n2doc
n2doc's Journal
Blackwater (beautiful pics of deep sea creatures)
Photographer Joshua Lambus has put together a beautiful series of photographs showing luminous creatures of the deep glowing with light against a pitch-black background. The project is titled “Blackwater.”
The photographs were captured in the ocean during the Hawaii-based photographer’s deep dives. “My photos are to show people things they haven’t seen before… or maybe things they see all the time… in a way they’ve never cared to look,” Lambus writes.
Lambus is a veteran of deep dives, having logged hundreds of dives for both personal and commercial purposes. The dives are held in the darkness of the night in water that is thousands of feet deep. Lambus ventures deep under the surface to photograph the animals as they float by.
In an interview with Underwater Photography Guide, Lambus compares photographing the faintly glowing creatures to taking pictures of a piece of aluminum foil and a piece of plastic wrap in a your closet with the lights out. If you can photograph them in focus and well exposed, then you’re fit for this type of underwater photography.
Read more at http://petapixel.com/2013/05/25/beautiful-close-up-underwater-photos-of-luminous-sea-creatures/
more
http://www.jlambus.com/SHOP/Blackwater/21106109_mt8RdD#!i=1712062340&k=jNRfJsZ
Next year’s Winter Olympics are being held in just about the most unsafe place they could be
By Josh Meyer
With nine months to go before the 2014 Winter Olympics, the biennial sport of Olympics-bashing has begun in earnest. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is being criticized for cost overruns and the other usual problems. And as always, the host country, this time Russia, is taking heat for cronyism, corruption, environmental concerns and construction delays.
But this time there is another, bigger set of worries. At several recent gatherings around the world, experts have wrung their hands publicly about how the XXII Winter Games pose the biggest security threat of any games in memory.
The Olympics, which will run from February 7th to the 23rd, are going to be held right in the middle of one of the world’s hottest conflict zones, the North Caucasus. Sochi, the host city, is a lovely resort town on Russia’s Black Sea coast. But the region around it is a cauldron of ethnic hatred and anti-Russian separatist movements. And then there is all of the organized crime, Islamist militancy and terrorism.
Some experts have been warning about security risks ever since the IOC picked Sochi in 2007 over bids from Austria and South Korea. But recent developments have alarmed Caucasus watchers. The two Boston Marathon bombers had ties to the region, and one of them spent six months last year in the Russian republic of Dagestan, where a virulent Islamist insurgency has been gaining strength. And a spat between Washington and Moscow, which this month accused a US diplomat of recruiting spies, has threatened to undermine what little counter-terrorism cooperation the two countries had.
more
http://qz.com/87482/next-years-winter-olympics-are-being-held-in-just-about-the-most-unsafe-place-they-could-be/
‘Pet-Bird’ Flavored Ice Cream
May 24, 2013 // 10:39 am // By: Charisma Madarang
Torimi Cafe, a peculiar spot in Japan that serves homemade treats while guests enjoy their meals surrounded by birds, recently rolled out a new feather-friendly flavor: Pet Bird-Flavored Ice Cream.
Because you know, pizza-flavored and ramen-flavored ice cream are so banal by now.
The cafe’s new flavors include Cockatiel, Java Sparrow and Parakeet, all which debuted last week at a small bird expo in Osaka. According to the business, the ice cream is made with all-natural ingredients and “once in your mouth, the aroma of a parakeet would spread intensely.”
Oh, but it gets better.
According to Torimi Cafe, the Java Sparrow flavor evokes “the feeling of pressing the breast of a java sparrow into your mouth,” while the Cockatiel ice cream emulates that moment “when you’re sleeping with your mouth open and your cockatiel runs over your face and gets its leg in your mouth.” Happens all the time.
And to think I was so naive as to think that this “Pet-Bird” flavored ice cream would taste like chicken.
http://foodbeast.com/content/2013/05/24/pet-bird-flavored-ice-cream-is-a-real-edible-thing/
The Collapse Of Public Infrastructure Spending In One Chart
The big news today is that a bridge in Washington collapsed, throwing cars into the water. Amazingly, nobody died.
This may revive debate about the need to spend more on infrastructure, which would have multiple positive effects.
Nothing is likely to happen, however.
That being said, here's a chart of public construction spending (TLPBLCONS) as percentage of GDP.
You can see, public construction spending is lower than its been in over 20 years.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/skagit-bridge-collapse-infrastructure-spending-2013-5
Cool Street Art
Fun Site-Specific Wheatpastes on the Streets of France by Lavalet
more
http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/05/fun-site-specific-wheatpastes-on-the-streets-of-france-by-lavalet/
Amazingly Gorgeous Photo of Lunar eclipse
Found on here
http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/05/flickr-finds-no-31/
Detection of the Cosmic Gamma Ray Horizon: Measures All the Light in the Universe Since the Big Bang
May 24, 2013 — How much light has been emitted by all galaxies since the cosmos began? After all, almost every photon (particle of light) from ultraviolet to far infrared wavelengths ever radiated by all galaxies that ever existed throughout cosmic history is still speeding through the Universe today. If we could carefully measure the number and energy (wavelength) of all those photons -- not only at the present time, but also back in time -- we might learn important secrets about the nature and evolution of the Universe, including how similar or different ancient galaxies were compared to the galaxies we see today.
That bath of ancient and young photons suffusing the Universe today is called the extragalactic background light (EBL). An accurate measurement of the EBL is as fundamental to cosmology as measuring the heat radiation left over from the Big Bang (the cosmic microwave background) at radio wavelengths. A new paper, called "Detection of the Cosmic ?-Ray Horizon from Multiwavelength Observations of Blazars," by Alberto Dominguez and six coauthors, just published today by the Astrophysical Journal -- based on observations spanning wavelengths from radio waves to very energetic gamma rays, obtained from several NASA spacecraft and several ground-based telescopes -- describes the best measurement yet of the evolution of the EBL over the past 5 billion years.
Directly measuring the EBL by collecting its photons with a telescope, however, poses towering technical challenges -- harder than trying to see the dim band of the Milky Way spanning the heavens at night from midtown Manhattan. Earth is inside a very bright galaxy with billions of stars and glowing gas. Indeed, Earth is inside a very bright solar system: sunlight scattered by all the dust in the plane of Earth's orbit creates the zodiacal light radiating across the optical spectrum down to long-wavelength infrared. Therefore ground-based and space-based telescopes have not succeeded in reliably measuring the EBL directly.
So, astrophysicists developed an ingenious work-around method: measuring the EBL indirectly through measuring the attenuation of -- that is, the absorption of -- very high energy gamma rays from distant blazars. Blazars are supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies with brilliant jets directly pointed at us like a flashlight beam. Not all the high-energy gamma rays emitted by a blazar, however, make it all the way across billions of light-years to Earth; some strike a hapless EBL photon along the way. When a high-energy gamma ray photon from a blazar hits a much lower energy EBL photon, both are annihilated and produce two different particles: an electron and its antiparticle, a positron, which fly off into space and are never heard from again. Different energies of the highest-energy gamma rays are waylaid by different energies of EBL photons. Thus, measuring how much gamma rays of different energies are attenuated or weakened from blazars at different distances from Earth indirectly gives a measurement of how many EBL photons of different wavelengths exist along the line of sight from blazar to Earth over those different distances.
more
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130524104644.htm
New IMAX Super Short: Galaxies Across Space and Time
by NANCY ATKINSON on MAY 23, 2013
“Hubble: Galaxies Across Space and Time” is an award-winning IMAX Super Short film. In less than 3 minutes you can explore 10 billion years of cosmic history as you fly through one of Hubble’s iconic images, the Hubble Deep Field. These galaxies were photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of the Great Observatory Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) project. Hubble scientists and imaging specialists worked for months to extract individual galaxy images, placing them in a 3-D model according to their approximate true distances.
Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/102384/new-imax-super-short-galaxies-across-space-and-time/
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