Attention arachniphobes: Colin Schultz has some bad news for you over at Smithsonian’s Smart News: This Giant New Tarantula Has an Eight-Inch Leg Span Let’s design the world’s most terrifying spider, shall we? First, we’ll get the basics down: the legs, the eyes, the fangs. Some spiders, like the giant huntsman, look scary but are basically harmless. We can’t have that. Our spider needs to be poisonous. Let’s make it super fast, too, able to dart around in and out of reach. It needs to have camouflage and a propensity for hiding in the world’s nooks and crannies, ready to jump out and scare the bejesus out of us. Now, we’re almost there, but we’re certainly missing something. Oh, I know, let’s make it the size of your face. Say hello to Peocilotheria rajaei, Sri Lanka’s most recently discovered giant spider. But don’t worry, it’s only like the second-biggest spider ever. Really, nature? Really?! We needed this? (via Smart News)
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Attention arachniphobes: Colin Schultz has some bad news for you over at Smithsonian’s Smart News: This Giant New Tarantula Has an Eight-Inch Leg Span

Let’s design the world’s most terrifying spider, shall we?

First, we’ll get the basics down: the legs, the eyes, the fangs. Some spiders, like the giant huntsman, look scary but are basically harmless. We can’t have that. Our spider needs to be poisonous. Let’s make it super fast, too, able to dart around in and out of reach. It needs to have camouflage and a propensity for hiding in the world’s nooks and crannies, ready to jump out and scare the bejesus out of us. Now, we’re almost there, but we’re certainly missing something. Oh, I know, let’s make it the size of your face.

Say hello to Peocilotheria rajaei, Sri Lanka’s most recently discovered giant spider.

But don’t worry, it’s only like the second-biggest spider ever. Really, nature? Really?! We needed this?

(via Smart News)

Source: blogs.smithsonianmag.com

Pollination 2: Electric Buzz-aloo Biological senses are one of my favorite things to learn and think about. From your answers on this post, it sounds like many of you are just as fascinated with them as I am. Our reality consists only of what our five limited senses tell us about the world. We can build tools to convert what we can’t sense into something that we can, but we’ll always be limited by our basic set of tools. That’s why it blows my mind to find out things like bees can sense electric fields when looking for flowers! For half a century, it’s been known that flowers have a negative charge and bees tend to have a positive charge. This is because flowers are “grounded” (literally) and bees build up a sort of static buzz while flying through the air. Why might that be beneficial to flowers? It helps all those pollen particles jump from flower to be to aid the pollination process! Daniel Robert from the University of Bristol just recently teamed up with a physicist and a botanist to find out whether bees are actually sensing that electricity. They created several shapes of synthetic flowers that they could control the electrical charges of. Bees quickly learned to visit charged/sweet fake flowers over uncharged/bitter fake flowers. This matches what may happen in the wild, since after a bee visits a flower, it takes away not only its nectar, but also some of its zap! If you visit twice, you’re wasting your bee time. Bees are also able to see things about flower colors that are invisible to us, like using ultraviolet light to see a “bulls-eye” to guide them in:  Want more? Ed Yong has a great, detailed write-up of the electric bees at Phenomena.
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Pollination 2: Electric Buzz-aloo

Biological senses are one of my favorite things to learn and think about. From your answers on this post, it sounds like many of you are just as fascinated with them as I am. Our reality consists only of what our five limited senses tell us about the world. We can build tools to convert what we can’t sense into something that we can, but we’ll always be limited by our basic set of tools. That’s why it blows my mind to find out things like bees can sense electric fields when looking for flowers!

For half a century, it’s been known that flowers have a negative charge and bees tend to have a positive charge. This is because flowers are “grounded” (literally) and bees build up a sort of static buzz while flying through the air. Why might that be beneficial to flowers? It helps all those pollen particles jump from flower to be to aid the pollination process!

Daniel Robert from the University of Bristol just recently teamed up with a physicist and a botanist to find out whether bees are actually sensing that electricity. They created several shapes of synthetic flowers that they could control the electrical charges of. Bees quickly learned to visit charged/sweet fake flowers over uncharged/bitter fake flowers. This matches what may happen in the wild, since after a bee visits a flower, it takes away not only its nectar, but also some of its zap! If you visit twice, you’re wasting your bee time.

Bees are also able to see things about flower colors that are invisible to us, like using ultraviolet light to see a “bulls-eye” to guide them in: 

Want more? Ed Yong has a great, detailed write-up of the electric bees at Phenomena.

This is what it looks like to shock flowers with 80,000 volts. In this odd but old photographic technique (called Kirlian photography), the object is placed over photographic film over a metal plate. When the extreme voltages are applied, the air surrounding the flower is ionized, leaving a ghostly electric image on the film. The remainder of the colorful image is hand-painted later. Check out Robert Buelteman’s gallery for more shockingly ethereal flowers. Bonus: Check out this gallery of plants imaged via electromagnetic photography at myampgoesto11. Gorgeous! (via DeMilked)
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This is what it looks like to shock flowers with 80,000 volts. In this odd but old photographic technique (called Kirlian photography), the object is placed over photographic film over a metal plate. When the extreme voltages are applied, the air surrounding the flower is ionized, leaving a ghostly electric image on the film. The remainder of the colorful image is hand-painted later.

Check out Robert Buelteman’s gallery for more shockingly ethereal flowers.

Bonus: Check out this gallery of plants imaged via electromagnetic photography at myampgoesto11. Gorgeous!

(via DeMilked)

Source: demilked.com

Fractal Flowers I know you love fractals, because we’re friends, and all my friends love fractals. We’ve seen them in nature, in the recursive spindles of branching rivers, but they’re more rare in living things (although our blood vessels follow a certain fractal-like pattern as they spread to capillaries). That’s why it makes me so happy to see fractals captured in an imaginative art/nature intersection. Silvia Cordedda uses fractal generation software to digitally draw fractal flowers. They are mystically unreal (unfortunately for us) but they remind me of several near-fractals in actual flowers. That’s right, fractals (or at least near-fractals, because they aren’t infinite) DO exist in nature, and you’ve probably seen them. My favorite flower fractal? Romanesco broccoli (yep, it’s a flower!): If you can’t choke that down, pour some Vi Hart cheese sauce all over it and check out this video of fractal fractions: (via My Modern Met)
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Fractal Flowers I know you love fractals, because we’re friends, and all my friends love fractals. We’ve seen them in nature, in the recursive spindles of branching rivers, but they’re more rare in living things (although our blood vessels follow a certain fractal-like pattern as they spread to capillaries). That’s why it makes me so happy to see fractals captured in an imaginative art/nature intersection. Silvia Cordedda uses fractal generation software to digitally draw fractal flowers. They are mystically unreal (unfortunately for us) but they remind me of several near-fractals in actual flowers. That’s right, fractals (or at least near-fractals, because they aren’t infinite) DO exist in nature, and you’ve probably seen them. My favorite flower fractal? Romanesco broccoli (yep, it’s a flower!): If you can’t choke that down, pour some Vi Hart cheese sauce all over it and check out this video of fractal fractions: (via My Modern Met)
Zoom Info
Fractal Flowers I know you love fractals, because we’re friends, and all my friends love fractals. We’ve seen them in nature, in the recursive spindles of branching rivers, but they’re more rare in living things (although our blood vessels follow a certain fractal-like pattern as they spread to capillaries). That’s why it makes me so happy to see fractals captured in an imaginative art/nature intersection. Silvia Cordedda uses fractal generation software to digitally draw fractal flowers. They are mystically unreal (unfortunately for us) but they remind me of several near-fractals in actual flowers. That’s right, fractals (or at least near-fractals, because they aren’t infinite) DO exist in nature, and you’ve probably seen them. My favorite flower fractal? Romanesco broccoli (yep, it’s a flower!): If you can’t choke that down, pour some Vi Hart cheese sauce all over it and check out this video of fractal fractions: (via My Modern Met)
Zoom Info

Fractal Flowers

I know you love fractals, because we’re friends, and all my friends love fractals. We’ve seen them in nature, in the recursive spindles of branching rivers, but they’re more rare in living things (although our blood vessels follow a certain fractal-like pattern as they spread to capillaries).

That’s why it makes me so happy to see fractals captured in an imaginative art/nature intersection. Silvia Cordedda uses fractal generation software to digitally draw fractal flowers. They are mystically unreal (unfortunately for us) but they remind me of several near-fractals in actual flowers.

That’s right, fractals (or at least near-fractals, because they aren’t infinite) DO exist in nature, and you’ve probably seen them. My favorite flower fractal? Romanesco broccoli (yep, it’s a flower!):

If you can’t choke that down, pour some Vi Hart cheese sauce all over it and check out this video of fractal fractions:

(via My Modern Met)

Dolphins Call Each Other by “Name”!! “Cool” is finding out that dolphins are among the handful of species on Earth that can recognize themselves in the mirror. “Cooler” is finding out that dolphins “name” themselves from a young age with a signature whistle used to signal their identity to other dolphins. “Ice Cold” is the new discovery that dolphins call out other dolphins’ signatures when they are separated. It’s like calling out for a friend in a crowded room! They even put their own slight tweak on the call, the effect of their unique anatomy (sort of like their voice, if dolphins had “voices”). I would probably hesitate at calling this something like true “language”, because when we do that we’re prone to attach a lot of human characteristics to it. But it’s definitely an amazing case of animal intelligence and perhaps even culture. This isn’t the only whale that passes on its calls to others. Humpback whales have been shown to trade and teach mating calls across entire oceans, like the cetacean version of foreign language classes! Dolphins amaze me at every turn. But lest you think they’re 100% awesome all the time, let Deep Sea News remind you of several reasons that dolphins are complete a$$holes.
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Dolphins Call Each Other by “Name”!!

“Cool” is finding out that dolphins are among the handful of species on Earth that can recognize themselves in the mirror. “Cooler” is finding out that dolphins “name” themselves from a young age with a signature whistle used to signal their identity to other dolphins.

“Ice Cold” is the new discovery that dolphins call out other dolphins’ signatures when they are separated. It’s like calling out for a friend in a crowded room! They even put their own slight tweak on the call, the effect of their unique anatomy (sort of like their voice, if dolphins had “voices”).

I would probably hesitate at calling this something like true “language”, because when we do that we’re prone to attach a lot of human characteristics to it. But it’s definitely an amazing case of animal intelligence and perhaps even culture. This isn’t the only whale that passes on its calls to others. Humpback whales have been shown to trade and teach mating calls across entire oceans, like the cetacean version of foreign language classes!

Dolphins amaze me at every turn. But lest you think they’re 100% awesome all the time, let Deep Sea News remind you of several reasons that dolphins are complete a$$holes.