One Cubic Foot of Life

Lap-sized habitats, or what Central Park gardens and Polynesian reefs have in common.

Ask a scientist, and she’ll tell you size is absolute. Ask an artist, and he’ll prove it’s relative. That’s exactly what photographer David Liittschwager did in his One Cubic Foot project, exploring how much of different ecosystems can fit within a single cubic foot of space. (Can you tell we’re on a biodiversity roll this week?)

Armed with a 12-inch cube, a green metal frame, and a team of assistants and biologists, Liittschwager set out to probe five sharply different environments — water and land, from New York’s temperate Central Park to a tropical forest in Costa Rica — putting down the cube in each, then waiting patiently, counting and photographing all the creatures that lived or crossed that space, down to those about a millimeter in size.

The Hallett Nature Sanctuary at Central Park, New York

Table Mountain National Park is an iconic mesa towering over Cape Town, South Africa

The endeavor was just as laborious as it sounds — each habitat took about three weeks to catalog, and a total of over 1000 organisms were photographed.

For clear access to the organisms of Duck River, Tennessee, the team had to lift a sample into a tank

It was like finding little gems.” ~ David Liittschwager

The project is highly reminiscent of a WWF campaign we featured last year, putting a global spin on the concept of ecological microcosms.

Towering a hundred feet over Monteverde, Costa Rica, this tropical cloud forest houses a microcosm of organisms the size of a finger nail

Coral reef in Moorea, French Polynesia, where Liittschwager worked with scientists from the Moorea Biocode Project, an effort to catalog every creature in and around the Moorea

Besides the original concept and impressive amount of work that went into it, the One Cubic Foot project bespeaks the incredible richness of our planet — and the regrettable gray deadness of our man-made concrete jungles: Try setting the green cube in the middle of an LA expressway or a New York City sidewalk.

So next time you venture out into the non-grey world, consider the fascinating and intricate homes and habitats framed by your even footstep.

Thanks, @TEDchris

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Phylomon: The Game of Life

Pokemon meets Mother Earth, or what preschoolers have to do with the life of life.

The UN has declared 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity. And while we’ve seen a number of smart, ambitious scientific and creative efforts inspired by and advocating nature’s bounty, the fact remains that preserving the incredible natural variety of species is in the hands of the future generations. So raising children with a biological sensibility and getting them excited about biodiversity is at the root of any viable effort.

Which is why we love the understatedly brilliant Phylomon project by The Science Creative Quarterly, a wonderful repository for well-written, unconventional scientific literature.

When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all. ~ E. O. Wilson.

Phylomon is a web-based initiative for creating Pokemon-like cards, using real creatures and nature’s own “character design” genius. The project was inspired by a recent study that found young children have the remarkable ability to identify and characterize more than 120 different Pokemon characters, but fail to name more than half of common wildlife species. So Phylomon has set out to broaden children’s natural characters vocabulary, drawing inspiration from the clearly successful model used by “synthetic characters” like Pokemon.

Submissions will be crowdsourced from a variety of creatives, with the scientific community weighing in on the content, game designers invited to brainstorm innovative ways of using the cards, and teachers participating to evaluate the educational merit of the cards.

Best of all, the hope is that this will all occur in a non-commercial-open-access-open-source-because-basically-this-is-good-for-you-your-children-and-your-planet sort of way.

Because Phylomon depends so heavily on the creative community’s contributions, we urge you to submit yours. Use this Flickr pool if you’re a designer or illustrator, this one if you’re a photographer, or this one if you come from the education community.

And if you still have doubts about the momentous importance of biodiversity, take it from Ban Ki-moon, the UNSYG himself — it’s important, alright.

Read up on Phylomon and contribute — why not?

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Far Out: The Real Space Odyssey

Hyperkinetic smashups, amateur brilliance, and what Stanley Kubrick has to do with sea sponges.

If you’re like us and have a NASA image of the day fetish, or simply like to gawk at the magnificence of the universe, you’ll love journalist and filmmaker Michael Benson‘s Far Out: A Space-Time Chronicle — easily one of the best books of last year in both science and photography. In this fascinating and viscerally gripping anthology, Benson curates hundreds of remarkable images from observatories around the world and in space, telling the story of time and space in a way that intrigues, illuminates, and inspires.

The book has a mix of images from a number of different observatories.

I tried not to be too reliable on the Hubble, because images from the Hubble tend to be the best-known.

This hyperkinetic gumbo in space, known as the Antenna Galaxies, may resemble the fate of the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy when they collide in about 2.5 billion years.

Benson approached it in a way that gives viewers context and perspective of scale — so he combined wide shots, medium shots and closeups. (The latter being Hubble’s métier, because it’s a narrow-field instrument.) He even curated the images in an order that positions the reader by organizing them in a time-space line, so that images in the front of the book are closer to Earth, between 400 and 700 light years away, and those towards the back are some 12 billion light years away, before Earth even formed.

The Cat's Paw Nebula, named for its shape, attributes its extraordinary color to ionized hydrogen.

But the real gem comes on page 84, a 4-way foldout showing a 360-degree mosaic view of the Milky Way, which was actually put together by an amateur photographer in the Midwest with a normal, non-digital Nikon.

If you have a time exposure that’s long enough and you have a wide-field view, you can get an image that looks like it was taken by a telescope.

The Andromeda Galaxy, the nearest major spiral galaxy to the Milky Way, with diameter of about 220,000 lilight years compared to the Milky Way's 100,000.

The epigraph in the beginning of the book features the famous William Blake quote from the devil’s dictionary — “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.” — alluding to our fundamental fascination with the unknown and our eternal quest to know it.

Where did Benson’s inspiration for Far Out come from? His mother took him to see 2001: A Space Odyssey. Proof for our highly scientific theory that Stanley Kubrick is just a few degrees of separation removed from every great cultural artifact of our day.

Shaped like a sea sponge, the Crab Nebula, in all its 6-light-year-wide glory, remains a hallmark of a supernova that exploded 956 years ago.

You can catch a brief interview with Benson on the January 4 episode of The New York Times‘ Science Times podcast, and you can take a sneak peek at some of the remarkable images from Far Out in this marvelous slideshow, also from The New York Times.

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