Lioness steals camera, makes a film

Shot at Tswalu Kalahari Game Reserve by this team of artists, the camera was left on the ground to record lion movements close to the fence. A curious lioness picked up the camera and made the video hers.

Sea Creature Kites

Stingray Kite, world's largest kite, France

Some Unknown Kite Festival somewhere

Driffield Kite festival

Berkeley Kite Festival, CA

Semaphore Kite Festival, Australia

What happens if your hooker kite gets bitten by my shark kite.

LeafSnap: An Electronic Field Guide

I grew up in the woods, surrounded by deciduous trees. As years went on, the Dogwoods, Oaks, and Magnolias became as familiar as good friends, but now that I live in Southern California, I'm totally naive again. 

Enter--LeafSnap app: an iPhone app that identifies trees based on pictures of their leafs. I may be older, but I'm no less in love with technology. Just snap a pic of that three-leafed suspect or beautiful bouquet on your hiking trail, upload it to LeafSnap, and the app will compare it to thousands of high res pics of leafs in its database. Then, you have an opportunity to put a name with your mysterious member of Plantae.

Smithsonian Institute did the identification, collection, and photography of all the plant species in the database, and let me tell you--the pictures are beautiful. Behind the electronic field guide is a sophisticated visual recognition algorithms built by researchers at Columbia University and University of Maryland. In a nut shell, it works by finding the outline of the leaf in your picture, measuring its shape at various points along its edge, and returning the best matches in it's database. You get to make the final call as to which species matches best. 

So, next time you hit the trails, get in touch with your inner techno-horticulturist:

Illusion Comes to Life: the Science of 3D

How does our brain make us see a rose pop out of this flat splotch of red paint?
 

It starts out as an oblong red blob. The outer lines of the blog converge in the distance, so my eyes tell my brain that it's about 25 feet back-to-front.

As the artists adds black shading to the red splotch and petals start to pop out, suddenly it's a round red rose. The shadows tricks my brain into thinking I'm seeing a different object all together. Suddenly, what was the back of our blob, is the top of the rose, and my brain uses the sides of the rose instead of the back of the blob to determine how far back the object goes into space.

The human eye calculates distance by by how much each eye tilts to see something. Since the eyes are set apart, looking at a farther object means less inward eye tilt, closer means more inward eye tilt. Look at your nose, and the acuteness of you inward eye tilt makes you look cross-eyed.

In the final concrete painting, we register the sides of the rose with our eyes and our brain tells us it's close, not far. The effect of the shadow on our brain's perception of 3D is tremendous, as Rembrandt or Cezanne knew well. The artist here take full advantage of it.

So, that's how the rose seems so close. But, how do I see 3D in the first place? Simple. Camera 1, camera 2. My eyes see in stereo which means they spot slightly different images at the same time from their slightly different vantage points. The slightly different images combine into one image in the brain, an image which basically presents almost two sides of a thing and registers it as 3D:

Again, the shadows on the flat painting do the work of telling our brain that our eyes are viewing a 3D object from different angles. Cool trick. But not new...

Rembrandt self portrait, round face accomplished through shading.

Jello Science—aka Freaky Collagen

Jello uses gelatin, of course, for its bouncy texture, which you might not guess is made of animal bone and skin (specifically, a protein called collagen which also makes up a third of the human body.) When you make Jello, you have to boil it to break apart the collagen particles and cool it quickly to make it form a loose network of tangled proteins with water inside called a gel. The only difference between a pure liquid and a gel is that a gel has a few crosslinks between molecules here and there. But, it's not exactly a solid either because it's molecules are vibrating like a liquid.

Here are the possibilities:

Jello white house

Jello brain

Jello baseball

Jello neighborhood

Sleep Consolidates Your Memories

Neuroscientist Giulio Tononi and moderator Alan Alda

Face Transplants: How The Hell...

Dallas Wiens, the first person in the US to get a full face transplant—yes, that means he now wears someone else's face—appeared in public for the first time today. Wiens face was obliterated in 2010 in a construction accident: he was using a cherry picker to paint the top of a church and accidentally ran into a high voltage electrical wire. After 15-hours of surgery, doctors gave him a whole new look plus the added bonus of restoring his sense of smell.

It sound pretty sci-fi—you just cut off someone's face and flop it down onto someone else's? 

It's not so easy. A full face transplant is not like a liver, kidney, or even a heart transplant where you can just cut it out and reattach somewhere else; the face contains muscle and nerve that must be re-attached as well, to render a face in working order.

Doctors have to make something like a topological map of the transplant recipient's face and where he or she need extra muscle and skin. Then, the donor's epithelial tissue, muscle, and nerve are cut to compensate for missing areas of the recipient's face. The recipient's skin would need to be prepped before the new face was laid on top, the outside skin and some of the underlying fat and muscle removed. Wiens' whole face would have had to been prepped this way. Recently-deceased cadavers serve as face donors.

 Evidently, even though you're wearing someone else's face, you don't necessarily look like them. A varying degree of underlying muscle and bone are still distinctly yours, and your expressions can remain similar.

Face transplants can restore function and a sense of normalcy to the lives of those involved in serious accidents. Dallas Wiens can smile now. He says it feels really great to breathe out of a nose after years of breathing through a stoma and even better to regain his sense of smell—the flowers smell so sweet now, he says.

Other face transplant recipients:

Sandeep Kaur, a 9-year-old girl who caught her face and scalp in a thresher, was technically the first person to get a full face 'transplant.' They attached her original face back on.

Oscar, a Spanish farmer who lost his face to a accidental shotgun blast, was the first full facial transplant in the world. March 2010 in Barcelona.

Isabelle Dinoire, maimed from a dog attack, received the world's first partial facial transplant. November 2005.

Connie Culp, disfigured from an accidental gunshot, was the first to undergo a partial facial transplant in the US. 2009.

Images by AP