Stories tagged nature
Groundhog (Marmota monax)Courtesy Kirk MonaThe 2012 Official Twin Cities Groundhog Report reveals that winter will soon be over. No surprises there this year. Read the full report online and learn a little more about Theriomancy the art of predicting the future by observing animal behavior.
Tags : 
The sunflower and the bee: just the kind of photograph Project Noah likes to see.Courtesy Mark RyanI saw a posting on Facebook yesterday (tip of the hat to the Bell Museum) about a website called Project Noah. It’s a really cool site that allows anyone with a camera and a love of nature to upload pictures or video and help identify the plants and animals that populate our world, both locally and globally. And who doesn’t have a camera of some sort nowadays?
Anyway, according to their website Project Noah is:
"… A tool that nature lovers can use to explore and document wildlife and a technology platform research groups can use to harness the power of citizen scientists everywhere. The purpose of the project is to mobilize and inspire a new generation of nature lovers. It began as an experiment to see if we could build an app for people to share their nature sightings and has evolved into a powerful global movement for both amateurs and experts. The name “Noah” is an acronym that stands for networked organisms and habitats. “
That kind of sums it up. The site is easy to navigate and figure out. I uploaded a couple photos I’d taken recently and it wasn’t difficult at all. You can also join a “mission” dealing with a particular zoological or botanical subject you’re interested in. You can contribute to the mission’s knowledge base by adding your own photographs or some information such as the genus and species of an unknown specimen captured in someone else’s photograph. I like shooting photographs up around Lake Superior so I joined the “Great Lakes Monitoring” mission. It just took a click of a button to become a part of it.
You can even start your own mission. It could be a legitimate study you’ve devised like why "megapug" bees seek out sunflowers or something as simple as a call for the best wildlife photos of the year. Here at the Science Museum we could start a mission called Rotting Pigs. I wonder how many contributions that would garner?
As mentioned, there’s even a Project Noah app that you can download for the mobile device of your choice. I downloaded it for my iPod Touch but noticed the reviews for it seem to be mixed. It only got an average rating overall, but what the hey, it’s free so I’m giving it a shot anyway. You can do the same if you'd like. I already know the site works fine on my laptop.
I’m really excited about this. It’s a novel and cool way to intermingle our ever-changing networking technologies with the rest of the natural world, and contribute something to the science community at the same time.
If you have more questions you might find the answers on Project Noah’s FAQ page.
LINKS
Project Noah
In these last few months as I've been creating graphics for the Future Earth exhibit I've learned an overwhelming amount of information about global change. My creativity has been challenged in ways I hadn't expected—an experience shared by many scientists, activists, politicians and humans during the challenges our environment is taking on right now.
Because my approach to learning is more visual than practical, I'm grateful to know there is an intention to create a symbiotic relationship between art and science with the Cape Farewell Programme, based in the UK.
by David Buckland, Ice Texts, 2008: U-n-f-o-ld art exhibition, Kings Place Gallery, LondonCourtesy by David Buckland, Ice Texts, 2008 Kings Place Gallery, LondonSelected artists and scientists from the around the world journey natural terrain and translate their experience to the public with their makings. The latest exhibition, titled U-n-f-o-l-d, is on view later this year at Parsons School for Design. I'm certain that whether playful, intimate or provoking, these works are sincere reactions to the health of our natural world, serving us a reminder of our potential to transform the world for the better.
For continued reading, please visit the Cape Farewell Art Programme site and read more below:
"We intend to communicate through art works our understanding of the changing climate on a human scale, so that our individual lives can have meaning in what is a global problem."
—David Buckland, Cape Farewell Founder and Director
David Buckland Website
Unfold exhibits the work of twenty-five artists who have participated in the Cape Farewell expeditions in 2007 and 2008 to the High Arctic and in 2009 to the Andes. Each artist witnessed firsthand the dramatic and fragile environmental tipping points of climate change. Their innovative, independent and collective responses explore the physical, emotional and political dimensions of our complex and changing world stressed by profligate human activity.
This body of work addresses a new process of thinking where artists play an informed and significant role through creating a cultural shift, a challenge to evolve and inspire a symbiotic contract with our spiritual and physical world.
The University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment has made some great movies examining what they call "big questions."
Big question: Feast or famine?
IonE's first Big Question asks: How do we feed a growing world without destroying the planet?
Big question: Is Earth past the tipping point?
Have we pushed our planet past the tipping point? That's a critical issue the IonE explores in our second Big Question video.
Big question: What is nature worth?
Plants, animals, even entire ecosystems are disappearing. So what? "What is Nature Worth" offers a three-minute look at what we’re REALLY losing – and what we can do about it.
Interesting problems, right? If you're intrigued, and want to know more about the folks posing the questions and trying to find the solutions, jump over to Future Earth.
Aiding and abetting science: Prison inmates have been enlisted to help forest ecologist Nalini Nadkarni in her research.Courtesy Nalini Nadkarni Since 2004, scientist Nalini Nadkarni has enlisted prisoners to aid in her scientific research.
Don’t worry, it’s not cruel and usual punishment. The inmates aren’t being used as guinea pigs to test new drugs or try out some new method of electroshock therapy. Instead, the incarcerated offenders are part of Nadkarni’s research team. Nadkarni holds a PhD in Forest Ecology and is on the faculty at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has funded some of her inmate-aided research.
For one of Dr. Nadkarni's
Dr. Nalini NadkarniCourtesy Nalini Nadkarni research projects, offenders at the Stafford Creek Corrections Center in Aberdeen, Washington, helped plant seeds of rare prairie plants then recorded data during the plants growth stages. The prisoners actually enjoyed helping out with the research. Not only did it give them a sense of doing something worthwhile, it connects them to something that’s sorely lacking in the old Graybar Hotel: nature.
For another project called Moss-in-Prisons (no Thor, your hero Randy has been picked up by the Tennessee Titans), Nadkarni recruited inmates at the Cedar Creek Corrections Center in Littlerock, Washington, to help discover improved ways of cultivating slow-growing mosses.
"I need help from people who have long periods of time available to observe and measure the growing mosses; access to extensive space to lay out flats of plants; and fresh minds to put forward innovative solutions," Nadkarni said.
If successful, the research could help replace ecologically important mosses that have been stripped from old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest, a sometimes illegal tactic that seems to be a favorite among some horticulturists.
In many cases, helping with the research isn’t just a way for inmates to pass time behind the brick walls and barbed wire of their confinement. It’s also a way to inspire them. One former inmate, who had worked with Nadkarni, enrolled in a Ph.D. program in microbiology after his release from Cedar Creek, and went on to give a presentation of the research he had done there at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America.
Apparently, Dr. Nadkarni is on to something, and its importance is not lost on those still behind bars.
"It teaches me something," said one prisoner involved with Nadkarni’s prairie plant study. "It makes me work with people and it's just a new skill that I've learned."
Both science and prisoners benefit from this natural symbiosis taking place in such an unnatural setting. And other prisons have expressed interest in getting their inmates involved in Nadkarni’s research programs,
"Everyone can be a scientist,” Nadkarni says. “Everyone can relate to nature, everyone can contribute to the scientific enterprise, even those who are shut away from nature.”
SOURCES
NSF story and video
NSF press release
There's a lot of work being done at the nanoscale to find a cheap source of green energy. Will Pokeberries be the final material needed for a solution?
http://www.nanowerk.com/news/newsid=15962.php
Pokeberries ripening: Pokeberries may provide a key to cheap solar energy.Courtesy Huwmanbeing
Live sound and video from eagles nest.
To get rid of ad overlay click to full screen (lower right icon) and on small x in upper right of ad.
The New York Times' Dot Earth blog has a cool new post: "The many faces of water in winter." It has a link to a post about snow's "fluff factor."
Andrew Revkin, the blogger, is asking readers to send in photos or video (via Flickr or YouTube) of "...parts of your environs that you treasure, that are imperiled, or that otherwise matter." Doesn't say they have to be of New York, and Minnesotans know a thing or two about beautiful places and water in winter or both.
I noticed a link on the Pharyngula blog today. I think the image it leads to deserves the Beauty of Nature award for today, as well as the Warm Hug from Mother Earth certificate.
(Be warned—depending on where you're coming from, you might find this Looney Tunes-hilarious, or, you know, kind of disturbing.)
Not to mention good taste and common sense. Heck, I could have told them that.
