“Thought to have arisen between about 740 million and 520 million years ago, both phyla of marine invertebrates were among the first multicellular animals to evolve several different tissue types. Their appearance ramped up the complexity of the animal world:” 👇

Really grateful to see our work featured by @quantamagazine.bsky.social in this piece on the evolution of genome regulation. Huge thanks to @philipcball.bsky.social for such a beautifully written article.

A thoughtful and beautifully written @quantamagazine.bsky.social article about genome regulatory innovation at the origin of animals. Featuring some of our work and highlighting key open questions. Thanks to @philipcball.bsky.social for this fantastic piece.

I adored writing this piece. It brings together several of the things preoccupying me right now, like chromatin organization and gene regulation. There's so much more to be said on that. Also, these marine critters look gorgeous. www.quantamagazine.org/loops-of-dna...

Astronomer Ejnar Hertzsprung was born #OTD in 1873. 🧪 🔭 H-R diagram: 🔵 🟦 🟥 🔵 🟧 ⚪️ 🟨 ⚪️ 🟡🟡 ⚬ ⚬ 🟠🟠 ⚬ ⚬ ⚬ 🔴 ⚬ 🔴 ⚫️

Painters of the Hudson River School understood what was happening to North American forests in the nineteenth century, and they didn’t like it. https://bit.ly/42tM7Ag

“AN ACT to enable the President of the United States to take possession of the territories ceded by France to the United States” I have several early government documents in my personal library, this being the Acts from the First Session of Eighth Congress in the year 1803. Apropos coin for scale.

I've long been obsessed with government documents. What do they communicate and to whom, how and when and by whom were they printed and circulated? The @jcblibrary.bsky.social has a terrific collection of the many printed journals of Congress, fr 1774. Started a weekly series on IG to discuss. 🤓

sharing on #sciart feed 🐡

sharing on #sciart feed 🐡

sharing on #sciart feed 🐡

sharing on #sciart feed 🐡

Rembrandt finding out Roger de Piles gave him a 6 out of 18 score for “drawing”.

Happy #WorldOctopusDay! Detail of a plate from my copy of a folio from ‘Tableau Encyclopédique et Méthodique des Trois Règnes de la Nature’ published in Paris in 1791.

#WorldOctopusDay is celebrated annually on October 8th to highlight the beauty, intelligence, and conservation needs of these fascinating creatures. This octopus is from British Conchology v5: Marine shells and Naked Mollusca (1869) www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/24429566 #SciArt #ILoveBHL

Rembrandt finding out Roger de Piles gave him a 6 out of 18 score for “drawing”.

Cooloola monsters are weird, chunky insects endemic to South East Queensland, Australia. They're probably related to king crickets (Anostostomatidae), but not much is known about their evolution. The wingless females live permanently underground. #EverydayEnsifera 📸: Visit Gympie Region

Blue flag iris (Iris versicolor) Chromolithograph from my copy of The Native Flowers and Ferns of the United States by Thomas Meehan, published by Louis Prang & Co. in 1878. Coin for scale.

My unsolicited #eel fact for today is that there are ten species of Gulper Eels (Saccopharynx) while there is only a single species of Pelican Eel (Eurypharynx ).🐟 www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nwD...

An example of the geodiversity biodiversity link. A profile of trees and Cactaceae species from Fort Smith, Arkansas to San Pedro, California (LA), a distance of about 1500 miles (2400 km). As the geology changes from plains, through river valleys, & across mountains, so does the biodiversity (1/2)

A trilobite plate from my copy of, Geology of New York by James Hall, published in 1843. #TrilobiteTuesday

French artist, engraver, and author Roger de Piles was born OTD in 1635. He was also an art critic: this is my first edition copy of his Cours de Peinture par Principes in which he catalogued artists from 0 to 18 for composition, drawing, color and expression. An example follows (1/2)

“Transmission of scientific knowledge from one culture to another plays an important role in the history of science.” 👇

Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci, whose mathematical abilities, acquired from Clavius, made it possible for him as the first European in the 17th century to penetrate Chinese society & build a bridgehead for the Jesuit mission, was born 6 October 1552 #histsci thonyc.wordpress.com/2012/10/06/a...

Happy birthday to Danish #physicist Niels Bohr (1885-1962). 🧪🐡🎢 #histsci One of his most famous contributions to quantum mechanics was the Bohr-Rutherford model of the atom. Bohr is shown next to the Bohr model of the Hydrogen atom (all the concentric circles are actually at the appropriate spacing

For the herpetology folks, a new species of frog 🐸

Up. Up. And away! North Pacific water temps the past 15 years, with September 2025 being the cherry on the top (right) of the chart. @zacklabe.com is going to need a bigger Y axis!

New this week! Among our recent uploads to BHL are the 1953-1955 volumes of the “Records of the South Australian Museum”. Included here is the introduction of the spotted stingaree to the scientific record by Trevor Scott in 1954. www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/65114357

…were called Gherardini, which translates the same. And thus I discovered that my distant cousin happens to be this woman, who is better known by her married name Lisa del Gioconda - the Mona Lisa. Isn’t the word very small!?

Nearest living relative to the elephant medium.com/elp-rumbles/...

We're firmly into autumn in the Northern Hemisphere, so it's once again time to share one of my favourite chemistry infographics on the kaleidoscope of chemical colours found in autumn leaves! 🍂 www.compoundchem.com/2014/09/11/a... #ChemSky 🧪

Feel like a fish out of water? Meet the giant mudskipper! This fish needs to breathe air & spends a decent amount of time on land! Found on the muddy shores of mangroves in parts of Southeast Asia, it uses its pectoral fins to “walk” across mudflats. Photo: mysorekid, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, iNaturalist

Brazil is confident the World Bank will be its main partner in launching a $125 billion fund to protect tropical forests — one of the country’s flagship initiatives for the COP30 climate summit in November.

oh wow! A stunning Porpita shot from @natalipaqpa on the other site

Pigments and shells with drilled holes to be used as beads found with Châtelperronian stone tools in France suggest humans—or Neanderthals—were decorating themselves in the Middle Paleolithic, just as Homo sapiens were moving into Eurasia. In PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

In 1917 Hubble spent an entire night finishing his thesis, completed the oral defense of his dissertation the following morning, & then enlisted in the U.S. Army. He sent a telegraph to George Ellery Hale, saying: “Regret cannot accept your invitation [to Mount Wilson]. Am off to the war.” #HistSci

VAR! In the early morning hours #OTD in 1923, Edwin Hubble took a photo plate of M31 that showed a Cepheid variable star. Using Henrietta Swan Leavitt’s distance-luminosity relationship, Hubble concluded that M31 is another galaxy outside the Milky Way. 🧪 🔭 ⚛️ Image: Carnegie Observatories

When Harlow Shapley received a letter from Hubble containing the evidence that the spiral nebulae were separate "galaxies", he said: “This is the letter that destroyed my universe." Shapley had believed the Universe contained just one "Big Galaxy" - our Milky Way. Now we know there are ~2 trillion!

Attention exoplanet fans: A collection of articles showcases how the James Webb Space Telescope has enabled atmospheric studies of distant worlds, including work on the atmospheres of sub-Neptunes and the challenges of detecting biosignatures. In PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Happy International Geodiversity Day! ⚒️ 🧪 #PhiGeo @geodiversityday.bsky.social youtu.be/LtFzkDMsYtI?... www.geodiversityday.org/what-is-geod...

Well, since there’s no apparent interest in my history of science, historical scientific art, and geology posts this morning, how about native wildflowers I see on my hikes and trail runs? I have a ton. #bloomsky

I’ll try the #HistSci hashtag, although I think I may need to subscribe to something for it to work?

Scottish mathematician & physicist James Clerk Maxwell’s work puts him in the physics pantheon with Newton and Einstein. This is part of a paper he wrote that was read to Royal Society of Edinburgh when he was the ripe old age of 14 years. It simplified some of Descartes’ work in Geometria.

“How conceive a finite being who knows the paths and velocities of all the molecules..” Part of an 1867 letter from James Clerk Maxwell to Peter Guthrie Tait containing his thought experiment he thought disproved the Second Law of thermodynamics. The being was later called a demon.

You thought you knew what the Second Law of thermodynamics is? So did I. Researching this piece for @quantamagazine.bsky.social made me realise that I knew only the classical approximation to it. 🤯 www.quantamagazine.org/a-thermomete...

For the #spacetober_challenge day 6 prompt constellation, I am sharing my portrait of #astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868-1921) who set the scale of our Universe. 🧪🐡👩🏼‍🔬🔭 Behind her is a line showing stellar luminosity (capital L with subscript sun-symbol, a circle with a dot) as a function of 🧵