Amelanism
Previously I wrote about melanism (https://tmblr.co/Zyv2JsYpZGm-qa00), amelanism also exists and is characterised by a lack of melanin pigments (making it the opposite of melanism). Melanin is a pigment produced from an amino acid by a melanosome. Amelanism can affect a range of animals including fish, mammals, birds, and amphibians. However, difficulty in producing melanins affects these groups of animals differently.
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Melanism
Melanism is the development of a dark pigment (melanin) in the skin of an organism, which, like albinism alters the appearance of the organism. Examples of melanism in the animal kingdom include the Black Panther (a melanic form of the leopard), coral snakes, birds (such as flamingos), canids and squirrels.
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“My Precious”: Precious Gems, Minerals and Metals in Art
Gollum sure did get it right when he had an overwhelming fixation for the beauty of his gold ring. Sure, it had magical powers but it was rather beautiful to look at too.
Gemstones and precious metals have been used and admired by many different cultures throughout the ages. For a mineral to be considered a precious gemstone it must satisfy the three fundamental criteria of beauty, rarity, and durability. A truly precious gemstone must be attractive to the beholder, not be so commonplace that it is easy to find, and be long-wearing so that it can be handed down from generation to generation, increasing its historic and sentimental value.
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Rainbow Roses.
This beautiful rose is not genetically modified but instead created in a simple, yet effective way.
As petals get their nourishment through the plant stem, the rainbow rose is created by splitting the stem into several channels and dipping each one in a different coloured water and natural dye mixture. The colours will be drawn by the stem into the petals and the resultant rose will have all the colours in it.
Originally created by two Dutch companies, River Flowers and F.J. Zandbergen in 2004, these are now on sale worldwide or can be created at home.
-Jean
Image Credit: Flickr User INTVGene
Do it yourself: http://www.cutoutandkeep.net/projects/rainbow-roses
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The world’s deepest snail?
Critters that live in caves often lose their energy intensive pigmentation and eyes after some generations in such a low energy ecosystem without much primary production at the base of the food chain to sustain much in the way of complex life. This here gastropod is a fine transparent example, discovered in 2010 in the depths of the Lukina Jama-Trojama caves of western Croatia.
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Video going around lately of a “White” (not albino) Giraffe in Africa
Rutile
The most common form of titanium dioxide was named after the Latin for red, due to the lovely deep hues exhibited by some specimens. It forms in both volcanic rocks and high temperature/high pressure metamorphic rocks, testament to the extreme conditions needed to distil it out of the Earth. It is also the most stable polymorph of TiO2. It is a common accessory mineral in plutonic rocks, magmas that never made it to the surface and cooled slowly in the crust when they reached their natural buoyancy point, though it sometimes occurs in lavas sourced deep in the mantle such as the (sometimes) diamond bearing kimberlites and lamproites. Some rutile is also formed by alteration of volcanic rocks.
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Iridescent Plant Power
Plants are full of photosynthetic pigments that turn sunrays into energy every day. These pigments are called chlorophyll and they also give the plant their lovely green coloration. What about the plants that grow in areas lacking sunshine?
Begonia pavonina, or the peacock begonia, grows along the shady rainforest floor of southeast Asia. This particular plant carries leaves that glow with a shimmery blue iridescence. Researchers have recently discovered that the chloroplasts in the blue hues have photosynthetic structures called iridoplasts.
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The most accurate dinosaur recreation to date
A superb and complete fossil from the Jehol Lagerstätte (a place with exceptional preservation of fossils thanks to a vagary of geological history, for a detailed discussion of the formation and its biota see http://bit.ly/1cViPit) has resulted in the best reconstruction of a Cretaceous saurian ever seen. The specimen was found in such a perfect state that soft tissues, skin, tail bristles, the cloaca (their excretory and reproductive organ, still present in the last living dinosaurs, namely modern birds) and skin pigments were clearly revealed to the eager palaeontologists studying the turkey sized animal whose remains now lie in the collection of the Senkenberg Museum in Frankfurt.
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A sure sign of the onset of autumn can be seen in the leaves of trees. During the spring and summer the leaves have served as factories where most of the foods necessary for the tree’s growth are manufactured. The process, known as photosynthesis, takes place in the leaf in numerous cells containing chlorophyll a and b. Chlorophyll a molecules absorb light at a wavelength of 400-500nm, while chlorophyll b absorbs light in the 550-700nm as a result, the green spectrum is reflected and this is what we see.
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