Photo by Reuters
It has been a historical moment at the docks of some of the most important Chinese ports like Shanghai, Tianjin and Keelung as Cargo Ships was leaving towards Taiwan for the first time since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949. Direct shipping sea transport between China and Taiwan was not the only great yesterday novelty, it started direct daily passenger airflights and postal services too, underlining underscore how quickly ties have warmed under the island's pro-China President Ma Ying-jeou, who took office in May on a pledge to improve cooperation with Beijing.
Photo by Reuters
Photo by Reuters
Photo by Reuters
Photo by Reuters
Photo by Reuters
Photo by Reuters
A friend of mine sent me this picture whick took this morning in Limone Piemonte a town in Piemonte, Italy. The roofs are covered with an exceptional snowcover which has fallen in the last two days. If you focus the little men on the roof you can easily realize that the roofs are covered with a layer more than 2 metres high! That's something more usual in Finland than Italy.
In the meanwhile in other parts of Italy the threat is the rain, like the capital, Rome, where many areas close to the river Tiber are flooded as you can see in these pictures from Reuters (Click here for more):
Pedestrians watch Milvio Bridge as Tiber river flows in downtown Rome December 12, 2008.
REUTERS/Alessandro Bianchi
Trucks are partially submerged in floodwater in downtown Rome December 12, 2008. REUTERS/Alessandro Bianchi
Water from the Tiber river flows through the Corbara dam, near Orvieto, 80 km (50 miles) north of Rome, December 12, 2008.
REUTERS/Protezione Civile/Handout
Drivers drive through flooded streets after torrential rains and hail in Rome November 30, 2008.
REUTERS/Alessandro Bianchi
Rescuers ferry stranded people through flood waters near Via Tiburtina in Rome December 11, 2008.
REUTERS/Paulo Siqueira
Meanwhile in Venice, the legendary city built on the water, the "Acqua Alta" phenomenon is continuing, creating problems to the inhabitants and amazement among the tourists, as I've described in this previous post
Pedestrians wade through flood waters, past a gondola, in Venice December 1, 2008.REUTERS/Manuel Silvestri
© Ralph A. Clevenger/CORBIS
This is an awesome image realized by the Nature Photographer Ralph A. Clevenger. It is very famous for its immediate impact and because it is the perfect explanation of the "Tip of the Iceberg" rule:
Because the density of pure ice is about 920 kg/m³, and that of sea water about 1025 kg/m³, typically only one-tenth of the volume of an iceberg is above water. The shape of the remainder under the water can be difficult to surmise from looking at what is visible above the surface. This has led to the expression "tip of the iceberg", generally applied to a problem or difficulty, meaning that the visible trouble is only a small manifestation of a larger problem.
However, while it is a realistic image, it's not properly a true photograph (it would have been impossible) but rather a digital composed image as it's perfectly explained by the author:
"The iceberg image is a digital composite that I designed to illustrate the concept of "what you see is not necessarily what you get". As an underwater photographer I knew that my "vision" of what a big iceberg looks like was impossible to get in reality so I had to create it. The image exists in nature but due to water visibility is not possible to capture on film. There are 4 separate images involved; the sky, the background, the top iceberg (shot in Antarctica), and the underwater iceberg (shot above water in Alaska and flipped in the final composite)."
A woman walks through the French Quarter, as snow falls, in New Orleans December 11, 2008.REUTERS/Sean Gardner
New Orleans, Louisiana main city, is well known for its multicultural and multilingual heritage, cuisine, architecture, music (particularly as the birthplace of jazz), and its annual Mardi Gras and other celebrations and festivals and of course for the recent tragedy brought by hurricane Katrina. New Orleans is well known also for its humid subtropical weather, its particular location on the banks of the Mississippi river delta ensures the city very short and mild winters. Therefore when the snow falls on "The Northernmost Caribbean City", as it is nicknamed, it's a very remarkable event. Yesterday, 11th December 2008 It happened (for the eight times in the last 70 years) and Reuters Photographers were there to take these peculiar shots:
A street car travels down Canal Street as snow falls in New Orleans December 11, 2008.REUTERS/Sean Gardner
The Natchez Steam Boat sits along side the moon walk as snow falls in New Orleans, December 11, 2008. REUTERS/Sean Gardner
A house destroyed in Hurricane Katrina is covered in snow in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, Louisiana December 11, 2008. REUTERS/Lee Celano
This is just a brief selection. Click here for the whole REUTERS gallery
There is a sort of jellyfish which is the most amazing creature you will ever heard about, and that's because it developed a characteristic so special that no other creature in the animal world, not even other jellyfishes very closely related to it, developed. It is immortal.
It could seems unbelievable but it's just simple as that, this Jellyfish never dies for natural reasons (obviously it can be killed)
This incredible creature is the Turritopsis nutricula, it's not exactly one of the jellyfishes we're used to (Cubozoa and Scyphozoa), infact it is an Hydrozoa a taxonomic class that is part of the Phylum target="_blank"Cnidaria with Jellyfishes (Cubozoa and Scyphozoa) and corals (Anthozoa). What is curious is that Hydrozoans share a parte of their life as corals and another one as jellyfishes, to be more precise they have a unusual life cycle in which they change from a polyp stage (coral) colonial and rooted, to a medusa stage (jellyfish) solitary and floating. This is an extreme semplification of a reality which is much more complicated and wide-ranging, but it's enough to understand better our "Highlander" jellyfish. So let's go back to our Turritopsis nutricula, what makes it so unbelievably special is that it is able to revert its life cycle from medusa to the polyp stage after becoming sexually mature. It is the only known case of an animal capable of reverting completely to a sexually immature, colonial stage after having reached sexual maturity as a solitary stage. It does this through the cell development process of transdifferentiation. Theoretically, this cycle can repeat indefinitely, rendering it effectively immortal.
Don't let the pictures mislead you, our little immortal has a diameter of just 4-5 millimeters just big enough to see with your naked eye. Young specimens have only eight tentacles along the edge (see picture above), while adult specimens have 80-90 tentacles (see pictures below).
Stumbling on across the internet I've found this funny picture. Congratulations to the author!
What's best is that it recalled me those wonderful strips of Calvin and Hobbes in which Calvin creates snowmen and puts them in scenes where they were dying or suffering in grotesque ways. It was a regular appointment of every winter, in the ten years the strip was published, Calvin and Hobbes always started creating entire worlds of snowmen. In my opinion those deeply surrealistic stripes were really amazing and propbably the best ones of the whole collection.
If you do not know anything about Calvin and Hobbes, the comic strip written and illustrated by Bill Watterson, about Calvin, an imaginative six-year old boy, and Hobbes, his energetic and sardonic stuffed tiger, you're probably from another planet and for sure you've lost one of the best comic strips ever.
Click here to see a good collection of the Calvin and Hobbes' "Snowman Series":
©Greenpeace
Many species of whales are struggling for their own survival on this planet, but at least the public opinion is aware of the situation thanks to environmental associations like Greenpeace, WWF or Sea Shepherd. There is however another critical situation that involves a wonderful inhabitant of our oceans, which unfortunately is much less acquainted. This post is infact my little effort to contribute to the knowledge of this problem.
Let's start from the protagonist: the Bluefin Tuna.
The Bluefin Tuna is one of the greatest wonder of the oceans. Sadly the stupidity and incapability of setting limits to his own greed have led men to transform this:
into this:
photo PA
My friend John LoGioco from SaveTheBluefin.com has defined it "the ocean's most decorated gladiator, a supreme ocean master, a wonderful masterpiece of nature.." and infact Bluefin tuna may just be the coolest fish on the planet.
They are huge, weighing more than 800kg and attaining 3m in length. Unlike most fish, tuna have evolved to be warm-blooded and can heat their bodies up to 20° C (36° F) warmer than the surrounding water allowing them to hunt from the tropics to near-polar seas, while maintaining the capacity to accelerate as fast as the sports cars that emulate their streamlined shapes. This added warmth infact helps a tuna’s muscles work faster and more efficiently. Tuna consume as much as 5% of their body weight daily and must continually swim with their mouths open to force water over their gills, supercharging their blood-rich muscles with oxygen.
SeaWayBLOG has always been a photoblog so let the images speak for themselves about the majesty of the Bluefin. Here three pictures from National Geographic
©National Geographic/John Anderson
©National Geographic/Brian J. Skerry
©National Geographic/Brian J. Skerry
Unfortunately for them, they are also delicious to eat, to such an extent that in four decades of overfishing, the western north Atlantic population (stock) has been driven to just 3% of its 1960 or pre-longlining abundance - a decline of 97% that means an extreme danger of slipping into extinction.
While it has been replaced by some more common species like the Yellowfin in the canned tuna industry, Bluefin is an icon of Japanese cuisine in particular, being their crimson flesh a centrepiece of sushi plates. However, it's clear that the current situation is critical and we have to act immediately to avoid a disastrous loss.
One thing you can do right now is to become a proud member of the SaveTheBluefin community signing here, contributing to share the knowledge.
Some pictures from Greenpeace:
©Greenpeace/Gavin Newman
©Greenpeace/Marco Carè
©Sutton-Hibbert/Greenpeace
(c) Greenpeace/Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert
Some useful links and interesting reading:
- Save the Bluefin a social network aimed to share the knowledge about the critical situation of the Bluefin Tuna
- ICCAT The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, an inter-governmental fishery organization responsible for the conservation of tunas and tuna-like species in the Atlantic Ocean and its adjacent seas.
- Atlantic Bluefin Tuna - Severity of Decline and its Causes info and facts by Bigmarinefish.com
© Lionel Flageul
Reuters
Children take a bath in waste water at a slum in Jakarta October 14, 2008. In the recent year, at least 80 percent of the 250 million Indonesians have had no access to piped water. Due to difficulties and limited access to clean water, a large number of people still use rivers for drinking water, bathing and washing, according to a World Health Organization study.
Reuters
Sara the walrus and her Russian trainer Sergiy perform during a show at the newly-opened Istanbul Dolphinarium in Istanbul. Sara' show has immediately become very famous mainly because she doesn't perform in traditional sea mammal manner diving and clapping flippers, though she is said to be a capable ball player. What Sara the Walrus is noteworthy for is a skill that would almost make Adolphe Sax proud: Sara the Walrus sways to the wails and honks of the saxophone and pretends to play it (look at the video at the end of the post).
Reuters
AP Photo by Murad Sezer
AP Photo by Murad Sezer
AP Photo by Murad Sezer
AP Photo by Murad Sezer
Reuters
It could be strange but the crowd you are seeing in the above picture is actually fishing. They're fishing for mountain trouts in ice holes during the "Hwacheon Sancheoneo Ice Festival" a wintertime celebration that draws nearly a million visitors every year during three weeks in January. Sancheoneo (Mountain trout in English) is a fish in the Salmonidae genus of the Salmoniformes family which only inhabit cool, pure streams of 20 degrees Farenheit or below. The following pictures are taken during 2008 editon.
I think it's nice if you compare this pictures with the ones from the
Argungu Fishing Festival
A fishing contest in the waters of the river Mata Fada, Nigeria, using nets and traditional gourds made with calabashes a sort of punpkin dried and hollowed.
In both cases you can see thousands of people fishing together but they couldn't be more different!
All the pictures by Reuters, Ap, Afp/Getty Imges via Daylife
