Whitecliffe College of Arts and Design recently held its annual fashion show on the catwalk at the Alinghi Boatshed, Viaduct Harbour, Auckland. Here is a photo essay by Alexis-Heart and Belen, including entries from Whitecliffe’s year two, three, and four students working towards a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a fashion design major. 
Whitecliffe Fashion Show Hits The Catwalk!
It May Not Help Titanic: But Still Predicting Icebergs Matters
It won’t help the Titanic, but a newly derived, simple law may help scientists improve their climate models and glaciologists predict where icebergs will calve off from their parent ice sheets, according to a team of Penn State researchers.
“To predict the future of the ice sheet and to understand the past, we have to put the information into a computer,” says Richard B. Alley, the Evan Pugh professor of geosciences. “The models we have do not currently have any way to figure out where the big ice sheets end and where the ice calves off to form icebergs.”
Ice sheets, such as those in Antarctica and Greenland, spread under their own weight and flow off land over the oceans. The Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica floats for as much as 500 miles over the ocean before the edges begin to break and create icebergs. Other ice shelves only edge over the water for a mile or two.
“The problem of when things break is a really hard problem because there is so much variability,” says Alley. “Anyone who has dropped a coffee cup knows this. Sometimes the coffee cup breaks and sometimes it bounces.”
The coffee cup’s breaking depends on what it hits and where it hits, but the most important variable is the distance the cup falls or is thrown. Below a certain distance, the cup will always remain intact, while above a certain distance, it will always break; for in-between distances, the results are variable.
For iceberg calving, the important variable — the one that accounts for the largest portion of when the iceberg breaks — is the rate at which ice shelves spread, the team reports in today’s (Nov. 28) issue of Science. When ice shelves spread, they crack because of the stresses of spreading. If they spread slowly, those cracks do not propagate through the entire shelf and the shelf remains intact. If the shelf spreads rapidly, the cracks propagate through the shelf and pieces break off.
“Spreading explains most of what is observed on the ice sheet,” says Alley. “However, the equations come out a little better if we include a few other things.”
These factors are the width of the ice shelf and the thickness. With a narrow shelf between two ridges, for example, the sides hold back the ice movement, slowing the overall movement and making it harder to break the ice. Thicker ice shelves spread more quickly so this affects the location of ice calving as well.
The basic equation for ice calving is the rate of spreading times the width of the shelf times the thickness times a constant. The researchers realize that this does not capture the totality of variation in the ice calving process but does account for a large percentage of the variability.
Animals in Danger of Extinction
Many animals are losing their habitats and in the verge of extinction. Really heart breaking to see all these beautiful creatures going away for this our (their) earth.
Fungus That Produces Diesel
Have you ever heard of a fungus that produces diesel fuel or for that fact any fuel.
A wild fungus has been found to produce a variety of hydrocarbon components of diesel fuel. The harmless, microscopic fungus, known as Gliocladium roseum (NRRL 50073), lives quietly within ulmo trees in the Patagonian rainforest.
Gary Strobel of Montana State University has found that the fungus produces many energy-rich hydrocarbons, and that the particular diesel components produced can be varied by changing the growing medium and environment of the fungus. The fungus even performs under low-oxygen conditions like those found deep underground.
Strobel’s discovery suggests that fungi living in ancient plants may have contributed to the natural formation of crude oil, a slow process that occurs when organic matter is subjected to high pressure and heat under layers of rock.
Mythical Female Snipers Stalking Russia?
Russia’s top investigator is claiming that their wartime foes, the Georgians, deployed a cadre of female snipers from Ukraine and Latvia. The shooters sound an awful lot like the mythical “white tights” — the exotic, stone-cold, blue eyed, Olympic bialthete killers of Chechen war lore who were said to pick off hapless Russian conscripts.
