nobody's dream girl

US Elevation.

They said “before dinosaurs,” but we have a cave here that began forming between 450 million to 550 million years ago.

There are no bones in that cave. No fossils. No nothing.

That’s because this cave began forming before bones existed on land, and had only just started to exist in the ocean. Shellfish hadn’t evolved yet. Limestone, which forms many caves, was just starting to become a more prevalent rock.

those are over a billion years old.

that’s why they’re so small. they’re the last ancient remnants of a lava flow 5 miles thick. the lava didn’t kill any dinosaurs. or any fish. or any animals at all. because there were no animals. you know what there was?

algae.

those mountains were 5 miles tall when the most advanced life on earth was algae.

the Appalachians are way way old. the fossils that ARE found in these ranges are ancient marine beings, whose fossil remains predate the anatomical structures of beings migrating to land for the first time. THAT’S how old the Appalachians are.

[honk] [honk] (bicycle horn)

[honk] [honk] (seal)

[extremely loud explosion] [extremely loud explosion]

[bark] [bark]

gwa gwa

Hanna-barbera running sound effect

[dark souls 1 armour clank] [dark souls 1 armour clank]

[splortch] [splortch]

This is what a cycloaddition looks like

Anyone who has stayed up late collecting NMR data for a molecule of interest would agree: it’d be nice if you could just see the thing. That’s one advantage of the surface chemistry work being done in Antonio Echavarren’s and Szymon Godlewski’s labs at the Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia and Jagiellonian University, respectively. Another advantage to reactions on these metal surfaces—a 370 °C single-crystal gold surface in this case—is that they can produce molecules that can’t currently be made easily in solution in a flask. Here, atomic-force micrographs show the reactants and a large polycyclic product of a dehydrogenative Diels-Alder reaction; both the larger reactant and the product would be difficult to dissolve and incorporate into solution chemistry.  — Manny Morone

Credit: Rafal Zuzak. Follow @Echavarren_Lab and @SPMLabJUK on Twitter. Read the ACS Nano paper: 2021, DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.0c08995

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Nothing more cute than kittens

Guys, we need to spread this. It’s to cute to be lost in the deep depths of the internet.