Her Boss Called it ‘Girl Talk’

Her boss called it “girl talk.” She had just discovered the largest geological feature on Earth, a 10,000-mile mountain range running down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Marie Tharp mapped 70% of our planet from a basement lab at Columbia, using sonar readings, a ruler, and India ink. She wasn’t allowed on the research …

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Von Schmidt

Harold von Schmidt’s illustrations for Death Comes for the Archbishop were greatly admired when they first appeared in 1927.  And they still are as far as I am concerned.   Von Schmidt did over 60 illustrations for the book, and they are artfully interspersed with the text to create a book that is itself an aesthetic object. …

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Eagle vs Heron

  Still shot of a Bald Eagle capturing a Heron for its lunch in Glenwood, NS. Wow, I didn’t know they would do this. Hopefully, not fake.

Forest Thinning and Snowpack

What they found was remarkable. Over a single winter, this targeted thinning increased snowpack by 30% on north-facing slopes and 16% on south-facing slopes. That additional snow amounted to about 12.3 acre-feet of water—around 4 million gallons—per 100 acres on the cooler, north-facing slopes, and 5.1 acre-feet (about 1.5 million gallons) per 100 acres on …

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Quite the trick.

Richard Bischof, a wildlife biologist at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, sees a better way forward for this field of study, known as wildlife telemetry. He’s now building and experimenting with devices, described in a recent preprint, that would allow researchers to apply collars on animals without needing to capture them. Rethinking how we put …

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Crocodile Bites at Leopard

​ Spectacular footage likely to be seen everywhere soon. Prime fodder for Ozzyman. Text article. Many more videos, etc.

Amazonian Archaeology

Great mysteries of archaeology: an ancient Amazonian world revealed from the sky A good review article on the Amazonian archaeology and the lidar revolution.  

Fairy Snow

  BARREN SHADE —— That’s no fresh-fallen powder you’re seeing, no fluffy snowfall somehow snuck in overnight. It’s surely not smoke or a low-lying fog. What you’ve got here is the leavings of dandelions, all scattered where the wind would carry. Just south of here are a few fields gone feral, overrun with wild yellow …

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Form, Color and Pattern

A beautiful resident coastal cutthroat from a small spring fed creek that feeds the Lois lake watershed. Quite the combo of Form, Color and Pattern. Gorgeous