trans talks: Lana Wachowski

awesome Canadians: Commander Chris Hadfield

Chris Hadfield is coming home in two days via a Soyuz spacecraft.  He became the first Canadian to command the ISS when he arrived back on 21 December. Commander Hadfield has proven to be a great populariser of space exploration - he rocks at engaging audiences with science: 16,000+ You Tube subscribers with 860,000+ video views; and 773,000+ Twitter followers.

Canadian Space Agency

Twitter

YouTube

Wiki bio

guest shots: vultures by borneodaya@gmail .com

turkey vultures photographed in the Greater Vancouver Regional District

 

 

 

Classification of 'new world' vultures, including these turkey vultures, has vexed taxonomists for decades. Current thinking is that they belong in the order Accipitriformes along with hawks and eagles as diurnal birds of prey.

Photos by borneodaya@gmail.com. Used with permission. Contact the artist for high resolution copies.

trans talks: Dr. Carys Massarella

random sounds 55: Etheridge and lang

live, 1994

virgin's bower

 ^^Native to southern BC, Washington, Oregon and east of the Rockies to the Texas coast,  

Columbia Virgin's Bower (Clematis columbiana var. columbiana) often grows as a ground 

cover rather than as a climber in it's wild state.

random science 18: Maria Sibylla Merian 1647 - 1717

(bio from: The Royal Collection) Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) was one of the greatest artist-naturalists of her time. From childhood she had been fascinated by the life cycles of butterflies, and she made a close study of their transformations. She became a flower-painter and teacher in Nuremberg, Frankfurt and Amsterdam.... in 1699, at the age of fifty-two, Merian made an expedition to Surinam (Dutch Guiana) in South America... to study the indigenous flora and fauna in their tropical habitat. On her return to Amsterdam two years later, she began work on a lavishly illustrated book, the Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (‘The Metamorphoses of the Insects of Surinam’, published in 1705), depicting the life cycles of the region’s insects.

 all images from: Wikimedia Commons