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

Wow, what an incredible discovery!

…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!?

Hubble 👇

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

Infographic on the chemistry of the colours of autumn leaves. Green is caused by chlorophyll, carotenoids and flavonoids give yellows, and oranges come from carotenoids, which also contribute to reds along with anthocyanins.

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 🧪

A photo of a mudskipper hauled out of water and onto a branch. The fish is brownish in color and has unusual facial features.

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 Sees World Bank as Key Ally in $125 Billion Forest Fund 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.

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.

A blue bottle jelly with many tentacles emerging from it

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

I just glanced at my watch, is it Wednesday?!
Nope, no missed appointments and my
MolluscMonday posts are still good to go :)
Not that many have noticed them 🤷‍♂️

Modifications observed on shells from La Roche-à-Pierrot in Saint-Césaire, France, including perforations made by pressure and pigment staining. CREDIT: Solange Rigaud

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/...

Case Files: Edwin Hubble Introduction"Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science." - Edwin HubbleIn the early 1920s, most astronomers believed that the Milky Way galaxy...

Source for the information in the above post was via @franklininstitute.bsky.social

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

A photo of the two books mentioned in the post lying on a table. Sommerville’s book is opened to the title page and there’s an illustration of “Nebuleuses” on the frontispiece.

Two books in my personal library somewhat related to your thread: my copy of Photographic Investigations of Faint Nebulae by Edwin Hubble, his PhD dissertation, published in 1920, and the first French edition of Mary Sommerville’s On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences published in 1837.

Photo plate of Hubble's famous "VAR!" discovery. This is a photonegative plate of an image of the Andromeda Galaxy, with several small annotations made in grease pencil. One of them was previously marked "N" for "nova," but the N has been crossed out and replaced with an excited "VAR!" to indicate a Cepheid Variable.

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!

Artist’s depiction of planet TRAPPIST-1 d passing in front of its turbulent star, with other members of the closely packed system shown in the background. CREDIT: NASA, ESA, CSA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)

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/...

#addOcean

#addOcean

YouTube video by Oxford Geoheritage Virtual Conference Geodiversity: Biodiversity's Silent Partner

Happy International Geodiversity Day! ⚒️ 🧪 #PhiGeo

@geodiversityday.bsky.social

youtu.be/LtFzkDMsYtI?...

www.geodiversityday.org/what-is-geod...

Not sure how you got it 🤷‍♂️

Cool! You used the photo I took of my TV

A photo of a clump of Arrowleaf balsamroot (Balsamorhiza sagittata) with yellow daisy like flowers on a ridge with a cloudy sky beyond.

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.

A Thermometer for Measuring Quantumness | Quanta Magazine “Anomalous” heat flow, which at first appears to violate the second law of thermodynamics, gives physicists a way to detect quantum entanglement without destroying it.

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...

My linocut portrait of Henrietta Swan Leavitt is printed in silvery lavender ink on Japanese kozo (or mulberry paper). Behind her is a line showing stellar luminosity (capital L with subscript sun-symbol, a circle with a dot) as a function of time (t). She is printed over constellations in gold (Cepheus, Cassiopeia, Draco, Ursa Minor and Andromeda). ⁠ ⁠

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 🧵