It is almost incomprehensible that these colour photographs were taken in Russian Empire a century ago, even before the beginning of World War I! Such early years as 1909-1915, the years that these pictures were taken, are deeply engraved in our imagination as the world of black and white. Therefore these rare images by trained photographer and chemist Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky (1863-1944) strike us with awe.

The photographs were taken with specialized camera in three shots: one in red filter, one in green, and one in blue. All three of these filtered black and white photos would then be layered together and projected as transparancies (“slides”) with the same filters on screen, this way restoring the whole range of colours, very close to the true colours of photographed objects. Prokudin-Gorsky was a pioneer of this three-colour process technique, highly complex and expensive at the time.

Tsar Nickolas II was extremely fond of Prokudin-Gosrky’s early works and even commissioned his travel throughout southern and central Russia to take colour photographs of its nature, towns and people. After the October Revolution, however, he fled Russia and took the negatives with him, which were bought U.S. Library of Congress in 1948 and published only in 1980.

So in sum: Genetic evidence shows clearly that while orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos have 24 chromosome pairs, humans and our closest extinct ancestors (Neanderthals and Denisovans) have 23. And we know why that is: In modern humans and these other hominins, chromosome 2 shows clear genetic evidence of a fusion event that must have happened after our lineage split from chimpanzees and bonobos, but before our divergence with Neanderthals and Denisovans. The proof is right there in the DNA.

Faced with this, those who call themselves creationists are in a pretty uncomfortable position. Their bodies' own cells prove them wrong.

An unusual arrangement of particles has been discovered in the cells of chicken eyes. It's the first time scientists have seen such a system in a biological system — one that allows materials to behave like both a crystal and a liquid.

The unique arrangement is called "disordered hyperuniformity," and it could help researchers design advanced materials, such as optics that can transmit light with the efficiency of a crystal and the flexibility of a liquid.

When matter is organized into states of disordered hyperuniformity, it exhibits order over large distances and disorder over small distances. At one level, it's like a crystal that greatly suppresses differences in the density of particles across large spatial distances. But at another scale, it's liquid-like in that it exhibits similar physical properties in all directions.