Wake Up, Babe. New MBARI Species Just Dropped. 🤩 

Feelings Wheel❤️

In order to discuss your feelings and emotions, you must know how to appropriately name them.

Putting a name to what you're feeling helps you to gain clarity and move forward with identifying your next step toward healing or resolution 💜

Photosynthesis is one of those things that you usually learn about in a simplified way when you're little, that we grow up kinda taking for granted that we "know how that works."

But the process is actually so spine tinglingly bizarre, that if you heard about it for the first time as an adult, you wouldn't even believe it.

Plants are just transmuting light beams into highly complex molecules of sugar. By using the light as a fuckin' battering ram to shatter molecules of water apart. And we're just like "oh yeah, they do that, no big deal" as if that's not a seven layer bizarro dip of what the fuck.

My science teacher writes a joke on this board every week, they are so bad that they are funny and I love it

Hey... what the fuck???

So I read the article, and this is super cool. Basically what happened is that they let a drop of butyl alcohol out from a syringe onto the surface of another liquid, and it just... hung out there? For a very significant amount of time, too. In the past, this type of "droplet levitation" has only lasted a few milliseconds max, but this droplet was staying levitated without any external forces applied for tens of minutes.

The reason this happens is because of Solutocapilllary convection, which as far as I can tell essentially boosts the surface tension of that one spot in the underlying liquid using vapor molecules, so that the butyl alcohol molecule can't sink in.

Also, the reason why I specified that the reason this was cool is because it was done without external forces is that APPARENTLY we've been able to levitate things using sound waves since like... the 1930s. And it makes sense that you can do that, in principle, but it still looks absolutely wild to see.

Crescent Moon and Venus

Museum dates where she stares at the art and I stare at her.

Yves Pires: "The Kiss" (2012)

J. M. W. Turner - Fishermen at Sea (1796)

Seeing UV colors is common for butterflies, but in some species, it is a female-only power

So, you may or may not know that many butterflies can actually see in UV light. It is very cool and I'm definitely not jealous that they get extra colors. It's helpful to them because many flowers have UV patterns on them (invisible to us) that let the butterflies know that they're a good source of food. The plants get pollinated and the butterflies get to eat. Everybody wins. This is a simulated version of what butterflies might see when they look at a flower.

Some butterflies, such as the zebra longwing pictured above, only display this trait in females. Because of this, male and female butterflies will tend to visit different types of flowers. But scientists have just recently figured out how this difference came to be, evolutionarily speaking.

Obviously many species have sexually dimorphic traits, some more prominently than others. There are also cases in which one sex develops a trait that is just... less useful than the other, like this case with the UV vision. Almost all butterflies can see in the UV spectrum, so it follows that at some point in the evolutionary line the male zebra longwing butterflies lost that particular ability. There are multiple ways that this sort of thing can happen, and the article covers them briefly, but after sequencing the genome for these butterflies they found that none of those previously seen explanations were the case.

Basically, we already know the gene that causes UV vision in butterflies. It is called the opsin gene. In zebra longtail butterflies, this gene occurs on the chromosome W, which is the female sex chromosome. That means that sometime in history, this gene just jumped from a normal chromosome onto the female-only chromosome, and has locked the male butterflies out of this ability ever since. This is the first time we have seen a gene do a jump like that, and it is pretty cool.

But anyway, appreciate the girlpower of zebra longwing butterflies getting all the UV vision, and take a look at the study! It's free to read, which is really nice to see.

The Swamp (1900) by Gustav Klimt