Dead Baby Penguins on Rio de Janeiro’s Beaches

Can you imagine what’s it like to go to the beach and find hundreds of dead baby penguins washed up on the beach? Well the beach go-ers of Rio de Janeiro beach know. At last count, more than 400 penguins, swept from the shores of Patagonia and Antarctica, have been found dead on Rio de Janeiro’s beaches according to Michael Astor from Associated Press. So what are the causes?

Some say over-fishing; “Thiago Muniz, a veterinarian at the Niteroi Zoo, said he believed overfishing has forced the penguins to swim further from shore to find fish to eat “and that leaves them more vulnerable to getting caught up in the strong ocean currents.” Others say pollution, but scholars has pointed out it’s not likely. Instead, they suggested global warming; “I don’t think the levels of pollution are high enough to affect the birds so quickly. I think instead we’re seeing more young and sick penguins because of global warming, which affects ocean currents and creates more cyclones, making the seas rougher,” biologist Erli Costa said.

Star Dies and Explodes into Supernova

Another star died in an explosive death. According to CNN; “astronomers used a NASA X-ray satellite to spy on a star already well into its death throes, when another star in the same galaxy started to explode. The outburst was 100 billion times brighter than Earth’s sun.

The death of this star went through stages, with the core getting heavier in successive nuclear reactions and atomic particles being shed out toward the cosmos, Filippenko said. It started out in its normal life with hydrogen being converted to helium, which is what is happening in our sun.

The helium then converts to oxygen and carbon, and into heavier and heavier elements until it turns into iron.

That’s when the star core becomes so heavy it collapses in on itself, and the supernova starts with a shock wave of particles piercing through the shell of the star, which is what the Soderberg team captured on x-rays.”

Starving your dogs is art?

In 2007, Guillermo Vargas Habacuc, a so called artist, took an abandoned dog from the streets, tied him to a very short rope to a wall in an art gallery, and left a kettle of food on the other side of the room, beyond his reach, and left him there to slowly die of hunger and thirst.

The so-called artist of such cruelty and the visitors of the gallery of art watched the agony of this animal. The dog finally died of famine, surely after a painful, absurd and incomprehensible torture.

The prestigious Centralamerican Biennial of Art decided that this horrible act committed by this guy was art, and Guillermo Vargas Habacuc has been invited to repeat his cruel actions in said Biennial in 2008.

Here’s the article and the petition.

Blog to Death?

A few weeks ago, Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41,survived a heart attack in December.

According to this article by New York Times, many bloggers are suffering from sleep disorders, exhaustion and other types of non-stop strain of producing blog entries.

To make you feel better, it also says “To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.”

So I guess we don’t have to worry, yet.

Life Before Death: Photography of the departed

Taking portraits, easy. What about taking portraits before and after death?

“This sombre series of portraits taken of people before and after they had died is a challenging and poignant study. The work by German photographer Walter Schels and his partner Beate Lakotta, who recorded interviews with the subjects in their final days, reveals much about dying – and living.”

If you check out this article from guardian.co.uk, you’ll find the two portraits of all of the subjects were taken within a month. It’s strange how they can be so different within a month, being alive and being dead.

Life Before Death is at the Wellcome Collection from April 9 to May 18.