The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

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These are from Die acraspeden Medusen der deutschen Tiefsee-Expedition: 1898-1899, the first of two volumes on jellyfish written by Ernst Vanhöffen, a jellyfish scholar who was thrilled to be on the Valdivia Expedition.

As the Biodiversity Heritage Library describes it:

The expedition covered over 32,000 nautical miles, visited 268 stations around the West Coast of South Africa, the Gulf of Guinea, the Antarctic Sea, and a large portion of the Indian Ocean, and colle…

This is a video of a mouse, not yet born, already has some issues specifically “Waardenburg-Anophthalmia Syndrome.” It’s originally from a PLOS genetics paper, but I found it on Wikimedia Commons, while trying to figure out what exactly Optical Projection Tomography really was (basically using visual light to study things “sectionally,” I guess – it must be really bright light, I suppose).

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Mushrooms you can trust. I think.

From the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s Flickr collection “Edible and poisonous mushrooms: what to eat and what to avoid, London,Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge,1894“.

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This is half of a stereoscopic image of the surface of Mars. The other half is here, if you want to line them up, one in each eye, and see the Chasma in all its depth and glory. This is a Martian canyon named after the biblical land where Solomon sent a mission that returned with gold.

I found this via the USGS Astrogeology Planetary Photogrammetry Lab, although the LPL is a University of Arizona project.

SONG: “Under Orion’s Arms”.

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: SPACE.com, 3 January 2020, “Will Bright Star Betelgeuse Finally Explode? A Look at the Dimming Red Giant in Orion’s Shoulder,” as used in the post “So Orion’s shoulder might be about to explode.”

ABSTRACT: I’ve been binge-watching Twin Peaks: The Return over the last month. I guess this is what happens.

Had the organ down, like, after Episode 12. The guitars (so many guitars) followed in short order, with the main, Richard-Hawley m…

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This is a fusion reactor that was never built, a small power plant that takes the principles of a tokamak (use super-heated plasma to generate more power than you put into heating and containing the plasma) and adds different magnetic fields running in different directins to keep the hot stuff inside the donut-shaped body of the thing. A donut shape is technically a “torus,” and “toroidal” means in a circle that follows the shape of the donut. “Poloidal” means in a ring arou…