Beyond the Reach of God. Thought experiments involving the God-universe and the Nature-universe, the Turing-complete Game of Life, and a lot of insightful back-and-forth in the comment section, to boot. One of the most interesting and thought-provoking essays I've read on the Internet in a very long time, by Eliezer Yudkowsky on his blog, Overcoming Bias (via).
posted on Oct 9, 2008 - View this thread

Brutal or Amazing? - this is just one of many fine posts on the Photo Africa Blog, an excellent source of in-the-wild animal and nature photos and reports from bush field guides. Also see: Madikwe Lions.
posted on Oct 4, 2008 - View this thread

Violent death in the insect world - grisly yet compelling macro photographs of bug-against-bug carnage.
posted on Sep 8, 2008 - View this thread

Graffiti for Butterflies [via mefi projects] Making signposts and rest areas to help monarch butterflies on their journey.
posted on Aug 3, 2008 - View this thread

Can you identify these common plants and animals? A study shows that increasingly, 9- to 11-year-old children can't. Quoth David Attenborough: "The wild world is becoming so remote to children that they miss out, and an interest in the natural world doesn't grow as it should. Nobody is going protect the natural world unless they understand it."
posted on Aug 1, 2008 - View this thread

Pictures (and a video) of a leopard attacking and killing a crocodile.
posted on Jul 18, 2008 - View this thread

10 Rare Clouds. 20 Cool Clouds. NASA clouds. List of Cloud Types (wiki). previously
posted on Jun 27, 2008 - View this thread

Full of contemplative creatures and sleepers, Bruno Torf's Australian sculpture garden began with just fifteen life sized terracotta sculptures. Today there are over one hundred and fifteen pieces on display and Bruno is still making regular additions. Dive on in. Via
posted on Jun 14, 2008 - View this thread

Stephen Burch's Birding Website is full of fine photos of feathered friends.
posted on May 30, 2008 - View this thread

"With most animals, males duke it out and the winner gets the girls," says Holekamp. "But with hyenas, females have 100 percent say." They decide when and under what conditions they will tolerate deferential sperm donors. At age 2 or 3 a male leaves his natal clan and wanders off to beg acceptance into another clan. After vicious rejections, he eventually succeeds and reaps his reward: brutal harassment as the clan's nadir, one of the last in line for food and sex. This probation, which biologists call "endurance rivalry," is a test, Holekamp explains: "The guy who can stick it out the longest wins." The trial lasts about two years, after which some females may grant him access. "You do not want to be a male hyena," Holekamp says.

Gary Snyder, sublime and seminal poet of ecological awareness and activism [YouTube link], Zen appreciation of "ordinary mind" and American speech, shamanistic intimacy with the natural world, and surviving member of the Beat Generation (West Coast posse) at age 78, has won the $100,000 Ruth Lilly poetry prize. "Gary Snyder is in essence a contemporary devotional poet, though he is not devoted to any one god or way of being so much as to Being itself," said Poetry magazine editor Christian Wiman. "His poetry is a testament to the sacredness of the natural world and our relation to it, and a prophecy of what we stand to lose if we forget that relation.” Previous recipients of the Lilly prize include Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, and W.S. Merwin. [Previously mentioned here.]
posted on May 7, 2008 - View this thread

This is a list of frogs. Look at pictures the frogs. Most importantly, listen (sounds like a fart) to (sounds like a baseball card in your bike tire) the (sounds like a sheep) frogs (classic frog sound).
posted on May 3, 2008 - View this thread

Kennan Ward Nature-Wildlife Photography -- “Being a nature-wildlife photographer is a demanding job … but all the hardship is forgotten when I make eye-to-eye contact with a wild animal, or experience the moment when a window in the clouds opens up, highlighting a landscape … I feel honored to be able to bring the inspiring beauty of nature to others.”
posted on Apr 29, 2008 - View this thread

Dramatic footage of golden eagles hunting mountain goats. (alerts: rather gruesome; voiceover in Spanish)
posted on Apr 16, 2008 - View this thread

Ferocious-looking mystery creature in Tahoe National Forest confirmed to be a California wolverine, thought to be extinct since 1922. A motion-detecting camera snapped a compelling photo behind the beast last month, and the California Department of Fish and Game just confirmed the discovery with a clear profile shot. Notably, both photos appear to show the same animal.
posted on Mar 25, 2008 - View this thread

E.J. Peiker, Nature Photgrapher There are a lot of nature photographers out there -- some better than Peiker and some worse -- but what fascinates me about Peiker's site is the number of photos available. A birdwatcher's dream, it features pages of photos of over 500 different species of birds, including an index devoted solely to wild waterfowl. Maybe animals are more your speed? How about nearly 150 pages of photos of wild animals (including my favorite - a quite handsome, flower-eating porcupine.) There's also a section for scenic photography featuring 23 states and 20 countries (or you can search by national park.) The photos are, unfortunately, not that big but there a ton of them, many of them quite pretty.
posted on Feb 29, 2008 - View this thread

Over The River Project for the Arkansas River, State of Colorado. The Mastaba of Adu Dhabi Project for the United Arab Emirates
posted on Feb 4, 2008 - View this thread

While the dream of immortality might be as old as mankind, the jellyfish Turritopsis nutricula (image) seems to be living it:

The hydrozoan Turritopsis nutricula has evolved a remarkable variation on this theme, and in so doing appears to have achieved immortality. The solitary medusa of this species can revert to its polyp stage after becoming sexually mature (Bavestrello et al., 1992; Piraino et al., 1996). In the laboratory, 100% of these medusae regularly undergo this change. Thus, it is possible that organismic death does not occur in this species!

Fuck Planet Earth. The extreme beauty of the popular Planet Earth series comes alive with this comedic bit that simply repeats the F-bomb to great effect.
posted on Jan 26, 2008 - View this thread

'Race' graphically illustrated - "most Europeans" vs. Ashkenazim (previously; see also IQ & Gladwell, viz. ;)
posted on Jan 23, 2008 - View this thread

The dangers of living in a zero-sum world economy - naked capitalism reprints (with added commentary) an FT article by Martin Wolf on why it's vital for (civilised) society to sustain a 'positive-sum' world, otherwise: "A zero-sum economy leads, inevitably, to repression at home and plunder abroad." Wolf's solution? "The condition for success is successful investment in human ingenuity." Of course! Some are calling for more socialism, while others would press on to build more megaprojects. For me, at least part of the solution lies in environmental accounting and natural capitalism :P
posted on Dec 19, 2007 - View this thread

Form and Pheromone - truly lovely beetle mosaics and insect art. (via recogedor) Previously: Living Jewels.
posted on Dec 3, 2007 - View this thread

Exploring nature ("Trees" by Myoung Ho Lee) and structure (installations by Esther Stocker).
posted on Nov 28, 2007 - View this thread

The Young Gallery has an exceptional collection of photographs by both renowned and recently discovered photographers. The feast of visuals includes elegantly haunting images of African wildlife by Nick Brandt, Night Views of cities by Floriane de Lassée, salad vegetables by Viktor Polson, nudes and portraits by Patrick Demarchelier and images of Tibet, Mongolians and Tibetans by Richard Gere.
posted on Oct 27, 2007 - View this thread

An interview with Lebbeus Woods -- designer and illustrator of speculative futuristic landscapes and buildings. Woods just set up his own website, which has an amazing quantity of drawings, photographs, and text focusing on his lesser known projects [for those willing to deal with a frustrating flash interface and sound. It's better in IE than Firefox.]
posted on Oct 6, 2007 - View this thread

Are Zebras black with white stripes, or white with black stripes? Find the answer to this, plus many other fun zebra facts and many great zebra pictures and photos for your desktop at the appropriately titled Fun Zebra Pictures & Facts website.
posted on Oct 5, 2007 - View this thread

New Work from artist Mark Bryan's Sideshow
posted on Oct 2, 2007 - View this thread

Giraffe mating battles can be brutal but they are generally gentle giants. Man's fascination with these exotic creatures can be tracked from 9,000 year old rock art to the quest for exotics that brought them to the courts of Medici-era Florence, Restoration Paris, and Imperial China, spawning much curiosity and fanciful illustration. Today, giraffe-o-philes can get up close and personal in Kenya's Giraffe Manor.
posted on Sep 30, 2007 - View this thread

Braving Alaska is a fantastic 1992 National Geographic special that may make you want to move to Alaska. Focusing on a handful of U.S. families who have moved from the cities in the lower 48 to handmade homes above the arctic circle and now receive their mail by bush pilot maybe 3 times a year, living hundreds of miles from their nearest neighbor, and exist entirely of their own capability, the documentary is a fascinating view of life WAY off the grid. Presented here in a YT playlist of six segments, there are more great moments (from sawing through the frozen fish to the enumeration of meals made from Moose) than I can list.
posted on Sep 26, 2007 - View this thread

Photographer Kim Keever takes incredible, otherwordly nature shots using a unique technique: she builds the subject by hand in a 100 gallon fishtank. Other galleries of her work here & here. Via, which was via.
posted on Sep 24, 2007 - View this thread

Navarre now generates more than 50% of its energy needs by wind power: a profile of the small autonomous region in northern Spain that is leading the way in renewable energy. This is one of many free access articles in this special supplement on energy issues to the journal Nature.
posted on Sep 11, 2007 - View this thread

Scillywebcam. A frequently updated website with high quality photographs of Scilly. Here are some of my favorites.
posted on Aug 25, 2007 - View this thread

In 1918, at the age of 20, Oregonian Opal Whiteley published "The Fairyland Around Us" (contains full text & pictures), a nature book for children. Two years later, her diary (also contains full text and pictures) was published and became one of the best-selling books in the world. She died in a British mental hospital in 1992. More.
posted on Aug 21, 2007 - View this thread

The California poet Robinson Jeffers, though once popular enough to make the cover of Time Magazine, is for various reasons now a somewhat obscure figure- however, he has attracted increased interest in recent days both for the quality of his work and his pantheistic personal philosophy, which anticipated much future environmentalist thought. [more inside, with links to poems]
posted on Aug 9, 2007 - View this thread

"This site brings together just a few of the hundreds and hundreds of new species discovered since the year 2000. Hopefully, it will inspire us to see the world as a place still being explored, and give us the courage to conserve and protect the fragile, shrinking areas of habitat left on Earth... areas which, as we see here, contain creatures we haven't even yet Imagined... " That, of course, makes living in a low impact woodland home even more appealing or scary (you choose). Although I will admit that even the best of intentions can lead to perile, as in the case of Timothy Treadwell (as previously discussed). He too wanted to be 'one with nature'.
posted on Jul 24, 2007 - View this thread

Make Me Heal is an online community serving the needs of America's vast cosmetic surgery audience, with tips & tricks on what works best to heal scarring, etc, including an encyclopedia of terms. To promote their vision of "Celebrating Natural Beauty With Enhancement" they're hosting the first ever Plastic Surgery Beauty Enhancement Awards, with categories like Best Breast Augmentation (NSFW) and Best Male Liposuction." Contestants must submit before, during & after shots of the procedure, and site visitors can vote on their favorites.
posted on Jul 2, 2007 - View this thread

Earthlings (1 hr 35 min Google video) is "a feature length documentary about humanity's absolute dependence on animals (for pets, food, clothing, entertainment, and scientific research) but also illustrates our complete disrespect for these so-called 'non-human providers.'" Also in three parts on YouTube.
posted on Jun 24, 2007 - View this thread

Chippewa Lake Park is a former amusement park in Ohio; opened in 1878, it closed in 1978 due to lack of attendance. During the decades since then, the ballroom, roller coasters & other rides have lain abandoned as the surrounding forest reclaims them.
posted on Jun 23, 2007 - View this thread

Leopard seals, by Paul Nicklen. Leopard Seals are the second largest species of seal in the Antarctic, and are near the top of the Antarctic food chain. Paul Nicklen won first prize in the Nature Stories category of the prestigious World Press Photo contest for his photographs of Leopard Seals. The first known human fatality was in 2003 when a Leopard Seal dragged Kirsty Brown, a snorkeling biologist, underwater to her death.
posted on Jun 17, 2007 - View this thread

Unexpectedly, thousands of mammals were spotted during their migration in the Southern Sudan surprising scientists who had given up thinking that wildlife might still exist [video link] in this war torn region of the world.
posted on Jun 13, 2007 - View this thread

A slideshow & timeline of life on earth - A timeline of human migration.
posted on Jun 4, 2007 - View this thread

A dust storm overtakes Lubbock, Texas
posted on May 26, 2007 - View this thread

The Polar Bears of Spitsbergen is an amazing and gruesome photo gallery posted by a photographer who stumbled across a bear & its cubs at feeding time & spent the next 45 minutes capturing the event. via
posted on May 12, 2007 - View this thread

The Beltane Fire Society Fire Festival. Happy Beltane! [Some links NSFW.]
posted on Apr 30, 2007 - View this thread

The significance of the dinosaurs' death has been greatly exaggerated. This article in Nature discusses how mammalian evolution accelerated independent from the death of dinosaurs. The theory was derived from a "supertree" [pdf ~ 1mb] of mammals and how common ancestors have branched out. Coolest info-graphic ever.
posted on Mar 28, 2007 - View this thread

You think you've seen it all and then you see Snow Donuts
posted on Mar 20, 2007 - View this thread

Leave No Child Inside
Are children disconnected from the natural world? With the rise of endless variations of in-home entertainment, parents are finding it harder to get kids to play outside, get muddy, and explore nature. Are we inadvertently creating yet another childhood malady (Nature Deficit Disorder)?
posted on Mar 7, 2007 - View this thread

Bee eaters and lesser kestrels.
posted on Mar 3, 2007 - View this thread

Rosmarie Fiore is doing some fascinating and beautiful things with long exposures and 80's arcade games.

In the meanwhile, Patrick Dougherty is doing some fascinating and beautiful things with sticks and twigs. [more inside]
posted on Feb 9, 2007 - View this thread

When I grow up I want to be an environmental engineer. I want to work on projects that can provide potable water for people. I want to clean the polluted Mother Ganga [Ganges] who provides life giving water from the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal. Or the Nile, both blue and white, spilling fertility from her bunds on a regular cycle. I want to design products that use the least amount of energy and fuel, from recycled materials and are biodegradable. I want to seek alternative sources of energy, such as using biofuel to power cellphones. I want to design with maximum constraints. Call her mother earth, gaia, demeter, ceres or inanna, our planet is on the brink of no return. Or is it all just a matter of perspective?
posted on Feb 9, 2007 - View this thread