animals
Small World by Manuel Archain.
“ The usual, everyday dream, our out of scale perception and how each one of us is so into our personal world that we cannot see what is happening around us. The size and weight of things is so distorted, we can even manage to move into a small world. Why the size of a truck could not be the same as my personal scale of a tea cup?”
Arist Andrea Mastrovito created this huge installation out of cutouts from repurposed text books. The giant piece was inspired by H.G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau, and is aptly titled after the novel.
TAMBOPATA, Peru — After six months of speculation, we finally know what’s building these bizarre silk structures in the Amazon: a spider! But its precise identity is still a mystery that scientists are scrambling to solve as I write this.
Last week we followed these spider-hunting scientists, led by entomologist Phil Torres, deep into the Amazon rainforest as they attempted to find the tiny silk towers and figure out where they came from. It has not been an easy case to crack.
“With a lot of other weird mysteries, once you make an observation of some sort, spend enough time out there, the pieces kind of fit together,” said Torres, a graduate student at Rice University. “I’m surprised by how difficult this one is to solve.”
The bizarre structures first surfaced on the internet late this summer, when graduate student Troy Alexander posted photos to Reddit and Facebook, hoping that somebody could tell him what the structures were. He had discovered them on a small island near the Tambopata Research Center, deep in the Peruvian Amazon.
Made out of silk, the intricate constructions have two parts: a tall, central tower, and a circular fence that’s about 6 millimeters across. Back then, we asked as many entomologists as we could find, but no one had any idea what the structures were, or what made them. Until now.
[MORE: That time we went to the Amazon to find out what makes these weird web-tower things]
Inside Japan, more and more activists like Satoshi Komiyama are publicizing their opposition to the annual dolphin drive-hunt in Taiji.
We applaud people like Satoshi who are working tirelessly to stop The Cove slaughters. Reblog this to spread awareness!
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