Halo 2

Bishop’s Ring: "a huge brown or blue halo around the sun that was first noticed when the Krakatoa volcano exploded in 1883" —NYT

Yesterday's vocabulary

The chirality, or handedness, of molecules prevents certain reactions from taking place in chemistry and biophysics, Dr. Sandweiss noted, and affects what we can digest. —"In Brookhaven Collider, Scientists Briefly Break a Law," NYT

The jungle creatures that enthralled Bates use what are now recognized as four distinct strategies to avoid being eaten — mimicry; concealment, known as crypsis; the display of warning colors; and masquerading as inedible objects. —"Imitators That Hide in Plain Sight, and Stay Alive," NYT

Snarge at large

The National Museum of Natural History in Washington may not leap to mind when both engines on a high-tech plane quit at 3,200 feet. But around the corner from the stuffed African elephant that greets the visiting hordes of schoolchildren, down a back hall from the employee bike rack, a staff of four in the Feather Identification Lab took in samples from 4,600 bird-plane collisions, or bird strikes, last year. Arriving mostly in sealed plastic bags, these included birds’ feet, whole feathers or tiny bits of down, and pulverized bird guts, known as snarge. —NYT

Bird-frog

tapirage: "Macaws and other parrots supplied most of the plumage, but that of other species — Muscovy ducks, flamingos, egrets and the petite paradise tanager — was also prized. Some colors were produced artificially in a process known as tapirage. Birds with, say, green and blue feathers were plucked and then rubbed with frog secretions; the feathers would then grow back in an unnatural yellow-orange hue." —NYT