*the invisible circus*

29th Nov 2016 | Nº 84

herzogtum-sachsen-weissenfels:

Wassily Kandinsky (Russian, 1866-1944), Courbe Dominante [Dominant Curve], 1936. Oil on canvas, 129.2 x 194.3 cm.

(Source: jagkanbliintetal, via anaisninny)

22nd Nov 2016 | Nº 42463

(via anaisninny)

4th Nov 2016 | Nº 940

magictransistor:

Athanasius Kircher. Ichnographia Labyrinthi Ægyptiaci. 1679.

3rd Aug 2016 | Nº 1378

magictransistor:

Henry E. Roscoe. Spectrum Analysis. 1869.

18th May 2016 | Nº 1173

currentsinbiology:

How do trees go to sleep?
Scientists from Austria, Finland and Hungary are using laser scanners to study the day-night rhythm of trees. As it turns out, trees go to sleep too.
Most living organisms adapt their behavior to the rhythm of day and night. Plants are no exception: flowers open in the morning, some tree leaves close during the night. Researchers have been studying the day and night cycle in plants for a long time: Linnaeus observed that flowers in a dark cellar continued to open and close, and Darwin recorded the overnight movement of plant leaves and stalks and called it “sleep.” But even to this day, such studies have only been done with small plants grown in pots, and nobody knew whether trees sleep as well. Now, a team of researchers from Austria, Finland and Hungary measured the sleep movement of fully grown trees using a time series of laser scanning point clouds consisting of millions of points each.
“Our results show that the whole tree droops during night which can be seen as position change in leaves and branches,” says Eetu Puttonen (Finnish Geospatial Research Institute), “The changes are not too large, only up to 10 cm for trees with a height of about 5 meters, but they were systematic and well within the accuracy of our instruments.”
Eetu Puttonen, Christian Briese, Gottfried Mandlburger, Martin Wieser, Martin Pfennigbauer, András Zlinszky, Norbert Pfeifer. Quantification of Overnight Movement of Birch (Betula pendula) Branches and Foliage with Short Interval Terrestrial Laser Scanning. Frontiers in Plant Science, 2016; 7 DOI: 10.3389/fpls.2016.00222
Trees have their own day-night rhythm too, say scientists.Credit: Image courtesy of Vienna University of Technology, TU Vienna

sleeping trees <3