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On Monday I went to the Denver Botanic Gardens for a few hours, which was nice. Their tropical garden is especially well-done (the Japanese garden is pretty disappointing, especially for one spoiled by the Japanese Garden in Portland, OR, but I hear that they’re working on it). You can look at a few of my pictures here; I was mainly playing with my new polarizing filter, so I didn’t take many “real” pictures.
The Denver Botanic Gardens offer a lot of horticulture, cooking, and art classes (they offer a certificate in botanical illustration), including a variety of photography classes:
NPS Photo (public domain).
Shenandoah National Park in Virginia recently announced the installation of four live FalconCams to monitor the only active peregrine falcon nest in the park. Despite the success of peregrine recovery programs in the 1980s and 1990s, peregrine falcons remain rare in Virginia and West Virginia.
Last year was only the second time a known pair successfully bred in the mountains of Virginia since the decline of peregrine falcons due to DDT and other factors. They produced only one fledgling. This year, the pair’s eggs broke and two-day-old foster chicks were substituted. The chicks are quite active on the cam, moving around the nest, and were just banded last week–hopefully both will make it to fledging this year!
Biologists hope to use the cams to learn what kind of prey the parents are bringing to the nest and to observe the chicks fledging without disturbing the birds.
You can view the falcon cam at the Shenandoah NP FalconCams website or at the Center for Conservation Biology VAFalcons website (which also has FalconCams for other nests in Virginia).
Rosetta Stones as a graphic, generated by Webites as Graphics.
As GrrlScientist points out, it looks rather like an unrooted phylogenetic tree.
The colored dots represent different HTML tags (the formatting instructions your browser reads), as follows:
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags
Of course, most of the tags are from the template (I don’t use tables in my posts, for example), but it’s still pretty neat. The best part of the applet is that you get to watch it generate the map of a site’s tags in real-time, which is quite pretty to watch. There’s some more explanation of how it works and some observations on what it tells you about a site’s design here.
You can check out the wide varity of “trees” under the Flickr tag websitesasgraphs. I especially like this one.
Via Inky Circus, the Earthquake Rose.
It’s a pattern produced in a dish of sand by a pendulum during the 2001 earthquake in Washington–pretty and scientifically interesting!
Yellowstone Lake with Colter Peak & Turret Mountain in the background. NPS Photo by Bryan Harry.
Using molecular sequencing techniques, scientists have identified more than 251 new species in Yellowstone Lake, Yellowstone National Park, since 2004–more than double the previously-known number. Only two were known from previous species lists, and the new species belong to all three domains of life (Archaea, Eubacteria, and Eukaryota).
Scientists had previously classified the lake as a “simple ecosystem,” based on 263 identified species. This study was the first attempt at conducting a large biodiversity survey using genomic sequencing. The National Park Service (NPS), the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Diversa Corporation, Eastern Oceanics, Inc., the US Geological Survey, and the Yellowstone Park Foundation funded and collaborated on the project.
Some of the findings of the study were surprising. Researchers expected to find eukaryotes (multicellular organisms) typical of a nutrient-poor subalpine lake. While they did find one species assemblage consistent with this prediction, other organisms are previously known from marine environments or rivers and streams, and some are even indicator organisms for nutrient-rich or polluted waters.
