Category: Nature

At last I’ve managed to see Comet 17P/Holmes. Last night was the first night of clear skies since the announcement (on October 24) that the comet had suddenly increased in brightness. It’s currently in the constellation of Perseus. It looks just like a star to the naked eye (well, to my naked eye, at least), but a pair of binoculars clearly show it up as a fuzzy ball of light. Lovely! 

George Monbiot contributes a thoughtful, but depressing, column to today’s Guardian. It’s on the subject of the worrying environmental trends laid out in the UN’s latest Global Environmental Outlook report, published last week.

 

His sense of depression is deepened by the fact that he’s been reading Cormac McCarthy’s dystopian novel, The Road. I can’t say I blame him, it’s easy to have feelings of the inevitability of disaster when you mix a potent cocktail of the GEO report and dystopian novels. Ingredients such as Oryx and Crake or The Sheep Look Up when combined with the cold hard facts of GEO4 have a powerful effect on me as well. I become convinced that a pessimist is merely an optimist who is in full possession of the facts. As Monbiot says:

Phil, over at the Bad Astronomer blog, reports that comet 17P/Holmes has increased in brightness, from magnitude 17 to magnitude 3, literally overnight. He gives its location in the night sky (you have to be living in the Northern Hemisphere), so I’m going to hope for a cloudless sky tonight to see it. The odds are not favourable at the moment…

Interesting story of how a boy substituted echo-location ability for his missing sight.

Let it not be said that Kees Moeliker is afraid to take the search for science into areas in which others dare not tread…

I’ve hardly blogged at all during the last week. We’ve had family visiting us from Scotland, so we’ve been showing them the sights. Here’s some of the things we saw…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Carolyn Porco takes us on a journey. Come along with me and wonder.

http://static.videoegg.com/ted/flash/loader.swf 

A chance, in these last warm days of Autumn, to store energy for the final metamorphosis…

 

 

 

 

 

 

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With a nod to M. C. Escher…

 

 

Sometimes, Mother Nature lets slip the mask, and shows us what she’s really capable of…

There’s a pair of Green Woodpeckers (Picus viridis) who often visit the garden. Here’s the female (recognisable by having all-black around the eyes):

 

 

And here’s the male (with a red stripe under the eye):

 

 

 

They’re both extremely shy, so it’s difficult to get close shots of them. Here’s a closer shot of the male, taken last year:

 

 

 

In the nearby woods, I often catch glimpses of Great Spotted Woodpeckers (Dendrocopos major), but today was rather special. I saw a Black Woodpecker (Dryocopus martius), the first one I’ve ever seen in my life.

PZ Myers gets somewhat hacked off by yet another fool claiming that, without god, us atheists have no free will and no morality. Dear lord, that is such a tiresome argument. As PZ says, our chemistry is beautiful, elegant and sufficient; no god need apply for the position of driving force. 

Except, of course, because of climate change, it’s the warmth-loving species that are thriving. The Central Bureau of Statistics in the Netherlands has the graph to show it. 

PZ Myers has a wonderfully clear post on what we currently know about the Hox genes, and how they influence animal morphology. Loren Petrich, in the comments thread, points out that mutation has occurred to produce the tailless Manx cat. Fascinating stuff.

 

I can’t help but notice a definite chill in the air when I walk the dog in the morning…

 

 

 

Kai’s noticing it as well…

 

 

This year we have what seems to be getting close to a plague of field-mice. Working in the garden is accompanied by a flurry of brown or black bodies fleeing for the nether regions.

 

They are also discovering the attractions of staying indoors. I’ve found unmistakable evidence of mice in the kitchen – droppings in the drawers. OK, it’s now down to placing the traps in strategic spots. So far, the score in the kitchen is one down – an unknown number left to go. The battle continues…

 

The victims (from the kitchen and the attic) have thus far been placed in the compost container. PZ Myers draws my attention to the fact that the tiny bodies may have other uses…

Carl Zimmer, over at The Loom, has a fascinating post about the double sets of jaws possessed by Moray eels. It turns out that Nature got there long before H. R. Giger dreamed up the double jaws for the monster in Alien. 

That’s the title of a rather depressing blog entry from Carl Safina about a recent trip to the Artic to observe the impact of climate change on both wildlife and human communities there.

 

It’s definitely worth reading, but I did feel a twinge on reading Safina’s (to my mind) somewhat glib summary:

It’s probably true that people look to religious leaders. It’s just a pity that, to my mind, they often have little to say beyond their own dogma.