The app asks you a few basic questions — what’s the color, size, and behavior of the bird you saw, and also when and where did you see it — and then, drawing on a database of information gathered by Cornell experts and thousands of bird enthusiasts, the app will give you a shortlist of possibilities. From there you can zero in on the actual bird you saw.
The free app (introduced in the video above) launched with “285 species most commonly encountered in North America.” But Cornell plans to add more species and features over time. Meanwhile, the current app already offers “more than 2,000 stunning images taken by top photographers,” “more than 1,000 audio recordings from the Macaulay Library, identification tips from experts, and range maps from the Birds of North America Online.”
Happy birdwatching!
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The early decades of the twentieth century belonged to Cecil B. DeMille and his epic films both Biblical and classical: The Ten Commandments, Cleopatra, Samson and Delilah. The grand scale of these pseudo-histories required the most up-to-date cinematic invention of the day, and the most imperial vision, one later decades looked upon rather cynically. But just as the epic has roared back with a vengeance—with technological feats that make The Greatest Show on Earth look like community theater—so another medium of ambitious scope once popular between the wars has made a reappearance: the historical infographic, or as it was called back then, the “histomap”—5‑foot long visual histories of a variety of disciplines.
As with film, information technology has advanced to such a degree to make this early means of condensing huge amounts of data perhaps seem quaint. But if we imagine a world pre-internet, when the prospect of visualizing a subject as complex as, say, evolution, would be daunting indeed, we might just find the histomap as impressive a means of conveying information as its early readers did. These huge graphs of big ideas, writes Rebecca Onion at Slate, fit “with a trend in nonfiction book publishing of the 1920s and 1930s: the ‘outline,’ in which large subjects (the history of the world! every school of philosophy! All of modern physics!) were distilled into a form comprehensible to the most uneducated layman.”
We’ve previously featured that 1931 “History of the World!” histomap, an impressive condensing of 4000 years of human activity. The evolution graphic you see here, also from 1931 and “arranged” by John B. Sparks, is equally impressive, and speaks to the times in ways that DeMille’s Bible movies did as well. Bear in mind that the Scopes Monkey Trial had only concluded six years earlier, and the country—as it is again today—was hotly divided over the subject represented here. Nonetheless, Sparks and publisher Rand McNally gamely presented this “Story of the Emergence and Progression of Life” with confident precision and without apology.
I couldn’t begin to tell you how the science here has aged, though some of it, I’d suspect, not particularly well. In any case, the form of this elegant data map, with its graceful lines of descent flowing down the page like magma, complements its content. Rather than presenting the theory of evolution as a forgone conclusion or belief, Sparks’ graphic lays out all of the evidence, and fits it together neatly and comprehensively. Some modern evolution infographics surpass the visual appeal, but not the level of scientific detail shown here. Others reduce the science, and the design, to the level of oversimplified ideology. And though we may have enough historical distance to make infographicss of hundreds of years of evolutionary thought, it may seem that the technology of the evolution infographic may not have advanced as much as we might expect.
Back in December, Ayun Halliday took you inside an MRI machine to explore the neuroscience of jazz improvisation and musical creativity. Along the way, you got to see Johns Hopkins surgeon Charles Limb jam on a keyboard inside one of those crowded, claustrophobia-inducing tubes. How could you beat that for entertainment?
Today, we return with a new video showing another way the MRI machine is giving scientists new insights into the making of music. This time the focus is on how we produce sounds when we sing. When “we sing or speak, the vocal folds—the two small pieces of tissue [in our neck]—come together and, as air passes over them, they vibrate,” and produce sound. That’s basically what happens. We know that. But the typical MRI machine, capturing about 10 frames per second, is too slow to really let scientists break down the action of the larynx. Enter the new, high speed MRI machine at the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois, working at 100 frames per second. It does the trick.
Above, you can see the new machine in action, as a volunteer sings ‘If I Only Had a Brain.’ Get more of the backstory over at the Beckman Institute.
Japanese scientists have developed a camera that confirms what we’ve long sensed: “wine glass shape has a very sophisticated functional design for tasting and enjoying wine.” That’s what Kohji Mitsubayashi, a researcher at the Tokyo Medical and Dental University, told Chemistry World.
It’s a little complicated, and I’d encourage you to read this Chemistry World article, but the upshot is this: Mitsubayashi’s team used a special camera to analyze “different wines, in different glasses – including different shaped wine glasses, a martini glass and a straight glass – at different temperatures.” And they found that “different glass shapes and temperatures can bring out completely different bouquets and finishes from the same wine.”
In the video above, you can see the new-fangled camera in action, demonstrating how wines at different temperatures (something that’s affected by the geometry of the glass) release different vapors. And those translate into different flavors. Get more on this at Chemistry World.
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We all know that saying about walking in another’s shoes, but what about seeing through another’s eyeballs? I’m not talking about perspective. I’m talking about color. As in I see it, and my husband doesn’t. At least not the way I do.
His coping mechanism is to challenge me whenever I refer to something as “blue.” To him, it’s grey, or brown, or some other non-blue shade. He wants me to see it that way too. To admit that I am wrong. For my part, I feel it’s important that the person to whom I’m married acknowledge that there’s no way my favorite bowl can be the color of cement, no matter what his cone cell receptors are telling him.
Perhaps he’d have better luck asking patient strangers to describe color to him, as blind-from-birth film critic Tommy Edison does below. Hmm. Color may be more subjective than my husband’s and my spectral stand-offs would suggest.
According to EnChroma, the company that designed and sells the color-correcting lenses the onscreen guinea pigs are seen wearing in the video up top, an estimated 300 million people suffer from some form of color blindness. Their glasses offer some of those three million a chance at seeing red in the literal sense. The video participants are, not surprisingly, blown away by their first encounter with a Crayola-colored world.
Having refreshed myself on the structures of the eye, I took the color blindness test on EnChroma’s website. I tested normal, having identified the hidden (or in my case not-so-hidden) numbers in a variety of virtual mosaics.
My color blind friend, Bob, agreed to take it too, provided I muzzle myself from offering the sort of commentary to which husbands are subjected. (Whaddaya mean you can’t see it!? It’s bright fuchsia!!!) He pulled a pretty heavy duty protan deficiency, otherwise known as red-green color blindness.
According to the manufacturer, EnChroma glasses are unlikely to color his world. The best he could hope for is a slight improvement after weeks of wearing.
Perhaps Bob will get a peek at something he hasn’t seen before. Like red. Others will experience a revelation. Meanwhile, an insufferable non-colorblind individual such as myself might get an effect akin to an Instagram filter. My colors will pop.
“Unfair,” say Bob and my husband. I have to agree. Should the Museum of Contemporary Art offer color-leeching glasses, I will wear them, even if the frames are really ugly. Until then, the video below provides some sense of what those of us who see the full range of color aren’t missing.
The Experimenters, a three-episode series that animates the words of scientific innovators, concludes with the reflections of Richard Feynman, the charismatic, Nobel-Prize winning physicist who did so much to make science engaging to a broader public. Feynman knew how to popularize science — to make the process of scientific discovery and exploration so contagious — because he learned from a good teacher: his father. You can learn more about that by watching the animated video above. And don’t miss the previous two episodes in The Experimenters series. They touched on the life and thought of Buckminster Fuller and Jane Goodall.
This visual curiosity beats the black/gold dress craze of last month. The video above asks you to look at a photo and decide whether you see Albert Einstein or Marilyn Monroe — two 20th century icons who look pretty much nothing alike. If you say Albert, your eyes are in good shape. If you say Marilyn, it’s apparently time to pay a visit to the optometrist.
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