowers+Black tea by Parag Bhagat

Flowers+Black tea by Parag Bhagat

Parag Bhagat: Photos

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Eclairs by T_Hilal

Eclairs by T_Hilal

My tiny happiness after a long&hard day.

T_Hilal: Photos

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Made With Your Values by BRXSON

Made With Your Values by BRXSON

Way, way, way above Times Square...

BRXSON: Photos

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Skiathos, Greece by Thom Graham-Wood

Skiathos, Greece by Thom Graham-Wood

Thom Graham-Wood: Photos

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Boom time for whales in the Arctic driven by the loss of sea ice
The unprecedented loss of sea ice at high latitudes has one benefit it has created ideal conditions for baleen whales
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色达清晨 by 曦哥很忙

色达清晨 by 曦哥很忙

曦哥很忙: Photos

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surviving ... by patrick verweire

surviving ... by patrick verweire

patrick verweire: Photos

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AGR by Lucas Chien

AGR by Lucas Chien

Lucas Chien: Photos

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The Space Shuttle Challenger rises through the skies above...

The Space Shuttle Challenger rises through the skies above Florida on February 3, 1984.

With the first release of my book tomorrow in the United Kingdom, I have been doing a lot of thinking about why I started this project in the first place. To sum it up in one word, it has always been about perspective. Through space travel or satellites or simply bringing ourselves to a more elevated viewpoint, we can discover new ways to see our world like never before. I think that exercise can be healthy, it can be challenging, and ultimately, it can be beautiful. For me, it has been such an amazing adventure to work on this project and this book and I can't wait to see where it will take us next. Photo courtesy of NASA

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Venezuelan Food Shortages Force Many to Abandon Their Pets (19 photos)

In recent years, triple-digit inflation, massive food shortages, rising crime rates, and failing public services in Venezuela have forced many families into difficult decisions. The lack of available and affordable food has led to an increasing number of pets being dropped off at shelters, or simply abandoned in the streets. The Associated Press reports that “Pet owners say the price of dog food has more than doubled in recent months to $2 a pound, more than a day's pay for those earning the minimum wage.” Reuters photographer Carlos Garcia Rawlins and AP photographer Fernando Llano recently documented the growing number of abandoned dogs and cats in Venezuela's parks, shelters, and private clinics.

Sonrisa is pictured at the Famproa dog shelter in Los Teques, Venezuela, on August 16, 2016. "Sonrisa (smile), was given that name, because when someone approached her, she was frightened as if she were being beaten, but showing her teeth as if were smiling," said Maria Silva who takes care of dogs at the shelter. Sonrisa died the following week after the photo was taken. (Carlos Garcia Rawlins / Reuters)

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Green way by Fabio Antenore

Green way by Fabio Antenore

For more of my Works, Prints, Workshops ore personal Coaching follow me on: FACEBOOK HOMEPAGE

Fabio Antenore: Photos

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Abandoned by Raed Ammari

Abandoned by Raed Ammari

Raed Ammari: Photos

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Breakout by Michael Bollino

Breakout by Michael Bollino

Atmosphere was the name of the game during my recent trip to the Canadian Rockies. Rain, fog, clouds, wind all accompanied me on the day I entered the park. Awful conditions for the tourists yearning for mountain views but incredibly exciting for any photographers driving the Icefields Parkway that day. As hoped, the afternoon brought a stop to the rain as well as a breaking in the clouds obscuring the high peaks. This image is from the first series I shot during the trip. I've added a handful more to my New Releases gallery on my website if anyone feels like clicking over.

Michael Bollino: Photos

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Forces of Mountains by Adnan Bubalo

Forces of Mountains by Adnan Bubalo

The Matterhorn is a mountain of the Alps, straddling the main watershed and border between Switzerland and Italy. It is a huge and near-symmetrical pyramidal peak in the Monte Rosa area of the Pennine Alps, whose summit is 4,478 metres (14,692 ft) high, making it one of the highest summits in the Alps and Europe. It is estimated that over 500 alpinists have died on the Matterhorn since the first climb in 1865, making it one of the deadliest peaks in the world From my last expedition to Alps

Adnan Bubalo: Photos

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At the end of the day... by Marcel Bressers

At the end of the day... by Marcel Bressers

When I was making my way back at the end of the day, I suddenly discovered him standing there in the last light of day. So I raised y camera and took the shot. Enjoy!

Marcel Bressers: Photos

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Aline by Manfred Karisch

Aline by Manfred Karisch

Manfred Karisch: Photos

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Montreal Is About To Kill A Lot Of Dogs, Based On Quack Science
A dog registered as a boxer has killed a woman in Montreal, so the mayor is calling for a ban on pit bulls. This would be amusing, if it weren't so predictable and depressing: in few areas of public policy do you encounter thinking this routinely deranged. And it all starts with contempt for science.

Consider the National Post's Barbara Kay, almost certainly Canada's most prominent enemy of this ill-defined category of dog: the "pit bull." Kay is one of the saner voices on her side of the debate, and I sense she genuinely believes that she is acting on behalf of dog bite victims. For years she has written screeds calling for the ban of these dogs, based on what she considers solid scientific evidence. It would help, however, if she actually knew what a scientist was, and how they can be identified in the wild. I've never dealt with a journalist so distressingly lax when it comes to vetting her sources: she does not so much cherry-pick experts as pick diseased cherries and pronounce them epidemiologists.

In particular, Barbara Kay relies upon two crusaders who stress that they were personally bitten by pit bulls. I have written before about Merritt Clifton, the alleged statistician she describes as "her primary source." I addressed his claim that he had "more than a hundred peer-reviewed publications." I found only one -- unrelated to pit bulls -- in a marginal Asian journal. Since then an immaculately researched book has emerged -- Pit Bull: the Battle Over an American Icon (Knopf) -- and the author, Bronwen Dickey, is a more intrepid detective than I am: she managed to find two. Both in this same comically obscure journal. "In one of them, he cites his own newsletter twelve times. The rest of the citations came mainly from Web sites, news reports, and press releases." Dickey is clear on Clifton's credibility as a scientist: he "possesses no relevant credentials."

The woman Barbara Kay describes as her "other primary source" is Colleen Lynn. Here, Bronwen Dickey's revelations are priceless: "Before her bite injury, Lynn maintained a fortune-telling Web site called DivineLady.com, on which she referred to herself as 'Divine Lady, Beholder of the Soul.' In 2011, she self-published the third edition of Divine Lady's Guide to the Runes."

And the Divine Lady now runs DogsBite -- a sober, professional looking website, as long as you don't click on the links to drooling hate groups -- which credulous journalists consider a primary source for scientific information about pit bulls. Bronwen Dickey reminds us: "Lynn has no professional credentials in statistics, epidemiology, or animal behaviour; neither do the sources she relies upon most frequently."

These are the experts, peddled by Barbara Kay, who are informing Mayor Denis Coderre's decision to introduce a breed ban. Their favoured legislation is strongly rejected by every expert organization on the continent, including the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association, the American Veterinary Medical Association, the American Bar Association, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the American College of Veterinary Behaviorists.

When it comes to Breed Specific Legislation, it is not a question of two worthy opinions to be carefully considered and weighed against each other. It is a matter of science versus the worst kind of quackery: rune-throwing fortune tellers, wildly unqualified statisticians, and a posse of foul-mouthed trolls. There is no argument here, any more than there is in the sorry vaccine debate: it's simply knowledge versus willful, howling ignorance.

Barbara Kay's third vaunted source -- her "bible" -- is a book by Alexandra Semyonova, a former welfare inspector for the Dutch SPCA. Despite having spent time at good schools -- Johns Hopkins and University College London -- Semyonova likes to talk about "science whores": these are trained scientists with peer-reviewed publications, who come to radically different conclusions from hers, and therefore must be in it for the money.

I read Kay's bible after some urging. Semyonova's book is called The 100 Silliest Things People Say About Dogs. Which doesn't have quite the same ring to it as "The Old Testament." Still, it's not a bad book. Sure, she cites Merritt Clifton, so her statistics can be safely ignored, but it's not a dreadful book, really, until you come to the end -- the section entitled: "Myth 99: Scientists know what they are talking about because they study animals in an objective way."

Here the counterfactual statements are truly special. "The scientists who have studied dogs have done it either in highly unnatural circumstances (the lab), or they've only watched the dogs for short intervals." If you believe this silliness, I suggest you look up Dr. Ian Dunbar, a scientist with stellar academic qualifications -- a veterinary degree, a doctorate in animal behaviour from Berkeley, a Special Honours degree in Physiology and Biochemistry -- who has become famous for training dogs through decades of experience in the field. (He oppose BSL, of course, calling it "frankly stupid".)

I urge you to read "Myth 99" in its ridiculous entirety. Semyonova writes: "We now know that science often attracts people who have various, more or less serious, autism related disorders, perhaps in particular Asperger's syndrome." She laments science's "obsession with measurement and quantification." She suggests it might be a result of autism.

In short: rigorous science is overrated. Perhaps a kind of illness.

Barbara Kay seems to have come to her own self-serving conclusion: rigorous science reporting is overrated. I read her quirky bible, but despite my insistence, she has declined to read Bronwen Dickey's book, an exhaustive and likely definitive study representing seven years of research. Which didn't prevent Kay from tweeting this bit of non-libel, based on her profound insight into a book she hasn't read: "Why does @BronwenDickey hate kids?"

Let's take a look at what happened in Ontario when those evil "science whores" failed to prevent Breed Specific Legislation in 2005. For a short time it looked good: "A total of 486 bites were recorded in 2005. That number fell generally in the six years following, to 379 in 2010." And then -- when pit bulls were finally getting thin on the ground -- the numbers began to rise: "Toronto's reported dog bites have been rising since 2012, and in 2013 and 2014 reached their highest levels this century."

How could this be? Simple: other dogs stepped in to fill the gap. Irresponsible owners remained irresponsible -- since the laws did not apply to them, simply to maligned breeds -- and their dogs continued to bite. In 2014, pit bulls didn't even make the top ten list; the top biter in Ontario was the German Shepherd (a perennial), followed distantly by the Labrador retriever. Of course, had the wise rulers of Ontario listened to the science whores, they would have known to expect this: Breed Specific Legislation has been a disaster worldwide. Not one respectable study supports breed bans.

Oh, and if you care about dogs at all: "By 2012, the Ontario Veterinary Medical Association estimated that the law had led to over 1,000 dogs and puppies in Ontario having been needlessly put down."

Perhaps you don't care about dogs, but you value fiscal responsibility? Ontario's worthless Breed Specific Legislation -- while killing dogs, and doing nothing to make humans safer -- has certainly cost a whole lot of money. The precise figure hasn't been released, despite numerous requests, but we can infer how much from a study of Prince George County, Maryland (whose BSL costs are considered on the low side, relatively speaking): "The average cost to seize, detain, test, and euthanize a single pit bull was $68,000. In the fiscal year of 2001-2002, the total cost of pit bull confiscations was $560,000." Needless to say, this half million dollars purchased precisely zilch: "Studies proved that the community had no measurable safety benefit from the ban, and lost out on thousands of dollars from cancelled dog shows, tourism, and consistent 'pit bull' report calls from concerned citizens."

You'd think that Barbara Kay, a political conservative, would have strong ideas about fiscal restraint. But no, saving money has the unbearable consequence of saving pit bulls from the needle. Which is the only reason I can imagine Ms. Kay so greatly favours the failed Ontario legislation over the much less expensive program introduced in Alberta, which happens to actually work.

You see, Mayor Coderre need not look south of the border for relevant expertise here. By coincidence, the most lauded urban experiment in the containment of dog bites -- studied across the world -- is the Calgary Model. It's a remarkable success, and it's much cheaper than Breed Specific Legislation. The downside? It's a lot of work, and -- this really hurts -- it requires humans to be responsible. Calgary's bylaws governing dog ownership, described in depth here, are some of the strictest you'll encounter: yes, leashes are mandatory, as are licences. The legislation happens to be breed neutral, meaning that if your German Shepherd or your Dalmatian bites someone, you won't be off the hook. The program stresses education -- as opposed to BSL, whose fertilizer is ignorance -- which means even more in the way of human responsibility. So, it's a bit onerous. On the plus side it saves money, dogs, and humans.

Mayor Coderre has a genuine opportunity here: he could set an example, internationally, by introducing this groundbreaking legislation to a city twice the size of Calgary. This is personal: I lived in Montreal off and on for years -- one of my favorite cities -- and it would be thrilling to see it celebrated for a major contribution to the history of animal welfare.

The Calgary Model is not perfect, of course; nothing involving dogs and humans ever is. It requires constant vigilance and enforcement, and these have waned somewhat in recent years -- in 2011, for instance, Calgary experienced a distressing uptick in biting incidents. (Although not that distressing: the city retained "the lowest bite-per-population ratio in North America.") When the legislation is properly enforced, however, the results are peerless: Calgary "saw a five-fold reduction over 20 years -- from 10 bites per 10,000 people in 1986 to two in 2006."

Pardon my obsession with measurement and quantification. It's an illness I share with rational people who care about dog-bite victims.

NOTE: regarding the boxer I refer to at the top -- to be honest, we have no idea what kind of dog killed Christiane Vadnais. It was identified as a pit bull by the press, who are always quick to jump to this headline-friendly conclusion; then we discovered that it was registered as a boxer. Even this could be wrong; until we have DNA tests, we're simply throwing runes. All sorts of mixes can look like pit bulls. Alanna Devine, SPCA Montreal's director of animal advocacy, has the right approach: "The information that I think is pertinent here is that the dog was unsterilized, the dog was named Lucifer, and the dog had previously been involved in an attack against a human." In short, the owner would have been properly dealt with under the Calgary Model, and this tragedy would likely have been averted.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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A wall of trees across the Sahara is cool but we don't need it
The African Union is planning an 8000 kilometre stretch of trees across the entire continent, but the Great Green Wall isn't the best way to halt desertification
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Saving Africa's elephants isn't just a 'white man's job'

Kenyan conservationist Paula Kahumbu leads a new generation of Africans who are taking control of their environmental future

In the cool and serene area of Karen, near Nairobi, in the offices of the conservation organisation she has built, Paula Kahumbu eats chicken and rice and talks about a revolution.

The results of the wars we in conservation fight and win are not instant. They will be felt by generations to come

Continue reading...
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Never mind the pandas. What about the endangered geometric tortoise? | Jules Howard
Every year a list of the world's most endangered species is published. It's vital that the media looks beyond the great apes and fluffy bears

Look carefully at the most uppermost branches upon the great family tree of life on Earth, and near the top you will see a tiny twig labelled “panda”. It is re-growing. Slowly, it is getting sturdier.

Pandas are doing better than they were. In fact, this week, they have been officially downgraded in their conservation status from “endangered” to “vulnerable”, in the International Union for Conservation of Nature's latest “red list” update. The IUCN's annual announcement details the survival fortunes of every leaf upon life's great tree. It is nature's version of the FTSE 100, turned on its head.

Where was coverage of the nubian flapshell turtle?

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Montreal Is About To Kill A Lot Of Dogs, Based On Quack Science
A dog registered as a boxer has killed a woman in Montreal, so the mayor is calling for a ban on pit bulls. This would be amusing, if it weren't so predictable and depressing: in few areas of public policy do you encounter thinking this routinely deranged. And it all starts with contempt for science.

Consider the National Post's Barbara Kay, almost certainly Canada's most prominent enemy of this ill-defined category of dog: the "pit bull." Kay is one of the saner voices on her side of the debate, and I sense she genuinely believes that she is acting on behalf of dog bite victims. For years she has written screeds calling for the ban of these dogs, based on what she considers solid scientific evidence. It would help, however, if she actually knew what a scientist was, and how they can be identified in the wild. I've never dealt with a journalist so distressingly lax when it comes to vetting her sources: she does not so much cherry-pick experts as pick diseased cherries and pronounce them epidemiologists.

In particular, Barbara Kay relies upon two crusaders who stress that they were personally bitten by pit bulls. I have written before about Merritt Clifton, the alleged statistician she describes as "her primary source." I addressed his claim that he had "more than a hundred peer-reviewed publications." I found only one -- unrelated to pit bulls -- in a marginal Asian journal. Since then an immaculately researched book has emerged -- Pit Bull: the Battle Over an American Icon (Knopf) -- and the author, Bronwen Dickey, is a more intrepid detective than I am: she managed to find two. Both in this same comically obscure journal. "In one of them, he cites his own newsletter twelve times. The rest of the citations came mainly from Web sites, news reports, and press releases." Dickey is clear on Clifton's credibility as a scientist: he "possesses no relevant credentials."

The woman Barbara Kay describes as her "other primary source" is Colleen Lynn. Here, Bronwen Dickey's revelations are priceless: "Before her bite injury, Lynn maintained a fortune-telling Web site called DivineLady.com, on which she referred to herself as 'Divine Lady, Beholder of the Soul.' In 2011, she self-published the third edition of Divine Lady's Guide to the Runes."

And the Divine Lady now runs DogsBite -- a sober, professional looking website, as long as you don't click on the links to drooling hate groups -- which credulous journalists consider a primary source for scientific information about pit bulls. Bronwen Dickey reminds us: "Lynn has no professional credentials in statistics, epidemiology, or animal behaviour; neither do the sources she relies upon most frequently."

These are the experts, peddled by Barbara Kay, who are informing Mayor Denis Coderre's decision to introduce a breed ban. Their favoured legislation is strongly rejected by every expert organization on the continent, including the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association, the American Veterinary Medical Association, the American Bar Association, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the American College of Veterinary Behaviorists.

When it comes to Breed Specific Legislation, it is not a question of two worthy opinions to be carefully considered and weighed against each other. It is a matter of science versus the worst kind of quackery: rune-throwing fortune tellers, wildly unqualified statisticians, and a posse of foul-mouthed trolls. There is no argument here, any more than there is in the sorry vaccine debate: it's simply knowledge versus willful, howling ignorance.

Barbara Kay's third vaunted source -- her "bible" -- is a book by Alexandra Semyonova, a former welfare inspector for the Dutch SPCA. Despite having spent time at good schools -- Johns Hopkins and University College London -- Semyonova likes to talk about "science whores": these are trained scientists with peer-reviewed publications, who come to radically different conclusions from hers, and therefore must be in it for the money.

I read Kay's bible after some urging. Semyonova's book is called The 100 Silliest Things People Say About Dogs. Which doesn't have quite the same ring to it as "The Old Testament." Still, it's not a bad book. Sure, she cites Merritt Clifton, so her statistics can be safely ignored, but it's not a dreadful book, really, until you come to the end -- the section entitled: "Myth 99: Scientists know what they are talking about because they study animals in an objective way."

Here the counterfactual statements are truly special. "The scientists who have studied dogs have done it either in highly unnatural circumstances (the lab), or they've only watched the dogs for short intervals." If you believe this silliness, I suggest you look up Dr. Ian Dunbar, a scientist with stellar academic qualifications -- a veterinary degree, a doctorate in animal behaviour from Berkeley, a Special Honours degree in Physiology and Biochemistry -- who has become famous for training dogs through decades of experience in the field. (He oppose BSL, of course, calling it "frankly stupid".)

I urge you to read "Myth 99" in its ridiculous entirety. Semyonova writes: "We now know that science often attracts people who have various, more or less serious, autism related disorders, perhaps in particular Asperger's syndrome." She laments science's "obsession with measurement and quantification." She suggests it might be a result of autism.

In short: rigorous science is overrated. Perhaps a kind of illness.

Barbara Kay seems to have come to her own self-serving conclusion: rigorous science reporting is overrated. I read her quirky bible, but despite my insistence, she has declined to read Bronwen Dickey's book, an exhaustive and likely definitive study representing seven years of research. Which didn't prevent Kay from tweeting this bit of non-libel, based on her profound insight into a book she hasn't read: "Why does @BronwenDickey hate kids?"

Let's take a look at what happened in Ontario when those evil "science whores" failed to prevent Breed Specific Legislation in 2005. For a short time it looked good: "A total of 486 bites were recorded in 2005. That number fell generally in the six years following, to 379 in 2010." And then -- when pit bulls were finally getting thin on the ground -- the numbers began to rise: "Toronto's reported dog bites have been rising since 2012, and in 2013 and 2014 reached their highest levels this century."

How could this be? Simple: other dogs stepped in to fill the gap. Irresponsible owners remained irresponsible -- since the laws did not apply to them, simply to maligned breeds -- and their dogs continued to bite. In 2014, pit bulls didn't even make the top ten list; the top biter in Ontario was the German Shepherd (a perennial), followed distantly by the Labrador retriever. Of course, had the wise rulers of Ontario listened to the science whores, they would have known to expect this: Breed Specific Legislation has been a disaster worldwide. Not one respectable study supports breed bans.

Oh, and if you care about dogs at all: "By 2012, the Ontario Veterinary Medical Association estimated that the law had led to over 1,000 dogs and puppies in Ontario having been needlessly put down."

Perhaps you don't care about dogs, but you value fiscal responsibility? Ontario's worthless Breed Specific Legislation -- while killing dogs, and doing nothing to make humans safer -- has certainly cost a whole lot of money. The precise figure hasn't been released, despite numerous requests, but we can infer how much from a study of Prince George County, Maryland (whose BSL costs are considered on the low side, relatively speaking): "The average cost to seize, detain, test, and euthanize a single pit bull was $68,000. In the fiscal year of 2001-2002, the total cost of pit bull confiscations was $560,000." Needless to say, this half million dollars purchased precisely zilch: "Studies proved that the community had no measurable safety benefit from the ban, and lost out on thousands of dollars from cancelled dog shows, tourism, and consistent 'pit bull' report calls from concerned citizens."

You'd think that Barbara Kay, a political conservative, would have strong ideas about fiscal restraint. But no, saving money has the unbearable consequence of saving pit bulls from the needle. Which is the only reason I can imagine Ms. Kay so greatly favours the failed Ontario legislation over the much less expensive program introduced in Alberta, which happens to actually work.

You see, Mayor Coderre need not look south of the border for relevant expertise here. By coincidence, the most lauded urban experiment in the containment of dog bites -- studied across the world -- is the Calgary Model. It's a remarkable success, and it's much cheaper than Breed Specific Legislation. The downside? It's a lot of work, and -- this really hurts -- it requires humans to be responsible. Calgary's bylaws governing dog ownership, described in depth here, are some of the strictest you'll encounter: yes, leashes are mandatory, as are licences. The legislation happens to be breed neutral, meaning that if your German Shepherd or your Dalmatian bites someone, you won't be off the hook. The program stresses education -- as opposed to BSL, whose fertilizer is ignorance -- which means even more in the way of human responsibility. So, it's a bit onerous. On the plus side it saves money, dogs, and humans.

Mayor Coderre has a genuine opportunity here: he could set an example, internationally, by introducing this groundbreaking legislation to a city twice the size of Calgary. This is personal: I lived in Montreal off and on for years -- one of my favorite cities -- and it would be thrilling to see it celebrated for a major contribution to the history of animal welfare.

The Calgary Model is not perfect, of course; nothing involving dogs and humans ever is. It requires constant vigilance and enforcement, and these have waned somewhat in recent years -- in 2011, for instance, Calgary experienced a distressing uptick in biting incidents. (Although not that distressing: the city retained "the lowest bite-per-population ratio in North America.") When the legislation is properly enforced, however, the results are peerless: Calgary "saw a five-fold reduction over 20 years -- from 10 bites per 10,000 people in 1986 to two in 2006."

Pardon my obsession with measurement and quantification. It's an illness I share with rational people who care about dog-bite victims.

NOTE: regarding the boxer I refer to at the top -- to be honest, we have no idea what kind of dog killed Christiane Vadnais. It was identified as a pit bull by the press, who are always quick to jump to this headline-friendly conclusion; then we discovered that it was registered as a boxer. Even this could be wrong; until we have DNA tests, we're simply throwing runes. All sorts of mixes can look like pit bulls. Alanna Devine, SPCA Montreal's director of animal advocacy, has the right approach: "The information that I think is pertinent here is that the dog was unsterilized, the dog was named Lucifer, and the dog had previously been involved in an attack against a human." In short, the owner would have been properly dealt with under the Calgary Model, and this tragedy would likely have been averted.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Facebook And Mortality: Why Your Incessant Joy Gives Me The Blues

Has the social media site been good for our mental health or not? The evidence isn't straightforward, researchers say, despite lots of study. How Facebook makes you feel may depend on how you use it.

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Can School Integration Make a Comeback?

In 1954, Brown v. Board of Education declared that separate schools for black students and white students should be dismantled with “all deliberate speed.” However, in recent decades, schools have re-segregated to the levels they were just after Brown. In this video, Atlantic education editor Alia Wong speaks to the U.S. Secretary of Education John King, Jr. about his new plan to integrate schools. King's policy changes will expand a system known as “school choice” that permits students to go to schools outside their neighborhoods and theoretically allows parents to voluntarily integrate schools. But, D.C. parent Natalie Hopkinson argues that schools will continue to re-segregate if the federal government does not intervene more forcefully. “As long as we rely on [parental] choice, we will continue to have the same result,” she says. “White parents will not send their kids to schools unless they are already white.”

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Deer in Woods III

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Typo made Air Asia X flight land at Melbourne instead of Malaysia

Co-ords cockup causes confusion but not calamity

Finger trouble with onboard navigation systems led to an Air Asia flight making a two-hour internal hop in Australia before its scheduled journey to Malaysia.…

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AmirsCamera posted a photo:

London. July 2016.

Instagram: @amirscamera

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500,000 Cars and National Drive Electric Week
A few years ago, it would have been a pipe dream to imagine that there would be 500,000 plug-in cars on the streets of the United States--and more than a million worldwide. But we are now poised to cross this big threshold in the coming week. (If you are a bean-counter like me, you can track it yourself with the counter on our website.)

It's worth pausing a moment in the exciting run-up to National Drive Electric Week, to consider where we have come from and where we are trying to go. There is something about EVs that gets people fired up like nothing else. Partly, it's just that Americans care a lot about what they drive. But at the same time, people have known for decades that the petroleum economy is not sustainable on an environmental, economic or national security level--and have sought alternatives. Inventors have developed various electric cars since the mid-1800s. In the early 1900s, they outnumbered gasoline cars, but were limited by existing battery technology and were overtaken by the internal combustion engine with the advent of the Ford Model T.

The modern era of widely available, moderately priced plug-in cars began in 2010 with the launch of the Nissan LEAF® and Chevrolet Volt and has expanded to where we find ourselves today, with more than two dozen available models and over 12,000 sold every month and steadily increasing. All indicators suggest that the next half-million will come a lot more quickly, particularly once the Chevrolet Bolt, Tesla Model 3 and other eagerly awaited, moderately priced 200-mile range vehicles hit the market.

So National Drive Electric Week, the annual celebration of the plug-in car, comes at an auspicious moment this year. We project that we will cross the 500,000 vehicles sold milestone sometime during September 10-18. And we expect to have at least 4,000 of those vehicles at the events! This year will be the largest in its six-year history, with more than 220 events in nearly every state and Canadian province.

Plug In America, Sierra Club, and the Electric Auto Association serve as the national team providing support to the events throughout the country. We are pleased to partner with many other organizations and individuals working to bring National Drive Electric Week to communities near you. Nissan LEAF is the national automotive sponsor, and supporters include silver sponsor CalETC, bronze sponsor Clipper Creek, media sponsor PlugShare and EVgo.

On the events page, you can find National Drive Electric Week events in your community. So please come out, have some fun, test drive the newest cars, and maybe YOU'LL be the one buying that 500,000th car!

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Animal sound symphony tells us new things about our world
Brilliant sound and vivid spectrographs combine to create a hypnotic experience of the natural world and hint at a very different future for humans and animals
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Ferdinand Hayden Scientist of the DayFerdinand Vandeveer...

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Ferdinand Hayden Scientist of the Day

Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, an American geologist, was born Sep. 7, 1829.

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Flash Physics: Imaging single ions, UK's merging 'supercouncil', OMEGA laser sets fusion record
Today's selection of need-to-know updates from the world of physics

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A Crude Heroine: Nadiya Savchenko's Assault on Ukraine's Elite

After her release from a Russia prison, Ukrainian helicopter pilot Nadiya Savchenko was celebrated as a hero. Now, though, she is making powerful enemies with her coarse verbal attacks against the country's political elite.
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Cumulonimbus over Africa, as seen from ISS

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At IFA 2016, style trumped specs

Another of the world's grand tech exhibitions is now in the books, with Berlin hosting what might have been its most varied and intriguing IFA in years. Like other shows, this one had its oddities, such as LG's fridge running Windows 10, but what stood out to me was the practicality and immediate emotional appeal of many of the new products on show. With modern technology now mainstream and reaching a plateau of good-enough hardware, companies are spending less time chasing and explaining new specs and more of their effort on humanizing and styling out their latest gear.

This is not a criticism. I think there's a great deal of substance in style. It is the substance of design.

Lenovo was the consensus winner of IFA 2016 with its...

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Oceana's first North Sea expedition - in pictures

The ocean conservation society last week completed its first-ever expedition to document the richness of habitats and threats to marine life in waters off the Netherlands, UK, Norway and Denmark. The results from the two-month, at-sea study will be used to strengthen marine protection in the region

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https://t.co/pBbHKVOD4w Do not agree with taking off lists encourages hunting#marineconservarion #CITES #whalewatching
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Sunset Along the South Bank

adrians_art posted a photo:

The south bank of the river Thames in London, England taken at sunset

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Social Science Researchers Explore 'Unethical Amnesia'

Researchers find that one reason some people cheat over and over again is because we all tend to suffer from "unethical amnesia" — our minds are prone to forgetting the bad stuff we've done.

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Super-resolution microscope builds 3-D images by mapping negative space

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Scientists have demonstrated a method for making 3-D images of structures in biological material under natural conditions at a much higher resolution than other existing methods. The method may help shed light on how cells communicate with one another and provide important insights for engineers working to develop artificial organs such as skin or heart tissue.

Image credit: Jenna Luecke, UT Austin

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Light scattered by gold nanorods

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In this image, gold nanorods, embedded in a cell-populated collagen gel, scatter light as viewed under a darkfield microscope. The collective excitation of electrons in the conduction band of gold nanoparticles arising from resonance with incident-visible radiation is referred to as localized surface plasmon resonance. This excitation leads to resonant Rayleigh light scattering. Because of this strong scattering, individual nanoparticles, much smaller than the wavelength of light, can be observed using an optical microscope. There has been considerable interest in resonant Rayleigh scattering from gold and silver nanoparticles for biological and chemical analysis. In this application, a fibroblast-seeded collagen gel, an in vitro material system often used to model wound healing, is embedded with nanoparticles. The pattern of scattered light will be tracked using computerized pattern matching and image correlation techniques to measure the deformation that occurs as the collagen gel contracts, in a simulation of the formation of scar tissue. It is hoped that these small scale measurements will illustrate local heterogeneity in the mechanical response of the material.

Image credit: The USC Nanocenter

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lightslondon1

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tower of lights123

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The Royal Scam-o-rama

Lord Eglinton posted a photo:

The sun goes down on a neon aeon. Pre-lunar Londinivm from Greenwhich park.

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Believed In Ever Since

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Short-tailed ichneum

Short-tailed ichneumon wasp (Ophion sp.) collected in Forillon National Park, Quebec, Canada, and photographed at the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics (sample ID: BIOUG11178-E05; specimen record: http://www.boldsystems.org/index.php/Public_RecordView?processid=CNFNQ737-14)

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Extinction and the Integrated Liberal Arts
Although you may never have heard of Benjamin, I'm willing to bet that his story will interest you. He lived a tough and lonely life in Australia. His death, 80 years ago today on September 7, 1936, came after years of abuse. On his last day he suffered from dehydration during an unseasonably warm spell and he died during the night having been kept from his bed due to the neglect of those charged with his care. When he died in Hobart's Beaumaris Zoo the world lost more than just Benjamin, though, because Benjamin was the last of his kind. Benjamin was a thylacine, a Tasmanian tiger, but not just any thylacine. No, Benjamin was, by all accounts, the very last thylacine. When he died 80 years ago, the 25 million-year-long thylacine lineage went extinct.

Benjamin left behind a small trace of himself, however. Three years before Benjamin's death Australian naturalist David Fleay filmed him in his small, stark enclosure. The 45 second clip gives you a sense of Benjamin and his meagre existence.

What you can't see is what happened after the film ends. The opened mouthed gape or yawn Benjamin displays, it turns out, was characteristic of thylacine behavior when it felt threatened. The tripod with a camera on it with Fleay behind covered by a curtain triggered fear in Benjamin and he bit Fleay on the butt - twice.

There's no doubt that we are in the midst of a massive extinction event with many species going extinct every year. How many? It's impossible to know, partly because we don't know how many species actually exist. But what we do know is that since humans came on the scene extinctions have increased significantly and today the rate is likely between 1,000 and 10,000 times the natural extinction rate. That means that we are probably losing at least 200 species and perhaps as many as 100,000 species each year.

It's difficult for many of us to fully process what that means, partly because the numbers are so large and partly because we don't know much, if anything, about most of the species that are being lost. But we know Benjamin and our knowledge of him makes his loss more personal, perhaps moving some of us to act.

I hasten to point out that Benjamin was not alone in being the last of his kind to have been lost, lost not in obscurity but lost under our control as named individuals.

Celia, the last Pyrenean ibex, died on January 6, 2000 in the Spanish Pyrenees.
Incas, the last Carolina parakeet, died on February 21, 1918 in the Cincinnati Zoo.
Orange Band, the last dusky seaside sparrow, died on June 17, 1987 at Walt Disney Resort, Bay Lake, Florida.
Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island Tortoise, died on June 24, 2012 at the Charles Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz Island in the Galapagos.
Martha, the last passenger pigeon, died on September 1, 1914 in the Cincinnati Zoo.

The extinction of a species that each of these deaths represent is just a drop more poignant to most of us because, as I said, we have personal knowledge of the individuals involved.

But even as we might grieve for these individuals and the species they represent, does it really matter that because of our collective actions the world is losing species at a dizzying rate? I believe it matters a great deal, for a host of reasons. I'll summarize just three such reasons.

Natural environments are composed of interrelated webs of interactions. As various species are removed via extinction, the integrity of the entire ecosystem is at risk conceivably leading to increased extinction or collapse of ecosystem functioning.
From a completely utilitarian perspective, it's worth remembering that every day we discover fascinating natural products, including medicines, that benefit humans. These opportunities disappear as species are lost.
We lose a bit of our humanity with every species that we drive into oblivion. We have a moral and spiritual obligation to consider those with whom we share the planet.

Species extinction is but one of many complex problems we face as a society. While telling people about the large number of species going extinct each year will rouse some to action and sharing information about Benjamin, Celia, Martha and the rest will stir others, action must be informed by knowledge. It is important to recognize that addressing the myriad problematic issues we face today requires us to think holistically. To develop a citizenry capable of solving wicked problems of this sort, educators have been making progress in transforming the way students are taught by looking beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries while, at the same time, understanding that different perspectives offer different insights and attempting to integrate those perspectives.

Biologists alone will not be able to slow the rate at which we are driving species into oblivion. Knowledge gained from climatologists, from natural resource managers and from physicists is needed. Fully understanding the importance species play in the world requires the expertise of sociologists, psychologists, drug developers, theologians, artists and humanists.

Increasingly educators are recognizing the criticality of the full stretch of the liberal arts and, even more than that, the importance of teaching students how to integrate the different insights that each discipline offers. Such a perspective can be very powerful and will likely lead to unexpected and positive results.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Flycatcher genome sheds light on causes of mutations
A research team has determined the complete genetic code of 11 members of a flycatcher pedigree. Doing this, they have for the first time been able to estimate the rate of new mutations in birds. When they combined the new results with mutation rate estimates from other organisms, a clear pattern emerged: The more common a species is, the lower its mutation rate.
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European earthworms decrease species diversity in North America
European earthworms invading the forests of North America are responsible for a decline in species diversity in the forest understory. Scientists have now been able to demonstrate this general pattern for the first time. In invaded forests, the vegetation on the forest floor has changed dramatically: The species diversity of native plants is declining, yet the amount of non-native (exotic) plants is increasing, and so is the amount of grasses.
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Global warming data not enough to predict animal extinction, lizard study finds
Current models used to predict the survival of species in a warming world might be off target because they ignore the spatial distribution of shade, report scientists.
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Daily Dozen — Photos

Daily Dozen — Photos -- National Geographic Your Shot
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Daily Dozen — Photos

Daily Dozen — Photos -- National Geographic Your Shot
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FAN HO 08AUG14 NS PH

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Daily Design Inspira

Daily Design Inspiration | Abduzeedo
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Best in Show: 2011t

Best in Show: 2011today | Frieze
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New CERN LHC Experiments --"Predict a Boson Beyond the Higgs That Could Unlock Clues to Existence of Dark Matter"

Two separate experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, on the French-Swiss border, appear to confirm the existence of a subatomic particle, the Madala boson, that for the first time could shed light on one of the great mysteries of the universe - dark matter.

The Madala boson follows the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 "but the particles differ remarkably," said the team leader Bruce Mellado of South Africa's Witwatersrand University School of Physics. The Madala boson is heavier and disintegrates into the Higgs boson. "The Higgs boson in the Standard Model of physics is not able to explain several things, such as dark matter," Mellado added.

"The Madala boson is important for our understanding of the universe. Through this we can communicate with dark matter - we don't have an object that can do that. This could be the first," said Mellado. The boson appears to interact with energy that cannot be explained.

Mellado will summarize the reappearance of these features in the features in the proton-proton collision data collected during Run I by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider that were used to formulate the Madala hypothesis, and its implications.

These features in the data were interpreted as being due to the existence of a new scalar, the Madala boson, with a mass around 270 GeV. A conservative statistical combination yielded a three sigma effect. The ATLAS and CMS collaboration have just released new data at the international conference ICHEP2016.

In particular, Mellado will discuss a prediction, namely of the production of anomalously large 4 W bosons, leading to a striking and unequivocal signature.

Dark matter is the new frontier in physics, Mellado said, and scientists were racing to work out what it is. The Chinese and Japanese had declared intentions of building colliders that could be used to search for the identity of dark matter and dark energy. A team of 35 University of the Witwatersrand scientists today hosts a series of seminars about the Madala boson (Zulu for "old"), followed by other seminars in the US, UK, China and India.

The Daily Galaxy via wits.ac.za

Image credit: CERN

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Space history

europeanspaceagency posted a photo:

This week one year ago, ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen (left) spent 10 days in space on his ‘iriss' mission to the International Space Station. He was launched on 2 September 2015 in a Soyuz spacecraft with cosmonaut commander Sergei Volkov (right) and returned in a different Soyuz with commander Gennadi Padalka. Sergei stayed on to complete his third six-month stay on the Space Station.

Andreas and Sergei unveiled a bust of Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, exactly a year after their own launch. The event commemorated Gagarin's visit to Denmark 54 years ago during his tour of Europe after his landmark orbit of Earth on 12 April 1961.

The bust is at the Danish Technical University near Copenhagen, Denmark. The university participated in a number of experiments on the International Space Station, including Andreas imaging a newly discovered weather phenomenon.

Credit: DTUM. Schlosser

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China Speeding Efforts to Build a Manned Oceanic “Space Station”

China is accelerating efforts to design and build a manned deep-sea platform to help it hunt for minerals in the South China Sea, one that may also serve a military purpose in the disputed waters, joining an exclusive club of countries that are capable of achieving human access to the deep sea. The other countries are the United States, Russia, France and Japan. The achievement will allow China to explore more than 99.8% of the ocean floor, Liu Cigui, director China's State Oceanic Administration (SOA), told the media.

China is accelerating efforts to design and build an oceanic “space station” would be located as much as 3,000 meters (9,800 feet) below the surface of the South China Sea, according to a recent Science Ministry presentation viewed by Bloomberg.

The project was mentioned in China's current five-year economic plan released in March and ranked number two on a list of the top 100 science and technology priorities.

"Having this kind of long-term inhabited station has not been attempted this deep, but it is certainly possible," said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "Manned submersibles have gone to those depths for almost 50 years. The challenge is operating it for months at a time."

The U.S. Energy Information Administration says the South China Sea has proved and probable reserves of about 11 billion barrels of oil and 190 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. China Cnooc chairman estimated the South China Sea holds around 125 billion barrels of oil and 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Modern nuclear attack submarines like the American Seawolf class are estimated to have a test depth of 490 m (1,600 ft), which would imply a collapse depth of 730 m (2,400 ft). Test depth is the maximum depth at which a submarine is permitted to operate under normal peacetime circumstances, and is tested during sea trials.

In June 2012, China's manned submersible Jiaolong successfully completed its deepest test dive, to 7,020 meters in the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean.

Researchers at Shanghai Ocean University have also developed a submersible movable laboratory capable of operating at more than 13,000 feet underwater.

Deepsea challenger has gone to the bottom of the ocean On March 26, 2012, James Cameron reached the bottom of the Challenger Deep, the deepest part of the Mariana Trench. The maximum depth recorded during this record-setting dive was 10,908 meters (35,787 ft).

Nearly 50% of the world's oceans are deeper than 4 kilometers, which provides vast areas for concealment and storage. Concealment provided by the sea also provides the opportunity to quickly engage remote assets that may have been dormant and undetected for long periods of time, while its vastness allows simultaneous operation across great distances.

The Daily Galaxy via Bloomberg, Nextbigfuture, China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation, DARPA

Rocky Planet with a 3-Day Orbit --"Only 21 Light-Years Away"

NASA's Virtual Planetary Laboratory --A New "Systems" Approach to the Search for Alien Life

"Our Early Solar System Harbored SuperEarths" (Weekend Feature)

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Early Earth Collided With a Mercury-Sized Planet --"Set the Stage for Carbon-Based Life"

Scientists are speculating that virtually all of Earth's life-giving carbon could have come from a collision about 4.4 billion years ago between Earth and an embryonic planet similar to Mercury, approximately 100 million years after Earth formed.

In a new study this week in Nature Geoscience, Rice petrologist Rajdeep Dasgupta and colleagues offer a new answer to a long-debated geological question: How did carbon-based life develop on Earth, given that most of the planet's carbon should have either boiled away in the planet's earliest days or become locked in Earth's core?

“The challenge is to explain the origin of the volatile elements like carbon that remain outside the core in the mantle portion of our planet,” said Dasgupta, who co-authored the study with lead author and Rice postdoctoral researcher Yuan Li, Rice research scientist Kyusei Tsuno and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute colleagues Brian Monteleone and Nobumichi Shimizu.

Dasgupta's lab specializes in recreating the high-pressure and high-temperature conditions that exist deep inside Earth and other rocky planets. His team squeezes rocks in hydraulic presses that can simulate conditions about 250 miles below Earth's surface or at the core-mantle boundary of smaller planets like Mercury.

“Even before this paper, we had published several studies that showed that even if carbon did not vaporize into space when the planet was largely molten, it would end up in the metallic core of our planet, because the iron-rich alloys there have a strong affinity for carbon,” Dasgupta said.

Earth's core, which is mostly iron, makes up about one-third of the planet's mass. Earth's silicate mantle accounts for the other two-thirds and extends more than 1,500 miles below Earth's surface. Earth's crust and atmosphere are so thin that they account for less than 1 percent of the planet's mass. The mantle, atmosphere and crust constantly exchange elements, including the volatile elements needed for life.

If Earth's initial allotment of carbon boiled away into space or got stuck in the core, where did the carbon in the mantle and biosphere come from?

“One popular idea has been that volatile elements like carbon, sulfur, nitrogen and hydrogen were added after Earth's core finished forming,” said Li, who is now a staff scientist at Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences. “Any of those elements that fell to Earth in meteorites and comets more than about 100 million years after the solar system formed could have avoided the intense heat of the magma ocean that covered Earth up to that point.

“The problem with that idea is that while it can account for the abundance of many of these elements, there are no known meteorites that would produce the ratio of volatile elements in the silicate portion of our planet,” Li said.

In late 2013, Dasgupta's team began thinking about unconventional ways to address the issue of volatiles and core composition, and they decided to conduct experiments to gauge how sulfur or silicon might alter the affinity of iron for carbon. The idea didn't come from Earth studies, but from some of Earth's planetary neighbors.

“We thought we definitely needed to break away from the conventional core composition of just iron and nickel and carbon,” Dasgupta recalled. “So we began exploring very sulfur-rich and silicon-rich alloys, in part because the core of Mars is thought to be sulfur-rich and the core of Mercury is thought to be relatively silicon-rich.

schematic of proto Earth's merger with a Mercury-like planetary embryo
A schematic depiction of proto Earth's merger with a potentially Mercury-like planetary embryo, a scenario supported by new high pressure-temperature experiments at Rice University.

Magma ocean processes could lead planetary embryos to develop silicon- or sulfur-rich metallic cores and carbon-rich outer layers. If Earth merged with such a planet early in its history, it could explain how Earth acquired its carbon and sulfur.

“It was a compositional spectrum that seemed relevant, if not for our own planet, then definitely in the scheme of all the terrestrial planetary bodies that we have in our solar system,” he said.

The experiments revealed that carbon could be excluded from the core — and relegated to the silicate mantle — if the iron alloys in the core were rich in either silicon or sulfur.

“The key data revealed how the partitioning of carbon between the metallic and silicate portions of terrestrial planets varies as a function of the variables like temperature, pressure and sulfur or silicon content,” Li said.

The team mapped out the relative concentrations of carbon that would arise under various levels of sulfur and silicon enrichment, and the researchers compared those concentrations to the known volatiles in Earth's silicate mantle.

“One scenario that explains the carbon-to-sulfur ratio and carbon abundance is that an embryonic planet like Mercury, which had already formed a silicon-rich core, collided with and was absorbed by Earth,” Dasgupta said. “Because it's a massive body, the dynamics could work in a way that the core of that planet would go directly to the core of our planet, and the carbon-rich mantle would mix with Earth's mantle.

“In this paper, we focused on carbon and sulfur,” he said. “Much more work will need to be done to reconcile all of the volatile elements, but at least in terms of the carbon-sulfur abundances and the carbon-sulfur ratio, we find this scenario could explain Earth's present carbon and sulfur budgets.”

The research was supported by NASA and the National Science Foundation.

The Daily Galaxy via Rice University

Rocky Planet with a 3-Day Orbit --"Only 21 Light-Years Away"

"The Behemoth" --Immense Cloud of Hydrogen Observed Bleeding From Alien Planet

Kepler Mission's "Top 20" --Identifies Best Earth-Like Candidates

Exo-Planet Discovered With Chemistry Vastly Different than Earth --A Surface of Graphite and Diamond - The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel

Strange Alien Atmosphere of the "Diamond Planet"

NASA: Probabilty of Alien Life in the Milky Way Increasing Exponentially (Today's Most Popular) - The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel

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Evidence of Planet 9 --"May Already Exist"

“Actually, it's quite possible that the planet has already been in some way imaged,” says Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institute. “That happened with Uranus, Neptune and Pluto — they were observed but not understood before they were actually detected. Who knows, proof of Planet X {or Planet 9} may already exist in some observatory archive.”

Scott Shepard's team has been se arching for proof of Planet 9 using the Dark Energy Camera on the 4-meter Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tollolo Inter-American Observatory in the southern Atacama region of Chile (below) . They have also collected data on distant solar system objects with the Japanese Hyper Surpime Camera on the 8-meter Subaru telescope in Hawaii. (National Optical Astronomical Observatory)

Shepard is considering an alternative theory that involves a Planet 9 exoplanet that had been been kicked out of another nearby solar system that formed in the general vicinity of ours. Such things are known to happen.

“If this turned out to be the case, then we'd know that there were other suns being formed nearby our sun,” Shepard said. “It would have to be a very dense solar environment, and that would also tell us a lot about the formation of our solar system.”

Object V774104 shown at the top of the page was discovered in late October, 2015, and is one of the most distant objects ever detected in the solar system. It appears to be about half the size of Pluto, but with an orbit two to three times wider than Pluto's. (Scott Sheppard, Chad Trujillo and Dave Tholen: Subaru Telescope)

Sheppard's team is conducting the deepest survey so far for objects beyond Neptune and the Kuiper Belt, a circumstellar disk that lies some 30 to 50 times as far as the Earth is from the sun. It is filled with dwarf planets asteroids, comets, and balls of frozen compounds — remnants of the earliest days of the evolution of the solar system. The Kuiper Belt is the region that includes Pluto, the now dwarf planet demoted with heated debate several years ago.

The team has observed nearly 10 percent of the sky using some of the largest and most advanced telescopes and cameras in the world. As they find and confirm these distant and faint objects, they analyze whether their discoveries fit into the larger theories about how interactions with a massive distant planet could have shaped the outer Solar System.

“Right now we are dealing with very low-number statistics, so we don't really understand what is happening in the outer Solar System,” Sheppard said. “Greater numbers of extreme trans-Neptunian objects must be found to fully determine the structure of our outer Solar System.”

He said that although astronomers believe there are thousands of these small objects, only about 15 have been positively identified. One discovered by Sheppard and Trujillo in 2014 — designated 2012 VP113 but nicknamed “Biden” — has the most distant known orbit in our solar system.

At the same time, Sheppard and Trujillo noticed that the handful of known extreme trans-Neptunian objects all clustered together and moved at similar orbital angles. These unusual dynamics lead the astronomers to propose that a substantial planet might be shepherding the smaller objects through its gravitational pull.

The search for Planet 9 is not the first to use the orbits of other bodies as a signpost to another planet. Indeed, Sheppard said that “we are now in a similar situation as in the mid-19th century when Alexis Bouvard noticed Uranus' orbital motion was peculiar, which eventually led to the discovery of Neptune.”

The other team most deeply involved with the Planet 9 hunt is led by Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin of the California Institute of Technology. They are the ones who made a big splash earlier this year with their predictions of a Planet 9, again based on the orbits of smaller objects.

In an email, we said that the newly detected object “fit perfectly into our Planet 9 hypothesis, so we remain pretty confident that the planet we predicted is indeed the right planet.”

Other groups searching the trans-Neptunian region for planets and information about the early solar system include the Canadian Outer Solar System Origins Survey and the international Dark Energy Survey.

Sheppard said that while the teams searching for Planet 9 are definitely in competition — a discovery would, after all, re-write the textbooks — they are also cooperating in terms of reporting back to each other if a region of the sky they study comes up with nothing to report. That way, he said, the teams won't duplicate efforts where there is no promise of reward.

While Sheppard's and Brown's teams have the advantage of access to more sophisticated instruments to work with, it is certainly possible that one of the others will make breakthroughs, and possibly THE breakthrough.

The Daily Galaxy via NASA and Marc Kaufmann

Young Solar System Observed Around a Nearby Star

"There Could be At Least Two Unknown Planets Hidden Well Beyond Pluto"

Enormous Volcanoes Detected on Pluto that Spew Ice, Not Lava --"Nothing Like This Has Been Seen in the Deep Outer Solar System" - The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel

NASA's First Encounter With the 'Last Planet' --"A New Class of Worlds"

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Mystery Alien Signal from Hercules Constellation --"Was from a Russian Military Satellite" --Russian News Agency TASS

Mysterious alien signals from a star system 94 light years from Earth picked up by Russian scientists last year did not come from an advanced extraterrestrial civilization, but from an old Soviet military satellite, says Russian news agency TASS, much to the disappointment of astronomers and alien enthusiasts across the world. But was it?

The originally reported source of the signal HD 164595 is a solar system which is a few billion years older than our own, but is centered on a star of a similar brightness and size to our Sun. The signal was picked up by the RATAN-600 radio telescope in Zelenchukskaya, Russia shown below.

However, significant number of people around our globe are not convinced by TASS' version, believing it is one of the many cover ups aimed at deceiving us regarding the existence of advanced alien life from beyond our Solar System. They question Russia's motives for the denial of the signals validity --you'll have to draw your own conclusions.

The Russian scientists who originally intercepted the enigmatic signals, said they believed that they came from a cluster of stars ninety-four light years away in the Hercules constellation. The signals' frequency and power suggested there was a good chance they were messages from smart extraterrestrials. Excitement in the scientific community suddenly spiked.

Scientists say that HD 164595 has a Neptune-sized planet that is about seventeen times the mass of Earth. Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute in California, says its orbit is too tight it is too close to its sun for life as we know it to exist.

“We, indeed, discovered an unusual signal," said Alexander Ipatov, who works at the Russian Academy of Sciences in an interview with TASS. "However, an additional check showed that it was emanating from a Soviet military satellite, which had not been entered into any of the catalogs of celestial bodies. It can be said with confidence that no sought-for signal has been detected yet.”

On August 29th, we reported that an international team of astronomers detected signals coming from almost 100 light years away, that appeared to be a strong candidate for extraterrestrial contact, according to a document circulated by Alexander Panov, a theorectical physicist at Lomonosov Moscow State University --"a strong signal in the direction of HD164595, a planet system in the constellation Hercules was detected on May 15, using the RATAN-600 radio telescope (above) in the Russian Republic of Karachay-Cherkessia."

Subsequently, Eric Korpela, an astronomer with Berkeley SETI, downplayed the hype over this latest signal in a note reported by VOX on the Berkeley SETI website. "All in all, it's relatively uninteresting from a SETI standpoint." Korpela continued:

"I looked over the presentation. I was unimpressed. In one out of 39 scans that passed over star showed a signal at about 4.5 times the mean noise power with a profile somewhat like the beam profile. Of course SETI@home has seen millions of potential signals with similar characteristics, but it takes more than that to make a good candidate. Multiple detections are a minimum criterio

"Because the receivers used were making broad band measurements, there's really nothing about this "signal" that would distinguish it from a natural radio transient (stellar flare, active galactic nucleus, microlensing of a background source, etc.) There's also nothing that could distinguish it from a satellite passing through the telescope field of view. All in all, it's relatively uninteresting from a SETI standpoint."

"If the transient claimed originates from beyond the Earth, then, given what we currently know of the parameters of the RATAN search, such events ought to be common. The fact that they are not frequently seen in continuum imaging surveys suggests that the RATAN transient is likely due to instrumental interference or to some other artifact of human technology. While absence of evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence is by no means evidence of absence, our GBT observations did not detect ongoing emission from the direction of HD 164595 between9.1 and 11.6 GHz to a sensitivity of ∼ 10 mJy (10σ).

"Single-epoch transients are by their nature hard to confirm ordeny, illustrating the need for confirming followup, either at a later time, or as part of the observing strategy (whether triggered follow-up of interesting sources, or some form of onoff observing). We intend to re-observe HD 164595 as part of the Breakthrough Listen target list, along with ongoing observations of targets selected using a range of criteria."

The Berkeley SETI team concluded that they "welcome opportunities for partnership in order to quickly validate and analyze candidate signals, to continue to develop tools and techniques, and to share our excitement with those who, like us, seek to answer the question, “Are we alone?”.

Eleven Elliptical Galaxies Found Flying Free in Space Beyond Their Home Clusters

"Our Early Solar System Harbored SuperEarths" (Weekend Feature)

Jupiter's Eerie Voice --NASA's First Juno Mission Flyby: "Unlike Anything in Our Solar System" (LISTEN)

Planet Nine --"Could Spell Doom for Our Solar System"

The 'Monster' of Our Solar System --"In the Milky Way Alone, a Billion Jupiter-Like Worlds Could Be Orbiting Stars"

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Rakhine forest #turtle critically #endangered species . #TSA and #WCS are doing conservation #Rakhine Yoma. #CITES https://t.co/fLvgdZ5kVd
https://t.co/fLvgdZ5kVd

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My Dinner With the Devil
Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, had not done any formal interviews in about a decade back in the '80s. Then he called OZY's Eugene S. Robinson.
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Apple May Test iPhone Users' Loyalty If It Dumps The Headphone Jack

The next iPhone, expected to be unveiled Wednesday, may be missing something familiar: the ubiquitous headphone jack. Usability experts say the change could really sit badly with Apple customers.

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Decrying Hair Rule, South African Students Demand To Be 'Naturally Who We Are'

Pretoria High School for Girls has long banned certain hairstyles so that students would have a "neat" appearance. Now black students are pushing back.

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Coming Soon: How I Built This

On September 12, NPR launches a new podcast, How I Built This, hosted by Guy Raz. The show features innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

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Why Your Facebook Habit At Work Makes Economists Worry

Productivity, a key measure of the economy's health, has been growing more slowly in recent years. Can Facebook and other social media distractions on the job be partly to blame?

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Silent, But Not Lost: Philae Lander's Final Resting Place Located On Comet

The lander was the first to ever set down on a comet — but couldn't get enough sunlight to recharge its batteries, and went into hibernation. New images show Philae stuck in a crack.

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Before Apple And Facebook, There Was Something More Revolutionary

More than any of today's icons — Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and the rest — Guglielmo Marconi was uniquely at the center of the communication revolution of his time, says Marc Raboy.

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A Teen Might Pick The Landing Site For NASA's Next Mars Rover

Alex Longo hopes to be the first person to walk on Mars. In the meantime, the Raleigh, N.C., sophomore has suggested a landing site for the next rover mission. His pick is one of four finalists.

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Dear IUCN Congress: Lead On Gender Equality!
The 2016 IUCN International World Conservation Congress kicked off a few days ago here in Honolulu, Hawaii. The conference theme is 'Planet at the Crossroads', and a series of journeys, from 'Business' to 'Biosecurity' have been highlighted as key issue areas to frame dialogues and conversations during the Congress.

As an estimated 8,000 advocates, scientists and conservationists convene to advance the protection of our world's natural resources, we also see that people and cultures are inextricably linked to these efforts, as stewards of their lands.

Our planet is at a crossroads, and people are also at a crossroads. We must be willing to take urgent and bold action to challenge unsustainable systems in our societies, and recognize how power and privilege underpin environmental degradation and resource extraction.

People are really at the heart, or should be at the heart, of our sharing and learning here at the IUCN Congress. And further, an understanding that people's interactions with nature, in communities and households, is very much framed by intersections such as race, class, culture and, in particular, gender.

Why Gender & Conservation?

Gender is a social construct. While not immutable nor universal, gender shapes expectations, attributes, roles, capacities and rights of women and men around the world- and in turn, experiences and interactions with the natural environment. Women, compared to men, often have limited access to resources, more restricted rights, limited mobility, and a muted voice in shaping decisions and influencing policy. At the same time, gender roles generally ascribed to women such as informal, reproductive work often relate to caregiving for households and communities, caretaking of seeds and soils, maintaining traditional agricultural knowledge, and responsibility for natural resource management such as firewood and water, and thus these roles create opportunity for engagement as women bring diverse and critical solutions to conservation.

IUCN as a Gender Champion

As one of the leading environmental organizations in the world, IUCN has been at the forefront of recognizing women's rights and gender equality as a critical element of conservation and sustainable development. Since its founding in 1948, over 40 Congress resolutions have recognized women's role in resource management and at least 16 have emphasized the need for gender analysis and planning in conservation work.

Following a resolution in 1996 to develop a gender policy, the approved policy was passed in 1998 and included the creation of a Global Senior Gender Adviser Office (GGO), which almost 20 years later, now includes a global staff of over 15 people, conducting technical work with IUCN members around the world. This work has included support to mainstreaming gender into international environmental policy frameworks, and support to members at national level, creating action plans on gender in climate change and biodiversity planning. In addition to the Global Gender Office, IUCN has also established regional Gender Focal Points to monitor implementation of the IUCN Gender Policy at all levels.

This institutional recognition of gender issues is quite noteworthy for an intergovernmental organization such as IUCN, as it has taken many decades for other environmental frameworks and mechanisms to begin developing policies to integrate social issues into their work. This is beginning to shift across the board, and in particular, in 2015, where both the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Climate Agreement, placed gender equality as central to all actions.

As highlighted in the Opening Session of the IUCN World Conservation Congress, this is the largest global meeting of decision-makers and practitioners since the major global development agreements of 2015--and an important opportunity to focus on implementation and action. It is a moment for IUCN to highlight its strong history and work on gender equality, which the Congress seemingly recognized: "The IUCN Congress 2016 aims to be the most gender-responsive Congress in IUCN's history. It will comply with the Union's Gender Policy as well as the various mandates adopted by IUCN's General Assemblies. The IUCN Congress Gender Mainstreaming Strategy was created to ensure that IUCN's policies and actions reflect the importance of gender equality in all of the Union's work."

Measuring Success

In reflecting on the first few days of the 2016 IUCN Congress, there are some glaring challenges to achieving the goal of being the most 'gender-responsive' Congress in IUCN's history.

Motions. As stated above, this Congress marks a critical moment for building towards action and implementation from the big agendas decided in 2015. The Congress intends to leave with a Conservation Agenda - to help achieve a series of goals. It would seem unquestionable given progress on gender, and IUCN's history on this work, that gender equality would be a pillar of this agenda. However, the 2016 Congress will actually mark the first Congress in decades where out of 99 resolutions, there is not a single reference to gender.

Visibility. It's also surprising that out of the 17 journeys/ topics identified as critical issues for this 'planet at a crossroads', it seems that the concerns of people and communities, and in particular, gender issues are very hidden within the agenda. IUCN certainly has the expertise, partnerships and knowledge for gender equality, women's rights and the role of local communities / indigenous peoples to be critical journey not only as part of the themes of the conference but woven throughout all of the conference.

Influence. While much progress still needs to be made in integrating gender into the efforts of environmental conservation groups such as the members of IUCN, many do have gender advisors or advocates working within these organizations. In discussions with fellow gender advocates here at the Congress on the lack of gender issues in the motions as well as in events, there seems to be some shared experiences of either not being fully engaged in preparations for sessions and motions in relation to the World Congress but also challenges in support or political will among the organizations to see gender, women rights and the rights of indigenous peoples as priority issues. This suggests a need for continued opportunities for capacity building and knowledge sharing on how gender is central to all conservation work, and not simply an 'add-on'.

Voice. Most significant is an observation that many panels / sessions of the IUCN Congress have not included or prioritized people most impacted by environmental degradation, or leading conservation efforts, in particular, indigenous women. Beyond this, there is a lack of space for these important voices to be heard in the first place. As an example, an incredible group of indigenous women from Kenya, Thailand, Guatemala, Hawaii, Fiji and Russia, part of the Indigenous Women's Biodiversity Network (IWBN) held an event offsite on Friday, September 2nd, at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The organizers explained that they did not know in time about funding availability to be able to apply for an official side event slot. This sharing of experiences of resources management and conservation via traditional knowledge was worthy of a High-Level Panel at the IUCN Congress, but at minimum, more flexibility and space to ensure the participation and voice of indigenous women, peoples and frontline communities should be guaranteed in this type of space.

This is not to diminish the good work that is going on to highlight gender in the IUCN Congress, particularly via the efforts of the Senior Global Gender Office, as well as the many gender experts, advocates and indigenous women activists who are here organizing and sharing their experiences. However, with such a rich history in leadership on gender issues, and with a specific policy for gender mainstreaming, one would expect a much stronger coordination and emphasis on the topic. In addition, a much more progressive understanding that for the Congress to be truly gender responsive and also responsive to human rights, we must work to ensure that gender balance is only a first step. In addition to ensuring men and women in equal number we must also make space and prioritize frontline communities who are leading resilience efforts- to voice their challenges and their solutions for conservation and sustainable development.

Achieving Success

As the IUCN Congress moves from the Forum to the Members Assembly on Tuesday, there are a number of things which can be done over the coming days and in the future to ensure the Congress is fulfilling IUCN's role as a champion of gender issues.

Raise your voice. IUCN members should use the opportunity of the Assembly to raise the importance of gender equality and women's rights in conservation and sustainable development, in line with the big agreements of 2015 and IUCN mandates and policies. Members should highlight that this is the first Congress where gender has been absent from motions, and that it must not be absent in the future conservation agenda.

Reflect. Members should also reflect on the motions/events submitted and planning for the Congress and whether there were opportunities to engage with gender advisors and staff which were not utilized or explored.

Engage. Congress participants should join in the conversation on gender issues. Advocates at the Congress have been using the hashtag #IUCNGender to highlight some critical conversations. In addition, anyone interested in these issues is welcome to join an open and informal 'women and gender caucus' which meets at 8am each morning on level 3.

Lead. Finally, IUCN must ensure gender equality, and their leadership on this issue, remains as a guiding principle for the organization. Articulated in enhanced collaboration with women's groups and gender advocates around the world, greater coherence to its internal mainstreaming policies, and continued support to members on technical training and capacity building around gender issues.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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From Keystone XL to Dakota Access

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魔幻

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