Nerdy Science Stuff

09/21/2026

🔬 Nerdy Post #8

You're looking at the remains of a dying star. ✨

Sun-like stars can shed their outer layers into space near the ends of their lives.

The exposed hot core floods that expanding gas with ultraviolet radiation, making it glow.

The result: a planetary nebula. 🔭

09/19/2026

🔬 Nerdy Post #7

This frog can freeze. Its heart can stop beating. Then it can thaw out and carry on with its life. 🐸

Meet the wood frog, Lithobates sylvaticus.

As it freezes, glucose helps protect its cells. Breathing and heartbeat can temporarily stop.

Then spring hits and the frog thaws.

09/16/2026

🔬 Nerdy Post #6

A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus. 🔭

Venus takes about 243 Earth days to rotate once, but only about 225 days to orbit the Sun.

Even stranger, it spins backward compared with most planets.

09/14/2026

🔬 Nerdy Post #5

This mushroom makes its own light. 🍄

Mycena chlorophos glows an eerie green in the dark. Its bioluminescence comes mainly from specialized tissues in the gills beneath its cap.

The glow may help attract insects that spread its spores, but scientists are still investigating why it evolved.

Basically, a tiny glow-in-the-dark umbrella.

09/14/2026

🔬 Nerdy Post #4

Peacock Mantis Shrimp

This shrimp punches so fast, it hits its prey twice.

Odontodactylus scyllarus strikes with hammer-like clubs so fast they create cavitation bubbles in the water.

When that bubble collapses a fraction of a millisecond later, it delivers a second shockwave on its own.

09/14/2026

🔬 Nerdy Post #3

Auroras are collisions made visible.

Particles energized by interactions with the solar wind plunge into Earth’s upper atmosphere, exciting atoms and molecules until they release light.

Oxygen produces the familiar green and red. Nitrogen can glow blue and pink.

09/12/2026

🔬 Nerdy Post #2

Meet the axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum), a salamander that never fully “grows up.”

Lose a limb? It can regrow bone, muscle, nerves, blood vessels, and skin with remarkably little scarring.

Here’s how: cells near the injury form a structure called a blastema. These cells proliferate and rebuild the missing tissues, recreating the limb’s complex structure.

Axolotls can also regenerate their spinal cord and repair parts of their heart and brain.

09/12/2026

🔬 Nerdy Post #1

Meet the glasswing butterfly (Greta oto).

Most of its wings are transparent. Tiny, irregularly spaced nanostructures on the wing surface reduce reflected light, helping create that almost glass-like appearance.

05/04/2023