RP FLIP, the Strangest Ship in the World

The U.S. Office of Naval Research owns a very strange piece of oceanographic equipment. It’s called the FLoating Instrument Platform (FLIP), conceived and developed by the Marine Physical Laboratory (MPL) at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California. FLIP isn't a ship, even though researchers live and work on it for weeks at a time while they conduct scientific studies in the open ocean. It is actually a huge specialized buoy. The most unusual thing about this ship is it really flips.

FLIP is 355 feet (108 meters) long with small quarters at the front and a long hollow ballast at the end. When the tanks are filled with air, FLIP floats in its horizontal position. But when they are filled with seawater the lower 300 feet of FLIP sinks under the water and the lighter end rises. When flipped, most of the buoyancy for the platform is provided by water at depths below the influence of surface waves, hence FLIP is a stable platform mostly immune to wave action. At the end of a mission, compressed air is pumped into the ballast tanks in the flooded section and the vessel returns to its horizontal position so it can be towed to a new location.

During the flip, everyone stands on the outside decks. As FLIP flips, the decks slowly become bulkheads and the bulkhead becomes the deck. Most rooms on FLIP have two doors; one to use when horizontal, the other when FLIP is vertical. Some of FLIP's furnishings are built so they can rotate to a new position as FLIP flips. Other equipment must be unbolted and moved. Some things, like tables in the galley (kitchen) and sinks in the washroom, are built twice so one is always in the correct position. The entire flip operation takes twenty-eight minutes. When FLIP stands vertically, it rises more than five stories into the air.

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Colorful Indian Street Art

Modern graffiti art is rare in India, but traditional hand painted street art is ubiquitous. From tea stall signs to election messages on walls, from mud flaps on rickshaws to whimsical messages behind trucks, from brashly painted deities to giant larger than life paintings of Bollywood heroes, everything in India is hand painted. Though very few India’s street artists are formally trained they have collectively evolved styles that are very unique and typical to Indian visual culture.

Today, I present a very talented photographer and designer Meena Kadri who has been following the Indian street art scene.

An undergrad in anthropology and Masters in design, New Zealand–born Meena Kadri has taught at institutes in China, New Zealand and at the National Institute of Design in India. Her photography and artwork have been exhibited in Glasgow, Delhi, Rome, Barcelona and New Zealand. She currently works as a Community Manager on OpenIDEO.

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Huge Swarms of Mosquitoes Invade Russian Village of Mikoltsy

No, these are not Starling Murmuration. They are mosquitoes, millions of them that descended upon the Russian village of Mikoltsy near Myadel, Belarus, in the Minsk region on May 14. The mosquitoes were so loud that even cars could not be heard. Photographer Dennis Sour who managed to capture this unusual phenomenon said that although the swarm looked threatening, they didn’t bite. Such activity of mosquitoes is probably caused by the weather.

According to Tatiana Zhukova, director of the Naroch Biological Station, this is a natural process. The lake is home to mosquito larvae. When the larvae grow into adult they leave the water and come to land, where they mate and lay eggs. Large clouds of mosquitoes gather every year but they are usually not noticed because the windy weather blows away the mosquitoes. But on quiet and sunny days, like that on Monday, they become more than apparent.

Weather is known to cause weird behavior among animals and insects. Last year in Pakistan, rising flood waters drove millions of spiders up into the trees where they wove webs completely cocooning the trees.

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Grass Portraits by Ackroyd & Harvey

Grass is like photographic paper which becomes pigmented upon exposure to light. The more intense the light exposure, the more intensely pigmented the grass becomes. By exposing plots of seedling grass to light through a custom-made negative, Surrey, England-based Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey makes the grass grow in different shades, from yellow to green creating unique portraits out of them. After a couple of weeks, when the growing process is complete faces or landscapes starts appearing in the grass.

Grass photography wasn’t invented by this duo. This technique was pioneer by photographer William Henry Fox Talbot and his photographs published in a book in 1844. Ackroyd and Harvey admit that their photography is greatly inspired by his work and ethos towards nature.

In a small room Ackroyd and Harvey experimented for the first time with imprinting an image onto a growing wall of grass. Projecting a negative image of the storeroom containing all the large neon letters for Le Fresnoy, onto a growing wall of grass, the results were astonishing. The grass revealed an extraordinary sensitivity to light and the ability to print a living photograph was first realized. Ackroyd and Harvey spent over a decade fine-tuning this process.

Unfortunately, just as miraculously as these images emerge, so do they degrade over a short period of time. Lately, the couple has been working actively with scientists at the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research in Wales to create 'stay green,' a form of grass that lasts longer than the regular material and is grown from a genetically modified seed.

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Fighting Protesters With Colored Water

You must have seen photos of protesters being doused with colored-water cannons by the police. Using water canon is understood as it’s an easy non-hazardous way to disperse mob, but why would police spray protesters with purple and pink water? Simple: to identify and arrest them later. Many water cannons on the market today come with a tank specially designed to store a semi-permanent colored dye. If police decide they want to "tag" protesters with the dye, they can press a button to inject it into the main water stream. Once the water cannon is trained on a crowd, anyone hit by the spray will be easily recognizable by police.

The most famous use of colored-water cannons took place in South Africa in 1989, when police soaked anti-apartheid activists with purple water. But in the ensuing chaos, one of the protester turned a water cannon back at police and towards the local headquarters of the ruling National Party. The headquarters, along with the historic and white-painted Old Town House, were doused with purple. The next day, a graffiti artist tagged the Old Town House with the phrase "The Purple Shall Govern," which soon became an anti-apartheid slogan.

Police spray Ugandan opposition party leaders with colored water during demonstrations in the capital Kampala, May 10, 2011. President Yoweri Museveni has vowed to crush the protests and blamed rising food and fuel costs on drought and global increases in oil prices. (James Akena / Reuters)

During the last 15 years, protesters in Hungary, Indonesia, Argentina, Malaysia, India and Israel have all been showered with colored water. In Uganda last year pink dye was employed to humiliate protesters. In Israel, Palestinian rioters were sprayed deep blue, the colour of the Israeli flag. The Hungarian police use green, the Koreans orange. Indian police is particularly fond of purple.

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10 Most Incredible Flower Festivals Around the World

Flower festivals are celebrated all over the world and almost around the year. Even as I write this one such festival is taking place in India, the Malabar Flower Festival, and another scheduled to start later this month. The Kegworth Flower Festival is underway in Derby, England, and a dozen other places are preparing for theirs in the coming weeks. Here we present 10 most fascinating display of flowers in different parts of the world.

Bloemencorso

The Bloemencorso, a Dutch word which means "flower parade", are held in many towns in the Netherlands and Belgium. In a parade of this kind the floats, cars and in some cases boats are magnificently decorated or covered in flowers. Each parade has its own character, charm and theme. Zundert holds the largest flower parade in the world.

The parade takes place on the first Sunday of September. The floats are large artworks made of steel wire, cardboard, papier-mâché and flowers. In the Bloemencorso Zundert, only dahlias are used to decorate the objects and it takes thousands of them just to cover one float.

The huge floats are made by twenty different hamlets and each of them consists of hundreds of builders, aged 1 to 100, who are all equally crazy about the bloemencorso. The older members of the hamlet are often responsible for planting and growing the dahlias, while the younger ones build the float in large temporary tents that are built exclusively for the event.

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Celebrity Pin Art Portraits by Philip Karlberg

Photographer Philip Karlberg has just created a unique shoot for Plaza Magazine, sculpting famous faces by simply using clever lighting and carefully arranged wooden pins. The wooden pin are sparingly used yet the faces he created are instantly recognizable.

A couple of months ago I came up with an idea I have had in mind for years. I just did not know what I could use it for. But then I did a test with sunglasses, and it really turned out great. So I sent an image with the test to Plaza Magazine, and a week later I started shooting. It was a real challenge to ‘sculpt’ the faces of some classic wearers of sunglasses. It took me 6 days to shoot the 6 faces, and around 1200 sticks were used.

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Poo Machine by Wim Delvoye

Wim Delvoye is a Belgian artist known for his inventive and often shocking and repulsive projects.

Cloaca, also known as the "poo-machine", is probably Wim Delvoye's most famous art installation. In 2000, he put together a complex machinery at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, Belgium, that mimics the action of the human digestive system and converts food in feces. Real food is dropped down a funnel into a meat grinder (simulating the teeth) twice a day. Then, viewers can follow the food as it makes its way through a series of glass containers containing human digestive juices and enzymes, which represent the various stages of digestion. At the end of the tract, the machine produces feces which are then vacuum-packed and sold in translucent boxes. It is told that the smell is so powerful that not many visitors can take it.

It took Wim Delvoye eight years of consultation with experts in fields ranging from plumbing to gastroenterology to construct the poo machine. When asked about his inspiration, Delvoye stated that everything in modern life is pointless. The most useless object he could create was a machine that serves no purpose at all, besides the reduction of food to waste.

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Amazingly Realistic Cakes by Debbie Goard

Debbie Goard is a cake designer who runs “Debbie Does Cakes”, a single-woman cake company based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Debbie has been crafting incredibly realistic looking cakes over the last two decades. Debbie enjoyed her work but didn’t initially believe that cake design was her calling, viewing it as a job versus a career. But after countless instances where her cakes were mistaken for real objects – most notably a life-sized chihuahua cake that compelled restaurant patrons to exclaim “Why is there a dog on a table?!” – she began to realize that maybe she had been denying her fate.

Debbie says: "The best part of my job is being challenged by unusual requests. This year I had a gallery show of cakes based on scenes from Horror movies including the rat on a platter from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane......and food from the kitchen in Poltergeist, the most outrageous of which was maggot-covered chicken."

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Bryce Canyon National Park

Bryce Canyon National Park is located in southwestern Utah in the United States. Bryce Canyon which, despite its name, is not a canyon but a giant natural amphitheater created by erosion along the eastern side of the Paunsaugunt Plateau. Bryce is distinctive due to geological structures called hoodoos, formed by wind, water, and ice erosion of the river and lake bed sedimentary rocks. Some of these hoodoos are up to 200 feet high. The red, orange, and white colors of the rocks provide spectacular views for park visitors.

For millions of years water has carved Bryce's rugged landscape. Water drips into the cracks in the rocks, freezes and expands thereby splitting the rocks - a cyclic process that occurs some 200 times a year. In summer, rainwater etches into the softer limestones and sluices through the deep runnels. In about 50 years the present rim will be cut back another foot.

Bryce lies at a much higher elevation than nearby Zion National Park and the Grand Canyon, varying from 8,000 to 9,000 feet (2,440 to 2,740 m), whereas the south rim of the Grand Canyon sits at 7,000 feet (2130 m) above Sea Level. Bryce Canyon National Park therefore has a substantially different ecology and climate, offering a contrast for visitors to the south west.

The Bryce area was settled by Mormon pioneers in the 1850s and was named after Ebenezer Bryce, who homesteaded in the area in 1874. The area around Bryce Canyon became a U.S. National Monument in 1923 and was designated as a national park in 1928. The park covers 35,835 acres and receives relatively few visitors compared to Zion National Park and the Grand Canyon, largely due to its remote location.

Photo credit

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