National Park Service typeface

Fast Company: If you’ve ever been to a National Park, chances are you’ve come across signage with the same distinctive lettering. The type, which features rounded edges carved into wood in all caps, has become an icon of the National Parks system.

[Jeremy] Shellhorn, who was on sabbatical from his current job as an associate professor of design at the University of Kansas, was redesigning the park’s newspaper and wanted to include the type found on National Park signs. But he soon discovered there was no digital typeface because the letters are simply formed with a CNC router in the park’s sign shop, chiseled into wood. The shape of the letters were determined by the size of the router bit.

It doesn’t really exist as a typeface unless a sign is made.

Available for anyone to download for free, the typeface comes in four weights: light, regular, heavy, and outline.

See also

• Diglû: a pictographic typeface for archeology — Diglû consists of 440 characters and 404 pictograms developed for the analysis and mediation of archaeological finds.
• Anatomia: a quirky grotesk typeface — grotesk typeface born from the skeleton of an old Scotch Roman used in an anatomy book printed in the early 20th century.
• Inkwell: a typeface for expressive writing — A tiny universe of fonts that combines the informality of handwriting, the expressiveness of lettering, and the versatility of type.

If Birds Left Tracks in the Sky, They’d Look Like This

National Geographic: If birds left tracks in the sky, what would they look like? For years Barcelona-based photographer Xavi Bou has been fascinated by this question.

Ultimately he chose to work with a video camera, from which he extracts high-resolution photographs. After he films the birds in motion, Bou selects a section of the footage and layers the individual frames into one image.

This current work, he says, combines his passion and his profession. “It’s technical, challenging, artistic, and natural. It’s the connection between photography and nature that I was looking for.”

See also

• Movile Cave: The unique life isolated deep underground for 5.5 million years — “Almost 30 years after its discovery, Movile Cave remains perhaps the most isolated ecosystem on the planet.”
• Timelapse: The “slow life” of a coral reef, sped up — Time lapse cinematography reveals a whole different world full of hypnotic motion.
• Pigeons are gross. They’re also wildly underrated.

See also

BBC Earth: Movile Cave has been cut off for millions of years. Its air is thick with harmful gases, yet it is home to an array of strange animals.

A cave woodlouse

An unidentified leech from Movile Cave

Despite a complete absence of light and a poisonous atmosphere, the cave is crawling with life. There are unique spiders, scorpions, woodlice and centipedes, many never before seen by humans, and all of them owe their lives to a strange floating mat of bacteria.

Strangely, the worse the air gets the more animals there are. It’s not at all obvious why that should be, or how the animals survive at all.

A waterscorpion attacks its crustacean prey

An unidentified pseudoscorpion

Two woodlice which lack skin pigment

Without any signs of water reaching the deep cave from the surface, it is unclear how the animals in the cave survives. Tests have shown that the water flowing in does not contain any food particles. Instead, the food comes from the strange frothy foam sitting on top of the water. This floating film, which looks like wet tissue paper and can even be torn like paper, contains millions upon millions of bacteria known as “autotrophs”.

A waterscorpion

A centipede with extra-long antennae

In 1996, researchers categorised the animals in the cave. They included 3 species of spider, a centipede, 4 species of isopod (the group that includes woodlice), a leech never seen anywhere else in the world, and an unusual-looking insect called a waterscorpion.

• The Geologic Time Spiral — A timeline of the evolution of life.
• The Wellcome Image Awards 2015 — Showcasing the best in science imaging talent and techniques.
• Timelapse: The “slow life” of a coral reef, sped up — These animals are actually very mobile creatures, however their motion is only detectable at different time scales compared to ours.

Pigeons are wildly underrated

Pigeons are gross. They’re also wildly underrated.

Vox: Sure, there are bad things about these birds (like the way they deface statues of our own species’ great leaders). But over the centuries, their unique abilities to be trained and to find their way home have been used in interesting and surprising ways (that almost make up for their constant cooing).

Slow Life, by Daniel Stoupin

The most important living organisms that play the key functions in the biosphere might not seem exciting when it comes to motion. Plants, fungi, sponges, corals, plankton, and microorganisms make life on Earth possible and do all the hard biochemical job. Similarly to all living things, they are dynamic, mobile, and fundamentally have the same motion properties as us. They grow, reproduce, spread, move towards source of energy, and away from unfavorable conditions. However, their speeds happen to be out of sync with our narrow perception. Our brains are wired to comprehend and follow fast and dynamic events better, especially those very few that happen at speeds comparable to ours. In a world of blazingly fast predators and escaping prey events where it takes minutes, hours, or days to notice any changes are harder to grasp.

“Slow” marine life is particularly mysterious. As colorful, bizarre-looking, and environmentally important as we know corals and sponges are, their simple day-to-day life is hidden. We know some bits about their biochemistry, corals’ interaction with zooxanthella algae, their life cycles, and systematics. Unfortunately, it’s hard to tell what we don’t know about the rest, and particularly when it comes to interaction with other organisms happening over long periods of time.

Time lapse cinematography reveals a whole different world full of hypnotic motion and my idea was to make coral reef life more spectacular and thus closer to our awareness. I had a bigger picture in my mind for my clip. But after many months of processing hundreds of thousands of photos and trying to capture various elements of coral and sponge behavior I realized that I have to take it one step at a time. For now, the clip just focuses on beauty of microscopic reef “landscapes.” The close-up patterns and colors of this type of fauna hardly resemble anything from the terrestrial environments. Corals become even less familiar if you consider their daily “activities.” — Daniel Stoupin

(via Mental Floss)

See also: Wellcome Image Awards 2015: The art behind the science of life, death, sex, and disease and other posts tagged photography.