Nature is just so cool!
Jan. 9th, 2009 10:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jaunthieThank all the powers that be for the BBC and its continuing dedication to carrying science and environmental news. I check that section of the site almost daily, and I usually come away having learned something interesting, something that makes me smile and realize all over again just what a wonderfully incredible and complex world we live in.
And every so often, they report on something jaw-droppingly amazing and cool, like this:
That, my friends, is a brownsnout spookfish. It's a very deep-sea fish. Notice the big red-orange spots and the little black spots on its head? Each red-and-black spot-pair is a single eye that has evolved into two distinct parts - diverticular eyes. The black part of the eyes is a mirror, a curved biological mirror that the fish uses to capture the faint traces of light available at its native depths and focus that light (and the mirrored images of the world around it) on its retinas, enabling it to see.
That's right. This fish evolved mirrored eyeballs.
Nature is just too damned cool!
And every so often, they report on something jaw-droppingly amazing and cool, like this:
That, my friends, is a brownsnout spookfish. It's a very deep-sea fish. Notice the big red-orange spots and the little black spots on its head? Each red-and-black spot-pair is a single eye that has evolved into two distinct parts - diverticular eyes. The black part of the eyes is a mirror, a curved biological mirror that the fish uses to capture the faint traces of light available at its native depths and focus that light (and the mirrored images of the world around it) on its retinas, enabling it to see.
That's right. This fish evolved mirrored eyeballs.
Nature is just too damned cool!
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no subject
Date: 2009-01-10 04:01 pm (UTC)One of my favorite things about leaving work at the time I do is that I get to listen to BBC World News on NPR.
There was one evening about a year ago when I was at the intersection of Military Road almost at the top of the hill east of the airport (I remember distinctly because what the BBC was talking about was so cool) when the BBC started their science segment.
It was about the Japanese space program testing shapes and designs for paper airplanes. Why would a space program be interested in paper airplanes?
Because when the Japanese astronauts went up to the space station the next time they would be throwing these paper airplanes, "paper" being somewhat of a misnomer although the things they were throwing _were_ paper based, back towards Earth during a space walk.
Not just because it would be a cool thing to do, but because they were testing the designs of the airplanes in the quest for developing a new multi-use space vehicle. The airplanes were expected to survive re-entry and contained messages in several languages about what they were and what to do with them once found.
And as regards nature....
Did you know about the hairy frog?
--J
no subject
Date: 2009-01-10 07:59 pm (UTC)