This new Hubble image, captured and released to celebrate the telescope’s 23rd year in orbit, shows part of the sky in the constellation of Orion (The Hunter). Rising like a giant seahorse from turbulent waves of dust and gas is the Horsehead Nebula, otherwise known as Barnard 33.This image shows the region in infrared light, which has longer wavelengths than visible light and can pierce through the dusty material that usually obscures the nebula’s inner regions. The result is a rather ethereal and fragile-looking structure, made of delicate folds of gas — very different to the nebula’s appearance in visible light.
Where these gentle giants are a part of the family
These human and nature affection images are from the shadow of Kenya’s Mount Kilimanjaro, the world's tallest animals are free to roam their 140-acre estate and are regular visitors at their English-style manor owned by Tanya and Mikey Carr-Hartley that is built in the colonial era. Every day shortly before 9 am, the mammoth beasts stroll up to the house and poke their heads through the windows and doors in search of morning treats. Married owners Tanya and Mikey Carr-Hartley literally share their dining table with them. And now the pair are sharing the mesmerizing experience with the outside world - by opening the manor gates to guests at the world’s only giraffe hotel. Mr and Mrs Carr-Hartley, both 38, spent their childhood living close to the house in Nairobi and have both always been fascinated with the graceful giants.In the shadow of Kenya’s Mount Kilimanjaro, the world's tallest animals are free to roam their 140-acre estate and are regular visitors at their English-style manor built in the colonial era.
Every day shortly before 9 am, the mammoth beasts stroll up to the house and poke their heads through the windows and doors in search of morning treats.Married owners Tanya and Mikey Carr-Hartley literally share their dining table with them. And now the pair are sharing the mesmerizing experience with the outside world - by opening the manor gates to guests at the world’s only giraffe hotel. Mr and Mrs Carr-Hartley, both 38, spent their childhood living close to the house in Nairobi and have both always been fascinated with the graceful giants. Mrs Carr-Hartley said:
‘Mikey and I grew up near to this manor house when we were children.‘We are both third generation Kenyans who have always wanted to work in conservation.‘Mikey’s family have been involved in the protection of animals for many generations.‘His granddad was even involved in the relocation of giraffes as far back as the 1930s. Moving the giraffes ensured their protection and continued existence.‘When the house came up for sale, we jumped at the chance to buy it as we had always dreamed of one day owning it.‘We are now absolutely overjoyed to be involved with the protection of this very endangered species.
Tall order: A rare Rothschild giraffe joins the breakfast table at the Carr-Hartley family's manor house in Kenya
High tea: Tanya Carr-Hartley feeds one of the tall mammals - one of eight on their estate - from a window
Giraffic park: A gentle giant towers in front of the English-style manor house which guests can pay to stay in
The extraordinary scene was captured on camera by Brit Mark Bowler in the Addo Elephant National Park, South Africa. Mr Bowler, a conservation biologist from Edinburgh, Scotland, was just two feet away when the calf fell. A little elephant is clinging on to its mothers trunk as it tries to climb up a steep bank - but slips through its mothers grasp and end up with all four legs and trunk flailing in the air. The youngster had been lifted into the air by his mum when he struggled to scale the tricky obstacle but fell into the dust rather unceremoniously. Eventually, it stumbled back up on its feet and the mother elephant led it to a smaller and more manageable part of the bank to climb.
Rumble tumble: The calf is falling with its legs in the air helplessly looking up towards its mother
The 37-year-old Mark said: 'There were about 50 in the herd. They were running as they crossed the road and went up the bank, which was about waist high. ‘The babies struggled to get over and the mothers started to get a bit concerned - there was lots of deep rumbling and ear flapping going on.
The little calf reach for its mother as she wraps her trunk around it to carry it up the bank when it struggled to scale the tricky obstacle.
Slipping: Even with its mothers extra help, the little elephant calf loses its footing and slides down the bank
‘I admit I was scared but there was nowhere I could go - my car was surrounded. ‘There was a very small elephant, which needed help getting up the bank. The mother tried pulling the calf up from the top but she then dropped it. ‘At one point the baby was with all four legs in the air, mouth open and trunk flailing. It was certainly struggling but after it fell the mood seemed to change and it looked sulky rather than excited.
The calf looks a bit dazed as he lays in the dirt after falling over following his climbing. The scene was captured inAddo Elephant National Park, South Africa.
‘After this the mother became more concerned with comforting her offspring than the rush to get up the bank. ‘She eventually changed her tactics and led the baby to a less steep route.’ He added: ‘It all happened very fast and the adrenaline was pumping. I have never seen anything quite the same before or since. ‘I can almost feel the deep rumble and my own heart rate going up even when I look at the images now.’
After giving up on pulling her baby up the bank, the mother steps down and takes the calf around to an easier route (courtesy: dailymail)
Here they come just a walkin’ down the beach… Lt. Dave Bingham was on patrol when a “lobster walk” happened in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea. The lobster walk is really a neat thing to see. You can see thousands of lobsters walking in the shallows along the shore. Officer Bingham is a scuba diver and thought misplaced lobsters may be walking in the wake of Tropical Storm Isaac. Source: Florida Marine Patrol
Watch This Very Interesting Video Narrated by David Attenburrough
Having lived through one of the worst disasters imaginable, Jonathan M. Katz argues that the Haitians offer a good example of how to behave.
The superstorm blasting its way through the most densely populated region of the United States is leaving its predicted trail of destruction. Floodwaters have inundated city blocks, and storm tides are pulsing up rivers and canals. Understandably nervous people in the path of the ex-tropical menace are beginning to speculate about what might come next. On Monday, the Drudge Report issued its siren warning: “Gangs Plan Hurricane Looting Spree Via Twitter.” Business Insider intoned: Prepare For a Wave of Looting After Hurricane Sandy. “If police reports following Hurricanes Katrina and Irene are any indication, the East Coast is in for a crime wave,” writer Abby Rodgers warned.
Haitians use diggers to erect an emergency crossing after a bridge was washed away after heavy rains from hurricane Sandy. Several days after Sandy passed close by, Haiti is still suffering from severe flooding. Thousands there were already living in tents following the 2010 earthquake
Local residents wander amidst the ruins of their hometown hours after the earthquake that hit Port-au-Prince, Jan. 13, 2010. (Juan Barreto / AFP / Getty Images)
While I can’t offer much solace about the storm surge, I do have good news about the impending social meltdown: it’s a myth. Fears of wanton lawlessness, panic, and doom follow most every natural disaster, but they almost never come true. In fact, the myth itself is potentially a greater danger—prone to impeding efforts when help is needed most. I know this, because I lived though one of the worst disasters imaginable.
On Jan. 12, 2010, I was inside my house in the hills above Haiti’s capital when the floor dropped and the walls began to crumble. In less than a minute, the deadliest earthquake ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere tore through a metropolitan area of three million, destroying infrastructure, knocking out an already feeble power grid, impaired an already fragile food supply, and killed an estimated 316,000 people. Countless more were injured or made homeless.
As people around the world rallied to Haiti’s aid, they brought the same fears that Drudge and Rodgers are stirring now: that survivors—especially, as the myth often has it, poor, black survivors—are bound to panic, loot, or react with violence. This fear over looming anarchy is part of what prompts authorities to favor a military-led response. At home, that means mobilizing thousands of National Guard units. In Haiti nearly three years ago, that concern is much of the reason that the U.S. military was the leading presence in the quake zone for months after the aftershocks subsided—22,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines deployed at the height. A panic over impending chaos also fueled the civilian response, with aid groups pleading for donations on exaggerated descriptions of a disaster zone with “no food” and “no water,” prompting kind-hearted donors to flood the zone with an uncoordinated barrage of bottled water, latex gloves, and in one weird case, wooden hand puppets.
Yet for those of us who called the quake zone home, it was a very different experience. The sense of community in Port-au-Prince didn’t just unravel, but became stronger in those weeks after the quake, with people across Haiti putting aside vicious political squabbles and deep-rooted differences of race and class to focus on the immediate challenges of survival and coping with tremendous loss. Though authorities and many of my colleagues in the media fixated and exaggerated isolated pockets of presumed looting, lawlessness was isolated. Inexperienced journalists spread reports of “rioting”—often little more than pushing and shoving—at aid distributions made far more chaotic by pepper-spraying U.N. soldiers than malice. Many of the most widely reported events involved people just trying to dig food out of fallen buildings.
I don’t mean to make the situation in Haiti sound benign. Life in the quake zone was hard, and got harder as time went on. But that had far more to do with Haiti’s chronic want and the unnerving drumbeat of constant aftershocks than any lack of social cohesion. Yes, there were gangs in Port-au-Prince fighting low-intensity turf wars in the slums. And one bright morning, I ran across a pair of young men bleeding in the street, freshly executed with a shot to the back of their heads—by whom, no one would say. But such crimes were, if anything, more rare than they had been before the quake. And those two men killed? Witnesses said they had been caught stealing.
As those of us in Haiti found after the earthquake, when survival is on the line, the people around you are all you’ve got.
Indeed, law-and-order authorities found themselves with little to do. Most of the U.S. troops, sent to contain a societal meltdown, never left their ships. Hard-hatted foreign rescuers got the headlines, but due to inflated security concerns concentrated on a few high-profile sites and rescued only a handful of people. Haitian neighbors helping one another carried out the vast majority of rescues, ad hoc. And while the relief effort did fill crucial supply gaps and provided some lifesaving aid, the price of panic was an uncoordinated, uneven, sometimes paranoid response. The top-down “command-and-control” structure overcentralized the effort, leaving whole cities unattended for days while panicking responders duplicated efforts and wasted resources. The groundwork for a long-term recovery was botched. In Haiti, where there are still no federal or local agencies competent to deal with that magnitude of a catastrophe, the result has been more suffering. This month in Haiti alone, Hurricane Sandy's floods and winds, though merely sideswiping the island nation as the storm headed north, killed at least 52 people.
This disconnect, between what we expect from disasters and what is likely to occur, is common. “When people think of disasters, the common image is one of social breakdown,” Erik Auf der Heide, a disaster-management expert, has written (PDF).
“In contrast, researchers have found—at least in the immediate aftermath of disasters—that community resilience and unity, strengthening of social ties, self-help, heightened initiative, altruism, and pro-social behavior more often prevail. In short, when things are at their worst, disaster-stricken communities tend to rise to the occasion.” A terrific 2009 book by Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell,recounts the way people in disasters from Katrina to the 1985 Mexico City earthquake to a 1917 ship explosion in Halifax, Nova Scotia, showed their best qualities in the wake of disasters, even when authorities came expecting the worst.
The “looting” article Drudge shared with his million daily readers is laughable at best, conflating obvious jokes (“I’m looting today in preparation for the hurricane,” reads one quoted tweet) with persistent legends from the past. A constant theme is a return to the supposed war zone–like nature of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, even though studies and journalistic investigations after the fact have consistently shown that widely held perception was false. In one famous case, apoplexy over an imagined rash of sniper shootings provided cover for a group of police who in fact shot a group of unarmed people crossing a bridge, killing two. It was only later, after most of the public stopped paying attention, that the murdered victims were exonerated in the media, and the police convicted in court.
Panic mongering serves no one. The mistaken presumption that only “strong, central, paramilitary-like leadership can overcome the problems posed by a dysfunctional public suffering from the effects of a disaster” is counterproductive, Auf der Heide writes. “Authorities may develop elaborate plans outlining how they will direct disaster response, only to find that members of the public, unaware of these plans, have taken actions on their own.” Because we are most often our own families’ and neighborhoods’ first responders, positioned to help long before authorities can arrive, those authorities’ essential efforts are most effective when they follow the lead of the affected population. State resources should maximize, and not supplant or suppress, their efforts.
Jokes about an impending apocalypse are good for breaking the tension (“Wondering when we should start eating people?” a friend in Brooklyn asked on Facebook ahead of the storm), but those living in the disaster zone have to face a more banal reality: most of us will survive and should be prepared for a long, often inconvenient, aftermath. In the time between disasters meanwhile, knowing as we do that climate change and growing populations are making cities from New York to Shanghai more vulnerable than ever, we should patiently but determinedly support efforts to prepare everyone.
Most important, the expectation that a society challenged will break down should go out the door. It doesn’t happen. If senseless looting and killing is unthinkable to you, it’s probably unthinkable to most everyone around you. It’s our suspicion—the supposition that some group of people, some element of society, is a monster waiting to be unleashed by the wrath of the earth—that poses a greater threat when help comes calling. As those of us in Haiti found after the earthquake, when survival is on the line, the people around you are all you’ve got. It’s a shame that it often takes living through a disaster to learn that.
South west Western Australia |photo by Michael Schwab
The Red Tingle (Eucalyptus jacksonii) in Walpole Nornalup National Park of south west Western Australia is one of the tallest trees in the state and can measure up to 24 metres round at the base and grow to a height of 75 metres.
The trees often have shallow root systems and grow a buttressed base. Forest fires often act to hollow out the base of the trees creating a large cavity. They are now found primarily in Walpole-Nornalup National Park and in a few isolated sites outside the park in the Walpole area.
