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Quote of the day for November 26, 2024
The quickest way to end a war is to lose it. -- George Orwell

On this beautiful day of

Tuesday
26
November
00:36 UTC
Wikipedia has 6,915,954 articles.
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Ice eggs
Ice eggs, also known as ice balls, are a rare phenomenon caused by a process in which small pieces of sea ice in open water are rolled over by wind and currents in freezing conditions and grow into spheroid pieces of ice. They sometimes collect into heaps of balls on beaches where they pack together in striking patterns. The gentle churn of water, blown by a suitably stiff breeze, makes concentric layers of ice form on a seed particle that then grows into the floating ball as it rolls through the freezing currents. This formation of ice eggs was photographed in 2014 on Stroomi Beach in Tallinn, Estonia. The temperature was around −20 to −15 °C (−4 to 5 °F), and the diameter of each ball around 5 to 10 centimetres (2 to 4 in).Photograph credit: Aleksandr Abrosimov


Thecacera pennigera

Thecacera pennigera, also known as the winged thecacera, is a species of sea slug in the family Polyceridae. It has a cosmopolitan distribution, being found in temperate waters on either side of the North Atlantic Ocean, in the Mediterranean Sea, around South and West Africa, Brazil, Japan, Korea, Pakistan and more recently in Australia and New Zealand. There is a significant difference in colouring between Atlantic populations and Pacific specimens, however. Thecacera pennigera has a typical adult length between 15 millimetres (0.6 in) and 30 millimetres (1.2 in), featuring a short, wide head with two lateral flaps and two sheathed olfactory organs called rhinophores. The body is wedge shaped, being wide at the front and ending in a slender foot with a lateral keel on either side. The general colour of the body is translucent white and the upper side is covered with orange splotches and small black spots. Like other sea slugs, T. pennigera is a hermaphrodite with internal fertilisation and a mating mechanism whereby pairs of animals exchange packets of sperm. This T. pennigera was photographed in the Mar Piccolo of Taranto, Italy.

Photograph credit: Roberto Strafella

Recently featured:

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) was a NASA space mission aimed at testing a method of planetary defense against near-Earth objects. The target object, Dimorphos, is a 160-meter-long (525-foot) minor-planet moon of the asteroid Didymos. DART was launched on 24 November 2021 and successfully collided with Dimorphos on 26 September 2022 while about 11 million kilometers (6.8 million miles) from Earth. The collision shortened Dimorphos's orbit by 32 minutes and was mostly achieved by the momentum transfer associated with the recoil of the ejected debris, which was larger than the impact. This video is a timelapse of DART's final five and a half minutes before impacting Dimorphos, and was compiled from photographs captured by the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation (DRACO), the spacecraft's 20-centimeter-aperture (7.9-inch) camera, and transmitted to Earth in real time. The replay is ten times faster than reality, except for the last six images, which are shown at the same rate at which the spacecraft returned them. Both Didymos and Dimorphos are visible at the start of the video, and the final frame shows a patch of Dimorphos's surface 16 meters (51 feet) across. DART's impact occurred during transmission of the final image, resulting in a partial frame.

Video credit: NASAJohns Hopkins APL