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Brilliant photo of a horse I know well by Guernsey photographer, James Tissier. https://lnkd.in/dFiNFUJ View in LinkedIn

THE SLENDER REMAINDER. “More is unknown than is known. We know how much dark energy there is because we know how it affects the universe's expansion. Other than that, it is a complete mystery. But it is an important mystery. It turns out that roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest - everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter - adds up to less than 5% of the universe.” This is our reality. https://lnkd.in/dZz7Cr7 View in LinkedIn

MODEL PARAMETERS. “We infer the evolutionary history of these parameters and use these results to infer the pigmentation patterns of ancestral species. “ https://lnkd.in/dwfZQzE View in LinkedIn

SHADOW OF THE MIND. “The pigmentation patterns of shells in the genus Conus can be generated by a neural-network model of the mantle. We fit model parameters to the shell pigmentation patterns of 19 living Conus species for which a well resolved phylogeny is available.” https://lnkd.in/dwfZQzE View in LinkedIn

CONE SHELLS. “This group of sea snails shows a large variety of colors and patterns, and local varieties and color forms of the same species often occur. This has led to the creation of a large number of known synonyms and probable synonyms, making it difficult to give an exact taxonomic assignment for many snails in this genus. As of 2009, more than 3,200 different species names have been assigned, with an average of 16 new species names introduced each year.” https://lnkd.in/dxxf7qQ View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE for this and next weekend deals with cone shell patterning. For me, it is a testament to human curiosity that adults can spend lifetimes studying peacock feathers, beetle casings, the patterning of shells, or equally seemingly unimportant things; the reality is that these offer wonderful insights into things like photonic crystals, and the mathematics of chaos, and so much more. Thank you D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson. View in LinkedIn