Hello! I'm a scientific illustrator and I really love to draw journal covers. Happy #PortfolioDay

Day 31: Plants have hemoglobin! That protein that carries oxygen in your red blood cells. Even though plants don’t have blood, they have a type of hemoglobin that’s used for nitrogen fixation

Day 32: If a protein gets mis-folded, your cells can recognize that, de-assemble the protein, and recycle the amino acids to reuse them. Which is kind of crazy to think about

Day 33: Queen bumble bees mate with multiple males at the same time, in the air, and then the males die. They really bring a whole new meaning to body count

Day 34: Charles Darwin made a pros and cons list for getting married and one of his cons was that he would have less money for books!

Day 35: Apparently, we have no idea how teeth evolved? There’s an outside-in hypothesis that fish scales moved in the mouth and eventually became teeth. There’s also an inside-out model where teeth moved out and eventually became scales And there’s evidence for both 🤦🏾‍♀️

Day 36: Genetics and temperature aren’t the only factors that can determine sex! In a marine worm, isolated larvae become females while larvae near females become males And in brackish water shrimp, short days produce females while long days procede males

Day 37: Don’t be mean to caterpillars, cause they’ll remember it as butterflies! Well they probably won’t remember if you were mean, but there has been research showing that they retain some of their memory after metamorphosis!

Day 38: Today I learned that my mom doesn’t know what a menorah is, but thinks it’s perfect for our Hindu temple 😂 Happy Diwali everyone!! 🪔

Day 39: We all love a good twitter meme. But do you know where the word “meme” comes from? It was coined by an evolutionary biologist and originates from gene!

Day 40: The first racial categories in the US were “white” “slave” and “other” So yeah race is a social construct.

Day 41: The first antidepressant was actually an antibiotic! Our gut microbes may be more related to mental health than we thought

Day 42: Does your pup pick up on when you’re stressed? I always thought they knew from body language, but a double blind study found that dogs can actually smell when you’re stressed out through your sweat!

Day 43: How long do you think it takes your body to realize you’re dehydrated? Receptors in your brain will sense fluid changes, communicate it to your kidneys, then your kidneys respond by conserving water and you feel thirsty… all in less than 40 seconds 🤯

Day 44: Apparently you can estimate the half-life for a species and the average is 1-10 million years

Day 45: Today I learned the best scientific name - Boops boops! It’s a fish species commonly called bogue Thanks for this one Kat Sullivan

Day 46: Only 1.3% of the human genome codes for proteins! I knew it was low, but geez For context, the average bacterial genome is 90% protein coding

Day 47: Parasitic plants can do horizontal gene transfer! This means that they can put their DNA into a host plant, kind of like a virus!

Day 48: Everyone knows what mRNA is thanks to the COVID vaccine, but did you know that mRNA only makes up 1-4% of the total RNA in an organism?