| These Rainbow Roses are made by inserting dye into the stem of the roses while they are growing, which results in the color being absorbed by the petals of the flower. |
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The $33 million Wallypower 118 is the boat of my dreams. Its 118 feet are powered by five engines -- 2 diesels for tooting around the marina, and 3 jet turbines, for pirating at over 70 MPH. At top speed it guzzles a liter of fuel per second, which limits the range of its 22 ton fuel tanks to 400 nautical miles (compared to 1,500 nm if you're just putting around with the diesels at 9 knots). I could go on and on about how I want to get one and pirate my life away, but instead I'll just say this: I take back all the mean things I said about the guy that has sex with cars, because I would totally do this boat. A TON more pictures that you WILL look at because I spent a lot of time editing them (and there's one of a chick in a bikini from 50 miles away). Also, some videos.
The world's most spectacular sailing yacht, Maltese Falcon(EUR 115,000,000) is available for sale. It is a massive 88 meter length yacht, which has 2400 square meters. The five ultra opulent staterooms can entertain 12 guests and the open main deck has a main saloon, a cockpit, a nice dining area and 2 separate studio areas. It even has a protected bathing area.
via SuperYachtTimes
The Netherlands wants to redraw the map of Europe - literally.
A government body set up to promote innovation has drawn up proposals for an island about 50 kilometers, or 31 miles, long, sparking fierce debate.
We have repeatedly raved and ranted about Palm Jumeirah! Now we offer a visual treat of this extraordinary tangible reality. An icon for Dubai, the Palm Jumeirah is a marvel of design and engineering- and a natural candidate for the title of ‘Eight Wonder of the World.’ The first island in the Palm trilogy, it has risen from Arabian Gulf in just five years. The unique man-made island is built in the shape of a date palm tree and consists of a trunk, a crown with 17 fronds, and a surrounding crescent island that will form a water-breaker. The Palm Jumeirah is set to become one of the world’s premier resorts with 32 beach front hotels joining Atlantis The Palm resorts and The Trump Hotel & Tower to welcome an estimated 25,000 hotel guests.
July 18, 2007—A humpback whale with a tongue swollen to the size of a small car has been found on the rocky shores of Admiralty Island in southeast Alaska (see Alaska map). Scientists believe that a collision forced air into the male humpback's tongue and caused it to swell. A ship could be responsible for the death of the 40-foot (12-meter) whale, which was found last week.
"It is certainly possible that it was a ship strike, but that's still inconclusive," Aleria Jensen, a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Alaska, told the Associated Press.
There have been about 60 collisions between ships and large whales in Alaska since the 1970s. But the humpback population, which is currently estimated at 10,000, is growing at an annual rate of 7 percent. As the whale population grows, collisions will become more common, researchers believe.
Scientists preformed a necropsy Friday and plan to analyze samples of the animal's skin, blubber, stomach contents, and various other tissues. The study could take several weeks to complete, Jensen said.
"There's never any guarantee that we can find the cause of death, but that's always our goal," she said.
A Russian hunter traipsing through Russia's remote Arctic Yamalo-Nenetsk region in May noticed what he thought was a reindeer carcass sticking out of the damp snow. (See a map of Russia and its remote Siberian regions.)
On closer inspection, the "reindeer" turned out to be a 40,000-year-old baby mammoth, perfectly encased in ice.
The six-month-old female mammoth is the most well-preserved example yet found of the beasts, which lumbered across the Earth during the last Ice Age, 1.8 million to 11,500 years ago.
"It's a lovely little baby mammoth indeed, found in perfect condition," Alexei Tikhonov, deputy director of the Russian Academy of Science's Zoological Institute, told the Reuters news agency.
At 110 pounds (50 kilograms) and 51 inches long (130 centimeters long), the baby is the size of a large dog, Reuters reported.
Scientists are banking on the female—named "Lyuba" after the Russian hunter's wife—to reveal some of the genetic secrets of the prehistoric giants.
That's because Lyuda's excellent state—intact except for her shaggy locks—makes her a veritable treasure trove for research.
Emerging DNA technologies have already allowed some scientists to consider resurrecting the mammoth. (Read about the resurrection debate.)
Meanwhile, the newfound body will undergo three-dimensional computer mapping at Japan's Jikei University, followed by an autopsy at the Zoological Museum in St. Petersburg. The Ice Age toddler will end up on display in the Russian Arctic town of Salekhard.
National Geographic News
"It is probably one of the largest floods ever identified," said Phillip Gibbard, a geographer at the University of Cambridge who wasn't involved in the study.
At its peak, the flood would have discharged water at a rate of about 264 million gallons (a million cubic meters) a second, gushing at speeds of up to 62 miles (100 kilometers) an hour, the researchers say. This is roughly equivalent to ten times the combined flow rate of all the rivers in the world.
In addition to making Britain an island, the authors add, the huge flood had wide-ranging environmental consequences.
For example, the gigantic pulse of freshwater entering the Atlantic Ocean likely caused a period of climate cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, Gibbard said.
"The introduction of ice and freshwater into an ocean drives climate oscillations and causes marked cooling events," he explained.
The flood also marooned many animals and plants, so those species gradually evolved into different forms than their mainland cousins.
And humans appear to have avoided the newly made island altogether, leaving it unoccupied for over a hundred thousand years.
Crumbled Chalk
Researchers have long known that a narrow ridge of chalk once connected Dover in southeast England to Calais in northwest France (see a map of France showing Calais' proximity to Britain).
During the ice ages, when sea levels were low, the ridge held back a glacial lake from inundating a large valley between the two regions.
But during warm interglacial periods, sea levels rose and the chalk ridge was the only link. At some point the ridge crumbled. Theories as to why have included river or glacial erosion, tidal scraping, and—most controversial of all—a megaflood.
Now Sanjeev Gupta of Imperial College London and colleagues say they have found the first concrete evidence to support the megaflood theory.
A 3-D map of part of the English Channel reveals features that could only have been created by a massive flood, the team says.
"We have identified huge scours on the seafloor and streamlined islands," said Gupta, whose results will appear in tomorrow's issue of the journal Nature.
These features are very unusual, he said, and have previously been found only in regions where megafloods are known to have occurred.
Similar features exist, for example, in the Channeled Scabland in eastern Washington State, which was deluged when the glacial Lake Missoula burst its banks about 12,000 years ago.
Isolated Island
Based on their analysis, Gupta and colleagues say the most likely source of all this water was a huge glacial lake sitting in what is now the southern North Sea off the east coast of Britain.
The water was probably held back by the chalk ridge, and a small earthquake could have caused the first few cracks to appear.
"Chalk is not very strong, and eventually the water probably just started to over-spill," Gupta said.
Determining exactly when the megaflood took place is difficult.
But the divergence of plant and animal species between Britain and mainland Europe suggest that the event must have occurred sometime between 450,000 and 200,000 years ago.
"We now need to drill into the sediments to get an accurate date," Gupta said.
The great flood could help explain why Britain remained an uninhabited region for a large chunk of the archaeological record.
"There seems to be a large gap in the evidence for human occupation [of Britain] during cold and warm phases from about 180,000 until about 60,000 years ago," said Nicholas Ashton, an archaeologist at the British Museum in London.
(Related: "Humans Sped to U.K. After Ice Age, Study Says" [November 3, 2003].)
When the climate was warm, sea level between the island and the mainland was too high for humans to cross, Ashton said.
And during the much colder ice ages, humans could have crossed, but seem to have preferred to live in sunnier regions such as modern-day Italy and Spain.
"It wasn't until 60,000 years ago," Ashton said, "that humans—late Neanderthals—had the technological capabilities, such as more effective clothing and shelter, to survive the cold conditions."
National Geographic News
But scientists can't seem to get their arms around this ocean-going oddity, which has been dubbed "octosquid."
When the animal was sucked up from 3,000-foot (914-meter) depths by a deep-sea pipeline Tuesday at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority in Kailua-Kona (NELHA), scientists were initially stumped.
The foot-long octosquid had the body of a squid but eight tentacles like an octopus—and it lacked the long, flowing tentacles reminiscent of squid.
After the creature died two days later, NELHA operations manager Jan War noticed the squid was missing two tentacles, which probably broke off during its journey up the pipeline. The missing appendages had given the animal a more octopuslike appearance, War told National Geographic News.
The specimen was preserved and sent to the University of Hawaii-Manoa's oceanography team, which examined the carcass and today announced the deep-sea squid belongs to an already identified species. However, so little is known about the species that scientists have not yet given it a name.
Finding new or rare species is common in the pitch-black depths of the squid's home, which have still been largely unexplored by people.
The pipeline has already yielded some perplexing surprises, such as one still-unnamed fish with an eellike body that could be an entirely new genus, War said.
These possibilities could revolutionize future space missions in search of life elsewhere in the solar system, says the report, issued today by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).
The report concludes that scientists need to consider an expanded list of characteristics that define life, including so-called "weird" life-forms that may thrive where Earth organisms couldn't.
Instead of dispatching spacecraft to dig into the subsurface of Mars, considered a prime candidate for primitive life because of its watery past, the report says the probes may have better luck on Saturn's moon Titan, which has seas of liquid methane and ethane.
In fact, the report concluded that Titan is the most likely candidate in the solar system for weird life.
"It's a carbon world, so there's plenty of different kinds of carbon compounds there, and the possibility is that there may be the carbon compounds that make up life," said John Baross, an oceanographer at Seattle's University of Washington, who lead the report team.
Different Life
Baross chaired the committee that prepared the report released by the National Research Council, an arm of the NAS.
The report probes the question: How might life on distant worlds be different than life on Earth?
"We don't want to not recognize a life form because it doesn't exactly resemble Earth life," Baross said.
All life on Earth studied to date has certain characteristics and needs: water, carbon-based metabolism, a chemical- or light-based energy source, and the ability to evolve.
Since these characteristics make life on Earth possible, scientists have long assumed they are required for life elsewhere in the universe. But advances in biology and biochemistry in the last decade show that the basic requirements for life may not be so concrete, according to Baross.
Seth Shostak is a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, which is dedicated to the search for alien life. He was not part of the report but said the premise is "very justified."
For example, he said, the Viking lander missions to Mars in the 1970s were controversial, because although they did not find life, they only looked for Earthlike life.
(Read related story: "Viking Mission May Have Missed Mars Life, Study Finds" [October 23, 2006].)
"Let's be a little more broad-minded. Let's not just look for life as we know it," Shostak said.
"The only problem," he added, "is it's very difficult to look for life as you don't know it, because you don't know how to look for it. I think that's what motivates this study."
Weird Life
According to the report, the search for life elsewhere in the solar system and beyond should include efforts to detect "weird" forms of life.
For example, laboratory experiments have recently demonstrated that scientists can change the DNA of Earth organisms, which then continue to encode the new genetic information.
The findings suggest that "a different life-form doesn't necessarily have to have exactly the same chemistry that Earth life has," Baross said.
Even weirder life, he said, may tap into different sources of energy than the sun, which most Earth organisms depend upon.
Perhaps most intriguing, Baross continued, is the possibility that extraterrestrial life could thrive on a solvent other than water, such as the liquid methane and ethane on Titan.
(Read related story: "Saturn Moon Has Lakes, "Water" Cycle Like Earth's, Scientists Say" [January 5, 2007].)
"Could a carbon-based life-form survive and live in that?" Baross said.
"That's pretty much an unknown to Earth life."
(See a picture gallery of what extraterrestrial life might look like.)
Finding Weird Life
The hunt for weird life on other planets and moons begins with studying life on Earth, Baross explained. For example, one of the biggest unanswered questions about Earth life is how it originated.
"What comes out of this report is that there's so much about Earth life that we don't understand," Baross said.
This is especially true about life forms that exist in extreme environments like arid deserts, high-altitude lakes, and snuggled up against boiling deep-sea vents.
"The possibility exists that there are still organisms that can tell us something about early life and even possibly the origin of life that we haven't really tapped into," Baross said.
The lessons learned from Earth's weird life can then guide the search for even weirder life elsewhere in the universe, the researchers noted.
