Recently, many publications have been taking a look at the melting of the Arctic and the impending rush for newly accessible land. This account in Foreign Affairs is one of the best I've seen so far. The Northwest Passage is opening, fish are moving north, and Greenland is seeing a farming boom. There are tumultuous times ahead.

Another undeniable, frightening trend is the drying of the West. The development of the western U.S. was made possible only by an abnormal period of wet climate. And this period has come to an end. I think it won't be too long before we start to see northward human migrations. Canada is looking more appealing by the minute.

Last week engineers released a massive torrent of water into the Grand Canyon (video) in an attempt to restore the ecosystem. I can just imagine the survivors of the apocalypse coming across that headline on a decaying newspaper unearthed from the rubble of our civilization.

Why does one molecule smell of spearmint when its mirror image smells of caraway? Smell is a weird, weird sense. Fragrances and flavors are some of the hardest sensations to describe, since the sheer variety of nuances simply outstrips our everyday vocabularies. Instead, those in the industry use a different "vocabulary" based on referencing other smells and tastes. That's why you see wine descriptions that talk about hints of chocolate and oaky notes. They never made sense to me until fairly recently, because even if you understand the words, you don't really understand them in the olfactory context until you've actually experienced them.

I previously wrote about reusing tiles in video games to save memory. This comic points out that the clouds and bushes in SMB are actually the same! I feel so simultaneously impressed and cheated.

A 3D graphics engine written in Excel.

A German art group has programmed a robotic arm to "handwrite" a Martin Luther bible. I once saw a neat demo of two Comau robot arms. One held a whiteboard, and another used a dry-erase marker to repeatedly write and erase the company's name. The arm with the whiteboard then started to rotate and translate in space, while the other arm moved with it, continuing to write and erase without missing a beat. Mathematically, it was just a simple coordinate transform, but the effect was amazing. Anyhow, bible-writer 2.0 should dance like that as it writes!

Neatorama has a nice gallery of bridges. Make sure to check out the links to other galleries at the bottom.

The "art island" of Naoshima (flickr gallery) hosts a number of contemporary art museums. I'd love to head out there with a suitcase of books and just lose myself for a month.

Japanese scientists were able to capture the entire birth of a traffic jam on video. Traffic is really the result of one thing: tailgating. When somebody taps on the brakes, the person behind has to brake harder, because he or she is too close. This continues down the line until the braking force becomes high enough to completely stop a car. That's why traffic can grind to a standstill for no apparent reason. But it only takes a few good drivers to smooth out the flow. Clive Thompson writes about an engineer who realized he could "eat" traffic waves by trailing the car in front of him by so much that he never had to stop. This effect can also be seen in studies that show how just a few cars with adaptive cruise control improve overall traffic. There's absolutely no reason why we can't avoid congestion with good driving practices, which is what makes stopping on the freeway so infuriating. Driving schools need to wise up and start teaching people how to not drive like idiots.

In 1984 NASA launched a giant cylinder covered with 86 panels of different materials to measure the long-term effects of exposure to space. I'm not sure what happened to it when it came back, but they could've put it straight into an art museum.

NIGHT Windows is my favorite gallery of Japan photography. Amazingly, most of the pictures are completely devoid of people, which really captures the lonely feel of a Tokyo night. If you're looking for more, The Night views of Seto has some great nighttime panoramas.

One thing that's often said of Japanese culture is that it's so alien from that of the West. I think this especially stands out when examining Japanese mythology. Pop culture has familiarized us with the gods and creatures of Greek and Norse myth. Tolkien has taught us all about trolls and dwarves and dragons. Everyone's heard more than a few fairy tales. Basically, you can travel any Western country and not be too surprised at the fables you hear. But Japan has a completely different set of legends that really have no counterparts in our culture. The creatures of Japanese myth are so wildly inventive that the only way to describe them is "alien." Just take a look through the (beautifully illustrated) Obakemono Project to get a sense. You'll also know what I'm talking about if you've seen Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, Heisei Tanuki Gassen Pon Poko, or, to a lesser degree, Paprika (with its recurring parade sequence). Some of my favorite concepts - objects with souls and animals that become shapeshifters when they reach a certain age. A fox that lives to a hundred can transform into a human and grows an extra tail for each passing century. I love detailed, completely arbitrary rules like that.

The Kuchisake Onna is an ancient Japanese legend that became a modern urban one.