Sunday Links

by CKR

It’s easy to get depressed looking at the field of presidential candidates, the 392nd (or whatever) campaign debate, and the latest news of our government’s ambitions for more war in the Middle East. Here are some better things to think about.

Phila this week gives us a larger dose of Hope Blogging than usual.

Science magazine reports (3 August issue) on Pilai Poonswad, a biologist who has been working with villagers in southern Thailand to preserve several species of hornbills. Hornbills are large birds with impressively colored and very ornate bills. The communities are minority Islam in the predominantly Buddhist country, so the effort seems to be improving human-human relations as well as human-bird relations.

A much older forest has been unearthed in Hungary. The Taxodium (cypress) trees are still in standing position, and not fossilized. In other words, they are still tree-stuff rather than stone, and it may be that DNA can be collected from the 7-million-year-old trees and the bugs that inhabited them. Here’s a news clip from Hungarian tv:

And a clearer photo:

Arizona State University is making photos from the Apollo missions available. The Lunar and Planetary Institute is planning to post high-resolution scans of 35,000 photos from the Apollo missions. The film has been in a freezer for 30 years. So far only five are posted, but more are promised.

Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology has expanded its nestbox livecam coverage to 21. It’s late in the season now, and only the barn owls in California can be seen live. But the others, including seabirds in Alaska, prothonotary warblers in Texas, and barn swallows in Washington have archives you can look at through fall and winter.

[Credits: Hornbill picture from the Hornbill Research Foundation website; ancient forest photo from ABC News]