Categorizing Mother Nature
Take a look at this image, You see embedded spirals of green, pinkish-orange, and blue? Incredibly, the green and the blue spiralsare the same color.
The reason they look different colors is because our brain judges the color of an object by comparing it to surrounding colors. In this…
On the one hand, I just spent a month learning a fair bit about the visual system. I know this is how color works.
Yet I still didn’t believe that this picture was for real until I tested it in Photoshop. .____.
Genetics of the Beautiful “Glass Gem” Corn
Corn gone viral? You’re looking at an ear of a corn variety called “Glass Gem”, grown by Greg Schoen of Seeds Trust. This is real corn! How does it grow this way?
First you have to understand a few things about corn. Each corn kernel is actually a sort of unique plant. A corn plant’s male parts (the “tassels”) sit at the top of the stalk, and drop pollen downward. Unfertilized ears (the female parts) catch the pollen with the sticky ends of their corn silks. Each corn silk (I hate when that gets in my teeth) grabs a pollen grain, shuttles it allllllll the way down inside the ear, eventually creating one kernel for each pollen-silk-ovum combination. It’s one of the more interesting and inefficient breeding schemes I know of.
If you’ve taken genetics, you know that the parents’ genes will combine by chance, leading to certain ratios of inheritance in the offspring. This is the basis of Mendelian genetics (great Khan Academy video here).
With corn, we’ve simply carefully bred all the interestingness out of them. Native Americans were used to multi-colored corn, because corn plants held many varieties of color genes that could combine at random. Now all we are left with are one-color clones.
This “Glass Gem” corn is the other extreme of the spectrum, a combination of corn color hybrid genes and random pollination. It’s almost too pretty to eat!
(via Discover Magazine)
‘Spider’s erection’ by biologist Natacha Merritt
“Spiders have fantastic genitals, even in their non-extended state. Few people have ever seen an erect spider penis, though. Actually, their penises come in pairs called pedipalps: the males ejaculate onto a silk web and suck up the sperm with their pedipalps. Then they try to mate with females, a complex process that often involves a sort of high-speed dance since the females are usually twice their size – at least – and very likely to attempt to eat them.”
…
“I’m sure pictures of spider erections have appeared before in scientific journals, but I added extra lighting to give the shot a romantic feel. I think evolution is one of the most beautiful art forms. Since biologists wouldn’t shoot spiders in this way, it’s probably the first ever artistic shot of a spider erection..” - Natacha Merritt - via guardian.co.uk
Quadruple fluorescence image revealing the complexity of the optic fibre layer of a mouse retina. Optic nerve axons and glial cells are stained red and green, respectively while actin in the blood vessel-ensheathing endothelial cells are stained blue. DNA and RNA are in orange.
Source: Thomas Deerinck, NCMIR.
Sunda Flying Lemur - FYAP1500 by Francis Yap on Flickr.
STELLALUNA one of my fav childhood books
^ mine too I love her ok I still have the book, the puzzle and the little toy it came with. :3
but stellaluna was a fruit bat, not a flying lemur
ngl I laughed out loud
Ileodictyon cibarium
The white basket fungus is native to New Zealand. It has an unusual geometric shape. It is not edible. It is a member of the stinkhorn family, and it has a foul smell and slime covering the inside of the lattice. Mathematical!
look at me only reblogging like 20% of the fun-fungi posts
Mycena family
Some mushrooms in the Mycena family are bioluminescent. This family contains many species, which are usually tiny, with a bell-shaped cap and thin stem. It is unknown what the purpose of the bioluminescence is.
oh my god you guys, I may have never backspaced so hard in my life as I did when I saw that a post on the page I was leaving was from a blog called fun-fungi
FUCK I LOVE FUNGUS
The Secret Life of Plankton
A new video from TEDEducation about the beautiful, mysterious food web at the smallest scales of marine life. This is like stepping onto an alien world! All life on Earth depends in some way on these varied, microscopic wonders. A few tablespoons of seawater holds more marine life than there are people on Earth.
There is grandeur in this tiny view of life. Prepare to pick your jaw up off the floor, and then smile.
