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Boston College Professor Ethan Baxter has spent his quarantine putting together this set of educational videos titled "Every rock has a story", aimed at grades K-4. This is the final video in that series, including a rainbow of rocks! Check out and feel free to share with anyone you know in that range!
At this spot in Iceland, Þríhnúkagígur Volcano, molten rock once flowed through a cavity in the ground, but after an eruption ended, the molten rock retreated, leaving behind an open chamber in the ground. The walls are oxidized red, from the heat of the molten rock inside interacting with air as the magma drained away. People today can head into this site - literally heading into the plumbing of a volcano.
SOUND ON🔊 Louie Brings Plenty sends a powerful prayer out over the badlands towards the Stronghold on the #PineRidgeIndianReservation , South Dakota. Stronghold Table was the site of the last Ghost Dances before the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890, and a protected sanctuary for the Lakota in the battles that followed.
natgeotravel
The B.A.S.E Jumper sings a song flying through the skies at 250 km/h
For the first time on Planet Earth, a human being sings a whole song while flying through the skies at 250 km/h. No tricks, no post production, just a one sequence shot. No edits, no digital retouches. It’s all real. Any small mistake could have turned the whole thing into a fatal tragedy. But the risk paid off: art and extreme sports in perfect harmony with the universe.
Don´t try this at home
Singing to beluga whales...works
Hiking inside a glacial ice cave, Iceland. These are often originally formed by melt water that flows through the glaciers, and occupied by people later.
A pair of black-capped donacobius call to affirm their territory. Top bird nerd fact for the day- this type of singing is known as an antiphonal duet - a behaviour few birds are capable of where two individuals or groups sing alternately at speed with great precision! Unfortunately I wasn't recording sound! Filmed in the southern Pantanal, Brazil, on assignment for @stevewinterphoto, @natgeo and @natgeowild. Follow Steve and I (@bertiegregory) for news on our jaguar film coming soon!
Singing sand avalanche, Great Sand Dunes National Park, Colorado.
Have you ever heard sand sing? Listen to 15 seconds of this bizarre phenomenon! Just as our own voices are made by air moving through vibrating vocal chords, a humming sound is made at Great Sand Dunes as air is pushed through millions of tumbling sand grains during an avalanche. Avalanches occur naturally during storms, but can also be created by people pushing sand down a dune face. In the 1940s, one of Bing Crosby's musical hits was "The Singing Sands of Alamosa" - a love song based on the sounds of Great Sand Dunes. This humming sound continues to inspire people today!
Zebra Finch Lullabies
Zebra finches tend to be vocal little birds that like to sing, making them popular amongst pet owners and researchers alike. These birds often mate for life and the females usually do most of the incubation process. Males have brightly colored feathers and females have brown feathers helping them blend into their nests.
A new study indicates that these birds sing particular songs to their eggs late in their development, which might give their young a warning of warmer weather conditions before hatching. It has been long known that birds like chickens and quails can hear through their eggshells. This new research shows that special calls from zebra finch parents keep the chicks from growing too large after hatching if the weather is too warm. These calls can change the hatchlings behavior even into adulthood.
Mylene Mariette, researcher at Deakin, has found that zebra finches sing a certain song to their eggs during the last few days of incubation. Still unsure whether the male or the female finch sings to the eggs, the researchers placed microphones in 125 nests of captive zebra finches living in an outdoor bird aviary experiencing natural temperatures. It seems that the birds only make the special sound when the temperature reaches above 78 degrees Fahrenheit/25 degrees Celsius. Rather than calling out just because of the heat, Mariette explains, “Because they only do it toward the end of incubation, it really looked like they do it to communicate with the egg.”
The researchers then studied finch eggs experiencing a constant temperature in the lab. Playing back recordings, including the special song, to one group then playing the same recording, minus the special song, to a separate group of eggs during the last 3 to 5 days of their incubation period. After hatching, the researchers placed the birds back into their nests outside and noticed the differences between the two. Of the chicks that heard the warm-weather song, nestlings experiencing higher nest temperatures tended to weigh less on average than nestlings in cooler nests. However, chicks that had not heard the song grew heavier.
The researchers also found that birds who heard the incubation calls continued to show effects into adulthood, choosing nests with higher temperatures and producing up to six babies within their first breeding season. As to the finches that did not hear the special song, typically these birds had only one or two babies.
Mark Hauber, a professor of animal behavior at the City University of New York, says, “It’s so novel. It’s going to open up a brand new field of research.” Contributing some of the only other research on the incubation calls, fairy wrens singing to their nestlings, proved the reason was so the parents could distinguish their babies from those of cuckoos. “What was important about some of the more recent work is it showed that much of this learning already takes place inside the egg,” Hauber explains.
--Mi
Image Credit -- http://bit.ly/2cpjVId
Sources -- http://bit.ly/2bpKgoT http://bit.ly/2b5X3rI
