We Don't Need Software To Tell Us We're Lost

Shoutout to my dear friend @notso-darling for keeping the butt blog afloat so many days 💜🍑💜

Andy Warhol & Cat

Isabella and the Pot of Basil (1919) by George Henry Grenville Manton (English, 1855 – 1932), oil on canvas, 107 × 82.2 cm, Wycombe Museum, England

happy june 3rd to everyone except luke danes

"Self-Portrait as a Cocoon" by artist Valeria Duca

Artist Maggie Vandewalle

Joan Murrell Owens was a marine biologist that specialized in the study of button corals. While she wanted to study marine science from a young age, the university she attended didn’t have a program in that field, so she went into the field of education. After more than a decade working in that field, she found her male colleagues were being paid more than her, and Owens quit her job to go back to school studying her lifelong passion. Again, her university did not have a dedicated undergraduate program in the marine sciences, so she completed her B.S. in geology with a minor in zoology to gain the necessary knowledge set. She then earned a M.S. and was hired as a geology professor at Howard University. Simultaneously, she worked as a technician at the Smithsonian and conducted research towards her doctorate. Typically, PhD research in marine biology would include scuba diving to collect specimens, but Owens had sickle cell traits which would make diving dangerous. Instead, she conducted studies on a portion of the Smithsonian’s collection, gathered in the 1800s by the USS Albatross, a deep sea research vessel. She received her PhD in 1984 for her dissertation "Microstructural Changes in the Scleractinian Families Micrabaciidae and Fungiidae and their Taxonomic and Ecologic Implications." Owens went on to identify and name a new genus of coral, Rhombopsammia, and discovered and described three species of button corals.