12/23/09
12/22/09
12/21/09
HOLIDAY GREETINGS
I'd like to wish everyone a Wonderful Holiday Season and a Fabulous New Year!!! I hope the past year has bought blessings to you and your family and may 2010 be even better. Thank you for visiting my blog.
Fossil Bonanza for an Animal That Doesn't Fossilize: The Octopus
ALZHEIMER'S GENES LOCATED
This past September, a pair of research teams announced that they had identified three new genes associated with Alzheimer’s disease. The scientists also tagged another 12 gene variants as promising candidates for further study. Previously, only four genes were known to be linked to Alzheimer’s, which affects an estimated 5 million Americans. Both reports appeared in Nature Genetics.
To pinpoint the new genes, the two groups conducted studies looking for differences between the DNA of people who have Alzheimer’s disease and those who do not. Epidemiologist Philippe Amouyel of the Pasteur Institute of Lille in France and his colleagues closed in on genes called CR1 and CLU. The precise function of these genes is unknown, but previous research suggests they may be involved in removing a protein fragment called beta-amyloid from the brain. In people with Alzheimer’s, beta-amyloid molecules clump together and form destructive plaques.
HUBBLE'S NEW MIND-BLOWING "SCOPES"
The Hubble Space Telescope demonstrated its newly enhanced capabilities with this stunning image of the Butterfly nebula. In May astronauts docked the space shuttle Atlantis onto the 19-year-old telescope to make repairs and add new instruments. For astrophotography buffs, the most important upgrade is Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), whose predecessor captured many of Hubble’s iconic images, including the Pillars of Creation in the Eagle nebula. The latest version boasts higher resolution and an expanded field of view.This WFC3 shot captures strands of superheated gas that were expelled by a dying star almost 4,000 light-years away. The Butterfly nebula’s distinctive shape results from a ring of dust that prevents the gas from spreading uniformly in all directions. Its wings stretch more than two light-years across—equivalent to about half the distance between our sun and the nearest star.
12/20/09
BLUE XMAS / aka NOEL BLEU
A must see video. It is stunning. Noel Bleu is a video mapping project on the Notre Dame Church of Guebwiller, a happy village located on the "WinePath" in Alsace, France. The show consists of a 18 min. graphical exploration of the Church, designed by 1024, following a musical ambient score composed by Vincent Violuis. The show runs 8 times every weekend at dusk, til Xmas. The video in HD format is warped in realtime on the facade, using custom software.
12/19/09
AVATAR - A NEW EDEN, BOTH COSMIC & CINEMATIC
Movie Review by NY Times: With “Avatar” James Cameron has turned one man’s dream of the movies into a trippy joy ride about the end of life — our moviegoing life included — as we know it. Several decades in the dreaming and more than four years in the actual making, the movie is a song to the natural world that was largely produced with software, an Emersonian exploration of the invisible world of the spirit filled with Cameronian rock ’em, sock ’em pulpy action. Created to conquer hearts, minds, history books and box-office records, the movie — one of the most expensive in history, the jungle drums thump — is glorious and goofy and blissfully deranged." To read the full review, click on the heading above.
12/16/09
10 Most Incredible Earth Scars
Amazing photographs show what explosions and massive machines have scraped into the earth’s crust. Open cast mining has made an unpleasant impact on the planet’s surface. The face of the earth is full of giant scars, created by our ongoing plundering of the planet's natural resources. Here are 10 of the holes most needing a bit of environmental ointment – where rehabilitation of the land could take some time".12/13/09
12/11/09
IDAHO'S FIRE RAINBOW
The atmospheric phenomenon known as a circumhorizon(tal) arc, or "Fire rainbow", appears when the sun is high in the sky (i.e., higher than 58° above the horizon), and its light passes through diaphanous, high-altitude cirrus clouds made up of hexagonal plate crystals. Sunlight entering the crystals' vertical side faces and leaving through their bottom faces is refracted (as through a prism) and separated into an array of visible colors. When the plate crystals in cirrus clouds are aligned optimally (i.e., with their faces parallel to the ground), the resulting display is a brilliant spectrum of colors reminiscent of a rainbow. The example shown above was captured on camera as it hung for aboutan hour across a several-hundred square mile area of sky above northern Idaho (near the Washington border) on 3 June 2006.
Visual Effects: 100 Years of Inspiration
Watch 100 Years of Cinematic Special Effects in 5 Minutes.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)