Ancient fish brains and sunspots

Photo credit: Carl D Hopkins
Cornell University, New York
USA
www.cornell.edu

The elephantnose fish likes to hang around in the dark ocean depths rooting out critters from deep-sea mud with its snout. They are peculiar in having an electric organ, which allows them to generate an electric field. In stormy waters eyes cannot be relied on so fish can sense their environment using a line of special cells along their bodies. Pictured here are nerve cells from the electric organ of an elephantnose fish; they are coloured with a red dye from tree bark.

Photo credit: TRACE Project
USA
www.nasa.gov

At well over four and a half billion years of age, the sun is one of about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way and by far the largest object in our solar system. The energy it makes every second could power the USA for 9 million years. Sunspots, wells of intense magnetic energy on the sun’s surface, are cooler than the rest of the sun, but at some four thousand degrees C, that’s still hot enough to melt diamonds.