SO psyched.

 Via Fox News Photo Essay
 

From Alexis Via Redkemp.com

According to this article (San Jose Mercury News) giant "Humboldt" squid are infesting the waters of southern California:

It has probing arms and
tooth-lined tentacles, a raptor-like beak and an insatiable craving for flesh - any kind of flesh, even that of humans. It shows up briefly off California every four or five years, spurred by a warm current or some other anomaly, providing a boon for sportfishing businesses.

But amid this latest influx, to points as far north as Bodega Bay, there is a deepening concern among scientists that Humboldt squid are
entrenching themselves off California, and may expand northward, eating their way through fisheries as they go. The same thing is happening in the Southern Hemisphere, where squid are being blamed for depleting the hake fishery off Chile.

 From National Geographic:

Elusive and cannibalistic, the Humboldt, or jumbo, squid (Dosidicus gigas) has a reputation so fearsome that it has earned the nickname "red devil." […] Known as aggressive predators, Humboldt squid have powerful arms and tentacles, excellent underwater vision and a razor-sharp beak that easily tears through the flesh of their prey. They can also rapidly change their skin color in what appears to be a complex communication system.

Amazing!  

Via San Jose Mercury News

Image is from the First edition (1807) of "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" by Jules Verne. Via the National Maritime Museum, Royal Observatory, Greenwich.

thrillingwonder.blogspot.com linked to these awesome pictures of the "dry valleys" of Antarctica, which are snowless stretches of land in which everything looks awesome:

Some smoking snow: 

Post on thrillingwonder.blogspot.com

Original(?) post (in Russian)

"Orbital Space Station" 

"Lunar Base"

"Saturn from Rhea" 

Asteroid

And, my favorite - I remember this one from when I was a kid:

 "War of the Worlds", from New Challenge
of the Stars.

VIA David A. Hardy’s homepage 

From Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials. I loved this book when I was a kid. It was publised in 1979 - I was a fetus - it’s some talented nerds’ depiction of martians from various sci fi books. I like the HP Lovecraft guy from The Mountains of Madness (see above) the most because it’s exactly how I pictured the monsters when I first read the story. The scenes when the explorers are wandering through the ancient city are really amazing, and it’s too bad thy never made any sort of good movie from it, since it’s all so cinematic. In reality, though, the movie would be a bunch of guys in parkas wandering around saying "Wow" in a really expensive set with very little happening.

Furthering the "nerdy science fiction books I liked as a kid" topic is Expedition, also by Barlowe, being a bunch of really nice paintings of martian landscapes. I really loved the bizarro expansiveness of this book. I remember buying it at the weird toy store across the street from the Natural History Museum as a kid, and some of the images really reminded me of the dioramas in the museum:

This one is pretty much cribbed straight from the African wing, but we’ll let that go. Also strange that my favorite images are essentially depictions of space-livestock in their natural habitat, not the more outlandish ones of the crazy flying green elephants carrying stalagtites, or oceans made of Jell-o, etc. The boring ones jst seemed more plausable, I guess.

I think everyone gets a little nerdy for stuff like this. Let’s hear it for really lush weird sci fi paintings!

Barlowe’s website

Gallery of GtE images

A good Barlowe gallery

For VOLCANOES, that is.

AWESOME SPACE VOLCANOES.

From the planet volcanic region of Jupiter’s moon Io TVASHTAR.

It may look like this planet is wearing a tiny, cheap toupeé, but that’s actually a picture of a Giant Space Volcano on Io. According to Spacemongers Extrordinaire NASA,

This processed image provides the best view yet of the enormous 290-kilometer (180-mile) high plume from the volcano Tvashtar, in the 11 o’clock direction near Io’s north pole […] The remarkable filamentary structure in the Tvashtar plume is similar to details glimpsed faintly in 1979 Voyager images of a similar plume produced by Io’s volcano Pele. However, no previous image by any spacecraft has shown these mysterious structures so clearly.

The image also shows the much smaller symmetrical fountain of the plume, about 60 kilometers (or 40 miles) high, from the Prometheus volcano in the 9 o’clock direction. The top of a third volcanic plume, from the volcano Masubi, erupts high enough to catch the setting Sun on the night side near the bottom of the image, appearing as an irregular bright patch against Io’s Jupiter-lit surface. Several Everest-sized mountains are highlighted by the setting Sun along the terminator, the line between day and night.

More at the New Horizons mission webpage. The mission being to go to Pluto. That is all.