Lightning at Snail Speed
Have you ever seen lightning in slow motion? Here’s what it looks like.
Via Gizmodo
300 Day Loner Island Trip
The new French government must be pushing some sort of programme to urge its citizens to take on extreme solo missions these days. Just days after poor Michel Fournier’s hopes of ultimate skydiving were deflated, another enterprising chap from France is going to spend 300 quality days on a remote island with only himself as company and nary a Club Med in sight.
Link: THE PRIVATE ISLANDS BLOG.
French explorer and adventurer Xavier Rosset is about to embark on a 300 day trip to live alone on a remote tropical island in the South Pacific. His adventures will be filmed and used for a 52 minute documentary.
Xavier’s only luggage will be a Swiss army knife, machete video camera and a solar panel for charging the camera. He will spend 10 months alone on an island to develop another way of life through an exciting adventure, a return to the elemental sources. Xavier will survive alone on an island without human interference and without polluting emissions.
The ambition of this documentary is to make a reflection on our lifestyle, our current system and our relationship to nature. And the most important thing is to put the dream and emotion at the heart of adventure natural.
Via boingboing
Gecko Flying Lessons
From BBC News:
A gecko’s tail is as crucial to the animal’s acrobatic ability as its “sticky” feet, scientists report.High-speed video reveals that the creature uses its tail as a “fifth leg” to prevent it from slipping as it climbs wet surfaces.
And the footage shows that if it does fall, a flick of the tail is all it takes for the gecko to land feet-down.
Read the full article and view a high speed video of the gecko in motion.
More than 700 species of marine creatures found in Antarctic
One of the newly discovered creatures- a young isopod.
One certainly doesn’t have to go in outer space to discover new forms of life. Every time someone believes there are parts of the Earth that are too hostile to sustain a great diversity of living creatures, they seem to be proven wrong.
From BBC NEWS:
An extraordinarily diverse array of marine life has been discovered in the deep, dark waters around Antarctica.
Scientists have found more than 700 new species of marine creatures in seas once thought too hostile to sustain such rich biodiversity.
Groups of carnivorous sponges, free-swimming worms, crustaceans and molluscs were collected.
The findings, published in the journal Nature, could provide insights into the evolution of ocean life in this area.
Dr Katrin Linse, an author of the paper and a marine biologist from British Antarctic Survey (BAS), said: “What was once thought to be a featureless abyss is in fact a dynamic, variable and biologically rich environment.
