People: 2010 National Geographic Photography Contest Galleries

Aqui va la segunda parte: People. Todas las que estan aqui las escogi yo, pero hay muchisimas fotos en la pagina. Buen ride ;)

People

People Winner

Photo and caption by Chan Kwok Hung .

An Indonesian farmer and his buffalo charge through the mud in "Buffalo Race," an image that contest judge Joel Sartore called "an epic scene."

Farmers literally put a lot of stock into winning these annual races, which they believe will bring them luck during the upcoming growing season, according to photographer Chan Kwok Hung of Hong Kong.

National Geographic magazine senior photo editor and judge Sadie Quarrier praised the image as a "nicely composed, very real moment."

"I'm immediately drawn to the expression on the guy's face, with his open mouth and tightly squeezed eyes as if he's barely holding on."

Freelance photographer and judge Stephen Alvarez called the photo "high action perfectly captured. Sometimes photography is all about the moment."

Added Sartore, a freelance photographer, "Peak action, interesting subject matter, and a soft background all combined to make this image a winner."

Honorable Mention

Photo and caption by robin utrecht

Xhosa Boy

South Africa: A Xhosa boy from the Xhosa tribe cries during a circumcision ceremony, where the young boys become men after surviving 4 to 6 weeks alone in the bush in the West Cape of South Africa. Also Nelson Mandela is from the same tribe and has done this ritual.

Honorable Mention

Photo and caption by brian bielmann

Crazy Train

Donavon traveling the distance in slow motion while the white water erupts above him like a train out of control.

Viewers' Choice People Winner

Photo and caption by Bill Watson

Manog Giri

Sadhu, Manog Giri floats in the freezing cold Ganges during the 2010 Kumbh Mela in Haridwar, India. Approximately 40 million devotees converged on the small town of Haridwar to bathe in the holy Ganges and to receive blessings from the Hindu religion's holymen, the Sadhus.

The Fisherman Dance in The Morning

Photo and caption by thommy auguzth

look for fish in the morning is a habit of fisherman in the Rawa Pening, Central Java, Indonesia. One of the fishermen in this picture called Sugeng. He has a characteristic in catching fish using nets. While he was fishing he looked like he was dancing.

Energy

Photo and caption by Suhaimi Abdullah

Children enjoying a day out at the town of Pinamungajan, Philippines

Charcoal worker

Photo and caption by Debasish Ghosh

This worker inside the small dusty pit is removing charcoal for his livelihood despite severe health hazards.

Listening to Jesus

Photo and caption by gali tibbon

Christian Orthodox pilgrims rest their heads on an altar at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem's Old City. According to Orthodox tradition, if you place your ear over the altar you can hear the agony of Jesus.

Gypsy of Rajasthan

Photo and caption by sasson haviv

the original gypsies are originated in rajasthan India. i was amazed by their way of life and strong character. this image shows how the desert can shape one's face and character. the image was taken inside a straw hut with minimal light.

Old Couple

Photo and caption by Paul Borhaug

A couple is seen standing outside their little mud house, located in the barren desert landscape of Burkina Faso sahel.

Enal with Pet Shark

Photo and caption by james morgan

Enal swims with his pet shark. Enal is a young bajau child, his ancestors have traditionally spent their entire lives living on small wooden boats moving around the waters of Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. But increasing environmental destruction has forced Bajau families such as Enal's to live on shore in stilt villages. However, Bajau children, such as Enal, still retain a strong connection to the ocean and I believe they could play a crucial role in conserving the ocean and restoring harmony.

The Horseman Sweden

Photo and caption by lena holmgren

Stig-Anders Svensson is a solitary man in a remote village in Sweden. Together with his three draught horses, Stig-Anders works his land and forest in an old-fashioned way. The picture shows Stig-Anders and Sally coming out from the stable a wintry february day 2010. They are going to drive timber to the sawmill.

Sumo

Photo and caption by Andrew Peacock

I was fortunate to gain access to watch Sumo wrestlers at the Azumazeki stable practice their ritualistic sport at an early morning training session on February 15 2010 in Higashi-Komagata, Sumida, Tokyo, Japan.

Rosa

Photo and caption by Ian Spanier

Portrait of tobacco field worker Rosa Navarro, photographed in La Finca de Jugera outside Santa Rosa de Copan in Honduras.

People: 2010 National Geographic Photography Contest Galleries (Source: National Geographic Magazine)

Nature: 2010 National Geographic Photography Contest Galleries

Se que el post va a estar un poco largo y dividido en 3 partes, pero quiero ponerlo todas las fotos, tamanio XL y con descripcion porque estan INCREIBLES jajaja Las fotos se dividen en 3 categorias: Nature, People y Places. Aqui estoy subiendo los ganadores y un par de fotos de los Runner Ups que me gustaron. Ahi van las de Nature. Enjoy.

Nature

Grand Prize Winner and Nature Winner

Photo and caption by Lim Boon Teck , Aaron

A canceled trek turned into the opportunity of a lifetime for photographer Aaron Lim Boon Teck, who captured an active Indonesian volcano in his image "Eruption of Gunung Rinjani."

"Trekkers [who] were able to make it up to the crater rim on time [were] able to camp overnight to witness the eruption [the] whole night long," Boon Teck, of Singapore, wrote with his submission to the 2010 National Geographic Photography Contest. "I wanted to share with everyone this experience of seeing many elements going on at a particular point in time."

Honorable Mention

Photo and caption by Sean Heavey

Supercell Thunderstorm

A supercell thunderstorm rolls across the Montana prairie at sunset.

Honorable Mention

Photo and caption by Stephanie Swartz

Lion in the Shadows

This lion at a wildlife sanctuary in Indonesia found his light at the perfect moment for me to capture it.

Honorable Mention

Photo and caption by Nenad Saljic

Twilight Clouds

I have spent seven days waiting for this image, and finally on the morning just before my departure the clouds were moving fast and clearing the North Face of Matterhorn. I have used ND filter and exposure was 47 sec.

Viewers' Choice Nature Winner

Photo and caption by sanjeev bhor

Smile Please

When I entered into the deep forest of Jim Corbett National Park, I was searching for a tiger and suddenly we came across a monkey. He ran so fast that within a fraction of second he sat on a termite mound. He sat in such a manner and was watching me like he might be telling me to click his photograph. And I got this memorable image of a monkey sitting on a termite mound for a portfolio photograph. It is very rare to see him in such a pose.

Remembering Faith

Photo and caption by Simon Pidcock

This photograph was taken in the Canadian Gulf Islands. It was the first super pod of the year. There are three resident pods or families of Orcas that grace our waters for 6 months of the year. A super pod is when all three pods totaling 87 whales come together to socialize and mate.

This particular Orca is L57 "Faith" who was 31 years old and from L Pods' family. He went missing two months after this photo was taken and is presumed dead. He had a great affinity for inter-species interactions and loved to sneak up on unsuspecting boats for surprise visits. 

The Last of His Kind

Photo and caption by Jody MacDonald

Rajan is the last ocean swimming elephant on earth. Initially trained using very cruel methods to log the Andaman Islands, he was forced to swim hauling massive loads. At 60 years he is the last of the group to survive. Now retired, he spends his time with his caretaker and enjoys swimming and walking through the forests he once logged. He is truly the last of his kind.

Contemplation

Photo and caption by Lawrence Smith

We were in the Bwindi National Forest in Uganda, in search of the endangered Mountain Gorilla. After 3 hours of heavy hiking, through dense jungle, we spotted a group of gorillas. This gorilla looked as if he was pondering the world and everything which was happening. Though they are wild, and you need to keep your distance, sometimes they let you approach.

Playing Cheetah

Photo and caption by Rocco Sette

A young unexperienced Cheetah male played more than 20 minutes with a baby Gazelle. During the play time, it looked like the Cheetah found a companion, before he killed the Gazelle.

Cool, estamos con las fotos de Nature, faltan dos galleries nada mas. Hay bastantes mas en la pagina de Nat Geo, el link es este:

Nature: 2010 National Geographic Photography Contest Galleries (Source: National Geographic Magazine)

Top 10 Scientific Discoveries according to TIME

Here it is, the top 10 scientific discoveries of 2010, according to TIME

1. The Horniest Dinosaur That Ever Lived

Settle down, we're talking real horns — 15 of them to be exact, decorating the giant head of the 5,500-lb. (2,500-kg) Kosmoceratops, a beast that lived 76 million years ago in what is now Utah. Its fossilized remains were discovered by a University of Utah expedition in 2007, but the dino was formally described and named only in September of 2010. The bones shed light not only on the fanciful kinds of beasts that lived so long ago, but on the unfamiliar place North America was. Though the Kosmoceratops lived in Utah, it was a coastal dweller, making its home along the Cretaceous Western Interior Seaway, a great body of water that divided the continent in two.

2. Big News About a Small Particle

Guess what? There appears to have been an asymmetry in the behavior of neutral B-mesons during a collision at Fermilab's Tevatron accelerator! Not excited? Try this: If there hadn't been, you probably wouldn't exist. Conventional particle physics dictates that equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created during the Big Bang, but that's impossible, since matter and antimatter mutually annihilate. The only way anything could be left over to start a universe would be if the scales had been tipped slightly in favor of matter, a sensible theory, but one that had never been glimpsed in action — until this year. In particle collisions at Fermilab, scientists discovered that the number of muons (a kind of heavy electron) created exceeded anti-muons by about 1%. That's not much, but long ago it was apparently just enough to kick start the cosmos. On such margins are universes made.

3. Our (Sort of) Watery Moon 

The lunar surface is nothing if not predictable. You've got dust, you've got rocks, you've got bigger rocks. One thing you definitely don't have is water — which has always made the idea of homesteading the place a challenge. As it turns out, however, the moon is a lot wetter than we ever knew. NASA's LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) mission made that discovery when it crash-landed a spent rocket booster near the moon's south pole and then directed the LCROSS satellite itself to analyze the plume that was blasted up. It was no news that there was water vapor in the plume — the lunar poles are home to at least traces of permafrost — the surprise was how much: about 50% more than astronomers anticipated, making the moon roughly twice as wet as the Sahara Desert. O.K., that's not exactly beachfront property, but it could be enough to allow future settlers to manufacture their own water supply on-site, which would be easier and cheaper than hauling it from Earth.

4. The Robot Sleuth and the Mexican Tunnel

 

The pyramids of Mexico's Teotihuacan have always been one of North America's archaeological treasures. But those and other remains of the ancient city have always been a mystery too. A door into Teotihuacan's shrouded past cracked open a little this year when an archaeological bot equipped with a camera was sent on a subterranean trek and found a 12-ft. wide corridor with a perfectly preserved arched roof that was built — and sealed — nearly two millennia ago. Archeologists are hopeful that it may be connected to the tomb of a high priest, a find that could reveal volumes about how the people who constructed the Mesoamerican metropolis once lived.

5. Getting Old? Blame This Gene

the way they do and we, um, don't? One reason could be a little DNA sequence clustered near a human gene called TERC. The TERC gene is already known to produce an enzyme called telomerase, which helps regulate the length of telomeres — caps at the end of chromosomes similar to the plastic tips at the ends of shoelaces. Every time a cell divides, telomeres shorten, leading to a chromosomal fraying associated with aging. In a British study published in the journal Genetics, scientists found that people with one copy of the gene had slightly shorter telomeres similar to those of people three or four years older who didn't carry the gene; in other words, they were aging three or four years faster. In another study in Nature, researchers at Harvard Medical School were able to switch on a telomerase gene in prematurely aged mice, and reverse the aging process; the mice's organs regnerated, their shrunken brains increased in size, and their fertility was restored. Manipulating the gene for telomerase could, in theory, slow aging or at least the development of age-related diseases in humans. But there's reason for caution: Rapidly dividing, semi-immortal cells are also known as cancer cells, meaning that the search for eternal youth could yield an entirely different — less pleasant — outcome.

6. Planet Population Explodes

In the same year the U.S. conducted its decennial census, astronomers continued their ongoing nose count of known planets outside our solar system — and they found a lot of new celestial citizens. There's HIP 13044b, a world circling a distant star that was once not even part of the Milky Way, but was instead snagged by it gravitationally. There are up to seven new planets orbiting a star called HD 10180, about 127 light years from Earth. Most exciting was the discovery of Gliese 581g, the first extrasolar planet discovered that orbits its sun in the so-called Goldilocks zone, a distance at which conditions are neither too cold nor too hot for life. Alas, this Goldilocks may indeed be a fairy tale, as follow-up studies have now cast doubt on whether the planet exists at all. But few scientists doubt that more worlds like are out there — or that they'll be discovered soon.

7. The Ultimate Magician's Cape

When scientists speak seriously about something like a space-time cloak, they're either a) extremely smart or b) a tiny bit crazy. Prof. Martin McCall of Imperial College in London is not crazy. The British physicist published a paper in the journal Optics describing the theoretical possibility of something he calls "metamaterials," fabric or other forms of matter that could be molecularly engineered to scramble the usual flow of electromagnetic energy. Light passing through it would emerge unevenly, creating gaps in time and space. O.K., that's hard to follow, but his only half-joking description of a safecracker entering a room, robbing a safe and leaving while a surveillance camera reveals nothing amiss isn't. One tiny glitch in the plan: given the speed at which light travels, invisibility for even a few minutes would require a cloak about 100 million meters (320 million ft) long.

8. Meet the Ancestors

You never knew the woman and boy who were entombed in an avalanche of sediment in South Africa's Malapa cave some 2 million years ago, but spare them a thought since they might have been kin. Described in the journal Science in April, the fossils could fill an important spot in the evolutionary arc of humans, since there's little skeletal evidence of what was going on at that particular moment in our history. Paleontologists disagree about the significance of the new species, dubbed Australopithecus sediba — and some believe it was an evolutionary dead end that has little to do with us. But its intriguing mix of ancient and comparatively modern skeletal features at least suggests that it was a direct ancestor of Homo erectus, which in turn is a direct ancestor of Homo sapiens, a group that includes you, your plumber and everyone in your car pool.

9. A New Element — Maybe

Lead, iron and uranium are nothing compared to ununseptium, the temporary name for element 117, an extremely heavy combination of berkelium and calcium isotopes created in a particle accelerator in Dubna, Russia. The new element existed for only the tiniest fraction of a second before vanishing again — and it must be independently created elsewhere before it earns a permanent spot on the periodic table of the elements — but the fact that it remained stable for even the fleeting instant it did is promising. The heavier artificial elements get, the less stable they become, until they reach a point at which the curve turns back up and they begin to last longer and longer. Ununseptium is on the upward part of that arc suggesting that what physicists call "islands of stability" may exist, at which the heaviest elements of all could last for months or years. The periodic table, it seems, has yet to be fully set.

10. The Drinking Cat

Proof that all news — including science news — is local comes from the breathless announcement out of MIT, Princeton and Virginia Tech that scientists there have at last cracked the mystery of how a cat can drink milk without getting its chin and whiskers wet. Painstakingly analyzing high-speed videos, the investigators determined that while the predictably crude dog forms its tongue into a sort of ladle to scoop up liquids, the cat goes about things more daintily, curling its tongue down and under and touching the surface of the liquid lightly. When it laps — which it does at a speed of about four times per second — a complex interplay of gravity, inertia and fluid dynamics moves about 0.1 ml of liquid into its mouth per lap with no slosh or spillage. The practical applications for this? None at all. Does that matter? Not a bit.

Top 10 Scientific Discoveries according to TIME (Source: Time Magazine)

What Is the Winter Solstice, Anyway?

The shortest day of the year...

Every year, Dec. 21 or Dec. 22 is the shortest day of the year. Why? Because of the Earth's tilt on its axis (23.5 degrees), the North Pole and the Northern Hemisphere is tilted farthest from the Sun today. Likewise, the Sun's path is the farthest north from the Earth's equator. The North Pole, in fact, is in complete darkness and hasn't seen the sun in months. It won't see dawn until March.

The day officially marks the beginning of winter and thus has the longest night of the year. New York City, for example, is estimated to get only 9 hours, 15 minutes and 5 seconds of daylight.

Throughout history, people celebrated the day as they considered the worst of winter to be behind them (never mind that most of the United States has yet to experience the true bluster of winter it usually sees in January and February). But take comfort in the fact that the days will only get longer from here on out.

What Is the Winter Solstice, Anyway? (Source: Time Magazine)

Why Is Your Checkout Line Always the Slowest?

It's a matter of science...

Why the bad luck? It's just a probability issue. Watch this video, hosted by Bill Hammock, a professor at the University of Illinois-Urbana, and ease your mind.


Why Is Your Checkout Line Always the Slowest? (Source: Time Magazine)

What happened to the days where vending machines only sold Fritos and Coke?

The world's first gold vending machine!

Times are changing. We’re keeping pace and going a step ahead. GOLD to go® has developed the world’s first gold vending machine.

A simple and brilliant principle: put your money in and pick your gold!

The GOLD to go® vending machine is an unmanned point of sale. It offers an extraordinary opportunity to purchase gold bars and coins of assured quality, backed by the security of aSwabian Fort Knox® and with the ease-of-use of  a vending machine. Prices are updated in real-time. The GOLD to go® gold vending machine is largely burglar-proof and tamper-resistant. It has an excellent user guidance, which makes it very easy to handle.

• Gold Bars 1 gram, 5 gram, 10 gram and 1 ounce
• Krugerrand 1/10 ounce, 1/4 ounce and 1 ounce
• Kangaroo 1/10 ounce ($15) and 1 ounce ($100)
• Maple Leaf 1/10 ounce ($5)

(Source: gold-to-go.com/en/)