The Runion stonechat (Saxicola tectes) is a species of stonechat in the family Muscicapidae, the Old World flycatchers. It is found across the French Indian Ocean island of Runion in forests, shrublands, and artificial environments such as gardens and plantations. The Runion stonechat is a member of the common stonechat superspecies, but it is distinct, together with its closest relative the Madagascar stonechat, from the rest of that group being insular derivatives of the African stonechat. The male is black above and white below, with a white supercilium (sometimes absent), half-collar, covert patch, and a variable-sized orange patch on the breast. Females differ from males in being browner above, more buff-toned below, and often lacking the white greater covert patch. This male Runion stonechat was photographed in La Roche crite, south of the Runion capital Saint-Denis.Photograph credit: Charles J. SharpRecently featured: Climate changeShirley Graham Du BoisEuropean spruce bark beetleArchiveMore featured pictures

November 13 thelred II of England1002 King thelredII (pictured) ordered the massacre of all Danes in England.1914 Zaian War: Zaian Berber tribesmen routed French forces at the Battle of El Herri in Morocco.1963 A man wielding a dagger was subdued as he was about to attack Sanz Nosaka, the chairman of the Japanese Communist Party.1966 ArabIsraeli conflict: In response to a Fatah landmine incident, the Israeli military conducted a large cross-border assault on the Jordanian-controlled West Bank village of Samu.1974 Ronald DeFeoJr. killed six members of his family in Amityville, New York, events that later inspired the book The Amityville Horror and a subsequent media franchise.Theophilus Holmes (b.1804)Anne Dallas Dudley (b.1876)Arthur Nebe (b.1894)Amelia Bence (b.1914)More anniversaries: November 12November 13November 14ArchiveBy emailList of days of the yearAbout

Tomorrow on #CreateWithMaxon, create beautiful Redshift Caustics! Join 3D Artist Jess Hewitt (@virtuallyvisual) as she breaks down the Brute Force Caustics scenes she created for the #Cinema4D and #Redshift 2025 launch video.3D Artist Jess Hewitt is going to break down some of the Brute Force Caustics scenes she created for the Cinema 4D and Redshift 2025 launch video.

From Prison to Purpose Through Wildland Firefighting | Royal Ramey | TED

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A Rare Otherworldly Sculpture by Surrealist Artist Leonora Carrington Is Going to AuctionThe 1951 artwork, La Grande Dame (The Cat Woman), stands over six feet tall and features paintings of hybrid creatures and lush dreamscapesLa Grande Dame (The Cat Woman)by Leonora Carrington on display at Sotheby's in New York City John Lamparski / Getty ImagesAs Surrealism celebrates its100th birthday, a rare sculpture by renowned Surrealist Leonora Carrington is going up for auction.On November 18, Sothebys will sellLa Grande Dame (The Cat Woman), which the British-Mexican artist created in 1951. The piece is expected to sell for between $5 million and $7 million.The otherworldly sculpture is made of carved and polychrome wood, which Carrington painted with depictions of hybrid creatures and lush dreamscapes that evoke a lasting sense of awe, per Sothebys. At more than six feet tall, La Grande Dame is a poised, puzzling figure with elongated features and an indecipherable expression spread across its spade-shaped head, asArtnets Richard Whiddington writes. The piece is more than six feet tall. Sotheby'sExperts have raised concerns about the authenticity of some of the sculptures attributed to Carrington, according to the Art Newspapers Hannah McGivern. However, La Grande Dame isnt one of them. Sothebys says that Harold Gabriel Weisz Carrington, the artists eldest son and president of the Fundacin Leonora Carrington, has confirmed the works authenticity.Museums, as well as private collectors, are expected to bid on the sculpture. Its being sold by a distinguished private American collection, per Sothebys. The piece was previously owned by Edward James, a British patron of the Surrealist movement. This is the first time its come up for public auction in three decades.This is her greatest sculpture, Julian Dawes, Sothebys senior vice president and head of Impressionist and modern art for the Americas, tellsARTnews Karen K. Ho.Dawes adds that her work is very relevant across the world. Carrington was a British artist working in Mexico using Egyptian and Celtic and pre-Columbian iconography, creating something thats wholly fantastical and original, he says. I wouldnt be surprised if we see a lot of institutional activity.Another piece by Carrington, a 1945 painting called Les Distractions de Dagobert, sold for a record $28.5 million earlier this year. Experts say demand for Carringtons work has surged as the art world has shifted its focus to the often-overlookedwomen of the Surrealist movement. The sculpture isis made of carved and polychrome wood. Sotheby'sBorn to a wealthy family in England in 1917, Carrington was a rebellious child who was expelled from at least two convent schools. When she was 14, her parents sent her to an Italian boarding school, where she took up painting.She later moved to London, then Paris, and began participating in the Surrealist movement in the late 1930s. Carrington relocated to Mexico in 1942, became a naturalized Mexican citizen and spent the rest of her life in the country. Shedied in 2011 at age 94.Carrington was primarily a painter, but she was also a writer and sculptor. Her work often featured goddesses, animals, human-animal hybrids, mythological creatures and otherworldly scenes. However, as with the work of other Surrealists, Carringtons art is difficult to characterizeand she liked it that way.Throughout her life, she refused to explain her work and she disliked any attempt to impose the order of language onto her visuals, wroteArtsys Siobhan Leddy in 2019. In seeing beyond the visible world, beyond the rational or comprehensible, Carrington leaves us only with abstract terms like magic.Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.Filed Under: Art, Artists, Arts, Auctions, Mexico, Painters, Sculpture, Surrealism, Visual Arts, Writers

Mary, the 54-year-old Asian elephant at the Berlin Zoo, loves using a hose to rinse off. Urban et al., Current Biology, 2024Elephants are highly intelligent, social creatures capable of peeling bananas, burying and mourning their dead, solving problems and greeting their companions.Now, scientists have added another skill to this list: using hoses to keep themselves cleanand, possibly, to play pranks on each other. Researchers describe these behaviors in a new paper published last week in the journal Current Biology.I am convinced that elephantsand possibly lots of animalsdo all sorts of interesting things that we often miss, or dismiss as one-offs or anecdotes, says Lucy Bates, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Portsmouth in England who was not involved with the research, to Sciences Sara Reardon.A 54-year-old Asian elephant named Mary at the Berlin Zoo surprised researchers with her adeptness at not only using the hose, but also adjusting her use to serve different purposes.Mary, who was born in the wild and had lived at other zoos, cleverly used her trunk to manipulate a hose to shower herself with water. She adopted various techniques to shower different parts of her body, including a lasso-like motion that allowed her to reach her back. Mary also changed her grip on the hose to reach various body parts, and she would raise one of her back legs so she could shower it.Researchers also presented Mary with hoses of different sizes to observe her reactions. She preferred the zoos standard-sized hose over smaller or larger ones, probably because the other sizes were more difficult to grab and move with her trunk.Mary is the queen of showering, says study co-author Michael Brecht, a computational neuroscientist at Humboldt University of Berlin, in a statement.Watch this elephant turn a hose into a sophisticated showering toolWatch on But another Asian elephant, 12-year-old Anchali, appeared to understand how to use the hose to play tricks on Mary. When Mary was showering herself, Anchali would often squeeze, clamp and stand on the hose, thus interrupting the water flow.Researchers suggest Anchalis behaviors could have been purposeful attempts to sabotage Marys shower time, they write in the paper. Over time, she got better at kinking the hoseand she did it more often. The younger elephant alsodeveloped a new behavior, which the team calls a trunk stand, that involves leaning into her trunk to flatten the hose.Anchali may have just been messing around playfully. But its also possible she was acting out of spite, because Mary periodically acted aggressively toward Anchali, per the researchers.Its something we would really like to knowdoes she think its funny? Brecht tells the Guardians Nicola Davis. I think its very funny, but we really dont know. Maybe shes just trying to be mean.Researchers couldnt prove Anchalis antics were vengefulin another experiment, they found that she most often interacted with the hose closest to her, rather than the one Mary was using. But they note its not clear whether Anchali could tell which hose went to Mary. Mary used the hose in different ways to shower various parts of her body, while Anchali shut off the water by clamping the hose. Urban et al., Current Biology, 2024The captive Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) also exhibited highly lateralized behaviors when handling the hoses, meaning they showered one side of their bodies more frequently than the other. These preferences seemed to align with the elephants trunkedness, or whether they were right-trunked or left-trunked (similar to right-handedness and left-handedness in humans). For instance, Mary is left-trunked and spent more time using the hose to shower the left side of her body than the right side.Marys elegant and elaborate use of the hose for showering isnt all that surprising, given her physiology, the researchers write in the paper. They suspect that she might have a somewhat intuitive understanding for a hose, because its super similar to the trunk, says study co-author Lena Kaufmann, also a neuroscientist at Humboldt University of Berlin, to the New York Times Emily Anthes.Still, Marys behavior is yet another example of non-human animals using tools, along with cockatoos, macaques, crows, dolphins and others. Scientists have deemed hoses complex tools because of their length and flexibility, and because of the dynamics of flowing water.I had not thought about hoses as tools much before, but what came out from [this research] is that elephants have an exquisite understanding of these tools, Brecht says in the statement.Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.Filed Under: Animals, Cognition, Elephants, Neuroscience, New Research, Tools, wildlife, Zoology

Image credits:@one_to_one_hundred (Auckland, New Zealand)@franzao.f (Brazil)@arthursvalente (Budapest, Hungary)@ivaboxx (Ankara, Turkey)@golden.vis.st (Warsaw, Poland)@nobrand_studio (Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago)@vis_on.studio (Bangkok, Thailand)@vz.visual (Warsaw, Poland)www.cgarchitect.com/members/maritz-emile Best of the Week Nov 03, 2024Looking for inspiration? Check out the TOP 10 best images posted last week on cgarchitect.com!See more on our board www.cgarchitect.com/boards/5108034b-best-of-the-week-nov-03-2024#top10 #vizprooftheweek #architecture #cgarchitect #archviz #visualization #architecturevisualization #3d #rendering #cgi #cgavizpro #render #vray #coronarender #unrealengine #vantage #3dsmax #revit #cg #3dbuilding #3drender #3darchitecture #3drender #3drendering #3dinterior #3dinteriordesign

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