Working with bacterias
BEING SEEN: VIDEO DIARIES OF TRANSGENDER YOUTH
it’s not every day you find out you’re in the new yorker! i’m honored!
“The YouTube channel for skylarkeleven, an upbeat, articulate F.T.M., takes viewers through his initial physical and psychological changes on testosterone, interviews with his mother, post-surgical reports on his mastectomy and hysterectomy, and his life as a college student and aspiring musician four years later.”
Infographic by Mezzmer
Mobile chicken coop
Andrea Dezsö’s Embroidered “Lessons From My Mother”
I met Andrea in San Diego last year and was immediately floored by her work. (Also, being 1/4 Romanian but still knowing almost nothing about Romania, I’m always fascinated by Romanian artists.)
From afar, the stitching and calming colors looked like the work of a doting grandmother, but up close there were images of vaginas, fetuses and a study of the myths that mothers told their daughters in Transylvania, Romania, where Ms. Dezsö, 39, was raised…
Working in the city has provided fodder for many of her ideas and for her embroidery series, which she stitched while traveling throughout the city. A woman stitching in public is viewed differently in different neighborhoods, Ms. Dezsö found.
“If I’m in Queens, people think I’m a traditional woman,” Ms. Dezsö said. “If I’m in Manhattan, it’s the hippest thing.”
See more of Andrea’s work here.
Desert Tortoises Can Hear Better Under Water
by Douglas Main
Desert tortoises, as their name suggests, don’t encounter many large bodies of water. But surprisingly, all turtles, even desert tortoises, can hear better underwater, recent research finds.
“If a desert tortoise decided to stick its head underwater, it could hear better,” said Katie Willis, a University of Maryland doctoral student and co-author of a study published online this week in the journal PLoS ONE.
The findings shed light on the evolution of turtles, suggesting they all share an aquatic ancestor, the researchers said.
Willis and her co-authors took MRI and CT scans of the inner ears of many different species of turtles. They calculated that in every case these relatively large, air-filled sacks inside the skull resonated, or vibrated, more powerfully underwater, where sound waves travel more quickly than in air…
(read more: Our Amazing Planet) (photo: Taylor Edwards)
The HighLine is a new 1.5-mile long public park built on an abandoned elevated railroad stretching from the Meatpacking District to the Hudson Rail Yards in Manhattan.
Inspired bythe melancholic, unruly beauty of this postindustrial ruin, where nature has reclaimed a once vital piece of urban infrastructure, the new park interprets its inheritance. It translates the biodiversity that took root after it fell into ruin in a string of site-specific urban microclimates along the stretch of railway that include sunny, shady, wet, dry, windy, and sheltered spaces.
Through a strategy of agri-tecture—part agriculture, part architecture—the High Linesurface is digitized into discrete units of paving and planting which are assembled along the 1.5 miles into a variety of gradients from 100% paving to100% soft, richly vegetated biotopes. The paving system consists of individual pre-cast concrete planks with open joints to encourage emergent growth like wild grass through cracks in the sidewalk. The long paving units have tapered ends that comb into planting beds creating a textured, “pathless” landscape where the public can meander in unscripted ways.
The park accommodates the wild, the cultivated, the intimate, and the social. Access points are durational experiences designed to prolong the transition from the frenetic pace of city streets to the slow otherworldly landscape above.
