This Video Is Like Every Facet Of What It Is To Be A Cat, All At Once

“Most news outlets are only showing the blurry zoomed in picture of the black hole so I’m posting the entire zoomed-out image of the black hole and everything it is consuming. The tiny black spec in this image is 6.5 billion times the size of our sun. This thing is HUGE.” Dan Farr

A predatory moment, frozen in geological time

You’re a hungry spider who is rushing towards a wasp that has become entangled in your web when all of a sudden everything goes sticky, you can’t move, frozen in place like the proverbial Tantalus with your food in sight but forever beyond your reach. Very soon after you are engulfed in another wash of sticky sap oozing out of a tree and everything goes dark. The spider may ironically have also been courting a painful death, since these wasps are parasitic and known to lay their eggs in spiders and other insects, with the larvae slowly consuming the insect from the inside out, preserving it alive by leaving the vital organs for last. Such a moment was caught by a unique fossil pictured below, that turned up in a hundred million year old piece of amber from what is now the Hukawng valley in Burma.

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Portraits of Kilauea Volcano by Jules Tavernier (1844-1889)

 Tavernier was a French painter who was fascinated by Hawaii’s awe-inspiring fiery volcanoes. To reach Kilauea in the 1800s, one would have to make a difficult 3 day journey by horseback. Despite this, Tavernier called the place “an artist’s paradise.”

Heidi Gustafson, who has spent the past five years collecting and working with ocher, walks along Whidbey Island’s Double Bluff Beach, off the coast of Washington, in search of the material. She came to scout this area, where she spent time as a child, after recalling its interesting cliff exposure.Some ochers, Gustafson believes, are calling out to be turned into a pigment. Others are more resistant. Those ocher fragments are either returned to their point of origin, or, if Gustafson cannot get back there, placed outside in a stone graveyard of sorts that she has created in the forest near her cabin. A few of her ocher-based artworks hang on the wall.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/t-magazine/ocher-heidi-gustafson.html

Temple of Asclepius, Rome

I miss doing microscope work. Can we make a thread of our favourite thin section? This is mine

Actinolite Schist

Geology collection, Museum of Natural History, London

The Cats of Morroco 💙