Congratulations, you've made it through the week!

Have a Happy Thought:  People, given the opportunity, LOVE science. More specifically, exploration. In this case, specifically, exploring the deep ocean. Researchers from the Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales have set up a livestream from their Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) that is currently exploring a deep (3000 m)-sea canyon off the Argentinian coast. This went absolutely viral, both within and without Argentina – there have been at times literally tens of thousands of people watching this livestream. (To see the livestream, which as at writing is still going, go to the Schmit Ocean youtube page and look for the “Live now” section.) One of the real highlights of this was when the person operating the ROV found this very peculiarly shaped seastar (aka starfish). The operator did an honest-to-goodness double-take-then-zoom-in with the camera (or see it in full context ).   Image: a seastar with a symmetrical, rounded shape between two of its “legs”. ...

Have a Happy Thought:  Those of us older than a decade or so have gone through multiple formats of “saving” information. From physical documents, to reels of tape (be kind, rewind!), CDs and DVDs, flash drives (aka thumb drives aka USB drives aka aka aka), and, of course, “the cloud”. Now, I present to you the newest* method of recording information... a starling. Image: from gardenbirdwatching.com Basically, a guy who is “in to music and science” decided to test out his theory of converting an image into a soundwave, and then teaching that soundwave to a starling. His FIRST ATTEMPT was successful! And while this is fairly slow at an optimistic 2Mbps (a USB can transfer from betweeen 1 2Mbps to 12,000Mbps ), the fact that this theory has passed the first test is quite amazing. You can watch the ~30-minute video explaining the starling-storage system here, including a great explainer as to why starlings are so good at making so many noises: https://www.youtube.com/wat...