you literally captured whats called “ball lightning” which is the rarest form of lighting
its so rare that we dont even know how it forms other than by heat, static electricity, and humidity
storm elemental it is
look guys this is how nature-based deities and spirits come about this is ridiculous
Are you aware that the first-ever video footage of ball lightning outside a laboratory was taken in 2014 and there are only like 3 or 4 videos like this in existence and this might be the most close-up one
okay so today in plant pathology lab we were hanging out and chilling yet again and my professor is like “hey the mycology team brought back another weird mushroom wanna see it” and i thought about the last time a mycology team member brought back a weird mushroom and we were like HELL YEAHHHHHHH so he took us back there and lo and behold
M E G A B O Y
features: -mega boy is a perrenial fungus, you can tell because of the weird rings; these are formed by the same fungus growing over the old fungal structure with new mycelium year after year, leaving layers!
-is estimated to be about ten years old by the mycology team
-grew around a chain, which we can assume to be also super old because its in the thicker part of the mushroom and is also super rusty
-chain is like straight up like 2-3 feet long????
-was in a tree/stump and they removed it
-is being dried and treated for use as a teaching specimen because MEGA CHAIN BOY
-is super heavy, probably because of the chain bbut also because HE MEGA??
Fun fact: the guys at our college’s geology department prop out the doors with their samples. I totally understand why but as someone whose work with samples is necessarily super delicate and sterile it fucks me up so bad
lol idk if you watch nautilus live at all but watching them process bio & geo samples side by side evokes exactly this Thing (the descriptions are gold too… “here are the 30 steps we use to preserve bio samples, and as for rocks, well, we let them dry, bag them, & put them in the Rock Box)
Good to know there’s enough Biologist Salt™ to go around
Paleontologists occupy a weird and highly uncomfortable slice of this Venn Diagram
in my own experience with geology most precautions with samples are to preserve the life and safety of the geologist, most of the rocks are fine.
i am continually reminded of one of my colleagues, who wanted to collect a sample of gypsum on a field excursion but was too lazy to take off his backpack and get his rock hammer. so he said “eh, it’s soft enough” just fucking punched the rock until a piece fell off like it was fucking minecraft
Creepy or adorable? Researchers at Harvard University have demonstrated the first autonomous, untethered, entirely soft robot: the octobot.
Instead of being controlled by electronics, the robot’s logic board is powered by chemical reactions and fluid passing along tiny channels. Scientist have struggled to create completely soft robots because rigid components like circuit boards, power sources and electronic controls are difficult to replace.
Learn more about the octobot and soft robotics here and see the full study published in Nature here.
Videos Credit: Harvard SEAS/Image Credit Lori Sanders
I’m reblogging myself because I read the source. The lead scientist involved theorized that it was going fast enough that A) it would not have burnt up in our atmosphere, and B) it would not have been caught in Earth’s orbit. Essentially meaning, the first man made object launched into space was a manhole cover that’s still traveling the cosmic abyss.
Pride, Prejudice and Mail Order 