~openculture | Bookmarks (5)

The nature documentary series Our Planet opens with a startlingly stark observation courtesy of broadcaster, biologist, natural historian, and author Sir David Attenborough: Just 50 years ago, we finally ventured to the moon… Since then, the human population has more than doubled… (and) In the last 50 years, wildlife populations have, on average, declined by […]

?si=pnmakCdYBQ6dTM0T From the Royal Society comes a short primer on snowflakes. Narrated by physicist Brian Cox, the video explains how they form, and why no two snowflakes have the exact same dimensions. It also recounts how Johannes Kepler developed a groundbreaking theory about the hexagonal shape of snowflakes in 1611–one proved right 400 years later. […]

If you made it big in seventeenth-century Bavaria, you showed it by creating a garden with all the plants in the known world. That’s what Johann Konrad von Gemmingen, Prince-Bishop of Eichstätt did, anyway, and he wasn’t about to let his botanical wonderland die with him. To that end, he engaged a specialist by the […]

Image via Diego Sevilla Ruiz A certain Zen proverb goes something like this: “A five year old can understand it, but an 80 year old cannot do it.” The subject of this riddle-like saying has been described as “mindfulness”—or being absorbed in the moment, free from routine mental habits. In many Eastern meditative traditions, one can achieve […]

Are pinecones related to pineapples? This was the unexpected question with which my wife confronted me as we woke up this morning. As luck would have it, Dominic Walliman has given us an entertaining way to check: just a few days ago he released his Map of Plants, through which he gives a guided tour […]