lottereinigerforever:

Faye Dunaway & Steve McQueen on the set of “The Thomas Crown Affair”

✖ lottereinigerforever

snvff-film:

recreation

(via qukko)

✖ code1327

blech:

Worldwide edits using the new MapBox iD OpenStreetMap interface.

“After iD’s launch on OpenStreetMap.org last week [MAY 2013], many new and existing users tried it out and started editing the worldwide map.”

(via notational)

✖ mapbox.com

yoga9vipassana:

Yoga 9 Vipassana
www.facebook.com/yoga9v

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✖ beejayway

nybg:

science-junkie:

“Whodunnit” of Irish potato famine solved

It is the first time scientists have decoded the genome of a plant pathogen and its plant host from dried herbarium samples. This opens up a new area of research to understand how pathogens evolve and how human activity impacts the spread of plant disease.

Phytophthora infestans changed the course of history. Even today, the Irish population has still not recovered to pre-famine levels. “We have finally discovered the identity of the exact strain that caused all this havoc”, says Hernán Burbano from the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology.

For research to be published in eLife, a team of molecular biologists from Europe and the US reconstructed the spread of the potato blight pathogen from dried plants. Although these were 170 to 120 years old, they were found to have many intact pieces of DNA.

“Herbaria represent a rich and untapped source from which we can learn a tremendous amount about the historical distribution of plants and their pests - and also about the history of the people who grew these plants,” according to Kentaro Yoshida from The Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich.

Read more

Images: [x][x][x]

There are so many reasons why herbaria, like the NYBG’s William and Lynda Steere Herbarium, are important, and now there’s one more!

But first a reminder of what a herbarium is: It is a physical record of the plants of the world. Each specimen has been gathered in the field by a scientist who has also taken detailed notes and photographs, as well as notes on the plant’s location and the time of year. The specimens are brought back to the herbarium where they are described and indexed. Herbarium specimens have been gathered and stored for centuries.

Herbarium specimens are used to describe new species and to determine species relationships. Technology is having a huge impact on herbaria, including genomics which is helping to sort out some sticky cladistic situations. And now, herbaria are providing fascinating new research materials for geneticists and historians working on the history of agriculture, disease, and human migration. Seriously good stuff. ~AR

(via theolduvaigorge)

✖ mpg.de

mpdrolet:

Manlio Reina

(via sampayo)

✖ mpdrolet

formlinedot:

henry moore - two forms - 1934

(via sampayo)

✖ formlinedot

huntingtonlibrary:

William Sharp, one of the first chromolithographic printers in the U.S., created these extraordinary illustrations for the large folio Victoria Regia (1854) by John Fisk Allen. Allen, a well-known horticulturalist, cultivated a specimen of the rare, huge (up to 8 feet in diameter), fast-growing (up to an inch an hour!) water lily, native to the Amazon. After months of careful tending, the plant—named in honor of the recently-crowned Queen Victoria—blossomed on the evening of July 21, 1853. Sharp’s depictions of this exotic wonder—in various stages of bloom—were masterpieces and elevated the then-nascent art of chromolithography to spectacular new heights.

image captions: All images are from a copy of Victoria Regia in our collections. Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

(via scientificillustration)

✖ huntingtonlibrary