This module explores the basic relationships between life form and function of animals and plants.
When we talked about shapes in nature yesterday, the hexagon was a favourite, as the story of the bees honeycomb was fascinating.
I was thus tickled to see this article in Science Daily earlier this year that described an "odd, six-sided, honeycomb-shaped feature circling the entire north pole of Saturn"!
NASA Scientists are fascinated!
"This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides," said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
"We've never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn's thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you'd expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is."
See:
"Cassini Images Bizarre Hexagon On Saturn," NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory via Science Daily, 27 Mar 2007.
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About N. Sivasothi
Sivasothi is lecturing Biodiversity, Ecology, Structure and Function, Marine Biology and Animal Behaviour with the Department of Biological Sciences.
His interests include otters, mangroves, museum databases, coastal ecology, tree-climbing crabs and conservation of biodiversity.
He is also the national coordinator of the International Coastal Cleanup Singapore and Toddycats! Volunteers of the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research, NUS.