The perpetually awesome Big Picture has some great photos of a Kyrgyzstani hunting festival. Some of the wolf-baiting shots are a bit vicious but the Golden Eagles are amazing.
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Crisis of Credit
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Bish Bash Bosch
Google Earth now has ultra-high resolution versions (as in 14,000 million pixels) of 14 of the masterpieces from the Museo del Prado in Spain, including one of my all-time favourite works of art – Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (where by all-time favourite I mean I love it though it also freaks the hell out of me).
They’ve also got a self-portrait of one of my heroes, Albrecht Dürer.
I have to admit I quickly lost interest with Google Earth when I first installed it but if they start getting more content like this then I think it could be a bit of a winner.
Talking of Google this is also quite cool:
We’ve found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity in your state up to two weeks faster than traditional systems
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PotW – 27/02/09
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Comet
Around the end of this week Comet Lulin (C/2007 N3) will hopefully be visible to the naked eye (or at least with binoculars).
It should be down near Saturn (I think if you follow the opposite side of the Plough/Big Dipper to the one you use to find the North Star down you should hit Saturn) and if you follow the line made by Betelgeuse and Bellatrix (the top two stars of Orion) across to the left that’ll be where it ends up towards the end of the weekend.
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Ants are awesome
Review of a new book about Superorganisms that shows how amazing ants really are:
Pursuing the same reasoning, Hölldobler and Wilson argue that the nests of some ants correspond to the skin and skeleton of other creatures. Some ant nests are so enormous that they are akin to the skeletons of whales. Those of one species of leafcutter ant from South America, for example, can contain nearly two thousand individual chambers, some with a capacity of fifty liters, and they can involve the excavation of forty tons of earth and extend over hundreds of square feet. Coordination within such giant colonies, which can house eight million individual ants, occurs through ant communication systems that are extraordinarily sophisticated and are the equivalent of the human nervous system. Not all ant species have reached this level of organization. Indeed, one of the most successful groups of ants, the ponerines, rarely qualifies for superorganism status.
As well as some of the random experiments we do with them:
It has recently been found that ant explorers count their steps to determine where they are in relation to home. This remarkable ability was discovered by researchers who lengthened the legs of ants by attaching stilts to them. The stilt-walking ants, they observed, became lost on their way home to the nest at a distance proportionate to the length of their stilts.
I’ll add this to my favourite ant fact about the pheromone given off when some species die that in small quantities attracts more ants (to help fight off threats) but in larger quantities repels them (so the whole colony doesn’t die for a lost cause) and the awesome video of them building a raft.
The whole thing also brings to mind Granny Weatherwax ‘borrowing’ the swarm.