Bumblebee
Not really. Reminded me of that Transformer when I saw this macrophotograph of a Longhorn Beetle.
Just amazing. Via and TD.
Not really. Reminded me of that Transformer when I saw this macrophotograph of a Longhorn Beetle.
Just amazing. Via and TD.
I can stare at photographs of the Nefertiti Bust all day. It’s just so alive. It was carved out of limestone and covered in stucco/plaster. The eyes were made out of quartz and affixed with beeswax. Just so beautiful. Wikipedia has a 3D model you can look at.
The Steller’s sea eagle is one of the world’s rarest eagles. There are only around 4,000 left. It’s native to Russia and Japan. One was spotted in Maine and got bird watchers very excited.
“It would be like an elephant walking up out of Africa into Scandinavia,” Mr. Lund said. “Like getting a call that the Rolling Stones are playing in a field behind a warehouse in the next town over.”
It also just happens to be an absolute unit of a bird at 20lbs with an 8ft wingspan 🔥🦅😍
Photographer unknown (source)
Dr. Lees said vagrancy, as a biological mechanism, could help migratory birds expand their ranges, a potential advantage as global warming redraws the contours of suitable habitat. Dr. Farnsworth said, conversely, extreme weather — which is anticipated to grow in frequency and intensity as climate change progresses — can also play a role in displacing birds by hundreds or even thousands of miles.
What’s next for the lone, pioneering Steller’s sea eagle? It could migrate along with native bald eagles down the coastline. It could find its way back to northeastern Asia. It could stick around Nova Scotia, as it is well adapted to the cold and seems able to survive there. It could die, out of range of its original flock.
“It’s like an avian soap opera,” Dr. Lees said. “We’re all rooting for it. Will it make it home? Or is it doomed to never see another species of its own in its lifetime?”
Nailbiter.
Glass Octopus (Vitreledonella richardi)
Longarm Octopus larva (Macrotritopus defilippi)
Marine Snail (Atlanta inclinata)
Sea Butterfly (Clio chaptali)
Eye-flash Squid (Abralia veranyi)
Deep sea eel
Male copepods
Larval Prawn (Plesiopenaeus armatus)
Glass Squid (Bathothauma lyromma)
I absolutely love this otherworldly work by Maria Svarbova (Wiki, Web, Insta.) GN thought they looked like stills from a Wes Anderson short film.
Between takes of 2001: A Space Odyssey
This is around Rovaniemi, Finland.
By Jani Ylinampa, whose Instagram account is just magical. Here’s another picture. Looks like a highly detailed miniature.
♥️♥️♥️ Via @uiowa
04 September, 1957
Dorothy Counts, the first and at the time only black student to enroll in the newly desegregated Harry Harding High School in Charlotte (NC), is mocked by protestors on her first day of school. Bystanders threw rocks and screamed at Dorothy to go back to where she came from.
The man walking beside her is probably Dr. Edwin Tompkins, a friend of the family and a professor at the black college Johnson C. Smith University. After a string of abuses, Dorothy’s family withdrew her from the school after only four days. Children had been enrolling for the new school year and tension was particularly high in the south for districts trying to comply with the US Supreme Court’s ruling that states should desegregate their schools with deliberate speed.
I cannot imagine what she must have felt.
“There was unutterable pride, tension and anguish in that girl’s face as she approached the halls of learning, with history jeering at her back,” he later said. “It made me furious. It filled me with both hatred and pity. And it made me ashamed. Some one of us should have been there with her.”
Photos by Douglas Martin.
Bas Uterwijk’s AI portraits1 look just like photo shots, but are largely generated by an algorithm. He uploads drawings and paintings, often images of people who lived before the invention of photography. With the help of a neural network he creates realistic interpretations that appear as if they were made in a photographic process.
Each work is a quest for the visual character of the person portrayed. By combining art-historical and archaeological elements, Uterwijk achieves a layered and fascinating result.
First came by this remarkable generation of the DOOM guy’s face:
And here are Alexander, Caesar, Zuck, and Jesus.
More of his work on Instagram.
Looks like he uses ArtBreeder with StyleGAN2. ↩︎
Bit pricey but appears to generate lovely layouts. Via Ash Furrow’s photography site.
Some absolutely marvelous photos of a Southen Blue-Ringed Octopus by @SammyGlennDives
Like she’s dancing!
Would love to find out what kind of protective gear the photographer had on. But it seems like the octopuses are very shy and will attack only when provoked, which is when their rings become more intense 🐙 The salivary venom1, synthesized by bacteria and not the octopus itself, doesn’t have an antidote and is only used to hunt and defend. It’s either injected via the beak, or is sprayed as a mist, paralysing the prey in either case for the final kill (presumably involving more beak.)
Here’s a little more. Love the intro. They truly are so alien and so, so beautiful 😍
Always have to look it up: Poison is passive, venom is active. ↩︎
by the incomparable Herb Ritts. Not the same Dracula, but seeing these made me think of one of my favorite things: “Horrible Tragedy” by Philip Glass and the Kronos Quartet for the 1931 movie.
Mr. Thomas and the photographer Emily Shur rented a home in Los Angeles for a weekend in May. There, they shot several images that harked back to Mr. Rockwell’s “Freedom From Want,” one in a series of four paintings inspired by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 speech to Congress celebrating America’s freedom and democratic values.
“The image haunted me because of the world we live in,” the artist said, referring to today’s divisive political climate. “I wanted to imagine what it would look like today.”
Some recreations
– Hank Willis Thomas and Emily Shur
A lot of parodies of the painting here as well.
Kei Nomiyama and Radim Schreiber take otherworldly photos of fireflies.
The latter will be at the Des Moines Botanical Center exhibiting his “Firefly Experience”
Excellent, short photoessay by Debarshi Mukherjee on Bonalu