…Brits and Americans should eat less junk

(in my humble opinion, but I’m probably a food nazi).

[Quote]:

What a great catch, to photograph a cardinal mid-flight, from this angle.

[Quote]:

A fisherman in Rawa Pening, central Java, Indonesia

[Quote]:

German photographer Michael Wolf captures the aging high-rise culture of Hong Kong, which has more buildings over five hundred feet tall than any other city in the world. The results are so stunning, you’ll swear they’re somehow faked.

The modern face of Hong Kong was formed, like New York and Chicago, by a fire. In 1953, as refugees from mainland China surged into Hong Kong, one of the city’s largest slums burned to the ground, tens of thousands homeless. The British governor at the time, Alexander Grantham, saw a solution in an emerging form of modern architecture: the prefabricated concrete tower.

Wolf moved to Hong Kong in 1994, three years before the official handover from England to China. But as his photos attest, Grantham’s fingerprint endures, in the towers that make up the bulk of the city’s low-income housing stock. In Wolf’s new book, The Architecture of Density, he collects some of his most staggering architectural photos of the city’s supertalls. We’ve seen the city fromabove and below, but straight on is somehow more dramatic, right?

You’re probably wondering how much doctoring these photos received. The answer? Surprisingly little. There’s not much Photoshop trickery here, just a few adjustments to remove things like the horizon line and any errant patches of sky. The buildings themselves actually exist as they’re shown: a repetitive network of floor plates and windows, which often bear a hint at the lives inside thanks to errant hanging laundry and souped up a/c units.

Low-income housing in Hong Kong, a geographic aberration hemmed in by tropical forest and ocean on all sides, is a problem without an answer—just like it was in Grantham’s day. But according to BLDGBLOG post from 2012, the city has found a way to fit new infrastructure into the existing city: a network of artificial underground caves. Let’s just hope the same concept never extends to people. [The Architecture of Density]

[Quote]:

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has provided the first direct evidence of small meteoroids breaking into streams of rubble and crashing into Saturn’s rings.

These observations make Saturn’s rings the only location besides Earth, the moon and Jupiter where scientists and amateur astronomers have been able to observe impacts as they occur. Studying the impact rate of meteoroids from outside the Saturnian system helps scientists understand how different planet systems in our solar system formed.

The solar system is full of small, speeding objects. These objects frequently pummel planetary bodies. The meteoroids at Saturn are estimated to range from about one-half inch to several yards (1 centimeter to several meters) in size. It took scientists years to distinguish tracks left by nine meteoroids in 2005, 2009 and 2012.

Details of the observations appear in a paper in the Thursday, April 25 edition of Science.

Results from Cassini have already shown Saturn’s rings act as very effective detectors of many kinds of surrounding phenomena, including the interior structure of the planet and the orbits of its moons. For example, a subtle but extensive corrugation that ripples 12,000 miles (19,000 kilometers) across the innermost rings tells of a very large meteoroid impact in 1983.

[Quote]:

From the beginning of Project OXCART, it was known that the A-12s would be built in the SkunkWorks within the Lockheed Plant complex in Burbank, California and that the A-12s would have to be transported overland to Area 51 for flight testing, development and training of the Project Pilots. Long before the first A-12 airplane was ready for transport, the full scale model was built and had to be taken to the Area for installation on the radar range for studies of its radar cross section. The carriages that contained the model were smaller but all of these were oversize requiring a special travel permit. This trip to haul the full scale model was started in November 1959 and took three days to complete. The largest of these packages was 65′ long and 32.6′ wide.

[Quote]:

Scientists in both the United States and Morocco are studying what it would be like for human beings to live on Mars. Reuters photographer Jim Urquhart spent time in the Utah desert at the Mars Desert Research Station observing a crew simulate what conditions would be like on the red planet. Researchers with the Austrian Space Forum in partnership with the Ibn Battuta Center spent time in the northern Sahara conducting experiments in engineering, planetary surface operations, astrobiology, and geophysics. — Lloyd Young ( 27 photos total)

The Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) is seen in the Utah desert on March 2. (Jim Urquhart/Reuters) #

[Quote]:

The Smithsonian magazine’s 10th annual photo contest’s 50 finalists have been chosen, but there’s still time for you to vote for the Readers Choice winner! This year’s competition has drawn over 37,600 entries from photographers in 112 countries around the world. Editors will choose a Grand Prize Winner and the winners in each of five categories which include The Natural World, Americana, People, Travel and Altered Images. Voting will be open through March 29, 2013. — Paula Nelson ( 22 photos total)

PEOPLE – Guardians of the Forest. Rio Caqueta, Amazonas, Colombia, February 2012. (Piers Calvert/West Sussex, England/Smithsonian.com)#

[Quote]:

Deep in the belly of New York’s subway system, a beautiful untouched station resides that has been forgotten for years with only a limited few knowing of its existence. Stunning decoration with tall tiled arches, brass fixtures and skylights run across the entire curve of the station, almost a miniature imitation of Grand Central Station… But it sounds like something straight out of Harry Potter, right?

A group of friends in the hills above Tehran. Many (every single one I met) young Iranians feel deeply embarrassed by their government, and the way the nation is perceived abroad. Zac Clayton, a British cyclist who will finish a round-the-world cycle on March 23 described Iran as having the kindest people of any country he cycled through. “I found most Iranians — particularly the younger generation — to be very aware of the world around them… with a burning desire for the freedoms they feel they are being denied by an out of touch, ultra-conservative religious elite.”

[Quote]:

Amos Chapple is a travel photographer who made the following pictures over the course of three visits to the Islamic Republic of Iran between December 2011 and January 2013. The New Zealand freelancer said he “was amazed by the difference in western perceptions of the country, and what I saw on the ground… I think because access for journalists is so difficult, people have a skewed image of what Iran is — the regime actually want to portray the country as a cauldron of anti-western sentiment so they syndicate news footage of chanting nutcases which is happily picked up by overseas networks. For ordinary Iranians though, the government is a constant embarrassment. In the time I spent there I never received anything but goodwill and decency, which stands in clear contrast to my experience in other middle eastern countries. I met an American special forces soldier in Kyrgyzstan last year who said when it comes to the Middle East, America has the wrong friends and the wrong enemies.” Below is a selection of Chapple’s recent photographs of Iran, captions provided by the photographer.

[Quote]:

FOUND is a curated collection of photography from the National Geographic archives. In honor of our 125th anniversary, we are showcasing photographs that reveal cultures and moments of the past. Many of these photos have never been published and are rarely seen by the public.

We hope to bring new life to these images by sharing them with audiences far and wide. Their beauty has been lost to the outside world for years and many of the images are missing their original date or location.

Actually the above picture is false. The four seasons are: Almost winter, winter, still fucking winter, and road construction.