Prism Magazine

Fashion’s funny. Sometimes you want it guilt-free, cheap and a bit dirty. Other times we need chic, timeless, works of intelligence.

I love it when designers get it right. It serves as a great reminder to how utterly mind blowing the world of textiles can be.

Enter Shabd Simon Alexander, a designer creating simplistic feminine shapes with an immpeccable understanding of fabric composition and combinations. Taking inspiration from Hubble telescope photos of world’s being born and stars dying, she has created a line of hand dyed accent pieces that bring design, chance and chaos into perfect balance.

This makes me happy: http://www.shop.shabdismyname.com/

Image by Flickr user Karen Roe

There aren’t many things that lure you willingly out of bed at 9 o’clock on a Saturday morning. The smell of a cooked breakfast, coffee perhaps. What about the prospect of 50 minutes negotiating the M25 in a car on its last legs? No? What, even if there’s a guaranteed kingfisher spot waiting at the other end? Ah, now you’re changing your tune. And so it was that sleepy-eyed and in no position to navigate, I headed off towards Rye Meads, an RSPB reserve in Hoddesdon with the prospect of losing my kingfisher virginity.

There’s a strange phenomenon in bird watching. Even pre-Internet, pre-Twitter where Chris Packham and the like can alert us all to rare winter visitors or never-seen-before breeds hitting UK shores, ornithologists always know. Aged six or seven, I remember my parents dashing off down Cot Valley, Cornwall to see a visiting Siberian chiffchaff, which indeed they saw, except it was through the heads of the bird mafia a.k.a the entire population of UK ornithologists. Or so it seemed.

Kingfishers have RSPB Amber status, which means whilst once threatened, their population is on the increase. Not a complete rarity, but somewhat elusive. And what’s more, in a land where most of the birds are, though captivating, known as ‘little brown jobs’ they are characterised by a flash of royal blue and burning orange, catching your eye amongst the mossy greens of the river bank. In short, they are the A-List celebrity of the winged world.

Arriving at Rye Meads, the lovely lady on reception must have seen the shadows of blue and orange in my eyes, smiling ‘are you here to see our kingfishers?’. Apparently I am that transparent. Enhanced by the power of the Internet, the ornithologist grapevine was at full throttle, indeed by the look of the hide, the Rye Meads paparazzi were out in force.

The Rye Meads paparazzi

Feeling utterly inadequate with my measly zoom lens, and usurped by a Japanese fellow with what can only be described as the monster of all telescopic lenses, we jostled amongst the crowd awaiting the tiny bird that had managed to amass such a spate of onlookers. Some suspiciously professional looking photographers took pride of place, along with happy snappers like myself, wide-eyed children and then the multitude of visitors with binoculars.

My 'almost' shot of the monarch of Rye Meads

And then, the blur of blue and orange. Children and adults gasp. Shutters explode into choruses of clicks. The kingfisher moves at light speed, keen to feed its young, and disappears into its nest hole in mere moments. Being a girl, there may have been a swift drying of the eyes (is the pollen getting to anyone else?), but before the ‘manning-up’ had ceased the kingfisher is back. Taking pride of place on a post before it begins to fish; unaware of the awe-struck audience it is performing for.

The RSPB reserve predicts that the kingfisher will be feeding its young up until the end of May, meaning an almost guaranteed chance of seeing the brilliant bird this month. Only 50 minutes outside of London by car, and also accessible by train, Rye Meads isn’t just kingfisher-centric. We also spotted a sedge warbler singing in some reeds, a hobby catching and then losing its insect dinner and pond creatures in all manner of iridescent shades. But enough boasting from us, wherever you are there’s bound to be an RSPB reserve nearby where you can catch sight of all manner of avian wonders, and if you’re abroad then you’ve probably got hummingbirds and birds of paradise bombing you from every angle… so it’s your turn to boast.

www.rspb.org.uk

The iPad, Apple’s latest money-making creation, is set for release in the UK on the 28th of May with a starting price of just £429. This will buy you the most basic model with the highest spec iPad looking to set you back around £699.

The iPad is supposedly the middle ground between Apple’s iPhone and a MacBook (if you’re going to get the highest spec iPad, spending around £699, you’re probably better off just buying a laptop) but I won’t go too much into that. Laura posted her thoughts and feelings on the product at the start of the year and you can read why she’ll be buying one on the 28th May by clicking here.

To give you an idea of how simple to use an iPad is, here’s a video of a two and half year old from across the pond, deftly navigating this new piece of tech. It’s this sort of video that makes me feel old, even at 20.

Now we just have to sit back and wait for the next video – the one of her having a tantrum and throwing the iPad across the room because it doesn’t multitask or support Flash.

You can pre-order your iPad from the Apple store now by clicking here.

Photo: NASA

Sexy science pin-up, environmental champion and Prism favourite Professor James Lovelock has proclaimed that ‘We can’t save the planet’. Oh well, we tried I suppose. But did we try hard enough?

It’s hard to predict what will happen to the climate over the next hundred years or so. Will it get hotter as predicted or will the opposite be the case with a drop in global temperature? Lovelock says it can however take many millennia for temperatures to change by as much as 5 degrees, based on scientific data coming from ice cores. The earth has regulated itself and its climate since its creation (however you believe that was) and it only reacts to what we do to try and maintain some sort of equilibrium. We shouldn’t feel guilty though, says Lovelock, “we didn’t deliberately set out to heat the world”.

We know the climate has changed dramatically in the history of the Earth from extreme heat to extreme cold but it doesn’t change in the steady curve Al Gore and other activists would have us believe, it ‘jumps and jerks’ around. Despite recent reports and films (you know the one I mean), the world has not warmed in the last 100 years, or so Prof Lovelock says. In actual fact, the northern hemisphere has experienced some of the coldest winters on record as those in the USA, China and the UK will have experienced. These have coincided with prolonged periods of snow fall which caused wide-spread disruption in the UK during the month of January.

Whilst Lovelock, who is now 90 years old, says it’s too late to save the planet or at-least, stop climate change, that doesn’t mean we have to stop all the good things we’ve been trying to do over the last few years. Reducing emissions makes the world a much nicer, less polluted place and the move away from fossil fuels and other non-renewables is a change we will have to make at some stage anyway. It makes perfect economic sense to avoid non-renewables as petrol and electricity prices continue to increase. Lovelock believes the monetary value of goods and services is the greatest motivating factor if we are to change our behaviour. By making the greener alternative cheaper than its polluting counterpart, the public will be forced to change the way they consume and this will in turn lessen their impact on the environment.

Laura wrote this rather excellent post for Prism in September of last year on a lecture given by Prof Lovelock which elaborates on Lovelock’s theory. Worth checking out. Click here to read her post in full.

You can read the original BBC report on Prof Lovelock’s interview on the Today programme and view several videos of him explaining his theory here.

The quote which forms the title of this post was exclaimed by Jack Hawkins in the 1964 historical epic ‘Zulu’. For more information on the film, click here.

So Channel 4, we think we may have found a filler for that huge Big Brother shaped hole that will appear in your schedule – Solar System Live. Developer John Walker calls it the ‘interactive Orrery of the web’ – you can view the Solar system in its entirety or just the inner planets. Controls allow you to ’set time and date, viewpoint, observing location, orbital elements to track an asteroid or comet’ – space travel for those more inclined to keep their feet firmly on earth. Click here to start your adventure.

Showing at the Science Museum IMAX now. Forget How To Train Your Dragon (though it’s really rather good), screw Avatar. See this instead.

Information is never prettier than when put into a colourful diagram. Great White Snark have managed to clarify the distinction between geek, nerd, dork and dweeb with this Venn diagram. We like to think we sit comfortably in the mint green section…what about yourselves?

Who would have thought that for £500 you could photograph images of the Earth from space. Yorkshireman Robert Harrison developed this helium balloon to take aerial photographs of his home and eventually sent a digital camera, encased in an insulated box, 20 miles above sea level. The helium balloon inevitably bursts leaving the box to parachute back to earth where it emits a tracking signal so Robert can discover what images his device has captured. Imagine conducting experiments like this in school – science lessons would never be missed, imaginations would be set alight and you’d see an overgrown child hiding at the back of the class looking suspiciously like myself… Click here and here to discover more about Robert’s amazing project.

Wondering when and where you could see a total solar eclipse? Have a look at Michael Paukner’s guide. But those marooned on the little island we call Great Britain…don’t get your hopes up too high.

Beau Lotto is one of those gifted speakers that makes a sixteen minute Ted Talk seem like six minutes instead; time flies by when you’re having fun. He is the founder of Lottolab – a hybrid art studio and science lab – and this talk uses colours, shapes and honey bees in strange ways that make us question how we see. Watch this to interact with Lotto’s optical illusions (or are they?) and see how a six-year-old composed music for an orchestra with his colourful painting.

www.lottolab.org