Zoo Pond Algae Turns Polar Bear Green!

Not only do McCain's screens and Casey's Modesto Pool turn algae green, but polar bears too!

TOKYO, Japan (AP) -- Green-colored polar bears are drawing questions from puzzled visitors at a Japanese zoo.

The polar bears at at a zoo in central Japan turned green as a result of algae in their pool.

Three normally white polar bears at Higashiyama Zoo and Botanical Gardens in central Japan changed their color in July after swimming in a pond with an overgrowth of algae...
Polar bears turn green after dip in zoo pond Hat tip to Wagga for the find!
Does the zoo pond include koi and stuff?
Speaking of koi, Lou found an overpriced house with a sweet koi pond.
I may have already posted this somewhere...
Camille Rose Garcia - the veritable queen of gin drinking cephalopoda, emo swans, suicidal fawns & eerie, axe-wielding heroines - will exhibit new works at New York’s Jonathan LeVine Gallery in a solo show entitled Ambien Somnambulants from tomorrow onwards.
Suzanne G.

New blog that has promise: My Husband Would be Mad


Influential teenage shit.

Slime-Green Pools Spread to Kansas City!

It is not just in California anymore!
The Casey Virus™ continues to spread...

Hat tip (again) to Wagga for this find:

Some nights Terry and Carrie Madden won’t even step onto their patio in Waldo — the stench and mosquitoes from the abandoned swimming pool next door are
overpowering.

The Maddens’ cash-strapped neighbors moved out in August, and the lender on the now-vacant house let it fall into disrepair. The pool is slime-green.

Their foreclosures delayed, vacant homes fall into disrepair

Don't miss the slime-green video!

And the Moon over Marin Slouch in hiFi:

Living like a Fish

He likes to say that he "took to photography like a duck takes to water." But "like a fish" might be closer to the mark. At Silver Springs, Mozert pioneered underwater photography, building waterproof housings that allowed him to go deep with a camera in hand. For some 45 years (except for service with the Army Air Forces during World War II), he created scenes of people—comely young women, for the most part—talking on the phone, playing golf, reading the newspaper...underwater, all the better to show off the wondrous clarity of Silver Springs' waters.


"Everything has a picture in it, a sellable picture," Mozert says. "All you got to do is use your imagination." To create bubbles in a champagne flute, he would stick some dry ice or Alka-Seltzer in the glass; to simulate smoke rising from a grill, he used canned condensed milk. "The fat in the milk would cause it to rise, creating ‘smoke' for a long time," he says. With his meticulous production values and surreal vision, Mozert cast Silver Springs in a light perfectly suited to postwar America—part "Leave It to Beaver" and part "The Twilight Zone." His images anchored a national publicity campaign for the springs from the 1940s through the '70s; competing against water-skiing shows, dancing porpoises, leaping whales and hungry alligators, Silver Springs remained one of Florida's premier attractions, the Disney World of its day. Then, in 1971, came Disney World.



The Life Aquatic with Bruce Mozert via otomano

Acropolis Now!

BREAKING NEWS UPDATE via Mitchell: Colossal Squid WebCasts!
Don't miss the Dissection Table!

There's nothing like a PhDiva in Givenchy.

Beyond Koi

UPDATE! More Toilet angst can be found at Edgar's Toilet.



Haiku for the koi by ~shadowcatv10

Japan is famous for its beautiful ponds stocked with colorful "Koi" carp - a close relative of the common goldfish. Some breeders are now moving beyond Koi to create even more unusual types of goldfish including scaleless, pearlescent varieties!
Japan's Goldfish Breeders Fish for Riches



In other news, I present Barack OBollywood via Neatorama.

Green Algae in the News

From The Beam of Light That Flips a Switch That Turns on the Brain

...“If I were a fish, and somebody poked me in the side,” (in this case, with a fine glass tip), Dr. Isacoff said, “I would escape.” But when the translucent fish were strobed with violet light, the overstimulated creatures no longer detected being prodded. Blue-green light reversed the effect.

One advantage of the Berkeley approach, Dr. Isacoff said, is that it can be adapted for many types of proteins so they could be activated by light. But for the method to work, scientists must periodically douse cells with the glutamate string.

In contrast, Dr. Deisseroth’s laboratory at Stanford has followed nature’s simpler design, borrowing a light-sensitive protein instead of making a synthetic one.

In 2003, Georg Nagel, a biophysicist then at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt, and colleagues characterized channelrhodopsin-2 from green algae. This channel protein lets positive ions stream into cells when exposed to blue light. It functioned even when inserted into human kidney cells, the researchers showed.

Neuroscientists realized that this pond scum protein might be used to hot-wire a neuron with light. In 2005, Edward Boyden, then a graduate student at Stanford, Mr. Zhang and Dr. Deisseroth, joining with the German researchers, demonstrated that the idea worked. And in separate research published last spring, Mr. Zhang and Dr. Boyden, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, each found a way to also silence neurons: a bacterial protein called halorhodopsin, when placed in a brain cell, can cause the cell to shut down in response to yellow light....