This was a good week for me: I hired my field assistants for this summer’s fieldwork in Miami, and I think they’re going to be great! It’ll be a few weeks before I head back to Florida, and a few weeks more before Nate returns from Spain. But look out — when both halves of Day’s Edge are in the same place for a couple of months, exciting new photo and video projects will undoubtedly ensue!

I’ve come across some fantastic visualizations of science this week. Jorge Cham, creator of the science-themed comic strip PhD Comics, interviewed physicists Daniel Whiteson and Jonathan Feng about the physics of “dark matter.” Cham then animated a brilliant multi-panel comic to accompany the interview. The result is genuinely entertaining and quite accessible!

Al Gore entered the world of visual advocacy with the Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth and he is following up that success with a new e-book, Our Choice. This is an e-book that truly uses all the capabilities of handheld devices like the iPad, as you can see in . If you just want to read the book, you can. But you can also explore data in dynamic figures, watch videos and slideshows, and explore the planet’s future through simulations. This is the future of books!

A Ph.D. student at the University of Connecticut used high-speed video cameras to demonstrate that a long-held assumption about how hummingbirds feed on nectar is false. I love it when imaging technology can give us new insights about animals’ ecology and behavior!

In another example, new images and video purporting to show the Ivory-billed woodpecker have been released, accompanying . Collins believes he has observed Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in Louisiana, the third state to have putative Ivory-bill sightings since 2004. The videos and images are, technically at least, unimpressive. Yes, there are clues to be derived from them, and there are hints that the bird shown could be an Ivory-billed Woodpecker. But what we really need is a professional or serious amateur photographer or videographer to capture some decent-quality images of this bird, whatever it is!

To me, the most convincing evidence for the Ivory-bill’s persistence remains the growing number of good sight records by experienced birdwatchers and ornithologists. I’ve been birding with Collins, and he is good. So are Geoff Hill (who claims to have seen Ivory-bills in Florida) and the Cornell University team (who believe they have documented Ivory-bills in Arkansas). It would be hard (but not impossible) for all of these experienced birders to make an identification error. But until these sight records are substantiated by physical evidence, I think most people will remain (rightly) unconvinced!

It’d be hard to have made it through last week without reading plenty about Osama bin Laden’s death — it’s practically all the mainstream media could talk about! What you may not have realized is that Tom Gillespie, a geography professor at UCLA (and, incidentally, a member of my dissertation committee), had already predicted bin Laden’s location with a fair degree of accuracy over two years ago. Gillespie asked the undergraduates in his geographic information system (GIS) class to use biogeographic theory and GIS software to predict the location of bin Laden’s hideout, and helped them through the process. Abbotabad, where bin Laden was killed, was within the region where the class predicted he could be found. Nice work, Tom!