plop, plop, fizz, fizz

Swedish sound artist Alexander Höglund ordered different effervescent pain-relieving tablets from around the world and brought them to his recording studio in Malmö to press a limited run of vinyl records as a meditation on the fizzing sounds as the pills slowly dissolve.
The resulting album, Substance, is surprisingly soothing and perhaps a nice placebo—resonant with me as well for the morning ritual H calls my “vitamin water”—and makes me want to experiment a bit with the drinking vessel and water levels and makes me wonder how much of the experience one has to take in to achieve the desired result, like the impression that the angry hiss of tablet finding just a few drops of moisture instead of the full glass would probably begrudge any pharmacological efficacy.

båly bay

An undersea restaurant on the Norwegian southern coast whose ground-breaking caught our attention a year and a half ago is celebrating its official grand opening and welcoming diners. Designed by the Snøhetta group to suggest an emerging periscope, Under (that word also means a wonder in Norsk) hosts up to forty guests, for whom I hope the liminal experience makes a lasting and profound impression, and serves a dual purpose as a marine research laboratory when not serving meals. Learn more at the links above, including a peek at the menu and where to book reservations.

i’ve got a mule and her name is sal

In order to better protect the body of water and the ecosystem it supports from pollution, residents of Toledo on the shores of Lake Erie voted by a sizable margin to great it legal personhood, granting the lake (or some one championing it) the ability to sue (or be sued). The concept of a judicial personality (persona ficta) has been fraught and arguably abused in the past with the notion of lifting the corporate veil and giving businesses the rights, responsibilities and liabilities of the stakeholders (natural persons) but can in some cases be a force of good, this being the first under US jurisdiction.

styx

From the BBC Monitoring desk, we learn that years of neglect and crumbling infrastructure may be turned the Athens’ advantage and lead to the revival of an ancient and storied river that used to course through the city unimpeded but has been buried for decades after a post-war building boom.
Flowing down from Mount Hymettus and emptying into Phakeron Bay, the banks of the River Ilisos (Ιλισός, a demi-god, son of Demeter and Poseidon) was a favourite spot for Socrates and his pupils as well as being dotted with shires and temples to Zeus, Diana and Pan along its route. Rather than repairing the tunnel that contains the river, the plan is to return it to the surface and line its banks with a public park, emanating from the Pantheatnaic Stadium—the venue for the first modern Olympic Games in 1896.

peak curtains

Via Nag on the Lake, we learn about a couple of new and innovative IKEA undertakings that aim to augment and improve environmental conditions on a personal level which hopefully scales up.
Scheduled to go on sale in stores next year, the Gunrid drapes are made with a textile with a photocatalyst material that passively breaks down and absorbs air pollutants. The other development, based off the design of its toy boat the Småkryp, has already been pressed into service, trawling Deptford Creek in southeast London and collecting trash, twenty kilogrammes a go. This demonstration project is set to expand and the Good Ship IKEA are remotely controlled—as well as autonomous units—equipped with web cameras that provide a live-feed and shipping-report on conditions as they ply the waters. Much more to explore at the links above.

hungersteine

Weeks of drought conditions have precipitated significant drops in the water level in rivers and lakes across Europe, including the Elbe (Labe), where near the border between Germany and the Czech Republic at Děčín carved boulders, normally submerged, have been exposed. Known as hunger stones, the engravings mark historic droughts and thus failed harvests that have occurred over the past six centuries. While such memorials lends some perspective to our times, the extremes we are experiencing now and unprecedented in combination with intense temperatures that overtax the resilience of ecosystems when there’s no relenting.

darling, it’s better down where it’s wetter

Via Boing Boing, we are treated to a rather remarkable demonstration video from Marine Imaging Technologies’ new HYDRUS camera. An array of eight underwater cameras whose perspectives are selectable as if the footage were in real time surveys a reef off the Cayman Islands under natural, low light conditions, giving one a taste of what live-cams undersea could offer.

anthropocene

Via Nag on the Lake, we are invited to ruminate over the indelible mark that humans are leaving on the planet through insatiable greed and a feeling of entitlement to exploit Nature, which will result in a future world inimical and inhospitable to human life through anthropogenic climate change and destruction of vital ecosystems. This is not something that we can look away from and pretend is not happening.  Learn more about the filmmakers and their trilogy of documentaries here.

water column

Oceanographers in Queensland for the first time have produced a comprehensive, global map charting out the pristine, untouched areas of oceanic wilderness, which sadly reveals that there is only a small percentage not already befouled by mankind.
Researchers admit that they were expecting to find much broader expanses of unspoilt waters and ecosystems but these contrary results, testament to the endless assault that people are waging with careless pollution, climate change heating up waters and disrupting currents, over-fishing, sand-mining (the chief component of all the concrete and glass that goes into new construction) and intensive shipping, demonstrate the degree of negative, disruptive impact that humans have had above and below the waves.

residence hall

Under construction since the summer of 2016, the architects behind Urban Rigger—we learn via Plain Magazine—present an innovative concept to address the shortage of affordable student housing by creating floating dormitories along disused docklands in Copenhagen.
The potential for expanding sustainable dwelling places parallel to abandoned water transport infrastructure that line the world’s rivers and canals with extant but outmoded infrastructure is tremendous and would relieve a lot of pressure in places where space is already at a premium. Units, which would have applications for sheltering refugees as well, moored and unmoored as needed, are housed in upgraded shipping containers and include an array of amenities and harness power passively through solar panels and the passing current and tides.  Be sure to visit the links above for a whole gallery of the floating dorm and a video documentary.

froggy goes a-courting

Though taxologically distinguished from their amphibian cousins by behaviour rather than any agreed upon definition, most toads live their adult lives in dry woodlands and only return to the ponds where they hatched (a practise in the animal kingdom called natal site fidelity or philopatry) to spawn the next generation.
Their annual march down the valley goes directly through our yard but they encounter a big last-mile problem with a single lane road (read about a possible technological way to help mitigate such competition here). They’ve been managing the passage fairly well on their own but one does see a few flattened casualties but we helped out as many as we could to cross the street.

agalmatophilia

Though normally a highly sociable bird species, we learn that one handsome specimen of gannet called Nigel passed away happily at a ripe old age, surrounded by friends but sadly possibly on the cusps of something big that would have remedied what some are describing as terminal loneliness and would have certainly stripped him of his nickname of “No Mates Nigel.”  Conservationists in New Zealand wanted to reintroduce seabirds to Mana Island and in order to signal to passing flocks that it was safe to nest here (invasive species that might prey on hatchlings were removed from the island), they installed an ensemble of concrete, decoy gannets. Only Nigel alighted, however, in 2013 and became besotted with one particular stone figure which he courted (either to his great frustration or contentment—it’s hard to say) for the next five years. In February, Nigel’s body was found next to his beloved, just as more live gannets had begun to investigate the island.

antipodal

Amusing Planet brings us the story of the planet’s loneliest tree, a stunted Sitka spruce, and how this transplant is the perfect candidate to mark the separation of the Anthropocene geological epoch. While on a survey expedition, Uchter Knox, Earl of Ranfurly and Governor of New Zealand, visited the remote Campbell Island and was possessed for to plant a tree on this otherwise treeless piece of land, whose climate is hostile to anything growing above ground level.
The specimen that Knox choose, however, is indigenous to a strip of coast in British Columbia—from the opposite ends of the Earth almost—and while not exactly qualifying as an invasive species, the spruce having taken root but never matured to produce cones, it does demonstrate the effect that humans have on the environment. Moreover, the tree is a contender for a “golden spike,” a symbolic milestone like the ceremonial final spike driven that marked the completion of the North American transcontinental railroad that arraign other epochal transitions like the asteroid strike that ended the Paleocene and age of the dinosaurs sixty-six million years hence, as the tree is also a living record of humanity’s attempt to harness and weaponise nuclear fission and fusion. In order to demonstrate that the impact of nuclear testing was truly pervasive and global—that no one was out of range, no matter how isolated or removed—researchers took core samples of the Sitka spruce and found traces of the radioactive carbon isotope that is the signature sign of atomic explosions especially concentrated in the growth rings that corresponded to the mid-1960s when testing was at its peak.

7x7

clan of the ice bear: the outsized but possibly overlooked contributions that polar bears made to the development of evolution

hal 90210: Boston Dynamics is teaching its robotic dog to fight back, via Slashdot

one of these things is not like the others: Trump reportedly wears dress shirts with customised cuffs—as a reminder to himself and others, he is the forty-fifth president

tierrechte: Switzerland outlaws boiling living lobsters

we’ll leave the light on for you: a nice, retrospective profile of US National Public Radio essayist and humourist Tom Bodett

service feline: Puffy the cat with hypnotic powers

cultural icon: David Attenborough dance sensation, via Marginal Revolution

aquaculture

We are finding ourselves spoiled to distraction with Present /&/ Correct’s latest batch of postings which are all pretty visually stunning but we found ourselves especially taken with the photography of the award-winning, Hong Kong based Tugo Cheng whose keen eye captures (refined with a background in architecture) the contrasting and complementary symmetry and geometry of China’s coastal fishery operations. Find more images at the links above.

eau la la

To impart a bit of public luxury, the city of Paris is expanding its campaign of effervescent water (eau pétillante) fountains and will soon be installing at least one public convenience in each of the twenty arrondissements.
Though more subdued and functional than the historic Wallace drinking fountains that are scattered throughout the City of Lights (so called for being the first metropolis to be illuminated by night) the new ones are a modern complement to those iconic symbols of Paris cast by sculptor Charles-Auguste Lebourg at the behest of the eponymous philanthropist, Sir Richard Wallace, to make these watering places to supplement the utilities destroyed by the Franco-Prussian War and make drinking water as safe a beverage of choice so people weren’t expected to repair to alcohol, like since the Dark Ages when booze was the only non-lethal thing to imbibe, a little carbonation goes a long way. Expatriate Wallace gladly credited France with all his good fortune and wanted to repay his adopted home with every honour but also was sort of a teetotaler. It is hoped that this nudge will reduce plastic bottle use plus the need to shuffle bottled water around the world. Despite the off-putting news recently that there was a trace of Legionnaires’ Disease causing bacteria in my apartment building’s plumbing but it was immediately redressed, I’d gladly too drink water from the tap, so long as it was sparkling.

flussbau

We had not realised that the upper Rhein valley acquired its present appearance not by Nature but rather through extensive engineering until reading this profile on Johann Gottfried Tulla.
Of course many of the ancient palaces and fortifications that lend the river its romantic airs existed prior to Tulla’s excavation and construction that worked to straighten meandering sections, deepen the bed to improve navigation and remove numerous islets that began in the first decade of the nineteenth century, but the character of place was really transformed by the efforts to tame the marshlands and regulate flooding. Transportation infrastructure was the primary motivation and not tourism, but the manicured embankments did make for a good monumental showcase. Virtually unrecognisable from an ecological standpoint, Tulla’s landscaping and construction would be considered criminal today and an assault on the environment, it’s hard to imagine villages developing in swampier climes and malaria (which Tulla himself ultimately succumbed to) was rampant in the area. The efforts to mitigate flooding in the industrially-important cities of Koblenz, Bonn and Köln produced flooding further downstream, and presently work is being undertaken to re-naturalise and de-constrain the river as much as possible and allow it to choose its own course.

point source on a stick

Hoping to raise awareness of water pollution, a trio of art students in Taiwan collected sewage and wastewater run-off from a hundred different sites across the island, froze the samples in an ice pop mould and encased the results in resin. The display really has a bleakly beautiful æsthetic and is sure to heighten the profile of waterways in plight.

stockenten oder libellen

In Brandenburg not far removed from Berlin, there is a unique and protected natural reserve known as the Spreewald (the forested lands of the river that runs through the capital or Błota, the swamp, in the regional Sorbian language) shaped during the retreating phases of the last Ice Age and irrigated, kept from flooding at bay by a labyrinthine network of over one hundred and fifty “navigable” canals (Fließe) spanning over fifteen hundred kilometres in all.
Many visitors to the area avail themselves on a punting tour through picturesque villages like Lehde only accessible by water (with no motorised traffic allowed) but a lot of tourist stake out their own adventures in kayaks readily available for hire and paddle through the landscape on eye-level with ducks (deserving of their own ethnographic treatment) and various tribes of dragon-flies and privileged pushing along as silent as a cloud to some remarkably peaceful scenery.
We ended up taking little footage of our drifting through the reeds due to a bit of gun-shyness with our not water-proofed cameras that was probably for the best after all in terms of travel time not to mention sites we are hardly worthy of seeing, plagued by mosquitoes and my inferior piloting as we were, but it was an experience that we’d recommend without stint to anyone and we’re sorry for the limited opportunity to explore—we’ll have to return for a longer stay one day soon.

one million b.c.

Like forensics experts working on a case that went cold hundreds of thousands of years ago, archæologists are discovering that equipped with the next generation of genetic sequencers that there able to find bits of ancient hominid DNA when sifting through the sediment of practically any old cave.
No fossil evidence nor artefacts, though surely that’s pretty exciting to uncover, is required to trace how our direct ancestors and Neanderthal cousins spread across the continents and perhaps interacted. Surely this can be expanded to the whole of the plant and animal kingdoms, as well.  I wasn’t expecting that our machines were so finely calibrated to detect biochemical markers as so faint a trace, but this is sure to be revolutionary as palæontologists have already managed to extrapolate and reconstruct whole monstrous dinosaurs and more modest primogenitors of our kind out of just a fragment of a tooth or a little toe bone.