Congratulations, you've made it through the week!

Have a Happy Thought:   (Keeping it short and sweet this week) The sun is always shining, and there are blue skies at least somewhere on Earth, even if not exactly where you are.   Oh, and the sun is also often doing things like this:    A Solar Filament Erupts Image Credit: NASA 's  GSFC ,  SDO AIA Team     Make sure to check out the Astronomy Picture of the Day for this and many more spectacular views of our universe.   And have a sunny weekend!

Have a Happy Thought:   Space telescopes are amazing. And we live in a time where there are multiple space telescopes, bringing us incredible views of the universe.  I’ve shared images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope before ( https://cymittw.blogspot.com/2023/06/happy-thought-for-23-june-2023.html ) and now it’s time to share some pictures from ESA’s Euclid Telescope.   Feel free to just scroll through pretty pictures, or read the captions and click the links for all of the science!   The Horsehead Nebula Euclid shows us a spectacularly panoramic and detailed view of the Horsehead Nebula, also known as Barnard 33 and part of the constellation Orion. In Euclid’s new observation of this stellar nursery, scientists hope to find many dim and previously unseen Jupiter-mass planets in their celestial infancy, as well as young brown dwarfs and baby stars. CREDIT ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi. CC BY-SA 3.

Have a Happy Thought:   Most of us have heard (and are secretly tickled by) the fact that the ancestors of whales walked on land , then decided to “go back” into the oceans to swim and live their best lives.   What I hadn’t heard until recently was that apparently the ancestors of turtles made a similar decision. A few times.   It starts with the long-ago ancestors of all four-legged creatures on Earth, which lived mostly in the water. Then the turtles split off, and their ancestors adapted to living on land. Then some of the turtles started living in the water again, leading to most of the sea- and pond-turtles we know today. But then some of those decided to come back onto land, re-joining their distant cousins that we now call tortoises.          So yes: all tortoises are turtles, but not all turtles are tortoises.   Which means that the ancestors of box turtles have gone through ocean -> land -> water -> land. Who knows what they’ll decide next?

Have a Happy Thought: Some flowers change colour to tell pollinators whether they’re open for business. Take lupins for example. Image: Wild Russell Lupins (Lupinus polyphyllus) in central Otago. Photo by author, 2010.     These beautiful plants have a whole bunch of flowers on a single stalk. As a flower is pollinated, a part (or sometimes all) of each flower turns a different colour – which indicates to pollinators like bees and moths whether or not to bother with that flower, or even that stalk. A foraging pollinator of a species in the Lupinus genus. At the top of the inflorescence are rewarding flowers at anthesis where the spot on the banner petal is yellow. Towards the bottom of the inflorescence there are older purple flowers that are typically avoided by pollinators presumably because they contain less pollen and nectar. Photographer Terry Lucas CC-BY-3.0   With some types of lupin, the entire flower changes colour, others it’s just a lower petal or a centr

Have a Happy Thought: We’ve talked before about taking short breaks out in The Nature for mental and physical health . But sometimes you just can’t get outside. Maybe it’s raining torrentially Or maybe you live or work in the middle of a concrete jungle, which just is not as relaxing as a rainforest jungle.   In these cases, you can at least give yourself the audio experience of being out in The Nature By tuning in to Forest.fm   This is now one of my fave websites. You are now one click away from seeing the picture of a forest (or sometimes just a beautiful landscape) somewhere in the world, with a couple of minutes of audio recorded there.     tree.fm   Click to listen to a random forest and you may be transported to Ghana, or France, or Ecuador, or ...   (The audio will just keep looping as long as you leave it on. So I’ve been in Denali National Park the whole time I’ve been researching and writing this.)   And in most of these forests, you will hear bird