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This is insanely adorable. /misc/b/baby-octopus-jellybean.mp4 For more cuteness, you can see a high-res photo of a transparent baby octopus or a baby octopus’ chromatophores 🥰…

They look like priceless brooches and are tremendously important to our planet. Emphases mine: Living diatoms make up a significant portion of the Earth’s biomass: they generate about 20 to 50 percent of the oxygen produced on the planet each year, take in over 6.7 billion metric tons of silicon…

These are fossilized crinoids found in Western Australia by Tom Kapitany. Crinoids are animals and belong to the phylum Eichinodermata which includes starfish and sea urchins (and they all have “pentameral symmetry”). This is all well and good but these things, in their fossilized state, look like s…

Not really. Reminded me of that Transformer when I saw this macrophotograph of a Longhorn Beetle. Just amazing. Via and TD.…

The Steller’s sea eagle is one of the world’s rarest eagles. There are only around 4,000 left. It’s native to Russia and Japan. One was spotted in Maine and got bird watchers very excited. “It would be like an elephant walking up out of Africa into Scandinavia,” Mr. Lund said. “Like getting a call…

A study of DNA extracted from the leg bones of extinct moa birds in New Zealand found that the half-life of DNA is 521 years. So every 1,000 years, 75 per cent of the genetic information is lost. After 6.8 million years, every single base pair is gone. Bacterial RNA is much tougher and sequences ha…

Glass Octopus (Vitreledonella richardi) Longarm Octopus larva (Macrotritopus defilippi) Marine Snail (Atlanta inclinata) Sea Butterfly (Clio chaptali) Eye-flash Squid (Abralia veranyi) Deep sea eel Male copepods Larval Prawn (Plesiopenaeus armatus) Glass Squid (Bathothauma lyromma) More her…

(Source unknown) TIL that (a) tentacles and arms are two different things and (b) there is a lot more diversity to this family1 than I’d imagined! I don’t mean “family” in a taxonomic sense.↩︎…

I have a dying peace lily. I’m a bit attached to it and don’t know that I’ll be able to save it. Searching the internet for any hope led me to this post (cached) which made me feel slightly better about my inexperience. The first mistake is relying upon the plant’s visual cue that needs water: the l…

This is the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, an eponymous and subjective measurement of the pain caused by bees, wasps, and ants (and other things in the order hymenoptera.) It ranges from 0-4. In Level Zero, you don’t feel any pain whatsoever; the stinger doesn’t even penetrate your skin. The humble and f…

In college, I remember being blown away by a huge, physical map of metabolic pathways our Biochemistry professor once brought into class. It looked like this: Here it is online. Kinda like a Google Maps of cellular reactions. It was impressed upon us that the interior of a cell (especially a eukary…

Note that you can certainly burn them. That’s not ‘cooking’, however. The key here is that mushroom cell walls are composed of chitin which is far more heat-stable by virtue of the structures it forms, compared to pectin which is what you’d find in veggies1. In this video, Dan Souza explains all thi…

Rabies. It’s exceptionally common, but people just don’t run into the animals that carry it often. Skunks especially, and bats. Let me paint you a picture. You go camping, and at midday you decide to take a nap in a nice little hammock. While sleeping, a tiny brown bat, in the “rage” stages of in…

It is remarkable that mind enters into our awareness of nature on two separate levels. At the highest level, the level of human consciousness, our minds are somehow directly aware of the complicated flow of electrical and chemical patterns in our brains. At the lowest level, the level of single at…

Dark Brown or Black: Nocturnal (helps with camouflage.) Orange: Dawn and Dusk. Yellow: Daytime. There are no Blue-Eyed Owls.…

It was found in 1982 in France. It’s 165M years old. Researchers reconstructed it in 3D using “synchrotron microtomography.” I was unable this reconstruction because the system of scientific journals is a money-grubbing bullshit system run by greedy people. Here she is though ♥️…

Wikipedia calls it “decompression damage”. The Smithsonian Magazine has more.…

Every person I’ve sent this to has seen it. Not sure why my own internet excursions didn’t yield this manifestly horrifying video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuKjBIBBAL8 The last few seconds reminded me of scenes from Annihilation. Like this one: Edit: It’s been used in Eastern Medicine for a…

All Yesterdays is an exploration of things we know we will never know about “dinosaurs and prehistoric animals” . Jonathan Wojcik at bogleech.com has an excellent review of the book. Of particular interest: We know little-to-nothing about the creatures’ anatomies and morphologies because of missing…