Sea stars dance to their own rhythm: This one is called “The Ambulacral Groove.”
Sea stars amble about with hundreds of tiny tube feet—lovely hydraulically powered limbs unique to echinoderms, which include sea urchins and sea cucumbers. Often equipped with sticky mucus and small suction cups, tube feet make sea stars highly ambulatory.
Sea stars have five V-shaped channels for their tube feet to take a hike. These ambulacral grooves are named after the latin “ambulacrum”, meaning a walk planted with trees. The term has even deeper roots in the Indo-European “ambhi”, meaning “around.”
Of course, having your bare feet exposed to the seafloor can be a bit touchy—fortunately, the ambulacral grooves are protected by spines and ossicles that can close off the tube feet from the rest of the world if things get socked in.
Tube feet are groovy, to say the least. And if you thought a two-step was tough, try a hundred step!
For your daily dose of perspective, here’s a photograph of the space shuttle Endeavour, lifting through the clouds during its final launch in May 2011. The photograph was captured from a nearby NASA shuttle training aircraft.
Rock paintings in the Chauvet Cave (France), some of the oldest cave
paintings in the world.
They date back 30 – 32,000 years ago, from the Aurignacian
tradition of the Upper Paleolithic. The cave was closed off by a
rock fall around 20,000 years ago, and was rediscovered in 1994.
Solitary house on one of the smaller Westmann Islands, Iceland
While on the ferry to Vestmanaeyjarr (Westman Islands) in Iceland, I got seasick, so I left the cabin and went onto the deck for fresh air. Luckily, I had my camera with me, and caught a shot of this solitary house on one of the smaller windswept islands in the area.
![historyarchaeologyartefacts:
“Jade Dragon Pendant, 2nd century BC, Western Han Dynasty, China [564x807]
”](https://66.media.tumblr.com/ca2ddb222ea3bb6f14226f20af645994/tumblr_pkvadfWkAo1vx1np0o1_640.jpg "Source: historyarchaeologyartefacts")
![historyarchaeologyartefacts:
“Stone model of the god Khepri as a six or eight armed humanoid emerging from a scarab shell. Egypt, late period. 664 to 332 BC. [1253x1920]
”](https://66.media.tumblr.com/95bf61c9f0d9c309004ec2d9bf5e2ba0/tumblr_pkv5naMiUh1vx1np0o1_1280.jpg "Source: historyarchaeologyartefacts")
