18 July 2011

1. Greenland Glacier Cave. Photograph by Carsten Peter. National Geographic.
2. Anderson Glacier Ice Cave. Photograph by Larry Workman Qin.
3. Woman in bathing suit near ice caves in Paradise Glacier, Mount Rainier National Park, Washington, ca. 1925. Photographer unknown.

Emily Rothschild

I love this locket from Emily Rothschild
"...A re-design of a turn-of-the-century mourning locket, this necklace now contains a USB flash drive. Given new life, this locket stores all of your most important photographs and files to be shared or to be kept safe as memories..."

Tom Waits - Train Song

12 July 2011

“Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched—love for instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next.”

-Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Image by Paula May Evans

11 July 2011

Josef Konczak

Something I came across at the Brighton Photography degree show at Free Range.
See more of Josef's work here.

Cy Twombly 1928-2011

Good outfit. If I owned this skirt I don't think I would ever take it off.
Image from here

10 July 2011

Sunday Tune

9 July 2011

Trees cocooned in spiders webs after flooding in Sindh, Pakistan

An unexpected side-effect of the flooding in parts of Pakistan has been that millions of spiders climbed up into the trees to escape the rising flood waters.

Because of the scale of the flooding and the fact that the water has taken so long to recede, many trees have become cocooned in spiders webs. People in this part of Sindh have never seen this phenonemon before - but they also report that there are now less mosquitos than they would expect, given the amoungt of stagnant, standing water that is around.

It is thought that the mosquitos are getting caught in the spiders web thus reducing the risk of malaria, which would be one blessing for the people of Sindh, facing so many other hardships after the floods.

Picture: Russell Watkins/Department for International Development

Text

8 July 2011

Spider Webs

"In humans, we associate getting older with cobwebs of the mind; in spiders, it's the cobwebs themselves that suffer...as spiders age, they build shabbier, less perfect webs than they did in their youth. As a young creepy-crawly, the European house spider, Zygiella x-notata, weaves intricately patterned webs with regular spacing and exact angles, like this one in the left photo, built by a 17-day-old spider. The web in the right photo was built by a 188-days-old spider nearing the end of its life, and its web design is far more irregular and shows numerous gaps."

Webs made by drugged spiders photographed by Dr. Peter Witt: 1. undrugged, 2. benzedrine, 3. caffeine

Witt's photos via Neuroscience Art Gallery. More here + here.

To many spiders, the web is everything.

For the approximately 15,000 species of web-building spiders, most of them nearly blind, the web is their essential window on the world: their means of communicating, capturing prey, meeting mates and protecting themselves. A web-building spider without its web is like a man marooned on an island of solid rock, totally out of touch and destined to starve to death. A fly could walk unmolested right under the nose of a webless spider.

Perhaps no one knows this better than Dr. Peter N. Witt, a physician-pharmacologist who 37 years ago was seduced into a career-long study of spiders and their silken domiciles. In 1948 a frustrated zoologist at the University of Tubingen in West Germany turned to his pharmacologist colleague for help in photographing orb-web spiders in the process of constructing their homes. The spiders normally perform this task in the dark around 5 A.M., which is not exactly ideal for movie making. The zoologist wondered if his subjects might be drugged into changing their construction time.

Young Dr. Witt had no trouble feeding the spiders sugar water spiked with various stimulants or tranquilizers ... but the movie-making zoologist was not exactly pleased with the results. The drugged spiders still built their webs in the early-morning darkness, and now the resulting webs were bizarrely abnormal, as if built by a drunk.

The zoologist abandoned the movie, but the pharmacologist was hooked. Here, he explained in a recent interview, was a reliably reproducible means of assessing the behavioral effects of drugs with mind-altering potential. Each drug seemed to produce characteristic aberrations in the spiders' webs, changes far more reliable than the behavioral effects of drugs observed in laboratory rats or human subjects.

Jane E. Brody, writing in the 9/17/1985 NYT.
I found all of this via evencleveland. No wonder so many artists are obsessed with spiders webs...