Archive for the 'Sciences' category

Today is March 14 or 3-14. It’s time to spend time checking my special page with one million digits for PI.

If you want to meet dinosaurs, not only paintings or sculptures, go to the USA, fly to Los Angeles, California. There, in the Los Angeles Natural History Museum, there are free-roaming dinosaurs in the corridors. Not only are these automatons sized impressively, but they intereact with people and kids around them.

Woah! Stunning!

Everything points at a stark increase of elephant poaching in Kenya after years of relative calm. More precisely, in the Tsavo National Park, in the 6 most recent weeks, rangers of the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) found 5 dead elephants whose tusks have been sawed.

This is a reminder that some habits which we thought mostly gone are not. Sales of ivory (includign the official ones) are on the rise and there would be some troubling links here. Nevertheless, the KWS rangers already arrested two men and seized AK-47 assault rifles with ammunitions, but it could well be only the tip of a rising iceberg.

Source: Futura-Sciences.

Thanks to BibliOdyssey again, we can see magnificent reproductions of XIXth Century engravings of parrots, maccaws and other Psittacidae birds.

Macrocercus ararauna - Blue and yellow maccaw

But there are also interesting modern parrots. Go and watch the videos and photos from the Perroquet project from fashion photographer Sølve Sundsbø. Did I say impressive?

I recently met a couple of fine underwater movies. One shows a dive to find a nautilus at great depths; The second shows a phosphorescent amalgam of abyss animals. Always a source of great surprises.

According to the Guardian, change was long overdue. 8 years of Democrat presidency in Washington was much too much. Now that Al Gore is leaving the oval office, it’s time to go to more serious stuff.

You can appreciate it if you read the first paragraph:

No one thought Al Gore would be a loveable president, but, after eight years in the White House, he has gotten truly tiresome. The droning voice, the purchase of an eco-friendly robot dog, the campaign for carbon-free diamonds – all these things were hard to take, and he has been way too smug about reversing global warming. I think we’ve gone too far in the opposite direction, especially in light of the glacier that recently crushed Wasilla.

Go to the Guardian for the rest…

Using a Magnetic resonance imaging (RMI) technique, researchers have been able to represent graphically our human brain in a beautiful display.

Brain in MRI

Source: ScienceBlogs/Corpus Callosum & PLOS biology.

This Hungarian short movie is in English. I recommend waiting for the end (after 11 minutes).

This technique is used to demonstrate clearly the operation of a technical product by showing it as if parts were cut away to reveal the internals. This leads to quite a large choice of nice drawings. I collected some of them for your pleasure. They can be gorgeous when the graphic designer is a real artist:

Single Lens Reflex (SLR) camera (Beau Daniels & Alan Daniels)

Cut-away dog (Beau Daniels)

American car (David Kimble)

Kodak DCT Canon EOS Digital SLR Camera (Kevin Husley)

Ear cutaway (Medecine net)

General Motors engine

Spitfire Mk I (Century Imaging)

How a theatre is air conditionned (Frank Soltesz, Saturday Evening Post, March 1951)

Great Wall of China (circa 1570)

Noah's Ark (David Deal)

Source: Google

Stacey Whaley is a painter using the most modern tools available and depending heavily on the mathematical principles of fractals (those graphical figures that tend to repeat themselves at different scales when you zoom in or zoom out).

Apophysis - Copyright (C) Stacey Whaley

In most cases, when people follow this path, the result is quite predictable and there are a few compulsory forms (like the Mandelbrot set) that pop in the pictures. Please, check the admirable result of the example above. Stacey is able to create something that is clearly fractal and simultaneously bringing all the personal content that is the mark of the true artist.

Check all her work in http://intergalacticart.blogspot.com/, even if the updates are too few for our pleasure.

Certainly!

Here comes a photo camera with 1400 mega-pixels. This is the camera installed in Hawai in the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (PanSTARRS) telescope.

Pan-STARRS

I say that when Kirkland AFB builds a photo camera, Canon, Nikon, Sony and the others should bow and admire.

Source: Really Rocket Science.

Are you colour-blind like 5% of European male population? This is the question that will receive an answer here. You will even know the exact form of colour-blindness is yours when browsing to test your colour vision.

You will have to check little images like the one here and indicate what you see (not everybody sees the same thing, it’s not as simple as you’d think first).

Then, the test will speak and you’ll know. It’s barely less precise that a pro optician or a physician eye/vision test. It’s based on exactly the same elements.

See also: Color-blindness and spftware specification.

This is easy to reduce a color photo to a B&W image (any photo software or any B&W photocopier can do it). But the reverse operation seems difficult at best, impossible in most cases. However, a team of French scientists from the French INRIA (Guillaume Charpiat, Matthias Hofmann et Bernhard Schölkopf) presented recently an algorithm that succeeds to rebuild the color information from a B&W photo. And with some success.

On the image on the left, Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa has been converted to black and white (A), using color data and textures from a similar image (B), the algorithm built a color image again (C) not too far from the original (D).

Analyzing this work, I’d say that part of the differences between the result (C) and the original (D) come from the quality of the conversion to Black & White which led to an image quite hard (a bit more contrast than needed).

Impressive result on photos, you can expect to see it applied to moving images (and movies).

Source: Futura-Science.

I found a few funny, interesting, or surprising glasses or vases that I wanted to share with you.

The first ones are coming with a request to drink responsibly:

A Cognac glass (Rikke Hagen)

(more…)

Awesomely superb, “The Orchidaceae of Mexico and Guatemala” is an illustrated book (download in PDF) by James Bateman that you can find in Botanicus.org wbe site of the Missouri Botanical Gardens.

Even knowing that those are machines created to kill people, you will not be able to keep yourself from laughing or smiling at some of absurdly extreme designs generated by the brains of some military engineers.

Source: Dark Roasted Blend.

All the details about a simple optical illusion and what we can learn from it about the inner workings of the human brain.