- The Feather Cloak of Captain Cook (hakaimagazine.com)
On a cloudy afternoon in January 1779, British explorer Captain James Cook watched as the Hawaiian chief Kalaniʻopuʻu and his attendants arrived in outrigger canoes for a formal meeting at Kealakekua Bay. The chief, a man in his late 40s or early 50s, was dressed for the occasion in a spectacular cloak made of tiny scarlet- and saffron-colored bird feathers, a garment so soft and sumptuous that it seemed to be made of velvet. As Cook walked ashore to pay his respects, Kalaniʻopuʻu gracefully tossed the rich cloak over the explorer’s shoulders as a present. Then he placed a feather helmet on Cook’s head, and laid “5 or 6 other cloaks, all exceedingly beautiful,” at Cook’s feet, as one of the British officers later noted in a journal entry.
- Meet the Eukaryote, the First Cell to Get Organized (quantamagazine.com)
Three billion years ago, life on Earth was simple. Single-celled organisms ruled, and there wasn’t much to them. They were what we now call prokaryotic cells, which include modern-day bacteria and archaea, essentially sacks of loose molecular parts. They swirled together in shallow, primordial brews or near deep-sea ocean vents, where they extracted energy from the environment and reproduced by dividing one cell into two daughter cells. Then, one day, that wilderness of simple cells cooked up something more complex: the ancestor of all plants, animals and fungi alive today, a cell type known to us as the eukaryote
- Hawaii (Wikipedia)
Hawaii (/həˈwaɪi/ hə-WY-ee; Hawaiian: Hawaiʻi, [həˈvɐjʔi] or [həˈwɐjʔi]) is a state in the Western United States, about 2,000 miles (3,200 km) from the U.S. mainland in the Pacific Ocean. It is the only U.S. state outside North America, the only state that is an archipelago, and the only state in the tropics.
