Premiered This Day (1968): Barbarella

From the Jean-Claude Forest Home Page:

Jean-Claude Forest created the character of Barbarella for V-Magazine in 1962, at the request of its editor, Georges H. Gallet, who was already familiar with Forest's work as France's premier science fiction cover artist and had commissioned an illustrated version of Catherine L. Moore's classic story Shambleau in 1955.

Barbarella was published in book for by Eric Losfeld's publishing company Le Terrain Vague in 1964, became an immediate runaway bestseller and was soon translated in a dozen countries, including by Grove Press in the United States. Not long after, it was adapted into a 1968 motion picture, produced by Dino de Laurentiis, directed by Roger Vadim, and starring Jane Fonda, for which Forest acted as design consultant.

A Forest Barbarella design from the abandoned Nelvana animation project:

Dave Stevens (1955-2008)

Dave Stevens passed away today. Best known for creating and illustrating "The Rocketeer", Dave was a exquisite artist who specialized in 'good girl' art.

Marc Evanier has some nice words about him HERE.

All images from The Grand Comic Book Database.

The Search for A Primordial Dimension

Virgil Finley from goldenagecomicbookstories.blogspot.com

The universe as we currently know it is made up of three dimensions of space and one of time, but researchers are exploring the possibility of an extra dimension.

“The idea we’re exploring is that the universe has an imperceptibly small dimension (about one billionth of a nanometer) in addition to the four that we know currently,” Kavic said. “This extra dimension would be curled up, in a state similar to that of the entire universe at the time of the Big Bang.”

The group is looking for small primordial black holes that, when they explode, may produce a radio pulse that could be detected here on Earth. These black holes are called primordial because they were created a fraction of a second after the beginning of the universe.

A Virginia Tech group is preparing to set up an Eight-meter-wavelength Transient Array radio telescope in Montgomery County to search the sky for these radio pulses from explosions up to 300 light years away. They have a similar telescope in southwestern North Carolina that has been looking for events for several months. link

Diffractive Hygrochromic Effect of the Strongest Creature in the World!

image

The Hercules Beetle is remarkable, not only for its strength, able to carry up to 850 times its own weight, the protective outgrowth of the insects’ exoskeleton, also changes from green to black as its surrounding atmosphere gets more humid.

Researchers from the University of Namur in Belgium have used the latest imaging techniques to study the shell of the beetle - a scanning electronic microscope to determine the structure responsible for the colour and a spectrophotometer to analyze how the light interacts with this structure.

The light interferes with the structure to produce the green colour of the shell. When water penetrates through the widely-open porous layers, it destroys the interferences phenomenon leading to a black colouration.

As to why the beetle changes colour, question marks also remain. Some have suggested that it is to do with protection – it becomes more humid at night and is therefore good for cover to turn black. Others have suggested that it is to do with warmth absorption at night. Questions remain.

Marie Rassart, who did the research at the University of Namur, said, “The sort of structural behaviour displayed by the Hercules Beetle could be an important property for ‘intelligent’ materials’. Such materials could be put to work as humidity sensors. This could be useful for example in food processing plants to monitor the moisture level.” link

Diffractive hygrochromic effect in the cuticle of the hercules beetle Dynastes Hercules. 2008. M Rassart et al 2008 New Journal of Physics: (14pp).

Steranko Interviews Conan The Barbarian

Story & Art © Steranko
CLICK TO ENLARGE

From an old issue of Jim Steranko's Mediascene comes this 'interview' with Conan.

Discovered This Day: The Former Planet Pluto

In 1930, the planet Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh, the only planet to be found by an American astronomer, after three decades of work at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. Before Tombaugh was born, Percival Lowell had searched unsuccessfully for Pluto, a ninth planet whose gravity would explain deviations in the positions of Uranus and Neptune. In his will he decreed that the hunt should continue. That meant using a telescope to photograph tiny pieces of the sky by night, then and sifting through the millions of star images by day for one dim dot that moved. When Lowell Observatory director Vesto Slipher hired him, a Kansas farmboy, Clyde Tombaugh threw himself into the search in Apr 1929. From Today In Science History.

The above picture captures the true colors of Pluto as well as the highest surface resolution so far recovered. Although no spacecraft has yet visited this distant world, the New Horizons spacecraft launched early this year is expected to reach Pluto in 2015. The above map was created by tracking brightness changes from Earth of Pluto during times when it was being partially eclipsed by its moon Charon. Pluto's brown color is thought dominated by frozen methane deposits metamorphosed by faint but energetic sunlight. The dark band below Pluto's equator is seen to have rather complex coloring, however, indicating that some unknown mechanisms may have affected Pluto's surface. Info from HERE

More info HERE.

How Snakes Hear

It is often believed that snakes cannot hear. This presumption is fed by the fact that snakes lack an outer ear and that scientific evidence of snakes responding to sound is scarce. Snakes do, however, possess an inner ear with a functional cochlea.

Batman and Copperhead © DC Comics

Now scientists have evidence that snakes use this structure to detect minute vibrations of the sand surface that are caused by prey moving. Their ears are sensitive enough to not only “hear” the prey approaching, but also to allow the brain to localize the direction it is coming from.

Any disturbance at a sandy surface leads to vibration waves that radiate away from the source along the surface. A snake can detect these small ripples and if it rests its head on the ground, the two sides of the lower jaw are brought into vibration by the incoming wave. These vibrations are then transmitted directly into the inner ear by means of a chain of bones attached to the lower jaw. This process is comparable to the transmission of auditory signals by the ossicles in the human middle ear. The snake thus literally hears surface vibrations.

The extraordinary flexibility of the lower jaw of snakes has evolved because being able to swallow very large meals is a big advantage if food is in short supply and competition fierce. Moreover, the separation of the sides of the lower jaw also allowed this very interesting form of hearing to develop. press release

Auditory Localization of Ground-Borne Vibrations in Snakes. 2008. P. Friedel et al. Physical Review Letters, 100, 048701.