Fort Jefferson

Click to enlarge - very cool photo.

This is a coastal fortress on the Florida Keys, and the "largest masonry structure in the Western Hemisphere" (16 million bricks).

Note the walls are surrounded by a moat!

Good summary at Wiki, with more details and many more pix at this link.

The Roswell visitors return

Via The New Yorker.

Photos from this past week

For the weekend of the fourth, I traveled with family again to the National Eagle Center in Wabasha, Minnesota, where this fellow was in residence.  I should go in the winter sometime, because the open water at this segment of the Mississippi attracts eagles from miles around; one archive photo shows ~25 of them perched on one tree on the riverbank.

I spotted this other handsome fellow along the Wisconsin side of the river, while driving down the Great River Road.  I would suspect that's a very expensive rack on his head.

On the butterfly front, we are experiencing a second wave of Monarchs.  Our initial group flew away many weeks ago, and for a long time we saw no more new eggs in the garden, but recently some adults have arrived, oviposited, and grown to maturity; this week some of them were ready for release.

Out in the fields there appears to be a second wave of American Lady caterpillars as well.  I'm not sure how many brood cycles they go through at this latitude.  This caterpillar looks to be almost fully developed; it's interesting that she didn't pull any leaves together for her "nest," but rather just wove a mesh roof over her head.  Perhaps the leaves were so small that she couldn't approximate their edges.

Raising Snelson's "Needle Tower"

A rare chance to see how rigid the tower is in this video: the Hirshhorn Museum lay down the Needle Tower for some conservation work. In this video, 15 staff members up-right the tower once again.

Ingber Lab Animations

Revisited Don Ingber's videos hosted on the Wyss lab website, Harvard University.

Don Ingber himself, along with Bob Ezzell, produced these two:

Compression of a 6 strut tensegrity

http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewmedia/33/compression-of-6-strut-tensegrity-model

Compression of a "jitterbug" cuobactoahedron

http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewmedia/23/model-of-tensiondependent-stress-fiber-formation

Eddy Y. Xuan created the following animations. Start with his stunning "Architecture of life," an overlay of tensegrities and biological models; Xuan juxtaposes classic tensegrity structures such as a needle-tower mast with accurate data-based artistic renderings of cell cytomechanics.

http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewmedia/10/architecture-of-life

Tensegrity structure, nucleated, undergoing shear:

http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewmedia/36/sheared-tensegrity-cell-model-with-nucleus

Same nucleated tensegrity, stretching:

http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewmedia/35/stretched-tensegrity-cell-model-with-nucleus

And Molecular Geodesics Inc. animated some tensegrity fabrics:

Top view:

http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewmedia/28/collapsing-tensegrity-fabric-top-view

Same animation, viewed from an angle:

http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewmedia/27/collapsing-tensegrity-fabric-top-view

Retracting when released from its adhesive anchors:

http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewmedia/26/retracting-tensegrity-fabric-

Undulating:

http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewmedia/25/undulating-tensegrity-fabric

blogging lite...

as some of you can already tell, I've entered the fourth-of-july-holiday-family-activities phase, so blogging will be intermittent and less than intense for the next week.

many many thanks re the comments on the material stolen by the cake site.  I appreciate the expertise and advice and am pondering my countermove (if any).

back soon.  best holiday or summer wishes to all.

stan

A headless, skinned, gutted fish wiggles in the kitchen

"As I was preparing tea of 3 dog fish, which had been killed, skinned and gutted.They started to freak me out !!!"

I seem to remember something about dogfish (if that's what they are...) having very primitive nervous systems. I've never seen any activity remotely like this with Minnesota walleye...

Via Arbroath, where there's a second video taken an hour later -- and they're still wiggling!

Addendum:  Richard Hartmann and nfm girl point out that the applicatin of acidic lemon juice (??and salt) to a freshly dead specimen placed on aluminum foil probably creates the trigger for the movement.  This totally makes sense to me.  Perhaps I'll try it sometime....  (with a fish)

Update:  Full explanation, courtesy of "KickinPhresh" at Reddit:

The flopping action is actually the stimulation of local central pattern generators. (CPGs, yes, these are real things) A central pattern generator is a neural circuit which generates oscillatory patterns. Walking, respiration, slithering, and swimming (in the case of fish) are all driven by central pattern generators.

The general scheme of a central pattern generator is left/right and extensor/flexor antagonism. When any muscle moves, the opposing muscle will be simultaneously inhibited by an interneuron to allow for efficiency, and this motion with be 180 degrees out of phase with the contra-lateral side.

Fish have local central pattern generators up and down their side that coordinate this motion WITHOUT the brain. (Animals do too, remember what the beheaded chicken does?) The pattern is generated locally, and only modulated and switched on/off by the brain. The motion seen in the video is due to the activation of central pattern generator circuits. The motion in the video is likely due to the activation of CPG circuits by high sodium.