Photo credit: Vijay
Cherai is a lovely beach not far from Kochi. Its position on the border of Vypeen island makes it ideal for swimming, and a typical Kerala village with paddy fields and coconut groves nearby provides an added attraction. Continue reading
We first shared news of this fascinating species’ strange movements late last year, and since then the unusual Bubo scandiacus behavior has only been more eye-catching.
Last week, the New York Times reported that the Boston area is “seeing the largest number of snowy owls ever recorded,” and that birdwatchers had even spotted a Snowy Owl in Bermuda. See the excerpt from John Schwartz’s article below:
Norman Smith releasing a snowy owl in Duxbury, Mass., that had recently been captured at Logan airport in Boston. Photo by Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times
“This year’s been bizarre,” said Dan Haas, a birder in Maryland. “The numbers have been unprecedented. Historic.”
No one is sure why so many snowies are showing up in so many places — whether it can be attributed to more food in their Arctic habitats than usual, or climate change at the top of the world. “Think about the canary in the coal mine,” said Henry Tepper, the president of Mass Audubon, “you think about the snowy owl in the Arctic.” Continue reading
Puttu on right and kadalakari on left. Photo credits: Renjith
Puttu and kadalakari (chickpeas), make a popular breakfast for Keralites. Puttu is made by steaming rice flour along with grated coconut in a puttu kudam (a steamer in cylindrical shape) Continue reading
Little Rann of Kutch, Gujarat
Courtesy of Jhaveri Contemporary gallery. An installation by Rana Begum that was sold by Jhaveri Contemporary gallery in Mumbai, Maharashtra.
Thanks to India Ink for this update on the expanding market for contemporary art in India (click the image above to go to the source):
NEW DELHI — On the heels of Christie’s successful auction in India, the sixth edition of the India Art Fair demonstrated that demand in the country’s art market remains strong.
Spread across three tents and 200,000 square feet, this year’s fair, which ran from Thursday to Sunday, featured 91 booths and modern and contemporary works by over 1,000 artists from India and overseas…
Photo credits: Kannadas KD
Bilimbi is an evergreen tree native to tropical Asia, grown for its edible fruits. The trees are commonly found in the high ranges of Kerala and the fruits are mainly used in making pickles, soups, sauces and curries. Continue reading
The Wilderness Society says more than 93% of the disputed area is old growth, rainforest or intact natural forest and non-forest. Photograph: AAP
The Guardian today reports on a disturbing attempt to roll back conservation in Tasmania:
Fallout from the federal government’s request to Unesco to remove 74,000 hectares of Tasmanian forest from world heritage listing has erupted into a war of words and pictures over the status of the disputed land.
On Friday the Coalition announced it would follow through on an election commitment to request a rollback of last year’s 170,000 hectare extension of world heritage listed forest. The final proposal sought to delist a smaller area of 74,000 hectares but was met with strong opposition from environmental groups, the Tasmanian state government and representatives of the timber industry. Continue reading
Dandeli, Karnataka
Hayes has devoted the past fifteen years to studying atrazine, a widely used herbicide made by Syngenta. The company’s notes reveal that it struggled to make sense of him, and plotted ways to discredit him. Photograph by Dan Winters.
It has been many months since we last read something that a company did that made us think–Really?–in this manner that we have on several earlier occasions. We are sparing in these kinds of posts because we still believe most companies, most of the time, want to do the right thing. But when they clearly do not, they must be called out.
This post is a reminder to all of us to support public funding of science and private funding of journalism–subscribe to the New Yorker! Thanks to Rachel Aviv’s reporting, we see the fire behind the smoke, and it is not good fire. Two paragraphs of her story are shared here, but spend the 30-60 minutes digesting the whole story on the New Yorker‘s website, where thankfully it is not behind the subscription wall, and be sure to share it widely:
…Three years earlier, Syngenta, one of the largest agribusinesses in the world, had asked Hayes to conduct experiments on the herbicide atrazine, which is applied to more than half the corn in the United States. Hayes was thirty-one, and he had already published twenty papers on the endocrinology of amphibians. Continue reading
The United States National Football Leage (NFL) and it’s Hunky Dory Saucery Thing (which is beyond my scope of imagination) have never held any interest for me. The sport doesn’t elicit any reaction other than sympathy for the players’ bodies, although my disinterest bears no grudge against those who enjoy a game, whether from within the dynamic minefield of titanic collisions or from the comfort of their own home’s sofa, or anything in between. In fact, I know so little of the culture, statistics, and geopolitical implications of the sport that before last week I couldn’t have named three teams off the top of my head. Today, I unsuspectingly watched this:
Photo credits: Ramesh Kidangoor
Bordered on the east by the towering Western Ghats and interspersed with the magical backwaters for much of its length, Kerala’s coast has attracted people through the ages. In ages past it was traders, asylum seekers and empire builders; now it is haven for beach buffs and tourists. Continue reading
Photo credits: Shaji MN
Kerala offers an amazing diversity of dishes for every meal and every occasion. Food is an important indicator of a region’s history, and with a rich and vibrant ancient culture greatly influenced by civilizations from almost every corner of the globe down the ages, Kerala is indeed the proverbial melting pot. Continue reading
If you want to get a handle on what’s happening at the frontier of biology, Carl Zimmer is your man. He’s the author of numerous books, including Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, writes a regular column on science for the New York Times, and his award-winning blog, The Loom, is part of National Geographic’s Phenomena collective.
We asked him how he writes.
What’s the one thing you’ve learned over time that you wish you knew when you started out?
I wish someone told me I shouldn’t be making ships in a bottle. To write about anything well, you have to do a lot of research. Even just trying to work out the chronology of a few years of one person’s life can take hours of interviews. If you’re writing about a scientific debate, you may have to trace it back 100 years through papers and books. To understand how someone sequenced 400,000 year old DNA, you may need to become excruciatingly well acquainted with the latest DNA sequencing technology. Continue reading
It’s been said that there’s an imbalanced focus on ornithology within our site, but we can also claim to have a slightly skewed preference for sloths as well. Whether it’s their permanently gentle grin or their slow, methodical movements we’re not sure, but we know we’re not the only ones who find them fascinating.
Sloths are found in both rainforest and dry tropical forest ecosystems but the biodiversity of their habitat is nothing compared to what they carry around with them in their arboreal lives. A team of biologists from the University of Wisconsin led Jonathan N. Pauli and M. Zachariah Peery has recently tackled a 35-year-old mystery about sloth behavior.
The sloth is not so much an animal as a walking ecosystem. This tightly fitting assemblage consists of a) the sloth, b) a species of moth that lives nowhere but in the sloth’s fleece and c) a dedicated species of algae that grows in special channels in the sloth’s grooved hairs. Groom a three-toed sloth and more than a hundred moths may fly out. When the sloth grooms itself, its fingers move so slowly that the moths have no difficulty keeping ahead of them.
Every week or so, the sloth descends from its favorite tree to defecate. It digs a hole, covers the dung with leaves and, if it’s lucky, climbs back up its tree. The sloth is highly vulnerable on the ground and an easy prey for jaguars in the forest and for coyotes and feral dogs in the chocolate-producing cacao tree plantations that it has learned to colonize. Half of all sloth deaths occur on the ground. The other serious hazard in its life is an aerial predator, the harpy eagle.
Why then does the sloth take such a risk every week? Researchers who first drew attention to this puzzle in 1978 suggested that the sloth was seeking to fertilize its favorite tree. Meanwhile, the algae that gave the sloth’s coat a greenish hue were assumed to provide camouflage.
Writing last week in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the Wisconsin researchers assembled all these pieces in a different way. They started by trying to understand what would compel the sloth to brave the dangers of a weekly visit to ground zero. Continue reading
English writer and broadcaster Robert Robinson holding the first volume of A Supplement To The Oxford English Dictionary in 1977. Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
We love dictionaries, but apart from the Scrabble usage, we do not always know why. Thanks to Alva Noe for these clues (click the image above to go to the story on NPR’s Cosmos & Culture website):
Among the clutter and furniture of our intellectual lives, there are dictionaries. Although they have probably disappeared from the bookshelves of most college students, they haven’t disappeared. They’ve migrated online.
I thought of this while reading an article in The New York Times on the truly Herculean labors going on at the offices of the Oxford English Dictionary, where a team of scholars are busy producing the OED’s third edition. They started in 1994 and now anticipate finishing in 2037. It’s going to be a long book, if it ever comes out in book form. The second edition, published in 1989, was nearly 22,000 pages. (As reported in The New York Times.) Continue reading
Photo credits: Renjith
Kerala has a rich legacy of architectural excellence. The ancient buildings, temples and palaces reflect the styles of sculpture and wood work adopted by artisans from ancient times. Traditionally the architecture of the state has been of a humble scale, an ensemble of simplicity and elegance tailored to suit Kerala’s climate and culture. Continue reading
Thanks to Maria Popova for sharing Kurt Vonnegut’s brief lesson on the basics of story-telling, a reminder to all of us that shaping the lines of the telling is key to the story-listener’s hearing of it. As Seth shapes the story of Iceland’s role, and travelers’ story-telling roles, in the early precursor to modern nature tourism, the rest of us contributors to this site likewise note our own task in telling our stories effectively. In a written version on the same topic, Vonnegut put it this way:
…Now, I don’t mean to intimidate you, but after being a chemist as an undergraduate at Cornell, after the war I went to the University of Chicago and studied anthropology, and eventually I took a masters degree in that field. Saul Bellow was in that same department, and neither one of us ever made a field trip. Continue reading
Organikos 