This project caught my attention, and is an intersting idea for greening urban areas!

About this project

Here at BioSynC we truly value the scientific process!

Everyone wish us luck, and get ready to vote for us in the "People's Choice" category.

http://www.dmlcompetition.net/finalists.php

http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8584000/8584979.stm

Here are my top 5 reasons why the Darwin Center at the Natural History Museum in London is amazing.

1. The building is a giant cocoon.

2. A Climate Change wall: a "12m-wide interactive wall of screens show 100s of images and films about the beauty and diversity of the natural world." Can I have one in my living room please?

3. The Attenborough Studio: "a high-tech, atmospheric seated theatre with state-of-the-art audio-visual facilities" where you can interact with live animals. High Tech + Zoo = Awesome!

http://education.eol.org/educators/mammoths_mastodons

EOL has created educational species pages on the mammoth (Mammuthus), mastodon (Mammut americanum), giant short-faced bear (Arctodus simus), and two types of giant ground sloths (Megatherium americanum and Mylodontidae). In these pages you can find student friendly information on the biology and ecology of these species and unique fossil photos from the collections of The Field Museum, Chicago, IL, USA.

http://web.mit.edu/press/2009/visual-systems.html
http://scitedaily.com/building-3d-models-on-the-fly-using-a-webcam/
http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2010/01/21/realism_in_ui_design/

Also very cool: A visualization of the evolution of On the Origin of Species.

Biodiversity of the Day: A half-pony/half-monkey monster
(Isn’t it enough to know that I ruined a pony making a gift for you?)

HTML5 has a bunch of new features, but the spec won't become an official "W3C Recommendation" until about 2022 or so. A lot of the features of the specification, however, are already being implemented in browsers. "Which features, and in which browsers?", you ask? That's where the Modernizr library comes in.

I just put together a quick single-purpose drupal site for one of the researchers here at BioSynC (Torsten Dikow), and thought I'd do a walkthrough of that project here.

The objective:

He had a database of specimen data that he wanted to put up on a drupal site with a filterable google map showing where the specimens were collected.

Modules used:

For the import, I used the Node Import module and had Torsten send me a CSV file exported from his database. (Any delimited flat text file would work.) And for the mapping, I used the GMap module and Location module.

Click through to the full post for the end result and the step-by-step instructions.

Seamount Diary: November 2009