Photo by Nick Hobgood

During the holiday season, even the ocean gets in the spirit! The Christmas tree worm (Spirobranchus giganteus) is a type of polychaete, a group of segmented worms mostly found in the ocean. It lives on tropical coral reefs and resembles a fluffy fir tree adorned with colored ornaments. Each worm has two tree-like appendages that are used to breathe and to catch meals of plankton floating by.

The Christmas tree worms are sedentary, attaching themselves to coral cover that act as their home base. Once attached, they create a calcium carbonate tube that they can then retract into for protection. The fluffy, eye-catching section of the worms that attract divers are small in size, usually not bigger than a few inches, but the remainder of the worm (hiding in its burrow) can be almost twice that size.

Check out more holiday-themed ocean animals and phenomena on the Ocean Portal! 

Photo by Nick Hobgood

A colorful “forest” of Christmas tree worms. Photo by Nick Hobgood

Read more articles about the holidays in our Smithsonian Holiday Guide here

 Learn more about the ocean from the Smithsonian’s Ocean Portal. 

The October 3, 2005 annular eclipse, as seen from Spain. Photo by Abel Pardo López

On Sunday evening, for the first time in 18 years, a solar eclipse will be visible from the continental United States. This won’t be your typical eclipse, either—as in the picture above, from October 3, 2005, the moon will cross directly in front of the sun but block out only a portion of its light, leaving a “ring of fire” that is much thicker than the ring seen during most total eclipses.

Why the ring of fire? Total solar eclipses occur when the moon passes directly between the sun and earth, covering up the sun for a brief duration from our vantage point. Because the moon is currently near apogee—meaning it’s at a point in its orbit that is farther from us than usual—the moon appears smaller in the sky, and thus isn’t large enough to block the entire sun. The result: a bold, shimmering ring of fire, known as an annular eclipse.

Unfortunately, those on the East Coast (including us here at Smithsonian) won’t be able to see the eclipse at all, since the sun will set by the time it will occur. Many residents of Western states will be able to see the ring of fire eclipse during the afternoon or evening on Sunday; others will see a partial eclipse, in which the moon crosses in front of the sun off-center, blocking just one portion of it. This NASA map shows the thin swath of the United States that will be able to see the annular eclipse. If you’re outside it, you can click on your exact location to see what time you should look to the sky to see a partial eclipse.

Although up to 94 percent of the sun’s light will be blocked out by the eclipse, looking at it for even a few seconds with the naked eye can cause permanent harm to your retinas. (Don’t try watching with your smartphone or digital camera, either—it can damage the lens.) Instead, punch a small hole in a piece of cardboard and allow the sun’s light to pass through it, and you’ll see a projected image of the eclipse on the ground. You can also look to the shaded ground beneath a leafy tree to see the shadows turn into circular rings of light.

Watch the video below by Science@NASA for a full explanation of the astronomical phenomenon:

For his 65th birthday, Stephen Hawking took a ride in zero gravity. Photo: Associated Press

On January 8, 2007, scientist Stephen Hawking did something special for his 65th birthday—he took a trip up into zero gravity. He rode in the Zero Gravity Corporation’s modified Boeing 727 jet, which traveled up to 24,000 feet over the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida and performed a series of dips that let Hawking experience a total of about four minutes of weightlesness. Because Hawking suffers from a degenerative nerve disease related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a medical support team was on hand to monitor his blood pressure and cardiac readings. But the renowned physicist held up even better than expected, negotiating for two additional 30-second rounds of weightlessness while in flight.

NASA has been using aircraft to simulate the zero-gravity environment of orbit for decades, and in 2004 the Zero Gravity Corporation became the first company to offer the experience to the general public. The sensation occurs as the plane climbs upward with a very steep pitch and then levels out—a little like the feeling you get at the top of a roller coaster—and lasts about 30 seconds at a time. The price tag: $4,950 plus tax.

Hawking took the flight in order to publicize the possibility of commercial space travel. “I believe that life on Earth is at an ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster such as sudden nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus, or other dangers. I think the human race has no future if it doesn’t go into space,” he said before the flight. Using the force of commerce, he believes, is the most practical way to eventually make mass space travel a real possibility.

After the flight, Hawking was exuberant, and discussed his hopes to someday fully enter earth’s orbit (Richard Branson, owner of the company Virgin Galactic, has said he will waive the $200,000 fee). “It was amazing. The zero-G part was wonderful, and the high-G part was no problem,” Hawking said. “I could have gone on and on. Space, here I come.”

The rare all-white orca whale was spotted swimming with its pod. Photo by E. Lazareva / Newscom

On a summer morning in 2010, off the coast of Kamchatka in eastern Russia, scientists made a rare discovery. Photos, released earlier this week (and posted on our Retina Tumblr blog) document what may be the first verified sighting of its kind: an all-white adult orca whale. Also known as “killer whales,” orcas are typically a mix of black and white. White members of several other whale species have been seen previously, but so far, the only known white orcas have been young.

This one, nicknamed “Iceberg” by the researchers, sports a six-foot-tall dorsal fin, indicating that it is an adult. The scientists, led by Erich Hoyt of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, are are unsure why this whale has such unusual pigmentation. Although it is mostly white in color, it may not qualify as albino due to some color in the area behind the dorsal fin. One previously known young albino orca, a resident of a Canadian aquarium named Chima, suffered from a rare genetic condition that caused a number of medical complications, but Iceberg appears to be a healthy member of its pod.

Monday's solar eruption at its peak moment. Photo courtesy of NASA

On Monday, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory telescope recorded an awesome sight: one of the most visually spectacular solar eruptions in years. The mass of super-hot gases and charged particles exploded from the east limb of the sun, which is the left side for observers on earth. The false-color image above captures the prominence at its peak, showing charged particles from the sun’s magnetic field rising up from the surface.

Solar prominences occur when these charged particles interact with the sun’s plasma, and are often associated with solar flares, which are momentary brightenings of the sun’s surface. The flare that accompanied this prominence rated an M1.7 on the Richter scale for solar flares, making it a medium-size event, but since it was not aimed toward Earth, it has had no effect on satellites or air travel.

As captured in the video below, some of the particles did not have enough force to break away from the sun, and can be seen falling back toward its surface afterward. Have a look:

The Glaucus atlanticus sea slug, or blue dragon, feeds on toxins from much larger species. Taro Taylor / Getty Images

This tiny creature has gotten a fair bit of attention lately because of one simple reason: It’s absolutely crazy-looking. At first glance, it resembles a Pokémon or character from Final Fantasy more closely than a real biological animal. But the Glaucus atlanticus sea slug—commonly  known as the blue sea slug or blue dragon—is indeed a genuine species. And if you swim in the right places off of South Africa, Mozambique or Australia, you just might find one floating upside down, riding the surface tension of the water’s surface.

The species has a number of specialized adaptations that allow it to engage in a surprisingly aggressive behavior: preying on creatures much bigger than itself. The blue dragon, typically just an inch long, frequently feeds on Portuguese man o’ wars, which have tentacles that average 30 feet. A gas-filled sac in the stomach allows the small slug to float, and a muscular foot structure is used to cling to the surface. Then, if it floats by a man o’ war or other cnidarian, the blue dragon locks onto the larger creature’s tentacles and consumes the toxic nematocyst cells that the man o’ war uses to immobilize fish.

The slug is immune to the toxins and collects them in special sacs within the cerata—the finger-like branches at the end of its appendages—to deploy later on. Because the man o’ war’s venom is concentrated in the tiny fingers, blue dragons can actually have more powerful stings than the much larger creatures from which they took the poisons. So, if you float by a blue dragon sometime soon: look, but don’t touch.

A selection of a new image of distant galaxies in the COSMOS field. Click to see the whole view. Image courtesy of ESO/UltraVISTA team

You aren’t looking at a picture of stars. That bright white light in the top right corner is a nearby star, but all the other points of light are incredibly distant galaxies—each roughly the size of our own Milky Way, which contains some 200 billion to 400 billion stars. The larger image from which this highlight comes contains more than 200,000 galaxies alone. And that larger image represents just a piece of a 3-degree-wide slice of the night sky. The universe, it turns out, is a really, really big place.

The photo is part of a new view of the COSMOS field, located in the Sextans constellation, released to the public last week by the European Southern Observatory. Produced by the largest survey telescope in the world, the 4.1-meter VISTA Survey Telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, the image looks past the stars near us in the Milky Way and out into the great beyond.

To slowly accumulate the scarce amounts of dim light reaching us from these distant galaxies, astronomers made six thousand separate exposures of the same patch of the night sky over a combined 55 hours. It is the widest deep view of the sky ever produced by infrared telescopes, and will be used by scientists around the world to study distant galaxies and what they tell us about the early universe.

A good eye will spot the black-marble jawfish next to the mimic octopus's arm (Credit: Godehard Kopp)

The mimic octopus (Thaumoctopus mimicus) has the uncanny ability to make itself look like more dangerous creatures, such as lionfish, sea snakes and soles. The octopus does this with its distinctive color pattern and ability to adjust its shape and behavior (see this earlier blog post on the octopus for a video in which it mimics a flatfish). But now the mimic has a mimicker of its own, scientists report in the journal Coral Reefs.

Godehard Kopp  of the University of Gottingen in Germany was filming a mimic octopus during a diving trip to Indonesia last July when he spotted a companion–a small fish that followed the octopus for several minutes, always sticking close to the octopus’s arms. Kopp has some good observational skills, because the fish’s color and banding looks incredibly similar to that of the octopus.

Kopp sent his video (see below) to two marine scientists at the California Academy of Sciences who identified the fish as a black-marble jawfish (Stalix cf. histrio). The three write:

Jawfish are poor swimmers and usually spend their entire adult lives very close to burrows in the sand, to where they quickly retreat, tail first, upon sight of any potential predator….[In Kopp's video and photos], the Black-Marble Jawfish seems to have found a safe way to move around in the open. The Mimic Octopus looks so much like its poisonous models that it is relatively safe from predation, even when swimming in the open, and by mimicking the octopus’ arms, the Jawfish seems to also gain protection.

This might at first glance appear to be a case in which the fish evolved its coloring to gain protection by associating with the octopus, but the scientists don’t think that’s likely. The jawfish can be found from Japan to Australia, but the octopus lives only in the region around Indonesia and Malaysia. They contend that this is a case of “opportunistic mimicry,” in which the fish is taking advantage of a happy coincidence.

A composite image of S106, from the Hubble Space Telescope and Japan's Subaru Telescope (Credits: NASA/ESA/the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)/NAOJ)

About 2,000 light years away, in the direction of the constellation Cygnus (The Swan), in a rather isolated part of the Milky Way, lies a newly formed star known IRS 4. This star, about 15 times the mass of our Sun, is still so young that it hasn’t yet calmed down; it’s ejecting material at high speed, giving this image its wings. That hydrogen gas, colored blue here, is heated by the star to temperatures of 10,000 degrees Celsius, making them glow. The cloudy, red parts in the image are tiny particles of dust illuminated by the star.

This area of the universe is known as star-forming region S106 and it’s pretty small (well, by universe standards), at only two light years from the edge of one “wing” to the other. The nebula is also home to more than 600 known brown dwarfs, “failed” stars that, because of their size, less than a tenth the mass of our Sun, cannot undergo the nuclear fusion that powers glowing stars.

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In this image from December 15, 2011, Comet Lovejoy appeared to be headed towards sure destruction in a collision with the Sun (credit: NASA/SOHO)

Amateur astronomer Terry Lovejoy of Australia discovered a comet in 2007 using nothing more than a digital camera. Comet Lovejoy was a large member of the Kreutz family of comets–fragments of a large comet that broke up hundreds of years ago but still travel in its path, grazing the surface of the Sun and sometimes colliding with it. And yesterday it looked like Comet Lovejoy would meet such a fiery end.

But that didn’t happen.

Despite scientists’ predictions that the comet would not survive its encounter with the Sun, Comet Lovejoy lives on. The Associated Press reports:

The comet came within 75,000 miles of the sun. For a small object often described as a dirty snowball, that brush with the sun should have been fatal.

Astronomers say it probably wasn’t deadly because the comet was larger than they thought.

Comet Lovejoy’s near-fatal journey was well-watched by scientists who have a fleet of satellites pointed at our Sun. You can watch the comet streak through the Sun’s atmosphere in the video below, taken by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or see the comet’s path around the Sun in the animated gif (below the video), created with images from the NASA satellite SOHO.

Comet Lovejoy survived its close encounter with the Sun (credit: NASA/SOHO)

A map of extreme weather events in the United States, January to October 2011 (credit: NRDC)

The United States may not have seen anything like Hurricane Katrina this year, but it’s been a bad year for extreme weather events nonetheless. High heat, drought and wildfires in Texas. Flooding in the Midwest and Northeast. Deadly tornadoes. The Natural Resources Defense Council found nearly 3,000 broken weather records throughout the United States, and that count went only through the end of October. A map compiling the locations of these events is above; an interactive version that lets you visualize the events through time can be found on the NRDC website.

Scientists are reluctant to say any specific weather event is the result of climate change (weather and climate are, after all, not interchangeable). But they do largely agree that extreme weather events, such as the ones we’ve seen this year, will become more and more common because of climate change.

And those events come with a price. NRDC provided an estimate of $53 billion associated with the events in the group’s tally–if climate change contributed even a fraction to these events, we’re looking at potentially billions of dollars lost. And a country climbing out of a recession could surely use that money elsewhere.

What will humankind do about this? Well, 15,000 delegates are currently meeting in Durban, South Africa, to discuss just that, but little is expected to come out of the meeting. Christie Aschwanden at The Last Word on Nothing thinks part of the reason for current inaction is how we look at the whole situation:

The problem can seem insurmountable, and it’s possible that it is—not because there is no solution, but because we are incapable of choosing it. There’s a one-word solution to the climate (and energy) problem staring us in the face—restraint. Simply consuming less. It’s too late to talk about carbon emissions. With a population catapulting toward nine billion or more, it’s time to focus on carbon omissions.

Restraint is not the easy, no-need-to-change-a-thing solution that people keep pretending we will find. But it’s a reality-based solution that will happen whether we want it to or not. We can plan for it and make the hard choices ourselves, or we can wait for them to be forced upon us. Using less doesn’t necessarily mean lowering our quality of life, it means redefining how we measure our wellbeing.

I’m not sure “restraint” will be any easier of a message to sell to a global population, and particularly a U.S. population, than “reducing carbon emissions,” but it’s an interesting way to look at the problem. If the old ideas aren’t working, we need new ones.

So here’s the challenge: How should we go about addressing climate change? Are global agreements worth the time, energy and carbon emissions it takes to make them? Do small changes made in your own home make any difference? If you were in charge, what would you do? I’m really hoping that one of you has a good answer (tell us in the comments below), because these extreme weather events are taking a toll and humans need to do something to prevent the worst from happening.

Hawkmoths prefer columbines with long, slender spurs. (Courtesy of Scott A. Hodges/UCSB)

Adaptive radiation is a principle in evolutionary biology in which one species, in response to opportunities in its environment, quickly adapts and develops new traits and diversifies into many species. An example of adaptive radiation is found in columbine flowers (genus Aquilegia), a group of about 70 species that have nectar spurs extending from the base of the flower petals. What makes these spurs special is that each species has spurs of a different length, seemingly tailored to that species’ pollinator, whether it be a hummingbird, hawkmoth or bee.

Scientists since Charles Darwin have observed similar examples of adaptive radiation but have been unable to describe what happens on a cellular or genetic scale. “Darwin, observing orchids, recognized that the extraordinarily long nectar spur on the Angraecum must have evolved in concert with the equally long tongue of the moth that pollinated it, but the exact mechanism for this kind of adaptation has been a matter of speculation,” says Sharon Gerbode of Harvard University.

Gerbode and her colleagues at Harvard and the University of California at Santa Barbara investigated that mechanism in columbines and report their findings in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. For decades, scientists had thought that the differences in nectar spur length were due to the number of cells in the nectar spur. But when the researchers counted the number of cells and calculated the area and degree of elongation of each cell–which required more than 13,000 measurements across several species–they found that the assumptions were wrong. Nearly all of the difference in spur length can be attributed to the length of the cells.

In each species, cell division in the nectar spur stops when the spur is about 5 millimeters long. Then the spurs begin to elongate, and how many days they spend growing determines the eventual length of the spur.

“Now that we understand the real developmental basis for the first appearance and diversification of spurs, we can make more informed guesses about what genes contributed to the process,” says study co-author Elana Kramer. Further research should give the scientists insight into the genetic basis behind the radiation of this genus.

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An elephant seal in bull kelp, in the Southern Ocean (credit: Christopher J. Brown)

It’s gonna get messy, particularly in the oceans. That seems to be the message in a recent Science study that analyzed the pace of climate change.

A marine sea slug (credit: Hugh Brown, Scottish Association for Marine Science)

Using 50 years of observations, “we examined the velocity of climate change (the geographic shifts of temperature bands over time) and the shift in seasonal temperatures for both land and sea,” said John Pandolfi of the University of Queensland. “We found both measures were higher for the ocean at certain latitudes than on land, despite the fact that the oceans tend to warm more slowly than air over the land.”

The changes won’t be uniform, the scientists say. And some marine organisms will have to migrate hundreds of miles to new waters to find the right temperature, seasonal conditions and food. Those that don’t move fast enough could easily become extinct.

And it isn’t as simple as moving north or south toward the poles. Like most landscapes, oceans aren’t uniform. There are land masses and deep ocean trenches and strong currents that can prevent creatures from moving from one place to another. Then there’s the question of what might take the place of the organisms that currently live in the warmest parts of the oceans. “No communities of organisms from even warmer regions currently exist to replace those moving out,” Pandolfi said.

An Adelie penguin in a blizzard (credit: Christopher J. Brown)

In an accompanying Perspective essay, biologist Ralf Ohlemüller of Durham University notes that “climate affects both evolutionary processes, such as how fast species diversify, and ecological processes, such as range shifts and species interactions.” And while that complexity of interactions will make predicting the coming changes difficult, Ohlemüller reminds us that studies like this one, which are not as detailed as we might like, are important nonetheless as they help us to “broaden our understanding of how environments change in space and time and how this in turn affects patterns of disappearing, persisting, and novel climates, species, and ecosystems.” And with that knowledge, perhaps we can be better prepared for the changes ahead.

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A false-color image of flooding in Bangkok, Thailand (Image Credit: NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team)

If you think we’ve been having a wild weather year here in the United States (with droughts, horrible tornadoes, a freakishly early northeast snowstorm, to mention a few events), be glad you’re not in Thailand. From NASA:

Since July 2011, heavy monsoon rains in southeast Asia have resulted in catastrophic flooding. In Thailand, about one third of all provinces are affected. On Oct. 23, 2011, when this image [above] from ASTER, the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer instrument on NASA’s Terra spacecraft was acquired, flood waters were approaching the capital city of Bangkok as the Ayutthaya River overflowed its banks. In this image, vegetation is displayed in red, and flooded areas are black and dark blue. Brighter blue shows sediment-laden water, and gray areas are houses, buildings and roads.

And if it wasn’t bad enough to have your home flooded, have to search for food and clean water along with other drenched city dwellers and have the threat of illnesses like cholera hanging over your head, Bangkok’s residents also have to avoid the crocodiles let loose from flooded crocodile farms.

Meanwhile, scientists are warning that climate change will bring even weirder and worse weather events in the future. “The extremes are a really noticeable aspect of climate change,” Jerry Meehl, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told the Guardian. “I think people realize that the extremes are where we are going to see a lot of the impacts of climate change.”

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The Terkezi Oasis in Chad, as seen from Landsat 7 (Credit: USGS)

When someone at the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science Center saw this image of the Terkezi Oasis in Chad, taken by the Landsat 7 satellite, he or she saw art and included it in the Earth as Art collection. But when I came upon it, and mentally rotated it by 90 degrees (as shown above), I saw a ghostly screamer with one arm raised in anger.

Admittedly, I had primed my brain for such a discovery, searching for Halloween-ish images in keeping with the season, but I probably would have seen a face even if I hadn’t been thinking of monsters and ghosts. We often find patterns in places where they don’t exist, whether it be a witch’s head in a nebula, initials in the echoes of the Big Bang or the Virgin Mary in a piece of toast.

There are definite advantages in being able to recognize patterns—when they are real, they can provide useful information about the world around us, information that can help us to prosper and stay alive. But we haven’t necessarily evolved to tell real patterns apart from false ones, as Michael Shermer pointed out in Scientific American a few years ago:

Unfortunately, we did not evolve a Baloney Detection Network in the brain to distinguish between true and false patterns. We have no error-detection governor to modulate the pattern-recognition engine. (Thus the need for science with its self-correcting mechanisms of replication and peer review.) But such erroneous cognition is not likely to remove us from the gene pool and would therefore not have been selected against by evolution.

Shermer points to a study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B that examined the phenomenon and demonstrated that whenever the cost of believing in a false pattern (e.g., ghosts are real) is less than the cost of not believing in a real pattern (e.g., snakes of a specific color can kill), then natural selection will favor the belief in patterns, whether real or not. “Such patternicities, then, mean that people believe weird things because of our evolved need to believe nonweird things,” Shermer writes.

So if you believe in ghosts or witches or other things that go bump in the night, I guess you can blame evolution.