bird enjoyer

Think all eels live in water? Think again! In 2018 scientists described a new species of swamp eel which they believe resides almost entirely on land. The eel, dubbed Rakthamichthys rongsaw, is bright pink and has extremely tiny, almost non-functional eyes; a result of its subterranean lifestyle depriving it of the need for sight or pigment. Only one individual has been found in north-east India, so the extent of its distribution is currently unknown.

connectedpapers

the basic rundown is: you use the search bar to enter a topic, scientific paper name or DOI. the website then offers you a list of papers on the topic, and you choose the one you're looking for/most relevant one. from here, it makes a tree diagram of related papers that are clustered based on topic relatability and colour-coded by time they were produced!

for example: here i search "human B12"

i go ahead and choose the first paper, meaning my graph will be based around it and start from the topics of "b12 levels" and "fraility syndrome"

here is the graph output! you can scroll through all the papers included on the left, and clicking on each one shows you it's position on the chart + will pull up details on the paper on the right hand column (title, authors, citations, abstract/summary and links where the paper can be found)

so, ways to get around this:

turn off AI results. they're literally nonsense to us

don't use pinterest because the sources/provenance is often hard to trace

a standard internet search can be okay, but museum collections are the top tier (list of collections below this list)

instead of broad terms like victorian, regency, tudor, renaissance etc. try using the decade you're looking for. if you're not sure of what decade it is but have a vague image in your head, look on the fashion history timeline and just jump around until you find it. but even changing to e.g. 19th century will give better results than victorian

including terms like womenswear/menswear, daywear, formal wear, evening wear, court dress should increase the value of your search too

including "fashion plates" in your search can give you a nice impression of the intended silhouettes of the era. some of these might be a little stylised but will show you what was considered in vogue

for pre-fashion plate eras or things like makeup and styling, you'll have to look at portraiture or manuscripts. these are harder to actually find what you're looking for, but searching museum collections and limiting results to specific date ranges will be your friend

when looking at art, do bear in mind sometimes artists would paint fabric extra flow-y to show off their skills. it might not have been exactly like that in terms of fabric weight or drape. so, a pinch of salt required!

if you find something on image search where the provenance is dubious, reverse image search and you might find a source! i've been able to trace random pinterest images to real sources, but this does take a lot of time and effort and is often not worth the headache

some online resources and museum collections:

fashion history timeline is an invaluable resource if you're trying to get a feel for everything and should be your first port of call. it'll also link to good examples

the met has a vast number of extant examples of clothing, as well as fashion plates

costume institute fashion plates is a subcollection of the met for fashion plates (1800s-1922)

v&a also has many extant garments, fashion plates, and incredible articles on clothing and aesthetics. read the details of the objects because they'll often reveal a lot about the piece

lacma is good for C19th-20th pieces

nypl digital collection for photographs

national portrait gallery or similar for portraiture, or literally any museum in your country that has historical art

national museums scotland can be useful situationally but might be oddly specific

stout style history is a great collection for finding image references for fat people wearing historical clothes. survival bias of a lot of museum pieces tends towards smaller clothing that couldn't be repurposed, but this aims to counter that. it's not sortable, but is still a really nice resource

wikimedia commons is surprisingly handy! and the images, if you should need to link/repost them, are public domain

auction websites sound like a funny one to recommend. some won't have mannequins and some will. just look up historical garment auctions and you'll find some!

Scientists have long hypothesized that the high electrical charge of thunderstorms could produce an opposite charge in the ground that would discharge from the forest canopy. But this phenomenon, known as a corona, had never been observed on actual trees.  (Image credit: W. Brune; research credit: P. McFarland et al.; via SciAm)

In urban Chicago around this time of year if you want to go The Bean spotting you mostly just need to keep an eye out around downtown drugstores for formations like this.

I took this picture myself in a Walgreens. As you can see we have a nice healthy-looking family group consisting of a parent The Bean, several juveniles who will often stay with the parent for several years, and some newborns this year who naturally group up protectively near any large sign reading "Chicago".