The rotary mechanism of mitochondrial ATP synthase

It ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out.

— Heraclitus

Click here for animation.

Image credit: MRC MBU

Seeking and finding

The mind, full of curiosity and analysis, disassembles a landscape then reassembles the pieces — the nod of a flower, the colour of the night sky, the murmur of an animal — trying to fathom its geography. At the same time the mind is trying to find its place within the land, to discover a way to dispel its own sense of estrangement.

— from Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez  (1986)

with thanks to Miriam Darlington

Our perception depends in large measure on stored visual experiences in our memory

— Arvid Herwig


Image: Samovar Hills and Malaspina Glacier via Ground Truth Trekking

The echo of strange noises

The past has flown away,
the coming month and year do not exist;
Ours only is the present’s tiny point. 

Time is but a fancied dot ever moving on
which you have called a flowing river stream.  

I am alone in a wide desert,
listening to the echo of strange noises. 

– Mahmud Shabistari (1317)

Image: Abandoned Mining Town, Namibia by Marsel van Oosten

Living on nuts and berries

 

[On the testimony of the poems] the variety of the plants and animals found in the countryside and eaten by the early Irish...is quite astonishing to a twentieth-century town-dweller, to whom "living on berries and nuts" seems such an improbable kind of existence. [Poem] No. V mentions apples, yew-berries, rowan-berries, sloes, whortleberries, crowberries, strawberries, haws, hazel-nuts, mast, acorns, pignuts, water-cress, herbs, wild marjoram, onions, leeks, eggs, honey, salmon, trout, water, milk and beer. No. XVI speaks of deer, swine, mast, hazel-nuts, blaeberries, blackberries, sloes, trout. No. XV has cress, brooklime, mast, trout, fish, wild swine, stags, fawns. In no. XIX are blaeberries, blackberries, apples, sloes, strawberries, acorns, nuts, pig fat, porpoise steak, birds, venison, badger fat, fawns, salmon, fish. No. XVII mentions blackberries, haws, hazel-nuts, bramble shoots, "smooth shoots", garlic, cress, meadhbhán, dilisk, birds, martens, woodcocks, otters, salmon, eels, fish. Suibhne Geilt gives his "nightly sustenance" as blaeberries, apples, berries, blackberries, raspberries, haws, cress, watercress, brooklime, saxifrage, seaweed, herbs, sorrel, wood-sorrel, garlic, wild onions and acorns ... The diet is then one of flesh of animals and birds, fruit, berries, nuts, herbs, shoots, and waterplants, eggs, honey and fish, an impressive and intriguing menu.

from Studies in Early Celtic Nature Poetry by Kenneth Jackson (1935), quoted by Andrew Ray in Some Landscapes

Image: Douglas Griffin

Stones of the Sky

The nearest anyone has come to explaining the origins of the remarkable rocks of the Meteora – meaning suspended in air in Greek – is the German geologist Alfred Philippson. In 1897, he suggested that a river once ran into an ancient lake that covered what is now the plain of Thessaly, depositing in the same place where the Meteora have risen its rippling debris of silt, gravel, mud and water-smoothed pebbles and stones. Some 60 million years ago the river’s estuary was an alluvial fan that opened and spread from its point of entry into the lake. Over the course of thousands of years the layers of the fan deepened, eventually being compressed by the immense forces of water and earth into conglomerate – a type of sedimentary rock composed of the pre-existing stones that the river had washed into the lake – that was concreted together by hardened sandstone. 

When a massive earthquake emptied the Thessalian lake by cleaving open a channel to the Aegean Sea, the deltaic cone at the end of the river was raised from the lake bed into the sky. Loose sandstone was rinsed away by rain and the stone pillars were further worn into their present sinuous forms, riddled and pocked with caves and fault lines, by wind, weather and subsequent movements of the earth.

– from Notes from Near and Far by Julian Hoffman

"Consciousness takes place in time"

The problem of consciousness is an aspect of the question of what the world really is. We don’t know what a rock is, or an atom, or an electron. We can only observe how they interact with other things and thereby describe their relational properties... 

While [the future of science] is unpredictable…the only certainty is that we will know more in future. For on every scale, from an atom’s quantum state to the cosmos, and at every level of complexity, from a photon made in the early universe and winging its way towards us to human personalities and societies, the key is time and the future is open.

from Time Reborn by Lee Smolin (2013)

Image: The White Fence by Paul Strand (c1917) via wikipedia

The Science of Awe

Scientifically speaking, the storm brought me into a state of awe, an emotion that, psychologists are coming to understand, can have profoundly positive effects on people. It happens when people encounter a vast and unexpected stimulus, something that makes them feel small and forces them to revise their mental models of what’s possible in the world. In its wake, people act more generously and ethically, think more critically when encountering persuasive stimuli, like arguments or advertisements, and often feel a deeper connection to others and the world in general. Awe prompts people to redirect concern away from the self and toward everything else. And about three-quarters of the time, it’s elicited by nature.

from The Science of Awe by Jake Abrahamson (h/t: FJ)

Image:  Running the Teacups at Dry Meadow Creek, Sierra Nevada, California. Wallpapercavern via lovethesepics.com