Leonardo Da Vinci was one of the earliest known inventors that looked to nature for design inspiration. He studied the flight of birds and the wings of bats to draft plans for his infamous flying machine. This design approach is biomimicry, which finds solutions for human challenges from the sustainable systems and patterns of nature.
Daniel Barenboim, the Israeli-Argentinian maestro leads his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra this evening in an open-air concert in Berlin. He founded it in 1999 with the late Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said, as an experiment in co-existence. An orchestra alone cannot bring peace, as Mr Barenboim and the more than 100 musicians from Israel and Arab countries concede. But it can further mutual understanding and exemplify the necessary co-operation, patience and courage; the United Nations made Mr Barenboim “messenger of peace”.
By: Jaime Clifton, Research Curator
Back in May, Ed Hawkins shared his spiral climate GIF animating the rapid nature of global warming. This visualization made waves across the web as it communicated the threat of climate change in a way that people could better understand.
Suzanne Simard, a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia's Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences, has conducted and published hundreds of experiments in forests.
By: Jaime Clifton, Research Curator
Glancing out my basement office window this morning, I saw a small frog in the window well and then another a few feet away. I went to let them out a little later and they were on the ledge pressing against one another, one larger than the other. After releasing them, I wondered about the difference between people who care and those who don't and what causes the difference? And similar to the last blog, how have our research assumptions and the lens we use influenced our interpretation of the 'others' and their behaviour, how much do we miss?
While it’s not unusual for interspecies friendships to form in captivity, it’s not typical in the wild. Finnish photographer, Lassi Rautiainen, captured the remarkable bond between a young male bear and female wolf in a remote northern region of Finland. For 10 days straight, he witnessed their nightly encounters for dinner and hangouts into the early hours of the morning.
By: Jaime Clifton
A team of researchers at Yale University recently completed a study on urban centres from 3700 B.C. to 2000 A.D. They explored the global distribution of cities, their populations, and how they influenced their local and regional environments.