Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Photographs of Electricity

Hiroshi Sugimoto is a Japanese photograher who takes pictures of electrical charges. His exhibit “Lightning Fields” is currently on display at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco. Sugimoto uses a 400,000-volt Van De Graaff generator to directly apply electricity to film. The above image is entitled “Lightening Fields 128, 2008.”

Artist’s Website

Link, Via: Gizmodo, Via: Neatorama

Nikola Tesla

Today is Nikola Tesla's birthday. Nikola Tesla (10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943) was an inventor and a mechanical and electrical engineer.

Tesla was an ethnic Serb born in the village of Smiljan, Vojna Krajina, in the territory of today's Croatia.

He was a subject of the Austrian Empire by birth and later became an American citizen. Tesla is often described as an important scientist and inventor of the modern age, a man who 'shed light over the face of Earth.'

Nikola Tesla is best known for many revolutionary contributions in the field of electricity and magnetism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. LINK

Fish Woos Mate with Electricity

Birds do it, bees do it, but this Amazon basin fish do it with ‘lectricity! The nocturnal (and toothless) gymnotiform fish attract the opposite sex and intimidate rivals by amping up their electric field:

One weakly electric fish is the nocturnal gymnotiform fish (Brachyhypopomus pinnicaudatus), a toothless fish native to the Amazon basin. At night, males of the species give off big, long electric hums, almost like serenades. […]

Salazar discovered the male fish invested as much as 11 percent to 22 percent of their body’s energy in their nocturnal electric displays. Females hardly exerted themselves electrically, just expending 3 percent of their energy.

"If these displays are expensive to generate, one can presume that individuals paying attention to these signals can infer a better quality male is generating them," Salazar told LiveScience.

When Salazar looked at how fit the males were, she found the fattest and healthiest males often broadcast the biggest electric signals. As such, they were essentially advertising their bodies. LINK, Via: Neatorama