Here’s a nice little piece of news (to me, anyway): for those of you who loved Grooveshark, the same music streaming/searching functionality is now available on StreamSquid.

Ellen Jewett (previously) effortlessly blends animals with elements from their environments, creating ceramic pieces that often balance unexpected species together in a singular piece. Each work is highly detailed—flowers, leaves, and vines wrapping themselves around animals from coyotes to chameleons.

By focusing on negative spaces within the animals’ bodies, Jewett strips away the weight of her objects, a quality that is usually inextricably linked to the medium of sculpture. She constructs her ceramic pieces using an additive technique, beginning with the innermost parts of the sculptures and layering outward. As periphery components of the animals’ surroundings are added to the piece, a narrative begins to form. These additional pieces Jewett describes as being beautiful, grotesque, or fantastical and add to the object’s exploration of domestication, death, growth, visibility, and wildness.

New Surrealist Sculptures by Ellen Jewett Effortlessly Combine Animals With Their Fantastical Surroundings | Colossal

For the last several years, marine photographer Alexander Semenov (previously) has lead the divers team at Moscow State University’s White Sea Biological Station located just south of the Artic Circle. Semenov directs scientific dives in extremely cold and harsh conditions to document sea creatures seldom seen anywhere else on Earth. From giant jellyfish to the tiniest of unknown sea worms, the photographer captures almost all of the creatures you see here out in the wild, without the convenience of a laboratory or studio.

It’s estimated that nearly 80% of all aquatic life in the world’s oceans has yet to be studied or even discovered. In response to this potentially vast world of unknown lifeforms, coupled with Semenov’s unceasing interest in marine biology, an ambitious trek across the world’s oceans has been planned for 2016. The Aquatilis Expedition is a proposed journey that will take a team of divers, scientists, and videographers to locations around the globe for the purposes of identifying new species, an odyssey on par with the advertures of Jacques Cousteau.

Many of Semenov’s best photos are available as prints, and he shares regular updates on both Facebook and Flickr.

Alexander Semenov Continues to Photograph the Earth’s Most Fragile Marine Wildlife Near the Arctic Circle

xkcd: Git

Donald Trump falls somewhere between “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen. Ben Carson resembles A.W. Tozer’s “The Pursuit of God.” Marco Rubio has a lot in common with “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” while Jeb Bush is a little simpler and sunnier — closer to “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” Marie Kondo’s tribute to decluttering.These comparisons aren’t about the candidates’ policy platforms. Mr. Trump has not advocated a great rafting trip down the Mississippi, at least not yet. They are instead based on an analysis of the candidates’ speaking styles in this year’s presidential debates, measuring both the complexity of their speech and the positivity (or negativity) of the words they use. To help make their speaking styles concrete, we compared them with a range of books, drawn from the most commonly downloaded titles on Project Gutenberg and supplemented with selections from our personal libraries.

Source: Ted Cruz as Beowulf: Matching Candidates With the Books They Sound Like – The New York Times

[Oh dear lord, yes. This is me all over. -egg]

Source: I used to suffer from FOMO – The Oatmeal

Linguists studying a signing system that spontaneously developed in an isolated Bedouin village say they have captured a new language being generated from scratch. They believe its features may reflect the innate neural circuitry that governs the brain’s faculty for language.

The language, known as Al Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, is used in a village of some 3,500 people in the Negev desert of Israel. They are descendants of a single founder, who arrived 200 years ago from Egypt and married a local woman. Two of the couple’s five sons were deaf, as are about 150 members of the community today.

The clan has long been known to geneticists, but only now have linguists studied its sign language. A team led by Dr. Wendy Sandler of the University of Haifa says in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences today that the Bedouin sign language developed spontaneously and without outside influence. It is not related to Israeli or Jordanian sign languages, and its word order differs from that of the spoken languages of the region.

Source: A New Language Arises, and Scientists Watch It Evolve – The New York Times

[Somehow I’m just feeling really moved by this one. -e]

http://awesomepeoplereading.tumblr.com/post/130201249072/master-painters-gabriel-ritter-von-max

When flipping through these prints by Netherlands-based printmaker Jaco Putker it’s difficult to pintpoint the exact emotion one should feel, but generally, if it’s somewhere between amused and terrified, that’s just what the artist intends. Putker combines both digital preparation with traditional photopolymer (solar plate) etching to create collages that can be both highly ridiculous and downright frightening. He refers to the artworks as “illustrations to fables which don’t exist, but hopefully take shape in the beholders’ minds.”

Source: Dually Sinister and Playful Solarplate Etchings by Jaco Putker | Colossal