wow
grrlscientist | June 27, 2010tags: Lightning Strikes Three Buildings Simultaneously in Downtown Chicago, Chicago, lightning strikes, nature, weather, storm, wow, your inner child, Craig Shimala, streaming video
For the third time in the last 6 days, another line of nasty storms rolled through Chicago on Wednesday evening. Wednesday's storms towered up to 63,000 ft, unleashed 80 mph gusts, local 3"+ rains and 15,000 cloud to ground lightning strikes in a single hour. Craig Shimala captured the action from his balcony.
Lightning strikes three of the tallest buildings in Chicago at the same time! from Craig Shimala.
Music…
grrlscientist | June 19, 2010tags: Foosball Fever, Foosball, table football, Nokia, film, filmmaking, innovation, technology, wow, television, streaming video
This video is amazing! It captures an amazing series of foosball matches, complete with all the wacky new tricks that were done. Plus, after the main video is over, you are presented with a clickable menu of embedded video links you can choose from, like slo-mo captures of how the tricks were done, behind the scenes footage, etc. All in all, this one video is a very cool innovation for foosball fans, video aficionados and technophiles!
grrlscientist | June 15, 2010tags: Foucault's Pendulum, physics, rotation, Pendulum, Jim LaBelle, Dartmouth University, wow, streaming video
This video features physics and astronomy professor Jim LaBelle, as he discusses the truly fascinating science behind a classic physics experiment, Foucault's pendulum, while seated next to Dartmouth University's pendulum in Fairchild Tower.
While scientists already knew that the Earth had a rotation, they had struggled to come up with a way of definitively proving this was so. In 1851, French scientist Leon Foucault gave a sensational demonstration in the Paris Pantheon proving…
grrlscientist | June 13, 2010tags: A Story Told With Sand, art, performance art, sand animation, storytelling, wow, Kseniya Simonova, streaming video
Kseniya Simonova is a Ukrainian artist who just won Ukraine's version of "America's Got Talent." She uses a giant light box, dramatic music, imagination and "sand painting" skills to interpret Germany's invasion and occupation of Ukraine during WWII. This is the most unique piece of performance art I've ever seen.
grrlscientist | June 12, 2010tags: The BP Oil Spill Meets Cats, Oil Spill, BP, entertainment, humor, weird, strange, wow, streaming video
This amusing little video should catch you up on everything that's happened with the BP oil spill so far.
If teh kittehs don't give you enough information, let's listen to what Obama has to say:
grrlscientist | June 7, 2010tags: Obsession for .. Animals?, perfume, Obsession for Men, Bronx Zoo, Wildlife Conservation Society, conservation biology, behavioral ecology, animals, mammals, big cats, weird, strange, wow, streaming video
This fascinating video shows that Calvin Klein's "Obsession for Men" is NOT just for men! This is a great example of how careful observation of captive animals' behavior is directly impacting research with wild animals. When biologists at the Bronx Zoo started spritzing "Obsession for Men" cologne near heat-and-motion-sensitive cameras, the tigers, snow leopards, jaguars and cheetahs…
grrlscientist | June 7, 2010tags: Natural Harvest: A Collection of Semen-Based Recipes, cookbooks, food, humor, weird, strange, wow, books
I thought I'd read or heard of absolutely everything, but apparently, this is not the case. It turns out that the spousal unit found a cookbook that he thinks is "hilarious" .. which means that he has to share it with me, too. Being a bibliophile, I always appreciate learning about new titles on the market, but this book surely is the strangest ever!
The author (whom I do not know), Fotie Photenhauer, writes:
Semen is not only nutritious, but it also has a wonderful texture and…
grrlscientist | February 23, 2010tags: Old Spice commercial, manmercial, television, Superbowl, advertizing, technology, computer-generated imagery, CGI, wow, I'm on a Horse, Isaiah Mustafa, funny, humor, streaming video
Daily, men ask themselves, What do women want? We want a gorgeous bare-chested man with a beautiful voice on a horse, that's what! And this is exactly what Old Spice gave us with bare-chested Isaiah Mustafa, a TV actor and former NFL player, in their "manmercial" that first aired during the Superbowl. But how was that amazing commercial made? Maybe you think it was stitched together from a lot of separate '…
grrlscientist | December 19, 2009tags: Chainsaw Illusion, magician, optical illusion, streaming video
I ran across this amazing illusion recently and have been intrigued: how did the magician do this?
Was the guy who was chopped in half actually two people? Was the short guy running around at the beginning of the scene the bottom half? Here's another view of the trick;
Apparently, "half-men" have been known before;
khannula | August 21, 2009I've been trying to get some xeriscaping established this summer, and I've been very pleased with the plants that are growing. This one, Ceratostigma plumbaginoides, is supposed to become a groundcover, and it's spreading quite well. But with the flowers have come some interesting pollinating... things... that I can't identify.
The leaves in the picture are about a centimeter or two across, so that thing is pretty big. It moves like a hummingbird, hovering in place and then zipping to another flower. (In fact, when my kid was buzzed by one recently, he swore it had been a hummingbird.) It'…
khannula | May 30, 2009I made a promise to myself that every month, I would at least look through the abstracts on my RSS feeds and note interesting articles that I wanted to find time to read. So now it's May 30, and I'd better do it before the June issues come out.
So... articles in the May issue of Geology that look interesting:
Extensional tectonics: Extension rates, crustal melting, and core complex dynamics. Metamorphic core complexes are made up of metamorphic and igneous rocks that have been brought nearer to the surface by continental extension. They're characterized by mylonites that separate the hotter,…
khannula | May 20, 2009I have a confession to make. My favorite rocks are flaky. Really flaky.
Phyllites are the metamorphic rock that gets left out of intro geology labs. They're kind of like slates, in that they break into slabs. But they're shiny like schists. The crystals are too small to see with the naked eye - well, except for the big ones, which are about the size of pin-head (at least in my rocks).
They're easy to break with a chisel. They require a lot of squinting and experience to identify their minerals.
And they're gorgeous under a microscope.
I just saw a really neat set of photos of phyllites on…
khannula | May 17, 2009Earlier this month, a group of biologists, oceanographers, volcanologists, geophysicists, and other scientists from many institutions took a trip to the area between Fiji, Samoa, and Tonga to look at actively erupting submarine volcanoes, including a backarc spreading ridge (never directly observed before!) and a new arc volcano.
And they had a blog.
So if you want insights into the experiences of marine geologists in the field... well, you can read for yourself. (Teaser: one post is titled "We Thought We'd Seen It All".) Science in action. So cool. Or hot, in this case.
(Thanks to the Lab…
khannula | April 23, 2009I got back from a conference Tuesday night, and came home to the craziness of the semester's end. Part of me wants to blog about how cool undergraduate research is, after we had our big school-wide undergraduate research symposium, but I really should be grading the proposals for next year's senior thesis projects. (Which will be fantastic, too, though right now the students are a bit overwhelmed at the thought of the work they're planning to do.)
So here are some things that made me say "oh, WOW" when I skimmed through my rss reader & Twitter:
Guest photographer at Through the Sandglass…
grrlscientist | April 16, 2009tags: bacteria, microbiology, TEDTalks, science, streaming video
This interesting video is a TEDTalk. TED -- for Technology, Entertainment, Design -- talks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. They are a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give "the talk of their lives" in 18 minutes. In this TEDTalk, Bonnie Bassler discovered that bacteria "talk" to each other, using a chemical language that lets them coordinate defense and mount attacks. The find has stunning…
grrlscientist | October 26, 2008tags: spider eats bird, golden orb spider, chestnut-breasted Mannikin, birds, avian, WTF, wow
Golden Orb Spider eats a chestnut-breasted Mannikin in Australian garden.
Image and story: Daily Mail.
This picture and story is so creepy that it makes my skin crawl to see this at the top of my blog. But it's also very strange -- the stuff of nightmares!! -- so I had to share it with you. If you are an arachnophobe, as I am, this will defintely give you nightmares. But if you are insatiably curious about the natural world, as I am, follow the link for the story and for more gruesome images --…