An evening pause: Taped on August 25, 2014. Hat tip Danae, who wrote, “It was 111.4 degrees under the side porch roof this afternoon, which explains why this video appeals to me. The visibility of the sea floor is just frosting on the cake.”
To me, this probably gives one who has never surfed (like myself) the best sense of what it is like to do it.
Link here. Just go and look. It is worth it.
Link here.
An evening pause: I haven’t posted a wingsuit video since 2012, so this clip is overdue, especially since the scenery is quite beautiful. My only complaint is that they cut just as one flyer releases his chute for landing. I would have preferred to see the whole flight, including its gentle end.
Hat tip tdub.
Want silence? Scientists can tell you where to find it.
Not surprisingly they have found that the western states, and especially the national parks within those states, are the quietest places in the nation.
Link here.
Some of these are not that unbelievable, but numbers 4 and 9 are really cool. And number 1 was already reported here on BtB.
Link here.
Switzerland is about to open the first suspension bridge ever built between two mountain peaks.
The bridge, suspended 9,700ft in the air, will also have a partial glass floor to allow visitors a once in a lifetime view of the 6,500ft drop between the Glacier 3000 and Scex Rouge.
It is scheduled to open in November, and is being built in an effort to attract more tourists to the Swiss Alps.
Just click on the link.
We exited the Grand Canyon on schedule at about 1:30 on Thursday. The hike out this year took one hour longer than last year, mostly because we took longer breaks.
As always, the Canyon is a sublime place, hard to describe to those who have never been there and unnecessary to describe for those who have. We hiked in, did an 11 mile hike the one day we were at the bottom, then hiked out today.
Posting will resume but will remain light until I return home on Sunday night.
The science journal Nature today announced the retraction of two controversial stem cell papers.
The two papers reporting the stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency (STAP) phenomenon appeared online on 29 January. Questions about the papers arose almost immediately, leading to an investigation by RIKEN, the headquarters of the network of the nationally funded laboratories that is based in Wako near Tokyo. Investigators documented several instances of fabrication and falsification in the papers and concluded that some of these constituted research misconduct on the part of [Haruko] Obokata [the lead author].
Japanese media recently reported that authors had agreed to retract the papers but were discussing the wording of the notice. In the note that appeared today, the authors point to errors previously identified by RIKEN investigations in supplementary documents. They also identify additional errors in both papers, including mix-ups in images, mislabeling, faulty descriptions, and “inexplicable discrepancies in genetic background and transgene insertion sites between the donor mice and the reported” STAP cells. [emphasis mine]
The list of errors now documented sound astonishing. In fact, I can’t see how any serious review by any competent specialist in this field could have missed them all, which suggests that for this research at least the peer-review process is mostly a sham. In fact, in the article Nature admits that its
» Read more
37 amazing places you must visit before you die.
Great pictures. I am happy to say that I’ve seen most of the places listed that are in the U.S. And I’ve also seen other places in the U.S. quite comparable to international locations shown here.
Update: After an almost two week rescue effort, the injured German caver safely reached the surface Thursday.
The pictures are great, but the commentary is wonderful and wise.
Cool! A man doing a 16-mile charity swim was surrounded and protected from a shark by dolphins. With video.
More evidence that dolphins are much smarter than we think.
Twenty places that are difficult to believe really exist.
Posting for the two weeks shall sometimes be limited to the evening hours, as Diane and I are heading east for the first time in two years to visit the Smoky Mountains on the border of Tennessee and North Carolina.
We decided to drive, partly because it is cheaper, and partly to avoid the TSA (Airlines: Pay attention!). It also will give us a vehicle for driving north after our hiking vacation to visit friends and family in Maryland and Pennsylvania.
I intend to post about our trip. I should also do most of my appearances on the John Batchelor Show as well. The only negative is that I will be out in the real world when both Falcon 9 and Cygnus finally complete their next flights. I will only be able to post about it after the fact.
