Swans on Tea

Anticrepuscular Rays Over Colorado, the APOD for Nov 16

Mimes are annoying, but mimics are cool. Can You See Me? Animal Camouflage: Leaf Mimics
Dead leaf butterflies are extraordinary creatures to observe up close. The specimen below illustrates the intricate details chiseled out by adaptation through natural selection, which is a driving force of evolution. The remarkable details help the [...]

Yeah, right.
Tech puts JFK conspiracy theories to rest
“The question we were trying to answer is, given the spatter evidence in a vehicle, and knowing an individual was sitting at a particular location, is there something we could use to determine where the shot originated?” said Steve Schliebe, a blood spatter and trace evidence specialist with [...]

Optical illusions: caused by eye or brain?
For the past 200 years, researchers have debated whether the illusion of motion in a static image is caused by mechanisms in the eye, in the brain, or by a combination of both. Because measuring these kinds of physiological responses is difficult, no study has successfully measured direct and [...]

Dominos as logic gates
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And the Domino half-adder

I’ve used it before. This time it’s Caves: The World Beneath the World at Dark Roasted Blend.

The Fire Rainbow: An Astonishing and Rare Marvel of Nature
To name it properly, a fire rainbow is a circumhorizontal arc. It is also known as a circumhorizon arc but whichever you chose, scientists (and aficionados) call it a CHA. It is given its name because it looks as if a rainbow has spontaneously [...]

Mysterious ‘dead water’ effect caught on film
Research has already shown that dead water occurs when an area of water consists of two or more layers of water with different salinity, and hence density – for example, when fresh water from a melting glacier forms a relatively thin layer on top of denser seawater. Waves that [...]

But we are fascinated. The Life of the Queen Bee: Superb Macrophotography

The Incredible Beauty of Hummingbirds in Flight
OK, Pedantic man says they are stills, and hummingbirds hover, so they’re not really showing flight.
Here’s one I took a few years ago. Not quite as high resolution, because didn’t (don’t) have a zoom lens that zooms in very much, so this is just a cropped portion of [...]

OK, it wasn’t really misspent. Much. But I’ve done this, and lost some hair on my fingers doing so. The can gets pretty warm, too.
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Important tidbit: Butane is heavier than air.

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Make your own carbon dioxide. At 44 g/mole, it is heavier than the other major constituents of air, so it stays in the pitcher and can be “poured” out.