Hello, dear readers! I took a newsletter vacation in January, and now I’m back with a vengeance with a squid trumpet.

Cephalopod News

If squid could speak English, they’d say we have our expressions “blood-red” and “baby blues” mixed up. Cephalopods would say, instead, “blood-blue” and “baby reds.”

Check out this stunning photograph of baby squid by Tony Wu, and the story behind it in bioGraphic:

Equally gorgeous are the recent photographs of adult cuttlefish, taken by biologist Arata Nakayama with special equipment that detects the polarization of light. They reveal patterns even more beautiful than what our naked human eyes can perceive.

I was lucky enough to see the results presented at a conference in October. Now they’ve been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and reported in the New York Times with the splendid headline “A New Way to Flirt: Dazzle Potential Mates With Patterns Invisible to Humans.”

My News

Did you know there's a searchable library of stories about failure in science? I didn’t, until I was asked to contribute to Fail-Safe Science, "an initiative designed to normalize experiencing and overcoming challenges in science graduate programs."

I enjoyed the opportunity to rifle through my myriad failures, choose one to reflect on, and turn it into something that might ease the way for current and future generations. Here’s my story.

I plan to be at several conventions this year: Peninsula Library Comic Arts Fest in April, Baycon in early July, and San Diego Comic-Con at the end of July. More details to come.

Funny Pages

The trumpeting squid that opened this newsletter was drawn at a friend’s request. It led to a second request, this one from my cousin, who wanted a squid playing baritone saxophone.

So now I know what a baritone saxophone is!