Check out this video. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIFCV2spKtg[/youtube] Isn't this exciting? This new technique is called seam carving. Seam carving is an image resizing algorithm developed by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir. This algorithm alters the dimensions of an image not by scaling or cropping, but rather by intelligently removing pixels from (or…
As reported by Scientific American, Researchers have concluded that only 10,000 years ago, the human transition from living off the land to actively raising crops and domesticated animals was accompanied by an accelerated rate of evolutionary change. The pressure for this change occcurred because populations became highly concentrated compared to hunter/gatherer…
On Bill Moyers' Journal, Bill Moyers discussed this multifaceted issue with Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. This video is well worth watching for many reasons. The introduction includes a clip of John F. Kennedy's 1960 speech to Southern Baptist…
I’m in Chicago with my nine-year old daughter and Shedd Aquarium was an important destination for us. We spent much of our Aquarium time at the Wild Reef exhibit.
The coral reefs of the world support about a quarter of our sea life, so they are immensely important, yet humans are destroying them in a wide variety of ways.
As important as the reefs are to world ecology, reef life is also stunningly beautiful. You can see these communities up close at Shedd. The irony is hard to ignore whenever you can view warm water life in Chicago while it’s bitterly cold outside.
Shedd Aquarium does a wonderful job displaying its marine life. It’s difficult to stop taking photos, if you have a digital camera. I took more than 100 photos, then deleted many of them, leaving about a dozen photos I liked. The challenge is not finding beautiful scenes to photograph. The Aquarium is full of such opportunities. The challenges are the low light conditions (no flash photography allowed, for the protection of the animals), combined with the quick movements of some of the creatures. Note: I took all of these photos with a Canon A700, a modest consumer-grade digital camera that is about 2-years old. Also, these photos are only minimally retouched. Comparable scenes await anyone interested in traveling to Chicago to visit Shedd Aquarium.
Many of the organisms living at a reef look like underwater plants, but they are actually animals. Those animals include the corals themselves…
Now Florida has joined the Creationism debate. In brief: Florida’s public-school students for years have been studying "biological changes over time," but proposed revisions in state science standards would for the first time use another term for that concept: evolution. Let the games begin. Letter writers are up in arms…