This Was My Birthday And It Was Such A Great Present To See This. Brie Is My Love

https://twitter.com/archeometrie/status/1170031822614474752?s=12

nothing wrong with being a gay scientist. nothing wrong with falling deeply in love with your lab partner who is also gay. nothing wrong with declaring your gay love for each other under the lights of your laboratory. nothing wrong with that.

so i just learned that baby eels (also known as eel larvae???)

start out looking like this monstrosity and can stay that way for SEVERAL YEARS

Punnett squares had no business being that fun

Jade and striped icebergs. “When seawater at depths of more than 1,200 feet freezes to the underside of massive ice shelves like East Antarctica’s Amery Ice Shelf, it forms ‘marine ice.’ Enormous hunks of ice calve—or break off—from the ice shelf, creating icebergs. When one of these icebergs overturns, its jade underside is revealed. The wondrous color of this ‘marine ice’ results from organic matter dissolved in the seawater at those great depths,” explained Audubon Magazine. “Green icebergs are infrequently seen because their verdant bellies are underwater; it’s only when they flip over, a rare event, that their richly colored regions can be seen before they melt. Striped icebergs, perhaps even more scarce than jade bergs, are thought to form in one of two ways: either meltwater refreezes in crevasses formed atop glaciers before they calve icebergs (creating blue stripes), or seawater freezes inside cracks beneath ice shelves (creating green stripes).”

Photo #14 by Steve Nicol via Australian Antarctic Division

Giant whale sharks have hundreds of tiny teeth-like structures around their eyes

https://sciencespies.com/nature/giant-whale-sharks-have-hundreds-of-tiny-teeth-like-structures-around-their-eyes/

Giant whale sharks have hundreds of tiny teeth-like structures around their eyes

Whale sharks, the majestic creatures that also happen to be the world’s largest fish, are far more gentle than the name suggests. They swim lazily around tropical waters, filter-feeding on plankton.

Now, biologists have discovered the enigmatic giants have a curious trick up their sleeve – teeth-like scales adorning their eyeballs. It appears to be the whale sharks’ version of eyelids, and one we haven’t seen in any other vertebrate.

“Eyeballs face a potential risk of damage from mechanical, chemical and biological hazards,” the researchers write in a new paper describing the find.

“This report elaborates on adaptations of the eyes of the whale shark (Rhincodon typus), including the discovery that they are covered with dermal denticles, which is a novel mechanism of eye protection in vertebrates.”

Dermal denticles, also known as placoid scales, are the tiny tough scales that cover sharks and rays. But although they are scales as we think of them, they’re also structurally very similar to teeth, and include an inner core of pulp, a middle layer of dentine or bony tissue, and a hard enamel-like coating on top.

We already knew that many sharks – including whale sharks – are covered with these denticles. However, finding them on the eyeballs of these fish is quite the surprise.

Eye denticles of the whale shark. (Tomita et al., PLOS One, 2020)

That’s partially because it’s long been assumed whale sharks don’t have to use their sense of sight much: their eyes are incredibly small compared to the rest of their body, and they don’t have a lot of midbrain, the part of the brain that processes vision.

“However, the highly protected features of the whale shark eye, in contrast to the traditional view, seems to suggest the importance of vision in this species,” the team argues in their study.

Researchers took a CT scanner to a preserved whale shark eyeball, as well as taking ultrasounds of two captive live whale sharks at the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium in Japan.

3D rendering of the morphology of each eye denticle. (Tomita et al., PLOS One, 2020)

As well as discovering the eye denticles, the researchers also elaborated on the mechanisms whale sharks use to retract their eyes back into their head. Most of the time this can be for just a short period of time, however not always. Once, a particularly unfortunate shark ended up with its eyes retracted for 10 days after it was transferred to a new aquarium from Taiwan to Atlanta, Georgia.

“It is likely that whale sharks maintain their vision during eye retraction because the pupils of the whale sharks in this study were not completely covered with surrounding white tissues when their eyes had retracted, though their visual field would be much more restricted than when their eyes are positioned normally,” explain the researchers.

“In fact, the animal that kept its eyes retracted for approximately 10 days at the Georgia Aquarium appeared to have no problem navigating the exhibit space, until its eyes returned to their normal positions suddenly and, apparently, spontaneously.”

So, while whale sharks aren’t exactly a fearsome predator of the ocean, these two eye-protecting features are a fearsome competitor to… eyelids.

The research has been published in PLOS One.

#Nature

In many cultures, ethnic groups, and nations around the world, hair is considered a source of power and prestige. African people brought these traditions and beliefs to the Americas and passed them down through the generations.

In my mother’s family (Black Americans from rural South Carolina) the women don’t cut their hair off unless absolutely necessary (i.e damage or routine trimming). Long hair is considered a symbol of beauty and power; my mother often told me that our hair holds our strength and power. Though my mother’s family has been American born for several generations, it is fascinating to see the beliefs and traditions of our African ancestors passed down. We are emotionally and spiritually attached to our hair, cutting it only with the knowledge that we are starting completely clean and removing stagnant energy.

Couple this with the forced removal and covering of our hair from the times of slavery and onward, and you can see why so many Black women and men alike take such pride and care in their natural hair and love to adorn our heads with wigs, weaves, braids, twists, accessories, and sharp designs.

Hair is not just hair in African diaspora cultures, and this is why the appropriation and stigma surrounding our hair is so harmful.

I want a GIRLFRIEND to go GHOST HUNTING with

Me a real pleasant fellow today. Decided he wanted to date and marry my underage sister after the fact. It was a lot of fun reading the things he wrote. Just going to leave this here as a warning for the other girls out there. He was getting pretty sketchy. His account is @williamrawson257 for anyone on the look out.