This is absolutely worth a few minutes of your time

Aaron Carroll

December 29, 2011

Go to The Atlantic and check out some of the photos that were considered in the National Geographic 2011 photo contest. Specifically , these came from the “three categories of People, Places, and Nature, with captions written by the individual photographers.” Some of them are amazing. My favorite is below (click to enlarge).

Spiders — An unexpected side-effect of the 2010 flooding in parts of Sindh, Pakistan, was that millions of spiders climbed up into the trees to escape the rising flood waters; because of the scale of the flooding and the fact that the water took so long to recede, many trees became cocooned in spiders webs. People in the area had never seen this phenomenon before, but they also reported that there were less mosquitos than they would have expected, given the amount of standing water that was left. Not being bitten by mosquitoes was one small blessing for people that had lost everything in the floods. (© Russell Watkins) #

And here’s my second favorite:

Shark — Cage divers confront a great white shark. (© David Litchfield) #

There are 45. Go check them out.

AEC

UPDATED: Edited for clarity.

For Fun

Aaron Carroll

Aaron E. Carroll, MD, MS is co-Editor-in-Chief of The Incidental Economist and tweets at @aaronecarroll. He is the Chief Health Officer at Indiana University. He is also a Distinguished Professor of Pediatrics and Associate Dean for Research Mentoring at the Indiana University School of Medicine. In addition to contributing regularly to The New York Times and the Atlantic, he is the author of four books, most recently The Bad Food Bible.

This is absolutely worth a few minutes of your time

Aaron Carroll

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Aaron Carroll

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