Going Into 2024 Like… 🦀 🖤 😞

GUESS WHAT you can finally get all of these critters as stickers in my shop! Thank you to all the Kickstarter backers who helped bring them to life!

Star Dragon Art

Shop — Star Dragon Art

Here it finally is, the full cetacean eye colour info sheet! A long time coming, and an even longer time in the making. I hope that all you cetacean eye curious people will find this one as fascinating as the killer whale eye colour post. It’s a wild world out there! 

Uncharismatic Fact of the Day

It's not every day you see a fish walking on land! However, when the streams and ponds of the airbreathing catfish dry up, this species will readily wriggle across the jungle floor in search of a new home. Thanks to a special organ called a labyrinth organ, they are able to breathe air and can remain outside of water for several hours provided they stay moist.

(Image: A Java walking catfish, Clarias batrachus, by sdickman via iNaturalist)

If you like what I do, consider buying me a ko-fi!

Digital illustration of an indigenous man with two braids wearing a jean jacket. There's text that reads, 'Columbus didn't discover anything.'

Thank you dear Eurovision audience. Not only a black ocean but also booing but what did the tv station do? Fake cheering....but at least we know how it really went down. I am so not watching btw

ITS THIS THING TUESDAY

phys.org

New 'chiral vortex' of light allows chemists to 'see' molecules through the mirror

An entirely new structure of light is helping to measure chirality in molecules more accurately and robustly than ever before, in a major po

An entirely new structure of light is helping to measure chirality in molecules more accurately and robustly than ever before, in a major potential step for the pharmaceutical industry. Published in Nature Photonics, a team from King's College London and the Max Born Institute have created an entirely new structure of light that traces out a chiral curve over time. This chiral curve has different shapes at different points in space, forming a vortex structure. By interacting with chiral particles it moves through over time, the new "chiral vortex" provides an accurate and robust form of measurement.

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phys.org

Researchers uncover 500 million-year-old mollusk ancestor

A team of researchers including scientists from the University of Oxford have made an astonishing discovery of a new species of mollusk that

A team of researchers including scientists from the University of Oxford have made an astonishing discovery of a new species of mollusk that lived 500 million years ago. The new fossil, called Shishania aculeata, reveals that the most primitive mollusks were flat, shell-less slugs covered in a protective spiny armor. The findings have been published in the journal Science. The new species was found in exceptionally well-preserved fossils from eastern Yunnan Province in southern China dating from a geological period called the early Cambrian, approximately 514 million years ago. The specimens of Shishania are all only a few centimeters long and are covered in small spikey cones (sclerites) made of chitin, a material also found in the shells of modern crabs, insects, and some mushrooms.

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