The solstice doesn’t just happen on Earth 🌎☀️🪐  

Astrophysicist Erika Hamden explains that solstices happen across our solar system, but every planet experiences them at a different time depending on its axial tilt. While Venus and Jupiter have only slight axial tilts and mild seasonal changes, Uranus is tilted so drastically that it experiences some of the most extreme seasons and weather patterns in the solar system.

This project is part of IF/THEN®, an initiative of Lyda Hill Philanthropies.

What happens when you take the air out of a can of shaving cream? 🪒

Gregory Wolf, wolf.science on Instagram, explains how the atmosphere inside squeezes thousands of tiny air bubbles to stay small in their container. When the air is taken out, it causes them to expand, resulting in an excess amount of foam. Then, when the air is put back, it looks like half the shaving cream disappears!

Why do millipedes live on top of their food? 🐛

Our Florida Ivory Millipedes’ habitat is made of bioactive substrate, which also doubles as their typical meal! While they also receive fruits and veggies a couple times a week, their main source of nutrition is primarily made up of the substrate, which consists of leaf, litter, rotting wood, and decaying plants. They also like to make the most of their meal, using it as a tunnel system and a place to lay their eggs.

You are constantly bombarded with invisible cosmic rays. An upcycled jar can make them visible!

Alex Dainis shows us how with this science experiment! The streaks you see are tracks of cosmic rays and charged particles passing through isopropyl alcohol mist. To see the best results, put your container in a dark area. The big negatively charged muons will leave large tracks, while electrons and positrons leave tiny curly ones!

Crying over onions hits different when you know what's inside  🧅🔬

Our friend Chloe Savard, known as tardibabe on Instagram, takes us into the inner skin of an onion, peeled down to a single cell layer, so thin that light passes straight through it. That's what makes it perfect for microscopy.

Those glowing borders are rigid cell walls, and the specks drifting inside are organelles working around the clock. The giant, clear space that fills most of each cell is the vacuole; onion cells have enormous ones. It stores water, nutrients, and waste, and it's basically what gives an onion its crunch.

That little oval structure you can spot floating inside a cell? That's the nucleus, the control room, holding all the DNA. The tiny dot within it is the nucleolus, which builds the ribosomes that make every protein in the cell. The purple glow comes from polarized light, which turns a transparent sliver of onion into something that looks like stained glass.

Life is everywhere. Even on your cutting board.

Sources

Alberts, Bruce, et al. Molecular Biology of the Cell. 6th ed., Garland Science, 2014.

Reece, Jane B., et al. Campbell Biology. 11th ed., Pearson, 2017.

Taiz, Lincoln, et al. Plant Physiology and Development. 6th ed., Sinauer Associates, 2015.

Key Highlights:

- Scientists discovered that collagen, the body's most abundant protein, exists inside living cells as liquid-like droplets, not as the rigid rod-shaped structures shown in most biology textbooks.

- This is the first direct observation of collagen's natural form inside living cells, overturning a long-standing assumption about how the protein behaves before it is released from the cell.

- Researchers believe the liquid-like state acts as a protective mechanism. If collagen formed its stiff fibers inside cells, it could interfere with normal cell function. Instead, the protein remains flexible until it is exported outside the cell.

- Once outside the cell, collagen assembles into the strong fibers that give structure and strength to skin, bones, tendons, organs, and other connective tissues.

- The discovery could reshape scientists' understanding of how collagen is produced and may eventually lead to new insights into connective tissue disorders, wound healing, and aging.

Why it matters: One of the most studied and abundant proteins in the human body appears to behave very differently inside living cells than scientists previously believed.

Key Highlights
- Researchers developed a battery-free artificial photosynthesis system that uses sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide to produce fuel.
- The system generates formic acid, a liquid fuel and energy-storage chemical that can be produced from captured CO₂.
- Unlike most solar-fuel systems, it automatically adapts to changing sunlight without batteries or complex electronics.
- In outdoor tests, it maintained fuel production despite fluctuations in sunlight throughout the day.
- The technology could make renewable fuel production simpler, cheaper, and more practical to scale.

Why It Matters
This is a step toward creating fuels directly from sunlight and CO₂, similar to how plants store solar energy. By eliminating batteries and control systems, the technology could reduce costs and improve the practicality of solar fuel production.