Mountain climbing in China

The still photo shows one of the stairways at Hua Shan.  I've previously posted a photo of the gondolas and the plank walk.   This morning I also found a video, which includes one stair segment even worse than the one above (think not just vertical but almost convex), and - at the four minute mark - video of the plank walk.  Not for the faint of heart.

Rooftop sled ride - Russian style

Prize-winning photomicrography

Living Licmophora juergensii on red alga, together with the diatom Cocconeis and filamentous cyanobacterial colonies. Licmophora cells can move to locate a place with suitable light exposure. They then produce a mucilaginous stalk for fixation on the substratum. Multi-layer image captured using differential interference contrast. Sample collected from Bodden, the brackish waters lying between the isles of Hiddensee and Rugia (German Baltic Sea).

This image comes from the Olympus BioScapes 2010 Winners Gallery.  Dozens of other fantastic photographs at the link.

Photographer: Wolfgang Bettighofer, Kiel, Germany.  Via MSN.

Weaver bird nests

Sociable weaver (Philetairus socius) nest in a quiver tree (Aloe dichotoma), Fish River Canyon, Namibia. Sociable weavers construct the largest nests of any bird, housing hundreds of individuals spanning many generations.

Very impressive!  Credit here, via Electric Orchids.

Hold your breath while you watch this video

A brief segment from the BBC's The Human Planet series, the trailer for which is here.  Remember while comparing your breathhold time to his, that he is performing significant aerobic work (and you are as sessile as a barnacle).

Via The Culturist and 22 Words.

Wattle Cup Caterpillar (Calcarifera ordinata)

This amazing-looking creature is the larval form of a rather unremarkable brown Cup moth, but as a caterpillar it is highly toxic.  It lives, with all the other toxic, poisonous, and venomous creatures, in Australia.

Photo credit to Nadia302, via The Twenty Most Toxic Caterpillars.   Another great photo here.

DaVinci would be soooo jealous...

Is there a name for this type of craft?  The rigid structure makes it look different from the usual hang glider.

Addendum:  Several reades have identified this as a Aeriane Swift'Light hang glider.

Via BoingBoing and Roger Ebert (note the background photo).

Wasp nest

We have an old wasp nest stored at our house (and there's one in the woods not far from here that's as big as a beachball, but too high for me to retrieve).  Ours is a rather homogeneous gray, quite a log power less impressive than this one from HarryR's Flickr photostream, found in an attic in the U.K.  His wasps must have had access to a nice variety of pulp materials.

Marshawn Lynch's touchdown run triggered earthquake sensors

When he saw a homemade video shot from the upper deck of Qwest Field following Marshawn Lynch's 67-yard touchdown run late in the fourth quarter that clinched the Seahawks 41-36 upset, Vidale, the director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, became a bit intrigued...

Turns out, Lynch's TD shook Qwest Field and the ground around the stadium — literally.

Vidale said a seismic monitoring station located about 100 yards west of the stadium registered seismic activity during Lynch's run. The shaking was most intense during a 30-second stretch about the time Lynch broke free from the line of scrimmage, finished off his touchdown and celebrated in the end zone with his teammates.

After that, Vidale said, the shaking died down, but it took about a minute for the shaking to completely fade away.

Sun halo

Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day:

As water freezes in the upper atmosphere, small, flat, six-sided, ice crystals might be formed. As these crystals flutter to the ground, much time is spent with their faces flat, parallel to the ground. An observer may pass through the same plane as many of the falling ice crystals near sunrise or sunset. During this alignment, each crystal can act like a miniature lens, refracting sunlight into our view and creating phenomena like parhelia, the technical term for sundogs. The above image was taken last year in Stockholm, Sweden. Visible in the image center is the Sun, while two bright sundogs glow prominently from both the left and the right. Also visible is the bright 22 degree halo -- as well as the rarer and much fainter 46 degree halo -- also created by sunlight reflecting off of atmospheric ice crystals.

Propellor-propelled automobile

I saw this photo at Lushlight and assumed it was an eccentric inventor's one-off, but a little searching revealed more information:

Leyat was a French automobile manufacturer established by Marcel Leyat in 1919 in Paris... The first model was called Hélica, also known as 'The plane without wings'. The passengers sat behind each other as in an aircraft. The vehicle was steered using the rear wheels and the car was not powered by an engine turning the wheels, but by a giant propeller powered by an 8 bhp (6.0 kW) Scorpion engine. The entire body of the vehicle was made of plywood, and weighed just 250 kg (550 lb), which made it dangerously fast.

In 1927, A Hélica reached the speed of 106 mph (171 km/h) at the Montlhéry circuit. Leyat continued to experiment with his Helica, he tried using propellers with two and four blades. Between 1919 and 1925, Leyat managed to sell 30 vehicles.

That is impressive for the era.  I also found a page showing all of the Helica models from 1913-1933, including these:

More at the link, which is in French.

Approaching Lake Vostok

Ever since I learned the Russians were drilling into Lake Vostok, I've had a vague sense of unease that the procedure would be screwed up and the lake would be contaminated in the process.  I am now a little more reassured after reading an account cited at Wired about the precautions being taken:

Lake Vostok, which has been sealed off from the world for 14 million years, is about to be penetrated by a Russian drill bit.

The lake, which lies four kilometres below the icy surface of Antarctica, is unique in that it's been completely isolated from the other 150 subglacial lakes on the continent for such a long time. It's also oligotropic, meaning that it's supersaturated with oxygen -- levels of the element are 50 times higher than those found in most typical freshwater lakes.

"Once the lake is reached, the water pressure will push the working body and the drilling fluid upwards in the borehole, and then freeze again." The next season, the team will bore into that frozen water to recover a sample whose contents can then be analysed.

The drill bit currently sits less than 100 metres above the lake. Once it reaches 20-30 metres, the mechanical drill bit will be replaced with a thermal lance that's equipped with a camera...

The conditions in Lake Vostok are very similar to the conditions on Europa and Enceladus, so could also strengthen the case for extraterrestrial life.

More at the link and at New Scientist.  I have a family member who studies extremophiles and will be most interested in the results of the probe, but personally I like this Reddit comment: "What's 14 million years of divergent evolution in a lightless, freezing, high oxygen environment going to look like? I don't know, but I kinda hope it eats people."

Image from the images page of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research's Subglacial Antarctic Lake Environments website (lots more information there).

Aron Ralston's book has now been made into a film

Embedded above is a rather marginal-quality video of Tom Brokaw's interview with Aron Ralston on Dateline NBC (the other five parts are here).  I remember watching it on television when it aired in 2004; it was really awesome.

Ralston has written a book about his experience...

My first act is to sever, with a downward sawing motion, as much of the skin on the inside surface of my forearm as I can, without tearing any of the noodle-like veins so close to the skin. Once I’ve opened a large enough hole in my arm, about four inches below my wrist, I momentarily stow the knife, holding its handle in my teeth, and poke first my left forefinger and then my left thumb inside my arm and feel around.

... and the Telegraph reports that the book has now been made into a film by Danny Boyle (director of Trainspotting, Sunshine, and Slumdog Millionaire).

Deep snow. Really deep snow. Now with video.

 The location depicted is in the Japanese Alps:

The section of the Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route linking the Tateyama station and Ogizawa only open from mid April to November, the reason for this hiatus is wintry snow, snow on this section reaches a thickness of 20 meters the most amazed of all is that in mid-April, much of the snow still lingers, so you have to make real corridors of ice to get through that stretch.

For those wondering (like me) how the snow is cleared from this road, this video shows the equipment needed.

Posted for Richard and Dottsie, who got the brunt of the 30" snowfall that hit northern New Jersey this week.

Text credit Genjutsu.  Photo via Gizmodo.

Addendum:  A hat tip to Karl, who found at Vimeo a video taken while driving through the "snow corridor."  I had no idea it was so long.  But what startled me was that where there are no pull-off lanes, drivers just stop and park their cars in the road. (!)

Shrimp

Limbs virtually transparent except for that remarkable purple vasculature.  Tagged "Indonesia," credit to "Nartshuk Andrew," found at Pixdaus.

"The Gift" - by Carl Erik Rinsch

A short (5-minute) video described as "a futuristic action thriller which involves a robotic manservant on the run from the Russian police."

...the release of the short film has spawned a bidding war between several big Hollywood movie studios, including Warner Bros and Fox. Everyone wants to turn the short film into a feature... Rinsch is currently developing a remake of Creature From The Black Lagoon and is in preproduction on an epic period samurai film titled 47 Ronin to star Keanu Reeves...

Warning: brief violence, but most of you won't want this to end..

It won a Grand Prix award at Cannes.

In this sci-fi thriller, Podarok introduces us to a dystopian future. It’s a winter’s day in Moscow, but the familiar landscape is not all it seems. The traditional backdrop is balanced by the technological hints to the future on show. An experienced KGB Agent is on his way to deliver a special gift. Expressionless and giving the aura of emptiness the lone man makes his way across the city. As the secret of the gift is unveiled to the receiver, the desire for the object becomes evident. The agent must have it. Even at the cost of a man’s life. A high-octane chase through Moscow ensues as the dead man’s robotic butler tries to rescue the precious gift. It must not be left in the wrong hands.

Hidden door

Very cool.  Found at Librarianista.

King William's College "Christmas Quiz" 2010

For over a century, students at King William's College on the Isle of Man have been given a quiz (formally the "General Knowledge Paper") just before the Christmas holidays:

Up until 1999, pupils at King William's College would sit the paper unseen on the last day of term before the Christmas holidays. The questions are very hard and often cryptic, and pupils got hardly any questions right first time: five percent was considered a good score! During the Christmas holidays, pupils tried to find the answers to the harder questions by consulting reference books or asking clever relatives. When they returned to school in the New Year, they took the test again, under exam conditions and without the aid of notes.

The quiz is now voluntary for the students, but has spread worldwide via publication in The Guardian.  It is, as noted above, inhumanly difficult, requiring impossible amounts of knowledge of trivia and/or extraordinary computer search skills -

A Latin phrase is always printed at the top of the quiz: “Scire ubi aliquid invenire possis
ea demum maxima pars eruditionis est”.  Freely translated, this means "the greatest part of knowledge is knowing where to find something."

The best way to approach the quiz is as part of a group, many of which will form on the internet in the weeks ahead.

I'm not going to reproduce the entire quiz here.  Those who want to tackle the project can download the quiz from the King William's College website, or view the questions where they were printed in The Guardian this morning.

To give everyone a taste of the quiz, here is the sixth set of 10 questions:

1 What was updated by HG Wells?
2 What might be perceived as an apiary?
3 Which island is doubly recognised on 198?
4 Who left great designs in the Gulf and New South Wales?
5 Who, aided by wizardry, cuckolded his rival by impersonating him?
6 Who, being the son of Suzanne, changed his name through the benevolence of her friend Miguel?
7 What did hateful and rough weeds lose apart from beauty?
8 What was the native city of a unique pontiff?
9 What can be used instead of mahogany?
10 Who recruited Hare for Dad's Army?

Each set of ten questions has a "theme."  I"ll give you a hint that for this sixth set above, the theme is that every answer begins with the same pair of letters.  Partial answer in the Comments.

Update:  ALL the answers are now in the Comments.  Hat tips to BJN, Lene Taylor, and Greg.

If you really thrive on intellectual challenges like this, the King William's College website posts the quizzes and the answers for the past three years.

Flower mantis

Photo via zumbi.  Another example at the Telegraph.  Further reading via Wikipedia.

Brahmin moth

Adult and caterpillar.  Photo credit to Igor Siwanowicz (gallery at the Telegraph).