Felix Sala photographs coral the way most people photograph landscapes: from inside it, looking out. His close-up work captures a world that most divers swim right past without really seeing. The shapes, textures, and colors here are genuinely alien, and they’re sitting about ten feet underwater at reefs all over the world.
I’ve always found coral to be spectacularly interesting, from a visual perspective. I was to do some snorkeling on the islands of Hawaii recently, and the diversity of form, color and size is staggering. Felix Salazar has some really nice shots from his own personal aquarium.
LA-based photographer and composer Felix Salazar recently captured some wonderful macro photos of several inhabitants in his salt water aquariums. The shocking variety of color makes the coral look like digital renderings, but Salazar assures me each is a unique photo selected from hundreds of attempts to get just the right shot as he experimented with focus and light. You can see many more on his website. (via my modern met)
In a beautiful and slightly spooky series, Shaun Jeffers explores the caves of New Zealand of Waitomo where brilliant glow worms live. Otherworldly stuff… Via Bored Panda:
The tallest and largest volcano in the whole solar system, Olympus Mons would be a true sight to behold, if we ever got to see it in person. The ESA has some really cool images taken by the Mars Express.
FastCo Design has a look at cell phone towers disguised as trees in Capetown. Photographer Dillon Marsh documents them in a series he calls Invasive Species. Personally, I think it’s a noble effort, if a bit silly. What do you think? Is this manmade artifice clever, or just a waste of time?
Tom Kondrat has some beautifully barren images from Iceland, taken during the coldest times of the year. His view takes on an almost haunting emptiness. Via FastCo Design:
An amazing photo project that shows cities if they didn’t have light pollution. Quite a beautiful piece of work. Via Its Okay to be Smart:
Before these pictures can exist, the sky from one place has to be superimposed upon cityscape from another. It is impossible to see this detail in the night sky above a city. Atmospheric and light pollution combine to make looking into the urban sky like looking past bright headlights while driving.
By travelling to places free from light pollution but situated on precisely the same latitude as his cities, Cohen obtains skies which, as the world rotates about its axis, are the very ones visible above the cities a few hours earlier or later. To find the right level of atmospheric clarity, Cohen has to go into the wild places of the earth, the Atacama, the Mojave, the western Sahara.
As more and more of the world’s population becomes urban, and as we lose our connection with the natural world, so it becomes plain that damage is caused by light pollution. There may be connections to certain cancers, and there are psychological burdens of permanent day. The ‘city that never sleeps’ is made up of millions of individuals breaking natural cycles of work and repose. Lose sight of the sky, and you become a rat in a lab.
Cohen hasn’t simply shown us the skies that we’re missing. His cities look dead under the fireworks display above No lights in the windows, no tracers of traffic. They are (in fact) photographed in daylight, when lights shine out less brightly. In urban mythology the city teems with energy and illumines everything around it. Cohen’s pictures are crafted to say the opposite. These are cold cities, cut off from the seemingly infinite energies above.
I finally got around to seeing the film Chasing Ice last night, and I highly recommend going to see it. The film is a gripping and fiercely scary look at the world’s glaciers, and their rapid decline and disappearance. Renowned photographer James Balog spends years of his life and literally destroys his own knees hiking to some of the world’s most remote yet critical glaciers, setting up multi-year timelapse studies. His visual records of swift glacial decline are irrefutable proof of climate change in action. At the same time, he captures images of ice, icebergs and glaciers that are visually astounding. Painfully beautiful and just plain painful, the film is a must-see for anyone that wants to feel invigorated to do something about the climate crisis. Go see it.
Some really powerful images, article via CoolHunting:
In his exhibit of images from Nairobi entitled “Buried in Dandora”, photographer Micah Albert explores the 30-acre wasteland located just 2.5 miles from the central business district. About one million people live by the vast Dandora dump site that literally spills into their homes and sickens children and adults with respiratory ailments, skin disorders and other fatal diseases. Sanitation problems increase exponentially with the growing population being literally buried in garbage but sadly, Kenya’s leadership shows alarming indifference to the plight of the people living in the slums of Dandora. Environmental laws, UN-commissioned health studies and calls for closure from human rights groups have largely been ignored.
Making the situation even more complicated is the cottage industry that has sprung up in Dandora. Street children live off salvaged items including food, candy and other things they find in the piles of waste. Thousands of people now make small amounts of money each day scrounging through the debris as they complete the back-breaking task of sorting waste for private companies.
When Albert learned about Dandora, he set off on a journey to tell the story of the people who live there, armed with a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting to make the project possible. For the “Buried in Dandora” series, Albert documented the piles of waste amid poorly constructed homes, and the harrowing labor involved in picking through the trash. Among the hardship and tragedy captured in the images emerges a sense of joy reinforcing the resilience of the human spirit.
“My approach to photography over the years has been to work on undercover issues mostly in Africa and the Middle East,” says Albert. “I have always gone out of my way to travel to Yemen, Chad, Sudan and the Congo, to extremely difficult to access locations, to be a voice to the voiceless. Nairobi has been a hub for me for such a long time, I know it like the back of my hand, or so I thought. Then I found out about this dump site and learned that this is one of the biggest in Africa and that many people live and work in this place. I partnered up with David Conrad, a writer I met in 2008 when we were both covering the elections in Kenya. We simply wanted to tell the story of Dandora.”
Once they arrived back in Kenya, getting to Dandora was an odyssey. “It took three days of negotiating with the lead of the cartel that controls the dumpsite,” explains Albert. “It is one of the most dangerous places in Kenya. Slums surround the dumpsite. You can’t just show up. So, to get in there I needed to negotiate with this guy named Tiger who is the head of the cartel. Most taxi drivers won’t go there for fear of their own safety. We more or less had to hide in the back of the car to get into the slum area two hours before the sun came up. Security was a big deal. This place is off the grid. This is a place where bodies are dumped, where women are taken to be raped and where weapons are hidden. This is the place where all illegal activity happens. That is what I didn’t expect. I am used to going into dangerous places, but I didn’t except it to be that much of a security issue.”
So moved by the tragedy of Dandora, Albert gets emotional talking about some of the people he encountered there. “The kid doing a handstand, I had to take that shot,” he says. “I am a new dad. No matter what circumstances or how terrible life is—kids will still be kids. I always try to show the positive, I don’t feel like there is enough of that in today’s news and media. The dumpsite at Dandora is a horrific place, but I really try to get to know people like I would get to know my neighbor. I don’t just start bombarding them with my camera. I try to get to know them as a person and once you do that you see ‘that guy is a dad too’, ‘that guy is a brother’, ‘that man is going to try to provide for his family’. There are a lot of points I can relate to.”
“Buried in Dandora” will be on view at Apolis: Common Gallery in downtown Los Angeles from 7-31 December. At the opening night reception, Albert will be joined by Pulitzer Center managing director Natalie Applewhite and Apolis co-founders Raan and Shea Parton. Albert is also an Apolis Advocate for the socially motivated lifestyle brand and contributes regularly to their Apolis Journal.
Over at NRDC Switchboard, Dana Gunders writes Dear Government: Food Waste is a Matter of Urgency. Please Take It Seriously. It’s an important post about a subject that is often ignored: that well over 40% of food in North America is wasted. Worldwide, almost a third of all food is lost to poor harvesting, lousy distribution, poor storage and ridiculous portion sizes. And it isn’t just the food wasted; it’s also the water, fertilizer and fuel.
Dana notes that the government is doing close to nothing about the problem, but that it once thought it important enough to run poster campaigns. She illustrates her post with her favourite from the US Navy in World War II.
In 2010, Alex Salmond, the First Minister of Scotland, announced that his government was aiming to power all of Scotland with 100% renewable energy by 2025. Just a few months later, they kicked it up a notch or five: Scotland would seek to run entirely on renewable power by 2020. Most of that would come from ambitious onshore and offshore wind farms, as well as some smaller wave and tidal power projects—and there are 7 GW of such clean energy projects already completed or underway.
2011 was an epic year for Scottish energy companies. The Department for Energy and Climate Change released figures recently demonstrating that the renewable energy sector saw more than £750 million of investment last year. Currently seven gigawatts (GW) of renewable projects are operational, under construction or approved … several projects are in the pipeline to eventually deliver 17 GW of power with an estimated investment of £46 billion … [Scotland] is already well on its way to hit its interim target of 31 percent.
Copyright by Moyan Brenn
And 2012 looks to continue that trend, especially as Salmond announced a new partnership with the United Arab Emirates, and Masdar, the Abu Dhabi clean energy company, today at the World Future Energy Summit. The two governments agreed to lay out an action plan this year that would allow them to pool resources and technology to accelerate cleantech development, initially focusing on offshore wind and carbon capture and sequestration.
Salmond acknowledged that one of the primary challenges to meeting the 2020 goal was finding ways to bring the costs of offshore wind projects down.
“The costs of offshore wind will have to be reduced by 20% to be competitive,” he said at a press conference today. Efforts to analyze and improve the supply chain will be a top priority, as will examining transmission challenges inherent in efficiently transporting electricity over long distances. Salmond repeatedly emphasized the need to commercialize offshore wind to make the technology available for wider deployment (and granting Scotland a foothold in one of the next generation’s most promising industries).
“The real prize is the technologies that we are refining together,” he said. “The result is to demonstrate the feasibility for deployment of those technologies around the world.”
By Flickr user David Shand
Other challenges to the burgeoning renewable sector are strictly political in nature: Salmond has been leading a push for Scottish independence, which has led the likes of Citigroup to warn investors of backing energy projects in the region. But Salmond dismissed such concerns today, asserting that there was great “strength in confidence in the renewable sector”, and pointed to a great potential for foreign investment.
Scotland’s push to become a leader in marine renewables (they’re also seeking to deploy as much as 2 GW of wave and tidal power) is not just laudable, but could prove visionary indeed. The effort could prove a major boon to Scotland’s economy, where wind could become a $30 billion dollar industry, according to forecasts from Scottish Enterprises. As such, it’s no surprise that the plan is raising high hopes in the renewable energy industry – and, no doubt, in Scotland.
Hot on the heels of a story of a cardboard bike comes something a little more high tech, but similarly ingenious. Just two blocks from my office is a bicycle in a front window that won the 2011 Oregon Manifest award. The bicycle in question is called the Faraday, and it is a collaboration between IDEO and Rock Lobster Cycles. After winning the audience award at the prestigious bike design show, the designers went back to work fine-tuning this 21st century cycle. With an integrated lighting system, front rack and electric assist, this bike is a beautiful example of forward-thinking design and creativity. Available Spring of 2013 for $3,500.
From Faraday:The Faraday Porteur is the ultimate electric propelled utility bicycle – the first electric bicycle built by, and for, cyclists. Dubbed “the ultimate modern utility bicycle” by the Oregon Manifest bicycle design competition, the Faraday Porteur is an elegant, powerful electric bicycle – a high-quality city bike that is comfortable and effortless to ride – with or without the electric motor.
An amazing collection of species from the future, changed irreparably due to climate change and the need to adapt to a new planet. Via Time:
In his “Engineered Species” project, part of his recently released book Past Forward, Fournier explores how life itself tinkers with its own design, changing DNA to make species better, faster and stronger. Fournier took pictures of taxidermy specimens—stuffed and pinned animals—and brought them to animal geneticists to find how these species were evolving in real time as the environment, thanks largely to human action, keeps changing.
PANGOLIN[Pholidota supraclimatis]
Climate change-tolerant mammal • Better adaptation to climate change (i.e. increase of 2∘C). Nocturnal/diurnal animals.
A high keratin content (DM content of 45%) maintains a constant body temperature and controls homeostatis. Claw composition: non-metallic and metallic (Ir) components [1:7] for animal defense.
BEETLE [Oryctes transmissionus]
Insect adapted to continuous tracking.
GPS receiver in the horn as integrated antenna. • Secretion of a two-layer ABS/Plexiglas material by the engineered animal. Accuracy of time signals (±10ns).
Head and thorax made with Al for short-wavelength transmissions in the ISM band from 2400-2480 MHz. Able to withstand accelerations of 12,000 g or about 118 km/s2. The L5 frequency band at 1.17645 GHz added. Animal for continuous tracking.
SPARROW [Passeridae megapixeliadeae]
Bird with high visual acuity
Injection around 20000 engineered stem cells per eye using isolate fibroblast precursors from corneal stroma.
Critical visual angle : 0.35 arc-minute. Large format camera : 180 degrees.Resolution of the bird eye : 576 megapixels. f/ratio = 22.3/7 = 3.2
Injection of a genetically modified gene isolated from camel hump cells in spores. Reservoir of fatty tissue derived from lipoblasts within cap.
Metabolized tissue with a yield of approx. 0.1 of H2O for each 0.1 g of fat converted through reaction with O2from the air.
Glass mirrors on scales providing parabolic reflectors. Very low f/#s. With a ray depth of 48.
Secretion of a thin layer of aluminium by reduction from tetrahydroxoaluminate Al(OH)4–to metallic aluminum by microbial-bacterial processes. Agro-infiltration of engineered bacteria with surfactant Silwet L-77. Body for mimetic camouflage.
GREAT GREY OWL [Strix nebulosa]
Predator-resistant feathers
Vision in pixels for delivering a fuller picture to the brain. Process of computer software memory. Engineered nerves cells and photoreceptor cells in the retina of the eye. Neither ears nor horns.
Embryogenesis modification. Tufts feather with a narrow band of wavelengths (305-320mm) to avoid predation. Claw composition: non-metallic and metallic (106Cd) components [1:5] for defense.
Wired has a fascinating and tough look at the forest fires that have been raging in the west, all from the vantage point of space. Make sure to click on the images to see the devastation full size.
The scale of the fires burning in the Western United States this summer can be hard to fathom. But the view from space reveals the true extent of the devastation. Satellites have captured some sobering images of the fire, smoke and burn scars scattered across the Intermountain West.
While the fires in Colorado are dominating the news this week, blazes have also been raging in New Mexico, Utah and Arizona in June. Here are some of the scenes from space collected by NASA, NOAA and the U.S. Geological Survey this month.
Above:
This view from NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, GOES-15, on June 28 shows fires dotting the Rockies and sending smoke over huge swaths of the Midwest. Much of the smoke in this image is from blazes in Wyoming.
These images captured by the USGS’s Landsat 5 and 7 satellites show the Fort Collins area on June 8 before the fire (left) and on June 18 (right) after 60,000 acres and 189 homes had burned. As of June 29, the High Park fire had destroyed at least 259 homes and torched more than 87,000 acres. The burn scar shows up in dark red, active fires in bright red and smoke in light blue in these images taken by the Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plusinstrument.Images: USGS
These images of the High Park fire near Fort Collins were captured by NASA’s Aquasatellite on June 9 (left) and June 10 (right). The approximate extent of the active fire is outlined in red. As of June 29, the High Park fire had destroyed at least 259 homes and torched more than 87,000 acres.
Images: NASA
These images of the Whitewater Baldy Fire in New Mexico were taken on June 5 by the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA’s Earth Observing-1(EO-1) satellite. The false-color image (right) shows the massive burn scar in red and active fire in orange. By June 14, New Mexico’s largest fire ever had burned 290,000 acres. The natural color image (left) is a close-up of the area inside the white box in the image on the right.
Keystone XL remains a terribly flawed project, and one I think would push policy and energy strategy in North America is the absolute wrong direction. In an era of climate change, air pollution and ever-dwindling fossil fuels, we need to seek new directions, not double-down and get even deeper into the hole we’ve dug for ourselves.
Obviously, the Sierra Club agrees, and have produced a succinct video on the project. Perhaps if you have a friend or relative on the dirty end of the argument, you could point them in this direction.
Fast Co. Design has an article showcasing a great infographic by graduate student Derek Watkins.
Graduate student Derek Watkins has created a map that’s shaped by its populations. Based upon William Bunge’sThe Continents and Islands of Mankind, Watkins created a blob-based view of the world, all shaped by population density. His resulting project takes over where Bunge left off. It’s an interactive map (you can toggle population densities with a simple slider), allowing you to see, very simply, the most dense places on the planet, and how these areas relate to one another. So the most dense cities in the world are depicted as land while the sparsely populated spaces sink into the oceans.
Areas with population density over 5 people per square kilometer.
I think the clean simplicity and relative vagueness of the map makes the information all the more compelling. Like an ink blob, the maps have bigger splotches where the density is higher, and empty canvas where the world is less populated. In this dead-simple way, it’s easy to make out India and China, and the growing density of places like Nigeria.
Areas with population density over 190 people per square kilometer.
At 190 people per square kilometer, things get simpler still. Nearly the whole western hemisphere disappears, leaving the remnants of megacities. Watkins’ website has a slider that lets you play with the density, and watch the world change.
