Amsterdam is turning rainbow for a visit of the Russian president Putin. The council of the city of Amsterdam has decided to hang out the gay pride flag on all council owned buildings and offices, in protest to Russia’s new anti-gay law.
Thanks, Amsterdam!
An Inside Look at Pitcher Plants
A pitcher plant’s work seems simple: their tube-shaped leaves catch and hold rainwater, which drowns the ants, beetles, and flies that stumble in. But the rainwater inside a pitcher plant is not just a malevolent dunking pool. It also hosts a complex system of aquatic life, including wriggling mosquito, flesh fly, and midge larvae; mites; rotifers; copepods; nematodes; and multicellular algae. These tiny organisms are crucial to the pitcher plant’s ability to process food. They create what scientists call a ‘processing chain’: when a bug drowns in the pitcher’s rainwater, midge larvae swim up and shred it to smaller pieces, bacteria eat the shredded pieces, rotifers eat the bacteria, and the pitcher plant absorbs the rotifers’ waste. But that’s not the whole story. Fly larvae are also eating the rotifers, midge larvae, and each other, and everybody eats bacteria. It’s a complex food web that shifts on the order of seconds.
Predicting food-web structure with metacommunity models
Image: http://harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu/press-resources-inside-look-pitcher-plants-4113
Related:
Topographically accurate LED moon light by NOSIGNER
“The so called Supermoon – the lunar occurance on March 19th, 2011 in which the moon appeared 14% bigger and 30% brighter – shined down on the people of Japan, inspiring them to believe in, and have hope for, rebuilding what they had lost just over a week ago. The Moon is a topographically-accurate LED light that was created based on data retrieved from the Japanese lunar orbiter spacecraft Kaguya.”
Beautiful :)
Detonation phase of the GCD model at the Flash Center for Computational Science. (As far as I can tell, this is a computer-generated model of how a particular kind of supernova might happen. Also it’s very, very pretty.)
