The Immortal Jellyfish (2015)

https://www.amnh.org/explore/news-blogs/on-exhibit-posts/the-immortal-jellyfish

by pravint • 2 years ago

64 14 2 years ago

pravint• 2 years ago

In response to physical damage or even starvation, they take a leap back in their development process, transforming back into a polyp. In a process that looks remarkably like immortality, the born-again polyp colony eventually buds and releases medusae that are genetically identical to the injured adult. In fact, since this phenomenon was first observed in the 1990s, the species has come to be called “the immortal jellyfish.”

mjklin• 2 years ago

Yes, like many plants and fungi, jellyfish exhibit “alternation of generations” with both an asexual and a sexual reproduction stage. Since the forms are usually far different in size, one biologist remarked it’s as if a woman gives birth to a mouse and then a mouse to a woman.

nojs3• 2 years ago

If anyone is wondering why the body text on this page looks so beautiful, it's this sneaky CSS property:

  font-smoothing: antialiased;
  -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
  -moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale

Seems like sites with notoriously nice UI (e.g. Stripe) all like to use it.

chrismorgan3• 2 years ago

Three things:

① I believe this only affects macOS, and has no effect on any other platform.

② There’s no such property as font-smoothing. Only -webkit-font-smoothing and -moz-osx-font-smoothing, with their different values.

③ Attempting to control this is highly controversial. You may prefer it one way, but others may prefer it otherwise. See, for example, https://usabilitypost.com/2012/11/05/stop-fixing-font-smooth.... (Note that discussion of these things tends to be from 7–15 years ago. I have no idea what the present situation is; I know macOS largely eschews subpixel antialiasing these days, so maybe the effect of this property has changed now, or maybe it literally does nothing, I don’t use macOS.) As a generalisation, you should not do things like this, but leave it to the platform or the user to decide. Features like this don’t tend to end up part of the standardised web platform, because you normally shouldn’t be able to control them, and when people control them, they’re normally doing so in order to work around platform-specific issues, or just because they’re copying and pasting what someone else did without understanding.

nojs3• 2 years ago

Ha, you're right about `font-smoothing` - it appears in the OP CSS like this but I guess they meant `font-smooth` [1] (which has a giant red warning akin to what you said).

As a generalisation, you should not do things like this, but leave it to the platform or the user to decide.

Tailwind also does it (e.g. see the CSS behind this page [2]). Those guys wrote probably my all-time favourite resource on UI design [3], so I do put value on little tricks like this that they're using.

1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-smooth

2. https://tailwindcss.com/docs/font-smoothing

3. https://www.refactoringui.com/

mickael-kerjean• 2 years ago

didn't know that trick, do you have some other cool ones?

deadbabe2• 2 years ago

Only other trick I know is the super white trick which is whiter than the brightest white

endorphine• 2 years ago

The Immortal Jellyfish (2015)

Related Stories