It's really not so simple as this. It's really dim under the sea ice and these divers have used strobes and floodlights to pick out subjects in a dramatic way. On that front I don't think the images required much tampering with. It's just a photographic way of trying to convey the grandeur and beauty you'd experience if you were actually there.
In terms of how "vivid" the photos are, the problem is often quite the other way around to how you put it.
I've spent a lot of time exploring jungles and coral reefs, marvelling at the divesity of nature, all the jewel-like lifeforms on display. It's very difficult to capture with a camera what your eyes perceive as brilliant coloration and exquisitely contrasted form. Your visual system makes many profound processing adjustments based on your total lighting environment: chromatic adaptation, simultaneous contrast, perceptual constancy, and so on. You perceive a green insect on a green leaf as vivid and striking when you're in the jungle with it, but dull when looking at the correctly exposed photo you took of it.
Not to mention your vision has a larger dynamic range than a camera sensor and a wider color gamut than a typical computer screen.
Crude postprocessing will attempt to correct for this by just pumping up saturation, which is maybe what you're complaining about on Instagram. But the best nature photography compensates in other, more subtle and appropriate ways, and the result approaches the wonder we experience "in real life".
For one thing, consumers favoring the convenience of supermarkets means choice gets limited to what large scale agribusiness can supply profitably. Local species and cultivars whose horticulture does not scale well, whose harvest can't be mechanized, which have a short ripeness window, which only produce crops rarely or under ideal conditions, and/or are too delicate to transport over long distances, don't fit with agribusiness production and supply models (nor with the patented GM sterile seed industry that is ever more forced on small scale farmers).
If you negate that list, you get a list of traits agribusiness tries to breed into more conventional plants often at the expense of optimal tastiness.
Yet the "reject" plants might be super delicious and perfectly suited to local soil and climate conditions and to traditional agricultural practices and regional cuisines...
In Malaysia as a child the roadside markets offered incredible local fruits like tampoi, certain distinctive cultivars of mangoes, langsats, salak, mangosteen, little-known species of durian and other jungle fruits, and many others that are much harder or impossible to find today. (Although the commercial varieties of mangoes, durian etc. are still very good if you know about seasonal variations and exactly where they're grown; and, according to my palate at least, the fresh produce available in S.E. Asia still far, far surpasses the range and quality available in northern Europe.)
The qualities of the Saqqara boxes are entirely consistent with what we know about the mathematical and engineering sophistication of ancient Egyptians. There is nothing well-verified "not in the books" that upends the "conventional timeline". The only people claiming otherwise are Discovery Channel nutcase types who want you to believe, without real evidence, often with fake evidence, and always with fatuous reasoning, that angels and aliens intervened in ancient human history.
I'm sorry that I have given you the impression that I or others like myself who discuss these questions believe in ancient aliens. I realize that this is a topic of confusion for many "debunkers". I don't accept belief as a valuable tool the process of discovering the truth, nor do I deem it necessary in the practice of science. Unbiased observation, free from belief is important.
And denotative language seems to be more effective than connotative language, at least as far as these kings of arguments are concerned. Logical argument is better than the disparagement of persons and groups when arguing and making a point. And staying on topic is also a good thing.
There is a growing discussion regarding belief systems within academia and various conventional sciences such as archeology. This seems to be a problem and if it is not cleaned up fairly quickly and replaced with something more logical, evidence-based, reality-accepting and legitimately scientific, the term "pseudoscience" will likely be used against those coming from the conventional side of these topics.
I don't see anything relevant from your link that explains the precision of the boxes I mentioned above. What do you know about ancient Egyptian mathematics and engineering that relates to this subject? I have read the entire page you linked to, so forgive me in advance for missing it.
It’s also not surprising that they could create a flat surface or angles that are exactly-ish 90 degrees. The Egyptians boast some of the earliest known texts on geometry, like the Rhind Papyrus (from around 1650 BCE) and the Moscow papyrus (from about 1850 BCE). The latter papyrus indicates that the Egyptians could approximate pi (as 3.16049) and find the volume of a truncated pyramid. It stands to reason that 500 years later, they would be able to carve a flat surface and make a corner of exactly-ish 90 degrees.
I was referring to the precision of the boxes, not Brien Forester's quote about it, and more specifically the surface that is mirror polished to several ten-thousandths of an inch as estimated with a precision straight edge and toolmaker's square by someone who was a precision machinist, engineer, "master craftsman" (member of a professional guild), and a member of Mensa. These tools are so precise that if you drop them on the ground, handle them the wrong way or they end up in untrusted hands, they have to be re-calibrated and verified.
I apologize if this is an order of magnitude beyond most peoples' understanding and experience. It's probably not your occupation, so please don't take it personally. As an example of what this degree of precision is, consider a thin hair which is about four thousandths of an inch in diameter. If you slice that diameter up ten times, you will then have something that is as small as or at least reasonably approaching this measurement.
If you look at marble statues, a square box is hardly amazing in comparison. "a few ten-thousandths of an inch" - close to micro meter precision - sounds almost like exaggeration, but some type of stone might just split in a very planar way.
Yes, there are some amazing marble statues. Have you seen the one where there is a fishing net cut from marble? Or the twins from Russia - two identical statues except for some obvious clumps of hair of hair, as if an image was taken at different times, in the breeze, and an artist or machine reproduced the statue from the image. I am assuming that most marble statues are at least an order of magnitude less precise than the granite box. Granite, by the way, is composed of different materials, such as, for example, feldspar and quartz. It doesn't break along a plane. Yes, a micrometer is .0001". Calipers, on the other hand, often only measure to .001" and would not be able to measure anything this precise.
> "a few ten-thousandths of an inch" - close to micro meter precision - sounds almost like exaggeration, but some type of stone might just split in a very planar way.
Not an exaggeration, just an extremely long time spent hand grinding/polishing with fine grit tools/paste.
They are one of the most biodiverse habitats, if not the most diverse, home to a vast array of often spectacular species. And unlike other highly biodiverse habitats, much of this spectacle is densely represented and constantly on show.
In a tropical rainforest, you can ramble uncomfortably through dense undergrowth for hours, hearing many animals but glimpsing few, usually from a limited range of phyla, and seeing mostly plants. On a healthy reef, drift but a few minutes through the clear, warm seawater, and the sheer abundance and variety of algae, corals, anenomes, molluscs, echinoderms, sponges and many other invertebrate phyla, as well as algae and of course fish, will be immediately apparent.
This is interesting to think about. As I'm sure you've considered, bacteria and other living cells exist in a state of highly regulated homeostasis. In bacteria, things like charged ion concentrations are maintained internally by various physiological mechanisms (chiefly the membrane-bound transport channels you describe) at specific concentrations with little variation. Salinity concentrations are generally the same as the surrounding seawater (marine bacteria are usually osmoconformers, as opposed to more sophisticated osmoregulators like fish), and the transport mechanisms exist as adaptations to maintain this state.
So while some aquatic bacteria can exist at a wide range of external salt concentrations (they are "euryhaline"), I don't know of any bacteria that have adaptated to actively concentrate salt internally above the salinity of typical seawater. Beyond a certain not-very-useful threshold, this would disrupt too many metabolic pathways and kill the bacterium. So I don't see how a concentrate-in-the-bacteria-then-filter-them-out approach to industrial desalination would work.
You might be thinking about brine pool extremophile bacteria / archaea, but again, they are just well-adapted when it comes to expelling salt or resisting salt intake, not actively concentrating it internally.
However, if you could embed euryhaline bacteria into some kind of impermeable membrane in a controlled orientation, and engineer them to express the right kind of one-way channels on opposite sides of the cell... there are some big bioengineering obstacles to doing this, but it's an interesting idea. It would basically be a sped-up version of the double reverse osmosis desalination approach already widely used, potentially more efficient and available to be powered more easily by sustainable / free energy sources.
I'm just typing as I think there, so maybe there's been work in this area already.
It's hard to directly compare the challenges of growing fungus vs. meat. Remember that in the case of fungi, the desired product for the food industry is usually a specialized reproductive structure (mushroom, truffle, etc.), produced by the fungus only occasionally, and according to complex environmental cues. So you need a more or less complicated fruiting protocol, depending on the species, on top of maintaining the fungus in culture. This is quite unlike meat, where you are "just" trying to grow a complex of somatic tissue types that is present by default in the wild organism.
On top of this, truffles have complex ecological requirements (mutualisms with plants and associations with soil microbiota), so unlike saprophytic species they are very difficult to grow in artificial culture to start with (even just spore germination is tricky). Fruiting is tied to seasonal changes in the host plant and we're only just beginning to understand the genetics underlying all of this.
I agree with you actually, but I think it is some decades away and will require lots of GM, and lots of work on how to get control over metabolic and fruiting systems without changing flavor profiles.
Roger Penrose wrote an interesting (if unavoidably controversial) book about these questions, "The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and the Laws of Physics".
London has fantastic arts, music, literary, theatre scenes, both contemporary and classical. Many of its venues, galleries and museums are world leading institutions. The science & tech research groups at its top universties are doing really exciting stuff. It's filled with extraordinary people and fascinating architecture. The food is amazing, some of the best chefs from Europe and SE Asia come here to work. Also, it has Kew Gardens.
Yes Brexit has put many of these things at risk and taken a shine off their appeal for many. And yes you have to be relatively rich to have a spacious, comfortable home here, to cushion yourself from the awful public transport, and to partake of all the delights on offer. But someone who's actually lived here and can't cite one example of London's special attraction is sleepwalking through life.
Have you been to the Science Museum or Natural History museum recently? We took the youngest 2 yrs ago and were deeply disappointed. They're but a neglected shadow of their former selves.
The Manchester Museum of science and Industry, part of the Science Museum group (though only since 2012), is a far more rewarding experience.
It's fine, I don't care about any of "fantastic arts, music, literary, theatre scenes, both contemporary and classical". I'm quite good at entertaining myself, I guess.
As things stand, Cameron will be replaced by a new Conservative leader in October who will be under pressure to call a general election more or less immediately (without the present mess we were not due another one until 2020). The Liberal Democrats, our third largest party, have pledged to run an election campaign based on nullifying the Brexit vote. So it seems what you propose is going to happen, but unfortunately the "Illiberal Undemocrats" are an unpopular choice for a wide variety of reasons...
The PM can't call for a general election anymore due to the Fixed Term Parliament Act 2011. Only a vote of no confidence in the Government by MPs or a unilateral decision by two thirds of MPs can break the five year parliament and result in a general election.
In terms of how "vivid" the photos are, the problem is often quite the other way around to how you put it.
I've spent a lot of time exploring jungles and coral reefs, marvelling at the divesity of nature, all the jewel-like lifeforms on display. It's very difficult to capture with a camera what your eyes perceive as brilliant coloration and exquisitely contrasted form. Your visual system makes many profound processing adjustments based on your total lighting environment: chromatic adaptation, simultaneous contrast, perceptual constancy, and so on. You perceive a green insect on a green leaf as vivid and striking when you're in the jungle with it, but dull when looking at the correctly exposed photo you took of it.
Not to mention your vision has a larger dynamic range than a camera sensor and a wider color gamut than a typical computer screen.
Crude postprocessing will attempt to correct for this by just pumping up saturation, which is maybe what you're complaining about on Instagram. But the best nature photography compensates in other, more subtle and appropriate ways, and the result approaches the wonder we experience "in real life".