View Animals in the Wild through the Zoo's New Global Camera-Traps

The Smithsonian National Zoo has unveiled a new website that will display more than 200,000 "camera trap" photos taken from all over the world. Camera traps are motion-activated, and the photos you see are exactly as seen by the scientists when retrieved from the camera in its location out in the wild.  Sometimes you may even see poachers.

The camera trap website displays both still photos and video clips of more than 200 species of mammals and birds, and provides links through social media such as Flickr, Twitter and Facebook to allow the public to share and comment on the photos. The site also provides reference links from each photo to corresponding species pages at the Encyclopedia of Life, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History's own North American Mammals page.

The site is part of the Smithsonian's Web 2.0 initiative to make Smithsonian science and resources more accessible to the public.

Fear of Stuff

Two items that you might want to keep in mind if your travels take you to distant lands.  Kuwait has banned DSLR cameras (big, digital cameras with big lenses) for everyone other than professional journalists. Small digital cameras and cell phone cameras are still okay.

A village in India, Muzaffarnagar, has banned cell phones for unmarried girls to thwart them from eloping.

And in the District of Columbia, cameras are prohibited from being brought into the Superior Court Building, but "you may bring a mobile phone into the building; however, you are not permitted to use the phone's camera function on the premises." Never mind that a cell phone camera can take really good photos, as in this front page New York Times photograph.

Locations of Neighborhood Cameras In DC

Here are the locations of police surveillance cameras in the District of Columbia. If (and we hope not) you're ever assaulted or robbed near one, chances are that there's a visual record of what happened.