HURRICANE SANDY

Giant Vegetables at Harrogate Autumn Flower Show

The Harrogate Autumn Flower Show, one of Britain’s most prestigious gardening shows, took place last weekend – September 14 to 16. The show offered thousands of gardeners, landscapers and horticulturists a chance to celebrate this year’s successes and look forward to the new growing season. The show featured the battle of the giants where gardeners from across Britain show off colossal vegetable and flower crops in hopes of earning a coveted award from the judges.

Weightlifter Jonathan Walker prepares to lift a marrow weighing 119lbs 12oz (54.3kg) above his head after it won the Giant Marrow Class in the Harrogate Autumn Flower Show. The marrow was grown by Peter Glazebrook from Newark who took six first prize awards in the Giant Vegetable classes at the show.

Giant vegetable grower Peter Glazebrook with his world record onion. It weighed in at 18lbs 1oz (8.16kg), beating his previous world record by almost two ounces. He won all six classes in the giant vegetable competition during the show at The Great Yorkshire Showground.

Peter Glazebrook wheels in his prize-winning giant cabbage, which weighs 81lb 6oz (36.74kg)

Visitors look at carrots in the Giant Vegetable competition.


Displays of seasonal fruits and prize winning apples.

The Moving Island of Schiermonnikoog

Schiermonnikoog is a small island off the coast of the Netherlands that has been continuously moving to the south and the east, due to the combining effect of tidal current, prevailing wind and the sea. Just 762 years ago the island lay roughly 2 km to the north of its present position, and it had a significantly different shape. If you work out the math, that is 2.62 meters per year, on average.
The island doesn’t actually move. The sea erodes the island at one end and deposits fresh slit on the other causing the island to shift position and assume a slightly different shape each passing day. There is not much to see in the pictures though and my searches for satellite images documenting the movement of the island drew a blank.

The name ’schiermonnikoog’ is derived from the monks who used to live on the island. "Monnik" means "monk" and "schier" is an archaic word meaning "grey", referring to the colour of the monks' habits. "oog" translates as "island". The name Schiermonnikoog therefore translates as “island of the grey monks.”
The island is small – measuring 16 km by 4 km wide and is the site of the Netherlands' first national park. The only village on the island is also called Schiermonnikoog, and about a thousand people permanently reside on the island. Because the island is small and flat, residents have to take out a special license to keep their own cars and only 200 islanders own cars here, making the few streets the island have virtually car-free.
Tourism is the main source of income on Schiermonnikoog. The island houses a campground, a ferry pier, a tidal harbour for small vessels and approximately 15 hotels and hundreds of vacation houses and apartments. Up to 300,000 people visit the island every year, staying in the 5,500 beds available in holiday homes, apartments and hotels.

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Horizontal Waterfalls in Talbot Bay, Australia

The Horizontal Falls or Horizontal Waterfalls are located in the Talbot Bay in the Kimberley region of western Australia. Although called waterfalls, this natural phenomenon actually consist of a pair of openings or gorges in the McLarty Range through which massive amount of water are pushed by tidal waves, creating temporary waterfalls up to 5 meters high. When the tide changes, so does the direction of the flow.
The twin gaps are located on two ridges running parallel approximately 300 meters apart. The first and most seaward gap is about 20 meters wide and the second, most spectacular, gap is about 10 meters wide. When the rising or falling tide occurs, the water builds up in front of the gaps faster than it can flow through them. This in turn creates an amazing waterfall effect as the water rushes through and then down to the lower levels on the other side of the ridgelines. The process is reversed and it is repeated again in the opposite direction.

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The tides in this area have a 10 meter variation which occurs over six and a half hours from low tide to high tide and vice versa. On a slack tide it is possible to drive boats through the two gaps to the bay behind.
The waterfall phenomena has been described by David Attenborough as "one of the greatest natural wonders of the world".

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Terrifying Yet Beautiful Pictures of Fire Tornadoes

Terrifying Yet Beautiful Pictures of Fire Tornadoes

Posted by Kaushik at 9:06 AM

Film-maker Chris Tangey of Alice Springs Film and Television was filming a wildfire in Curtin Springs, Australia, when a small twister touched down causing it to build into a spinning flame. Just 300-meters away was a 30-meter high fire swirl which 'sounded like a fighter jet' despite there being no wind in the area.
The so called fire tornado or fire whirls generally form when superheated air near the surface of a large fire zone rises rapidly in an airmass where sufficient horizontal or vertical vorticity (spin in the atmosphere) is also present. Much like a dust devil or whirlwind, the rapidly rising air above a wildfire can accelerate and turn the local vorticity into a tight vertical vortex, now composed of fire instead of dust.
Most of the largest fire tornados are spawned from wildfires. They are usually 10-50 meters tall, a few meters wide, and last only a few minutes. However, some can be more than a kilometer tall, contain winds over 160 km/h, and persist for more than 20 minutes. The tornado that Tangey caught on camera reportedly lasted for more than 40 minutes.

An extreme example of fire tornado is the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake in Japan which ignited a large city-sized firestorm and produced a gigantic fire whirl that killed 38,000 in fifteen minutes in the Hifukusho-Ato region of Tokyo. Another example is the numerous large fire whirls (some tornadic) that developed after lightning struck an oil storage facility near San Luis Obispo, California on April 7, 1926, several of which produced significant structural damage well away from the fire, killing two. Thousands of whirlwinds were produced by the four-day-long firestorm coincident with conditions that produced severe thunderstorms, in which the larger fire whirls carried debris 5 kilometers away.



Video of the fire tornado Chris Tangey recorded below.

Fire tornado at a training fire Long View Fire Dept. Photo credit

Fire tornado just south of Seminole, Okla., during the December wildfires in 2005. Photo credit

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A popular photo of unknown origin.

A fire tornado captured on camera on the night of 14 September 2004 near the southern Argentinean town of Ushuaia. Photo credit

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The bee orchid

A species of orchid from Israel that looks and smells like a female bee tricks male long-horned bees into pollinating them.

What does it feel like to be bitten by a black widow spider?

It was a sunny Sunday morning in the summertime of 2006 in Redwood City, California, and the Mrs. was back East with her gal pals for a weekend of recharging her batteries and reconnecting with old friends.

I was holding down the fort with the munchkins (boys 4 and 1 3/4), and in the interest of creating a morning diversion, we began to make preparations for a walk in the local hills.  Sunscreen on, snacks loaded, water filled, stroller out - you know the drill.

I grabbed a pair of old shoes from the garage, and hastily threw them on over my bare feet, and continued my charge around the house to build momentum to get out the door.  About a minute later, I realized that there was some wiggling in the toes of my right shoe, and just as I was about to take my shoe off, I felt a ***** on my 2nd toe - not painful, but a bit annoying.

I took my shoe off on the outside steps, and dumped it out, discovering a jet black inky spider with a body the size of an engorged pea.  I instructed my son to grab his bug-catcher which was conveniently nearby, and I dumped the spider into the clear container for inspection.

Imagine my horror when I rotated the container and got a glimpse of a distinct reddish/brown hourglass figure on the belly of the black black spider.  OK, I reasoned, I'd lived in those parts for the better part of nearly 4 decades, and I'd NEVER heard of anyone seeing (let alone getting bit by) a black widow spider, so presumably this is just a copy-cat spider that is harmless.

Well, I suppose before heading out for a walk, I ought to be safe and call the urgent care and see what they think.

After being reassured that there was "no way" I had been bitten by a black widow, the attending physician confessed that she was looking at information on Google (!!!) and started to ask me questions about what it looked like.

After 20 minutes on the phone (with the boys starting to melt down), and getting on the Internet myself, I began to experience my first tell-tale symptom -- a slight cramping in my lower right leg.

At this point, the doctor changed position entirely, and strongly recommended that I get medical attention immediately.

OK, kids, time to pile into the wagon.  We're heading to the ER.

Ten minutes later, I walked through the doors at the ER at Sequoia Hospital in Redwood City, CA, with holding the hands of my two boys, along with the bug catcher.

"30 minutes ago, THIS spider, bit me on THIS toe, and now THIS leg is cramping."

The otherwise bored doctors and nurses who were numbed by their predictable flow flow of blunt trauma, heart palpitations, and other mundane dramas rapidly appeared out of the woodworks and collectively shouted a big "Yah!!!".  This, they thought, was soooo cool.

Note: Capturing and bringing in the actual spider was by far the smartest thing I did all day, as it brought me instant celebrity and credibility, as the bite itself was completely and somewhat disappointingly unremarkable.

It was delicately but firmly suggested that I make some phone calls and line up some child-care, as soon I'd be all jacked up full of morphine and other things that would make me a less-than effective father.

I was able to get ahold of my neighbor friends, who gamely dropped what they were doing, and came to pick up my boys.  We had a long discussion about how to orchestrate the movement of cars and carseats, including me driving their car home, which was completely naive given how F-d up I was about to become.

By now the cramping had migrated into my groin area, and I was beginning to wonder what was in store.  I was told that an anti-venom does indeed exist, but it's kept in Arizona, and is highly toxic in and of itself, so they don't fly that in unless I was otherwise at risk (toddler, elderly, poor immune system).  So, my fate was to get jacked up on opiates and survive the onslaught of the neurotoxin from the spider which would otherwise cause tremendous pain and cramping for the next 6 hours.

At this point I texted (SMS) my wife (who was on her way to the airport to come home from Boston): "Hey there. I'm in the ER.  Got bitten by a black widow.  Love ya."  So much for a relaxing end to her fun getaway.

Several hours of mental bliss later, I was discharged from the ER, and picked up by my Dad, who took me to the pharmacy to pick up my meds (vicodin for pain, muscle relaxants). I was slurring words, and otherwise out of it, and happy to get home to relax.

The next 48 hours were literally a blur.  I barely remember any of that time, and mentally, lost track of days and hours.  It freaked my wife out when I said I thought my Mom had spent the night so I guess I was hallucinating.
We assumed at the time, that the meds were the culprit, but now later, we're pretty sure the delerium was a byproduct of the neurotoxins.

The medical literature suggests that recovery happens within 3 to 5 days.  Nights 3 and 4 and 5 were complete disasters for me.  For some completely unknown reason, I was sweating profusely at night.  As in, literally soaking through my sheets and changing my sheets 3 times on one night and twice the next.  Wet, not damp.

Specifically, I was leaking sweat out of my legs.  I'd wipe them off, and they'd bead up immediately.  It was freaky, to say the least.

Also, I was having trouble concentrating, or being coherent for up to 5 days.  Sleep was next to impossible, and I was getting worn down. I later learned my wife was doing her own Google searches to see what the risks were of permanent brain damage. And, I think my life insurance was promptly renewed shortly thereafter.

The doctors switched me over from vicodin to valium (one makes the pain go away, one makes you not care about the pain).  Finally, I got a decent night sleep on Thursday, and a good one on Friday.  I awoke on Saturday morning (Day 6) feeling like a human being for the first time, and proceeded to clean the garage like a freakin' maniac.

Upon further inspection of my shoe in question, I discovered that the spider was harboring an egg sac inside my shoe.  How rude of me to put my foot in there.  She was actually quite restrained in waiting so long to bite me, and it turns out that these deadly creatures are incredibly passive.  This is why it's so rare that a bite happens, as in fact, I discovered, these spiders are everywhere in the area where I was living.

If this happens to you, hang in there, and ride it out.  You will get better, but it takes some time.

10 Things You Probably Didn't Know About Cockroaches

Cockroaches.  Just the word makes you cringe, doesn't it?  Well, perhaps if I share some recently discovered social traits of cockroaches, you might, well, understand them better.... Though I'm not saying you will necessarily welcome them into your home...

Some interesting findings from research published by French and U.S. biologists in the journal Insect Sociaux (Social Insects)...

Cockroaches hang out with their families: image via wix.com1. Cockroaches may be creepy to humans, but they are actually quite sophisticated social creatures and pretty friendly too.
2. Of the 4000 or so species of cockroach, only about 25 have adapted themselves to human environments. (Be thankful for that.)
3. Though not formally recognized as a eusocial insect, which is the highest level of socialization among insects, the cockroach has several attributes of those insects, including family recognition and family living arrangements with generations of the same family living together.
4. Cockroaches form close-knit egalitarian societies and make communal decisions for the greater good.
5. The termite, which is considered to be eusocial, is now known to be a direct descendant of the cockroach.  (A new way to look at termites.)
6. The main difference between eusocial (bees, ants, termites, etc.) insects and egalitarian insects like cockroaches, is that eusocial insects have a queen female that is the only female allowed to mate, whereas in egalitarian insects, any member can mate.
7. Cockroaches use their body chemicals (cuticular hydrocarbons) to communicate to others about where the best food can be found or where they can safely seek shelter for the day.

Several generations of a cockroach family live and eat together: image via stopbuggn.com

8. When forming a decision about the best place to find shelter, all members of a 'clan' will make the same choice. They even make the same decisions on where to get their food.
9.  Lone cockroaches are rare. Young cockroaches need to be in close contact with other young'uns to mature properly. Isolation can result in an inability to join a group later in life and in an inability to mate.  Additionally, cockroaches can become physically sick and die prematurely from isolation syndromes.
10. Cockroaches lay a trail of feces (not attractive to human olfactory senses) by which others can identify relationships - "kin recognition."  Among other things, kin recognition keeps roaches from mating with other relatives.  (Guess that means they are smarter than some humans!)

Dr Mathieu Lihoreau of the National Centre of Scientific Research in Rennes, France, who led the cockroach studies, believes that further research on cockroach social behavior will provide greater information about the social evolution of animal, and possibly even human, societies.

7 Most Incredible Skyscrapers Being Struck by Lightning

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The tallest building in the world being struck by lightning.
All images are copyrighted and used with permission of the photographers.
With a deafening sound, the lightning bolt strikes the building’s antenna, while onlookers instinctively cover their ears and scramble for safety. Meanwhile, visitors inside the giant skyscraper are torn between grabbing their cameras and running for cover, shocked by the reality of being trapped within a building being struck by lightning...

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Lightning striking the skyscrapers of Chicago.
What exactly happens when lightning strikes a skyscraper? Let's take the Empire State Building as an example. The iconic Art Deco tower – a veritable old-fashioned gentleman among today’s skyscrapers – was, according to some sources, designed as a giant lightning rod from the day it opened its doors in 1931. In fact, scientists from the American Institute of Electrical Engineers recorded every single one of the Empire State Building’s lightning strikes between 1934 and 1937 on film, in order to determine the speed with which lightning strikes (10,000 miles per second, apparently, although that figure is still open to debate). The recordings continued as, in the words of one weather blog, “scientists measured some of the very first oscillographic readings of lightning currents there using tethered balloons in the 1930s, 40s and 50s.”

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This fantastic image of the Empire State Building being hit by lightning was taken on June 9, 2011. A violent thunderstorm passed through the city that brought torrential rains and hail. Whether this marked the last storm of spring or the first of summer, it seems the weather gods were out to give New Yorkers some excitement!
In a nutshell, skyscrapers are steel cages comprising various compartments that divide and subdivide the energy from a lightning strike until it is safely guided to the ground where it spreads out. A skyscraper thus functions in a similar way to a Faraday cage – a shield or enclosed space made of conducting material – that, like a plane, protects people from natural electric sparks such as lightning. Safe in this knowledge, sit back and relax while you enjoy these images of seven of the world’s tallest and most iconic skyscrapers being struck by lightning, shown in order of their height.

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7. Q1, Surfers Paradise, Queensland, Australia

As well as surfing, theme parks and hot air ballooning, visitors to Australia’s popular Gold Coast can add another attraction to their thrill list: going to the suburb of Surfers Paradise and watching lightning strike the Q1 landmark – while snugly inside it. Inspired by the Olympic torch and standing at a whopping 1,058 feet (322.5 m), the Q1 is the world’s fifth tallest residential building. As one source claims: “Visitors like to lay out on the floor during thunderstorms to watch lightning strike the Q1's impressive 97.7 meter spire.” Judging by this incredible image, it must be one heck of an experience, and certainly not one for the faint of heart!

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6. The Center, Hong Kong

We’re lucky to be able to include in our list this award-winning photograph, which was featured in the 2010 National Geographic Photography Contest. It truly is a spectacular capture of lightning striking Hong Kong’s The Center during a storm on September 13, 2009. What makes the lightning and the skyline appear almost pixelated is not a camera error but a reflection of the lightning bolt in the raindrops on the window. At 1,135 feet (346 m), The Center is no. 31 on the list of the world's tallest buildings.

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5. Empire State Building, New York City, NY, USA

The 1,454-foot (443-m) Empire State Building is struck by lightning about 23 times a year. Surprising, perhaps, that this number is not higher, given the building’s prominence on the city’s skyline and the number of thunderstorms that occur in New York – to say nothing of the fact that the building’s antenna was designed as a lightning rod!
In this picture from August 19, 2011, we can see the Empire State Building lit up in the Indian tricolor (most likely in honor of the Indian Independence Day on August 15) and being hit by lightning. Stuck at New Jersey's Hoboken train and bus terminal because of the severe thunderstorm, photographer Sugata Banerji made the best of the situation and set up his tripod. Good thinking!

Another bolt of lightning striking the Empire State Building, this time on August 8, 2011 during another severe storm. On the night of April 12 of the same year, the building was even struck three times in a row during a bad thunderstorm. So much for the old saying that lightning never strikes twice! It sure does, so be aware!

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4. Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower), Chicago, IL, USA

Here’s an image of the Willis Tower being struck by lightning on April 4, 2010. At 1,451 feet (442 m), the building formerly known as the Sears Tower is the ninth tallest skyscraper in the world and is thus bound to have its fair share of lightning strikes. A couple of years before this, when an observer had asked how the antenna could withstand the lightning, Tom Skilling, WGN-TV's chief meteorologist, offered a helpful explanation. Skilling said: “The antenna is not being hit directly – the appearance not withstanding. Instead, a corona of charged ions which pools up around the antenna is interacting with a charge descending from above to give off the light we see in these lightning strikes.” Interesting!

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3. Petronas Towers, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Number six on the list of world’s tallest skyscrapers, the Petronas Towers have a height of 1,483 feet (452 m). Like the other skyscrapers in this article, they too see their fair share of lightning strikes over the course of a year – with this photograph taken on April 29, 2010. Though the reflection of the room and its lights on the window pane takes away a bit from the image, the dramatic, sideways forking of the lightning against the towers more than makes up for it. For a real-time feel of the split-second event, make sure to check out this video.

Being Struck by Lightning

2. Taipei 101, Taipei, Taiwan

Our number two is the number five when it comes to its standing among the world’s tallest skyscrapers, at an impressive 1,670 feet (509 m). This incredible lightning strike – which seems to be directly attacking the tower’s antenna – was captured on August 3, 2007. The Taipei 101 has also earned the moniker of world’s tallest green building, due to its recycled water system. Now if only the energy of that lightning strike could somehow be converted and used for the building’s power needs…

y Lightning

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1. Burj Khalifa, Dubai, UAE

It's fitting that the Burj Khalifa in Dubai is number one on our list because, standing at a colossal 2,717 feet (828 m), it is also the tallest skyscraper on Earth. In this image, we can see two bolts of lightning seemingly crashing at once into the top of the building against an amazing purple sky.