Vivid blue creatures with sparkling bioluminescence… not just the province of expensive special effects in sci-fi movies. Here in earth’s own oceans you can find the lovely Corynactis viridis:

You can read more about this intriguing little organism (and see other beautiful videos of sea creatures) at the blog of Morphologic Studios – a “scientific art endeavor.”

[via @Vimeo]

See more of these wonderful 18th-Century illustrations (and much more) at the intriguing blog BibliOdyssey.

Science!

We need more science writing like this… Kurt Andersen’s appreciative essay in Vanity Fair about the Large Hadron Collider:

The believe-it-or-not superlatives are so extreme and Tom Swiftian they make you smile. The L.H.C. is not merely the world’s largest particle accelerator but the largest machine ever built. At the center of just one of the four main experimental stations installed around its circumference, and not even the biggest of the four, is a magnet that generates a magnetic field 100,000 times as strong as Earth’s. And because the super-conducting, super-colliding guts of the collider must be cooled by 120 tons of liquid helium, inside the machine it’s one degree colder than outer space, thus making the L.H.C. the coldest place in the universe.

Read more of Kurt Anderson’s exciting interpretation at Vanity Fair.