by Bernhard Edmaier
Bernhard Edmaier has done an unbelievable job at capturing the true essence and beauty of many natural landscapes. Strapped in tight in a helicopter, Bernhard transports us to breathtaking areas of the world.
الثلاثاء، 19 نوفمبر 2013
Aerial Photography
Hidden Cameras Capture Incredible Photos of African Wildlife
Photographer Anup Shah has captured an incredible and unique perspective on African wildlife by using hidden cameras that he camouflaged to look like they were part of the natural landscape. Placed in several location across the African savannah in the Serengeti and Massai Mara, Shah was able to capture some of the most incredible shots we have yet to come across.
36 Realistically Colorized Historical Photos Make the Past Seem Incredibly Real
A new artistic trend has broken out around the world which changes our perception of history dramatically. Colorizing historic photographs from the late 1800′s and early 1900′s changes their appearance from something historic and different, into a scene from today. The colorful image of Albert Einstein sitting beside the water gives us an entire new perspective on the genius. He goes from a brilliant historic relic, into a living brilliance of our era. The colorized photograph of Audrey Hepburn transforms our thoughts of beauty. Her photo goes from an intriguing historic photo to one of a sexy starlet of today. Historic events move forward decades, or even a full century, by the addition of color carefully planned and applied by artists like Jordan Lloyd, Dana Keller, and Sanna Dullaway.
You can see a wider selection of colorized photographs that redefine our look at history in the “Colorized Photographs” book available on Amazon for under $30.
London, 1945 (Photo credit: valdigtmycketfarg)
Hindenburg Disaster, 1937
Japanese Archers, circa 1860 (Colorized by Jordan J Lloyd)
View from the Capitol in Nashville, 1864 (Photo credit: Sanna Dullaway)
Albert Einstein in Long Island, 1939 (Photo credit: Paul Edwards)
Baltimore Slums, 1938 (Colorized by Jordan J Lloyd)
Unemployed Lumber Worker and His Wife, circa 1939
British Troops Board Their Train for the Front, 1939
Oscar II, King of Sweden and Norway, 1880 (Photo credit: Sanna Dullaway)
Old Gold Country store, 1939 (Colorized by Jordan J Lloyd)
Washington D. C., 1921 (Photo credit: Sanna Dullaway)
Charles Darwin, 1874 (Photo credit: Sanna Dullaway)
Abraham Lincoln, 1865 (Photo credit: Sanna Dullaway)
Theodore Roosevelt (Photo credit: Sanna Dullaway)
Louisville, Kentucky, 1937 (Photo credit: Sanna Dullaway)
Thich Quang Duc’s self-immolation, 1963 (Photo credit: Sanna Dullaway)
Anne Frank, 1942 (Photo credit: Sanna Dullaway)
Kissing the War Goodbye, 1945 (Photo credit: Sanna Dullaway)
Nicola Tesla
Big Jay McNeely, Olympic Auditorium, 1953
Elizabeth Taylor, 1956
Charlie Chaplin, 1916
Mark Twain, circa 1900
Walt Whitman, 1887
Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels scowls at a Jewish photographer, 1933
Audrey Hepburn
Operation: Crossroads Atomic Detonation (Thank you Steven Vaught, Western Michigan University) (Photo credit: Sanna Dullaway)
If you loved this post, be sure to check this one out!
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL PLACES TO STAY IN THE WORLD
A HEALING RETREAT IN BALI
It took three years to realize this passion project: a spa retreat built mainly of bamboo. Book a riverfront suite, or the hotel can arrange a stay in a rural family’s home.
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MAYAN HEALTH RITUALS AT THE ROSEWOOD MAYAKOBA
What Is the Point of the Female Orgasm?
A new study examines "orgasmability" to determine whether it serves a purpose or is just an evolutionary accident
Climax
Benjamin Rondel / Getty Images
There may be few questions of human sexuality more rancorous than those about the female orgasm. Scientists agree that women probably started having orgasms as a by-product of men having them, similar to how men have nipples because women have them. As Elisabeth Lloyd, a philosopher of science and theoretical biologist at Indiana University put it in her 2005 book The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution: "Females get the erectile and nervous tissue necessary for orgasm in virtue of the strong, ongoing selective pressure on males for the sperm delivery system of male orgasm and ejaculation." But why we ladies still have orgasms is hotly debated.
Male orgasms exist, it's widely believed, to encourage men to spread their seed. On face value, it would be easy to say that women orgasm for the same reason: to encourage them to have sex and make babies. But in practice, compared to male orgasm, female orgasm is very difficult to achieve. There's a lot of variation even within individual women, and 10 percent of women never have them at all. And, unlike male orgasm, female orgasm isn't a prerequisite for pregnancy.
So why do women have orgasms at all? There are two firmly opposed camps on this question. The first group proposes that it has an adaptive function in one of three categories: pair bonding, mate selection and enhanced fertility. I'll break these down. The pair-bonding theory suggests that female orgasm bonds partners, ensuring two parents for the offspring, while mate selection offers that women use orgasm as a sort of litmus test for "quality" partners. The enhanced fertility theory, meanwhile, proposes that uterine contractions during female orgasm help to "suck up" sperm into the uterus.
The by-product camp, on the other hand, claims that female orgasms are to this day an incidental by-product of male orgasm, not an evolutionary adaption. "There's no documented connection between women who have orgasm at all, or faster, having more or better offspring," Lloyd says.
The schism between the two camps deepened this month with the publication of a new study of twins and siblings in Animal Behavior that seems to rule out the by-product theory of female orgasm. Researchers Brendan Zietsch at the University of Queensland in Australia and Pekka Santtila at Abo Akedemi University in Finland asked 10,000 Finnish female and male twins and siblings to report on their "orgasmability" (their word, not mine). They looked for similarities in orgasm function between female and male twins. If the by-product theory of female orgasm is true, they say, this similarity should exist. Due to the inherent differences in orgasm between women and men, females were asked to report how often they had orgasms during sex and how difficult they were to achieve, while males were asked how long it took them to reach orgasm during the act and how often they felt they ejaculated too quickly or too slowly.
Zietsch and Santtila found strong orgasmability correlations among same-sex identical twins, and weaker yet still significant similarities between same-sex non-identical twins and siblings. However, they found zero correlation in orgasm function between opposite-sex twins. "We show that while male and female orgasmic function are influenced by genes, there is no cross-sex correlation in orgasmic function -- women's orgasmability doesn't correlate with their brother's orgasmability," explains Zietsch. "As such, there is no path by which selection on male orgasm can be transferred to female orgasm, in which case the by-product theory cannot work."
Zietsch says he doesn't have a favorite theory on the evolutionary function of female orgasm, but if forced to guess he'd say that it provides women extra reward for engaging in sex, thus increasing frequency of intercourse and, in turn, fertility. (There's no proof of this yet, though, as Lloyd points out.) Zietsch continues: "I've shown in another paper, though, that there is only a very weak association between women's orgasm rate and their libido, so the selection pressure on female orgasm is probably weak -- this might explain why many women rarely or never have orgasms during sex."
Lloyd and other proponents of the by-product theory agree that weak selection pressure could be acting on female orgasm, but not enough to maintain it over the eons of human evolution. Rather, if female orgasm bestows any reproductive benefits onto the human race, it would be by happy accident. Unsurprisingly, Lloyd has a lot of bones to pick with the recent study. Comparing different orgasm traits in women and men is a textbook case of apples and oranges, she says.
Kim Wallen, a behavioral neuroendocrinologist at Emory University and frequent collaborator with Lloyd, explains it thus: "Imagine that I wanted to compare height in men and women. In women I used a measurement from the top of the head to the bottom of the foot. In men I used how rapidly they could stand up. Would I be surprised that each measure was correlated in identical twins within sexes, but uncorrelated in mixed-sex twins? Such a result would be what was predicted and completely unsurprising. Zietsch and Santtila have done the equivalent of this experiment using orgasm instead of height."
Wallen also points out that previous research has shown that traits under strong selective pressure show little variability, while those under weak pressure tend to show more variability. With human orgasm this bears out in that men report almost always achieving orgasm during sex, while the ability to orgasm during intercourse varies widely among women. (Penis and vagina size – both necessary for reproduction -- show little variability, suggesting they are under strong selective pressure, Lloyd says, while clitoral length is highly variable.) Wallen asserts that Zietsch and Santtila, "chose to compare apples to oranges because the evidence is so strong that men's and women's orgasms are under different degrees of selective pressure, the very point they were trying to disprove." Yikes.
To their credit, Zietsch and Santilla acknowledged the limitations of their study, both in the paper and in Zietsch's email to me. More work obviously needs to be done. "Figuring out the function of female orgasm, if any, will probably require very large genetically informative samples, fertility data, and detailed information on sexual behaviour, orgasm rate, and the conditions and partners involved," Zietsch says. "I do have plans, but the debate probably won't be settled quite some time to come."
If, at this point, you're as frustrated as me, you might be wondering what we do know about female orgasm. Well, we're closer to knowing why they're so few and far between during sex. In a paper published online this January in Hormones and Behavior, Lloyd and Wallen found that the farther away the clitoris is from the urinary opening, the less likely it is that the woman will regularly achieve orgasm with intercourse. If this holds up in future experiments, Lloyd says, it would establish that a woman's ability to have an orgasm during sex rests on an anatomical trait that likely varies with exposure to male sex hormones in the womb. "Such a trait could possibly be under selection," she says, "but this would have to be investigated. So far, no selective force seems to appear."
What China makes: 10 things the country is big on [Infographic]
China makes everything and makes a lot of it. Here are 10 things that China makes so much of that if production stops, consumers across the globe will find themselves missing out on certain creature comforts.
Not that China will stop production soon. In July, the manufacturing sector went against projections of a contraction, with the Purchasing Managers’ Index going up to 50.3 that month instead of dropping to 49.8 as forecast initially. A PMI of below 50 indicates contraction while a number above 50 means expanding activity. June PMI was 50.1. August PMI is expected to climb to a three-month high of 50.6.
The optimism for the manufacturing sector naturally carries through to exports as production is heavily geared toward the latter. In Global Sources’ recent supplier survey, for instance, more than 70 percent of respondents expect higher export revenue in the second half of 2013.
This infographic is designed by Lisa Mahapatra and was originally published at the International Business Times.
Not that China will stop production soon. In July, the manufacturing sector went against projections of a contraction, with the Purchasing Managers’ Index going up to 50.3 that month instead of dropping to 49.8 as forecast initially. A PMI of below 50 indicates contraction while a number above 50 means expanding activity. June PMI was 50.1. August PMI is expected to climb to a three-month high of 50.6.
The optimism for the manufacturing sector naturally carries through to exports as production is heavily geared toward the latter. In Global Sources’ recent supplier survey, for instance, more than 70 percent of respondents expect higher export revenue in the second half of 2013.
This infographic is designed by Lisa Mahapatra and was originally published at the International Business Times.
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Can Organisms Evolve The Ability To Evolve?
A new study finds that natural selection selected for flexibility in one bacteria species.
Borrelia burgdorferi Bacteria
Electron scanning micrograph. Color added digitally.
Photo credit: Janice Haney Carr. Content Provider: CDC/Claudia Molins.
At least in microbes, flexibility and "evolvability" really are selected for, the team found in a study. The study, the team says, offers the first direct evidence of this happening.
The idea of evolution driving evolvability is "highly controversial," the team, including biologists from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Kentucky, wrote in their paper, published in the journal PLOS Pathogens. Although many quickly evolving creatures are successful, it seems strange that evolution should build that into organisms. After all, evolution should be as blind to the future as your local psychic (Sorrynotsorry). Natural selection selects for traits that are useful right now. Sometimes those traits happen to be useful to later generations in unexpected ways, but there's no mechanism in evolution to actively prepare for the future, which is what evolvability does.
Nevertheless, to look for some real-world evidence of selection acting on evolvability, the Pennsylvania and Kentucky biologists examined Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacteria species that gives people Lyme disease.
There's no mechanism in evolution to actively prepare for the future, which is what evolvability does.
Like all infectious microbes, B. burgdorferi make proteins that appear on their surfaces. To fight off infection, the immune system learns to recognize these proteins, latch onto them, and kill off B. burgdorferi cells. In a counter-move, B. burgdorferi sometimes changes its surface proteins, a feat that requires it to change its very DNA. Luckily,B. burgdorferi bacteria often carry a bunch of unused DNA, called cassettes, that are able to quickly become working DNA, offering instructions for making different surface proteins that are unrecognizable to the infectee's immune system. Sneaky!By analyzing 12 different strains of B. burgdorferi, the team found evidence there's strong selective pressure for the bacteria to develop a diverse collection of unused cassettes that would give them more varied surface proteins. Evolution doesn't need to be able to see the future to do this, the team writes. Selection for such a trait could happen during active infections, when host immune systems kill off less evolvable B. burgdorferi, or through reproduction, if more evolvableB. burgdorferi are more likely to produce offspring with a variety of cassettes.
This likely doesn't happen in organisms such as animals, plants and fungi, however, the team writes. The way those cells work, latent evolvability isn't so directly linked to traits important to their survival. So for humans, at least, the idea of evolving to evolve will have to stay in the self-help books.
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