This is (I think) a Greater Blue-Eared Starling (Lamprotornis chalybaeus) & the amazing chrome job is their super-power. They've evolved to manipulate light in VERY specific ways, attracting mates, intimidating rivals. Let's look at the nanostructures that bring this bling into being.

White House announces that the government of Iran has gifted a giant wooden sculpture of a horse to the current administration as part of their total surrender to the US.

i’m going to put my head through the drywall

Here's a lab safety incident worth sharing, from UC Berkeley's EH&S site: A researcher borrowed an older model hot plate to heat a mineral oil bath (great for temps up to 200 °C!) in a fume hood. Afterwards, they turned the heat off, but this model has "HI" on the other side of "OFF", so....

Cloning in sci fi always promises endless iterations of you, like a Xerox machine for people. But an important aspect of mammalian somatic cell cloning is those adult cells often no longer have the 'consensus genomes' of the fetal cells they came from. Each cell in your body accumulates mutations.

Beans, beans, the musical fruit; The more you eat, the more... you need Beano. What is Beano? It's a commercial formulation of the enzyme alpha-galactosidase (α-GAL), harvested from a soil fungus, Aspergillus niger. α-GAL breaks down complex sugars into simple sugars.

I'm going to speculate this is the first time in history that Barack Obama, William Shakespeare and Matthew McConaughey were mentioned together in a newspaper headline.

Look at this family of MOOSES. Wait. Is it MEESE? Let's talk about zero-plurals: words that are the same in singular & plural forms. Words like sheep, moose, deer, elk, tuna, cod. But first, let's check in on Shakespeare...

When Kristy Paniptchuk took her small jet-boat out in rural Alaska in 2020, she probably didn't expect to see the Moos-iah (Mooses?) performing a miracle. Real vid, but the water is <5 in. deep in the channel & Kristy is in a boat built with very shallow draft.

I'm going to need an elite team: a fast-talking confidence man, a safe cracker with a heart of gold, a hacker invisible as a ghost. And I'm also going to need a giant pile of crackers.

An etymology appropriate to how this day is going.

Blue halos of death! On a banana. 🟦💀🍌

I shall retire / to rehab beavers I shall retire / to rehab beavers I shall retire / to rehab beavers no turning back / no turning back

If you get your hands on a decent UV flashlight or other UV light source, try pointing it at a bruised banana. You'll have the opportunity to observe a phenomenon called "blue halos of death" caused by cellular senescence & the breakdown of chlorophyll in the fruit peel. Let's talk about it.

On Saturday afternoon, a 1 ton, 1 meter diameter chunk of iron entered the Earth's atmosphere traveling at 15 km/s (35,000 mph). It created a fireball & sonic boom visible from most of Houston, with strewn field fragments of up to 10 kg possible across a dense suburban area.

This is absolutely not the main focus for this amazing story, but I deeply in my heart of hearts believe I would be an amazing mama-fish-eagle-puppet operator. Put me in, coach. I'm ready.

Maybe you've heard of 'Stanley STEEMER' the carpet cleaning company, but did you know the 'Stanley STEAMER' was the most manufactured car in the US in 1898 & 1899? Let's talk about the Stanley Motor Carriage Company and the unusual vehicles they built.

The monowheel (1931 Cislaghi Motoruota monowheel shown) was a serious form of transportation that really caught public interest in Italy in the late 1920's. A few drawbacks, including the challenge of entering & exiting the vehicle, led to it being out-competed by simpler 2-wheeled vehicles.

The Supercargo 20.40 was a concept tractor-trailer from designer Manfred Steinwinter, funded by Mercedes Benz, that aimed to revolutionize shipping. It was first presented at the 1983 Frankfurt Motor Show, but never made it to production.

Here's something you may not have thought about. Chickens 🐔 have ears 👂. Good so far? Chickens have EARLOBES. 🤯 Also interesting fact, they're a general guide to the color eggs the chicken will lay (white=white vs red/orange=brown). So why do chickens need earlobes? Why do YOU need earlobes? 😕

If you take concentrated sulfuric acid (H2SO4) & slowly add 30% hydrogen peroxide (conc.) at about a 3:1 ratio, you get 'Piranha solution' that can render almost any organic substance into carbon dioxide in a two-step process. It's used industrially in cleaning wafers/chips, filters or glassware.

Going through old puppy photos of Finn the Corgi, and found this one from 2021, about 6 months old. Our little double merle mutant. ❤️

On a small island in the Seto Inland Sea of Japan live 700-1000 feral rabbits, descendants of 8 rabbits introduced here in 1979 as part of building a park system for tourists. Officially, it's named 'Ōkunoshima', but it's more commonly called 'Usagi Jima', the Rabbit Island. Let's talk about it.

This little salamander contains the same deadly neurotoxin as a pufferfish (tetrodotoxin, TTX) at levels that could kill a human. This is the rough-skinned 'newt' (Taricha granulosa) & it's locked in an endless war with garter snakes waged on the battlegrounds of the American Northwest. (📷AMNH IG)

You're looking at a Morelet's Tree Frog (Agalychnis moreletii), and more importantly, she's looking at you. 🐸 They're also known as "Black-eyed Tree Frogs", for obvious reasons. Those big eyes collect light without acting like reflectors, allowing them to hunt at night.

Being a frog involves a lot of shedding. 🐸 For some, it's a weekly strip-tease of removing the outermost layer of mucus-coated skin, pushing it carefully into their mouths for consumption. But I have to admit, it looks like it would feel AMAZING. Let's talk about frog skin shedding, or 'ECDYSIS'

We enter spring with a moment of balance. 🌱🌍 Today the Sun crosses Earth’s equator, bringing day and night into almost equal measure worldwide: longer days ahead in the Northern Hemisphere, while autumn begins in the Southern Hemisphere. 📹 : One year of Earth from 36,000km in space!

In 2021, researchers from Boston University & Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute aboard the Schmidt Ocean research vessel Falkor had a rare encounter with Vitreledonella richardi, the GLASS OCTOPUS. This mesmerizing creature, rarely seen, has a nearly transparent body with visible eyes & gut.

"Bone-Eating Giraffes" would be a great band name.

Please soothe your soul with this footage of an enraged muppet being treated at the wild muppet center.

I didn't know A Flock of Seagulls was still touring.

college basketball tournament is trademarked but Marsh Madness is not.

To truly appreciate the superb lyrebird (Menura novaehollandiae), you'll need audio on for this thread. Known to Indigenous Australians as weringerong, woorail or bulln-bulln, these passerine ("sparrow-like") birds are the Foley Artists of the Forest, masters of replicating any sound they've heard.

Scientists just discovered bull sharks have friends

Meet the king of the Weird Little Guys, the Butternut Woollyworm (Eriocampa juglandis), native to North America. They're the larval form for a wasp-like sawfly & they secrete tufts of wooly substance from epidermal glands to aid in camouflage. All hail the king! (📷: Robert Gromotka)

Why do all the old-timey signs say "Ye Olde" or similar? Because of a missing letter, thorn " þ ", which entered English as a Nordic rune, and disappeared by conversion to the letter "y" with the advent of printing. Let's talk about it.

There are many species of plant under the name "clover", but the Irish shamrock is assumed to refer to Trifolium dubium, "lesser trefoil," or Trifolium repens, "white clover", both of which are native to Europe. Let's learn some interesting facts about white clover!

We got rampaging rabbits this morning. Cold has everyone feeling feisty! 😂

Wow! Another one for the apocalypse bingo card ✍️

Topical Dad Joke of the Day: The Irish have developed a giant knife for cutting several soda breads at a time. It's a four loaf cleaver. #DJotD

I have a scientist joke, but you're in the control group.

TIL! Boots ("brogans") were made with a single shape ("straight last"), so no left/right pattern. A weird quirk of this is that the soldier would need to mark them during the breaking-in period to ensure they were placed on the same foot each time. But most struggled to remember left & right...

Here's a weird but true fact: The enamel on these teeth is older than the bones (evolutionarily speaking). Enamel began as the hard outer layer of ancient fish scale, a substance called "ganoine". Over time, this skin armor became... well, teeth armor🦷. Let's talk about the Outside-In hypothesis.

There are few things in life I am more certain about than the fact this man does, in fact, have a dinosaur. The context of this photo, taken by Steve Fitch & published in "Diesels & Dinosaurs": this is the 'Snakepit' in Sayre, OK along Route 66 in 1973. The man in the photo may be Mike Allred.

This tiger 🐯😛 is exhibiting a particular behavior called the Flehmen response, from the German word meaning "to bare front teeth". This behavior transfers organic compounds to a special organ in their nasal cavity, the vomeronasal organ (VNO), which is packed with sensory neurons.

44 BCE was a bad year for Julius Caesar, but 46 BCE was the LONGEST YEAR of his (or anyone's) life. 46 BCE lasted for 445 days! It had 2 extra months with no name, none of which had any decent holidays in them. Let's talk about the Year of Confusion & what it had to do with the Julian calendar.

March 15th is the Ides of March: the day in 44 BCE that Julius Caesar failed to invent the stab-proof toga. He was stabbed not in the Senate House (which was being built), but in the "Curia of Pompey." Today, that building has a new purpose: Torre Argentina Cat Rescue. Seems somehow appropriate.

It's Pi Day 2026! Did you know the most precise method of calculating pi (before computers) involved 'Pick-Up Sticks'? Modern estimation methods are refinements of a 1910 power series calculation by Srinivasa Ramanujan. The most recent of which is the "Chudnovsky algorithm," developed in 1988.

Sir James Dewar, Scottish chemist, would be nominated for the Nobel 8 times, but you probably know him for his most famous invention, which never made him a penny, developed to hold ultra-cold liquified gases. You probably own a "Dewar vessel," but you know it as a Thermos™. Let's talk about it.

This photograph series by Mark Cowan documents a phenomenon called 'lachryphagy' ("tear-feeding"). The caiman excretes salt in their tears & the butterflies need the precious minerals for their metabolism & reproduction. So, they're feeding on crocodilian tears. (📷: Mark Cowan, Curtin Uni.)