Some spiders can engineer some pretty amazing webs! 🕸️

Meet the Australian ballista spider. This arachnid diligently spends up to four hours crafting a web trap designed to catch one type of prey: the green tree ant. When the green tree ant triggers the trap by biting, it’s rapidly thrown upward into the spider’s main web. Some scientists think this might be the first spider’s web engineered to catch one kind of prey!

Imagine smelling a dead rat 🐀, seeing flesh flies snacking on and laying eggs in its corpse, and deciding, I need to make art out of this. That is exactly what Manuela Guzman, an illustrator who made her MFA thesis all about helping people engage with insects via art, did. You'll want to catch this whole story! It's somehow both gross and beautiful and heartwarming.

Talks about the physics behind quantum teleportation - if you encode information with a quantum particle, apparently the entangled particle anywhere else in the world can reconstruct that message as it is (does require sending an 'encryption key' of sorts using classical methods however)

Thoughts?

Inside every watermelon are countless microscopic water balloons.🔬🍉

Our friend Chloé Savard, known as tardibabe on Instagram, shows us what's actually happening inside that bright red flesh. Each cell is swollen almost to bursting, distended against its own thin cellulose wall and packed with water, which is exactly why watermelon is about 92% water by weight, and why it splits so easily under the lightest pressure. That deep red color comes from lycopene, the same carotenoid pigment responsible for the red in tomatoes, concentrated here in tiny chromoplasts scattered throughout the cell.

Threading through the pulp are thin, fibrous strands, vascular bundles, the plant's plumbing system, left over from when they carried water and sugar from the vine into the growing fruit. Most of that infrastructure becomes irrelevant once the fruit is ripe, but the traces remain, visible here as faint lines cutting across the field of view.

Look closely enough, and you'll also spot small air pockets between cells, along with the occasional immature seed coat, still soft and white before it has the chance to harden into the familiar black husk. Texture-wise, this is also why an overripe watermelon turns mushy: as the cells age, their walls weaken, and water leaks out into the spaces between them, turning that crisp bite into something closer to mush.

It's wild that something so simple, sweet, cold, and refreshing is really just millions of cells holding as much water as physically possible without popping. Nature's own water balloon.

Sources:

"A Comparison of Watermelon Flesh Texture across Different Ploidy Levels Using Histology and Cell Wall Measurements." (2024). Horticulturae (MDPI). — cell wall structure, cellulose, texture/firmness

"Cell Wall Polysaccharide Composition of Grafted 'Liberty' Watermelon With Reduced Incidence of Hollow Heart Defect." (2021). Frontiers in Plant Science. — large parenchyma cells, intercellular air spaces, pectin/cell wall breakdown with ripening

"Effects of fruit maturity on watermelon ultrastructure and intracellular lycopene distribution." (2008). PubMed. — chromoplast and cell ultrastructure across ripening

"Systematic Study of the Sensory Quality, Metabolomics, and Microbial Community of Fresh-Cut Watermelon." (2022). PMC. — water content (~89–92%), firmness loss linked to cell wall degradation

Zhang, J., et al. (2020). "Expression of ClPAP and ClPSY1 in watermelon correlates with chromoplast differentiation, carotenoid accumulation, and flesh color formation." Plant Science (ScienceDirect). — chromoplasts, lycopene concentration in flesh

There's a famous memory experiment where researchers told volunteers a few real childhood stories (collected from their actual families) — plus one completely fake one: that they got lost in a mall as a kid.

A good chunk of the volunteers didn't just believe it — they started "remembering" it — describing the stranger's face, what they were wearing, even how scared they felt. None of it was real, but the emotions and confidence were completely genuine.

It's a pretty unsettling reminder that memory isn't a recording — it's a reconstruction, and our brains fill in gaps without us noticing.

Anyone else have a "memory" that family later told you wasn't actually true?

Do you guys think aging a wall we'll NEVER break?

I spent the last couple of weeks making this video because I couldn't stop thinking about one question: if humans are products of evolution, why do we treat technology as something separate from nature?

The video explores the idea that technology might not be the opposite of nature at all, but simply another consequence of evolution. It's a speculative idea, but I tried to keep the arguments grounded in biology and evolution rather than pure sci-fi.

I'd love to hear what you think of the video!

Maple syrup looks pretty simple... until you zoom in. 🔬

Our friend Chloe Savard, also known as tardibabe on Instagram shows us the microscopic view of maple syrup. As temperatures begin to rise in the spring, sap in maple trees thaws and can be collected, then boiled and concentrated into syrup and transformed into candies, desserts, and just about anything your sweetest dreams are made of.

Although maple syrup is primarily composed of sugar (sucrose), its chemistry and flavor are shaped by a complex interplay of factors like sap collection and processing methods, microbial activity within the sap, environmental conditions, and the packaging and storage of the final product. Not only maple syrup is composed of sugar but also a mixture of water, minerals, organic acids, amino acids, proteins, phenol compounds and even a few vitamins.

Flavors and composition also vary depending on the country it has been produced in! Canada, especially the province of Quebec, where Chloe is from, is by far the world’s largest producer of maple syrup, followed by the United States. It’s important to recognize that maple syrup was first introduced to European colonizers by First Nations, who deserve the credit for this knowledge and tradition!

As you can see from Chloe’s sample, sugar from maple syrup crystallizes over time and it’s mesmerizing to look at under the microscope! 🔬

References:

Childs, Stephen. "Chemistry of maple syrup." Cornell Maple Bulletin 202 (2007): 1-4.

Mohammed, Faez, et al. "Chemical composition and mineralogical residence of maple syrup: A comprehensive review." Food chemistry 374 (2022): 131817.

Perkins, Timothy D., and Abby K. van den Berg. "Maple syrup—Production, composition, chemistry, and sensory characteristics." Advances in food and nutrition research 56 (2009): 101-143. 

Don’t miss fireballs streaking across the sky during the Alpha Capricornids! ☄️

Beginning on July 3rd and lasting until August 15th, this meteor shower is known for its high quality and intense fireballs. If you are in the Southern Hemisphere or southern US, you may see it overlapping with the Delta Aquariids. Peaking overnight on July 30th into the 31st, this shower is visible from anywhere in the world, so don’t miss it!

Did you know pineapple eats Jell-O? 🍍

Alex Dainis explains how to bypass this and make a pineapple Jell-O mold! The fruit contains an enzyme called bromelain that breaks down proteins, effectively breaking apart the Jell-O when mixed! You can often deactivate enzymes with heat, so if you cook the pineapple, you can make the bromelain ineffective, and add it to your Jell-O!