Eduard Florin Niga says a Romanian childhood, police training, and his toddler's curiosity all contributed to his beguiling closeups of ants and other insects.
A rescued giraffe, a see-through frog, a paralyzed jellyfish: Out of thousands of images, National Geographic editors selected these 28 striking animal pictures.
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The Saharan silver ant can scurry across the hot sands of northern Africa at blistering speeds, surpassing three feet in a second. Relative to body size, that would be like a human dashing more than two football fields in the time it takes you to say, “That’s fast.”
The giant turtle ant,
Cephalotes atratus, is sometimes called “the Darth Vader of the ant world.” With a large, flattened head and sleek body, it can glide between the treetops of South American forests. And then there’s the leaf-cutter ant: some of them have an exoskeleton coated in rock and farm fungus underground with bits of chewed up plants, developing agriculture millions of years before humans even existed
Taxes, Chauvin Trial, N.C.A.A.: Your Monday Evening Briefing
Here’s what you need to know at the end of the day.
Good evening. Here’s the latest.
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1. Democrats target multinational corporations and millionaires.
Senator Ron Wyden, above, the Oregon Democrat in charge of writing tax legislation, released a plan to overhaul the way the U.S. taxes multinational businesses, tweaking several aspects of President Donald J. Trump’s 2017 tax law.
The plan, which could be a blueprint for how lawmakers finance part of President Biden’s infrastructure plan, seeks to discourage companies from shifting profits and jobs to other countries to avoid paying U.S. taxes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/05/science/ants-wilson-photography-niga-rice.html
The Sahara Desert ant (Cataglyphis bicolor), with its long, spidery legs an invaluable adaptation for staying cool above the blazing sand.
The Great Read
Let Us Now Praise Tiny Ants
Even in the densest human habitations, there are orders of magnitude more ants than there are of us, doing the hard work of making our crumbs disappear.
The Sahara Desert ant (Cataglyphis bicolor), with its long, spidery legs an invaluable adaptation for staying cool above the blazing sand.Credit.
April 5, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
It is telling, the entomologist Eleanor Spicer Rice writes in her introduction to a new book of ant photography by Eduard Florin Niga, that humans looking downward on each other from great heights like to describe the miniaturized people we see below us as looking “like ants.” By this we mean faceless, tiny, swarming: an indecipherable mass stripped of individuality or interest.