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A dead leaf opens its wings
A Kallima butterfly can look like a dry leaf when its wings are shut, including the leaf-like veins. Its folded wings can resemble a dead leaf so closely that the butterfly’s appearance is easy to mistake for one. When it opens its wings, blue and orange appear. The leaf-like disguise disappears with that movement.
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Ceramic Moon Latch
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A shell-house that opens into a bigger world
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Beach sand shaped like stars
On some Okinawan beaches, tiny star-shaped grains of sand are the empty shells of foraminifera, single-celled marine organisms. Their unusual shape is not just a pattern in the sand: each grain is a shell that once held a living cell. So these little stars are remnants of organisms that lived in the sea. The grains may look like tiny stars, but each one is an empty shell.
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Folding Mineral Silk
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Normandie: a ship designed to speak for France
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The arum’s self-heating spadix
Cooke described a crowded cluster of tiny arum flowers gathered at the base of a central stalk, or spadix. A surrounding sheath, the spathe, slows the escape of warmth, making the heat easier to notice than it is in scattered flowers[1]. In Cooke’s period account, chemical changes accompanying flowering, which he described as oxidation and decomposition, produced that heat; he held that flowering plants generally gave off some warmth, but that densely packed, enclosed arum flowers made it especially apparent[2][3].
The figures Cooke reported are striking: citing Hubert, he wrote that a thermometer among five spadices of Arum cordifolium read 131°F, and among twelve read 142½°F, while the air was 74–75°F[4]. He also reported Goeppert’s finding that an Arum dracunculus spadix reached 31°F above the surrounding air[5]. These are measurements Cooke relayed from earlier observers, not present-day readings.
Would you also like to know when Lamarck first observed heat in arum flowers?Answer complete. One follow-up option available.
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One shared series, with partner details left open
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Combing the Soft Dunes
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What was the Brocken spectre?
In Loudon’s 1848 account, a traveler on the Brocken may see a magnified, distorted image of themselves on a cloud opposite them. She calls it the “spectre of the Brocken” and says the image is reflected there “under particular circumstances,” without explaining those circumstances further. The book says the best time to see it is September, around four in the afternoon[1].
Loudon treats that image separately from the local beliefs she records: country people regarded the Brocken’s summit as an annual meeting place for Germany’s witches and spirits, and the wild huntsman was also supposed to dwell there. Those are presented as beliefs and legends, not as her account of what produces the spectre[2].
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