Ooh! Have you seen the new Ab-Ex postage stamps at the USPS? I just picked up a sheet and man, oh, man. They are they great. Love the enormous Pollock stamp. Motherwell, too. Other artists on the sheet are Hans Hoffman, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky, Clyfford Still, Joan Mitchell, Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman.
Interesting to see Gorky getting his due. (I think the de Kooning biography had a role to play in that, don’t you?) And I’m wondering, if they included Joan Mitchell, why they didn’t include Helen Frankenthaler, too? Had they chosen two women instead of just one it would have seemed less like a token.
In a tender new discovery scientists have learned that the solitary O. avoseta queen bee works alone to make these petal nests for individual eggs and larvae. More wonderful pictures on NPR. And nice story on eurakalert.
Butterfly Emerges from Stellar Demise in Planetary Nebula NGC 6302
“What resemble dainty butterfly wings are actually roiling cauldrons of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The gas is tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour — fast enough to travel from Earth to the moon in 24 minutes!”
There’s a brilliant happiness essay in today’s NYTimes, Oh, Sting, Where Is Thy Death? by Richard Conniff. It’s about the Justin O. Schmidt Sting Pain Index. Entomologist Schmidt, who’s worked with all kinds of stinging insects, expertly rates their stings by level and variety of pain.
According the the Schmidt scale, a honeybee sting is “like a matchhead that flips off and burns on your skin,” while a yellowjacket’s is “hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.”
While it’s normal to find insects, including clusters of ladybugs, at the top of Green Mountain in Boulder, Colorado it’s NOT normal to find so many.
Ladybug Tree
This singular tree, just south of the summit marker, was covered from tip to toe when I hiked up to check them out last Saturday. Entomologists are citing rain as the responsible party for this so-abundant-it-seems-magical event.
Holding Ladybugs
Unexpected gifts like this make life seem wonderful.
I’m not sure exactly how this works but the demo caught my eye. It’s a new video game in which physical properties are applied to crayon drawings. Mesmerizing, eh?
Incidentally, the image is divided into nine parts. According to Michael Schnieder “Nine is the final number having a specific identity… The ancient Greeks called nine ‘the horizon,’ as it lies at the edge of the shore before the boundless ocean of numbers that repeat in endless cycles the principals of the first nine digits.”
Portugese artist, Susana Soares is doing some science-y work. She’s developed a glass breath chamber for diagnosing disease with honeybees. You can read more here.
