Some amazing pics from Brent Stirton, who documented the search party for four mountain gorillas killed in Eastern Congo last year. One of them was a silverback alpha male, the leader of the group, who was shot.

via we make money not art

Awsm. By Naoya Hatakeyama. Lots of pics at the link

Via the always-excellent things

When I first read about this family that walks on all fours, I thought it was a hoax. It’s not:

Cause it’s true.

Jyoti, all 1 foot and 11 inches of her, goes to a regular school (her classmates, pictured above) and sits at a custom-built little desk. And she’s recording a rap album later this year. Lots more pics at the link. Spread the Jyoti love.

via DGSF Patrick

Lei Rodriguez lives in Miami, and that’s appropriate, because you can feel the oppressive heat of rioting vegetation in her work. Gorgeous stuff—feels like being in a jungle that doubles as a strip joint, or being in Buffalo Bill’s house, if he ran the Little Shop of Horrors. More works:

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A story about developing the DNA of an extinct tasmanian tiger into an embryo. The reporter ends by playing it close to the chest, saying “…many people wonder: What’s next?” DUH. JURASSIC PARK IS NEXT. Get in line for your tickets. Opening date: 2060, when you and I are still spry enough to gun it to 88 mph in our flying cars.

Singularities, which are fascinating, have been peered into recently and new discoveries are made into how to retrieve information from black holes.

Through Ray Kurzweil’s website, comes This fascinating article:

Physicists at Penn State have provided a mechanism by which information can be recovered from black holes, those regions of space where gravity is so strong that, according to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, not even light can escape. The team’s findings pave the way toward ending a decades-long debate sparked by renowned physicist Steven Hawking.

“Once you consider quantum gravity, then space-time becomes much larger and there is room for information to reappear in the distant future on the other side of what was first thought to be the end of space-time.”

Are you serious? What does that mean? Information is being spit into the future and we have to wait for it? Is this a LOST theory?

Ray Kurzweil’s technological singularity borrows the principle to describe a point in the near future when technology begins to increase along Moore’s Law so rapidly that the outcome is impossible to predict, or something.

Zoinks. Being a locust is like being in a zombie horror flick:

Scientists say they may have discovered the reason why swarms of locusts are driven to devour such huge quantities of vegetation. They suggest that locusts combine into swarms because they are frightened of being eaten by each other.

A swarm can contain billions of insects and eat tens of thousands of tonnes of vegetation in a single day. Sounding like waves of rain, it darkens the desert sky and descends to destroy swathes of food crops.

No-one is sure exactly what makes locusts swarm in this way. They are usually herbivores but scientists have observed them eating each other. This is when they cannot get hold of enough food when normal supplies start to run short. Young locusts, which cannot fly, have been seen eating other members of their group. The new theory suggests that some other locusts start to panic. Increasing numbers of locusts band together to try to get away from the hungry cannibals chasing behind.

A volcano erupts in Chile.

via Andrew Sullivan/Wired. More pics here.