In an eye-popping reptilian first, researchers were able to genetically modify a reptile embryo using the gene-editing technique known as CRISPR. The technology has been used on fish, birds, amphibians, and even mammals, but this is the first time scientists have brought squamates—lizards and snakes—into the picture.

Squamates have been left out of most CRISPR experiments because of their unique sexual reproduction process. CRISPR works via a cocktail of specialized DNA strands and some enzymes that chop up other pieces of DNA, and it’s usually injected directly into an egg after it has been fertilized. But female squamates store sperm internally for long periods of time, and form fragile shells around embryos once they’re fertilized, making it hard for researchers to figure out exactly when to inject their carefully calibrated gene-editing mixture.

So scientists at the University of Georgia turned to the immature eggs—or oocytes—of female anoles, a type of lizard native to the Caribbean. How did they do it? Lizard surgery, complete with an operating table and anaesthesia. They accessed the anole’s ovary and gently injected the CRISPR cocktail into its oocytes. One of the genes modified in the study, which appeared Sunday on the preprint server bioRxiv, targeted the lizards’ pigmentation, providing a clear way to see whether or not the splicing worked on the embryos.

After some lizard mating, the female anoles began to lay fertilized eggs modified by CRISPR. Lo and behold, some offspring hatched as venerable ghost-lizards, shown above—the so-called “crispant” embryos, were a success.

Researchers are excited at what this could mean for the study of reptile genetics. As Jon Cohen reports for Science, one gecko biologist called the finding a “game changer.” This experiment has created a model for splicing the DNA of lizards and snakes without having to wait for embryo fertilization.

Douglas Menke, one of the study’s researchers, tweeted Monday: “We can finally explore the rich biology of gene function in reptiles.”

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Nuclear fallout? Acid rain? A tacky Instagram filter? Nope—plant sex. Lots and lots of plant sex.

On Monday, residents of Durham, North Carolina encountered what some are calling “pollmageddon,” during which an onslaught of greenish-yellow pollen blanketed the area. It covered cars and patios, and even visibly floated through the air. Photographer Jeremy Gilchrist saw the allergy apocalypse from his car and sent up his drone to document it.

He posted the eye-watering photos on Facebook, writing, “No tricks here. Yes you are looking at a green haze made up of tree pollen from the pines of central NC!”

The region’s trees have begun mating in the warmer weather, and that means high pollen counts. The Raleigh-Durham area experienced the fifth highest pollen count in the U.S. on Wednesday, according to Weather.com. From 10 a.m. Monday to 10 a.m. Tuesday, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality reported that the count was over 2,500 pollen grains per cubic meter.

Historically, North Carolina’s pollen levels have stayed between 1,000 and 1,500 grains per cubic meter during peak season. The highest pollen count ever recorded in the Raleigh-Durham area was 3,524 grains per cubic meter—Thursday’s count is expected to come in a close second.

Research suggests climate change could be to blame. It heightens temperatures and makes warmer weather last longer, giving plants more time to release pollen. This makes allergy seasons longer and more intense. What’s more, a 2010 study conducted by the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America found that ragweed (another source of pollen) releases more pollen at higher carbon dioxide concentrations.

Several hours after Gilchrist took the photos, residents got a much-needed break from the particles after thunderstorms rolled through the area and washed most of them out of the sky. Gilchrist captured that, too.

But North Carolinians aren’t out of the allergy-infested woods yet. Pollen counts through the end of this week are expected to remain very high as the trees continue their airborne courtship. Hunker down—it’s going to be a sneezy, yellow spring.

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The Hubble Space Telescope gave us a gift for its 29th birthday: This image of the Southern Crab Nebula. Located over 6,800 light-years from Earth, the hourglass-shaped formation of gas and dust—also known as Hen 2-104—was formed by two aging stars locked in a cosmic do-si-do in the constellation Centaurus.

The two swirling objects make up a binary star system, and they’re at very different stages in their lives. One is a white dwarf: A small, burnt-out core of a star that’s one of the densest objects in the universe (a spoonful of its matter would weigh as much as a truck). The other is a red giant: a bloated, cooled-down star that’s stopped burning hydrogen and started burning helium, which is a sign that it’s well on its way to becoming a white dwarf.

Because of its density, the white dwarf has an immense gravitational pull on the red giant, sucking matter off of its larger neighbor and twirling it into a high-energy ring of gas called an accretion disk. Eventually, all that energy heats the white dwarf up to a temperature of 15 million degrees, igniting the gas in the disk and causing a thermonuclear explosion called a nova. In the Southern Crab Nebula, all that gas shot outward in an hourglass shape, creating the symmetrical “legs” of the crab as it lit up interstellar gases and dust particles, possibly deposited there by a prior explosion.

Just a dot in the southern sky to the naked eye and low-powered telescopes, the Southern Crab Nebula was first distinguished from an ordinary star in 1989, when the crab leg structure was first observed by the European Southern Observatory’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. In 1999, Hubble photographed the nebula and revealed a smaller hourglass nested closer to the stars within the nebula. Twenty years later, it used its sharpest imaging mechanism yet, Wide Field Camera 3, to capture this latest image. The nested hourglasses of gas and dust could point to a previous explosion of matter from the red giant.

RELATED: Jupiter’s roiling clouds are a thing of beauty

Rocketed to earth’s orbit on April 24, 1990 (yes, Hubble is a millennial), the telescope snapped this portrait in time for the 29th anniversary of that launch on Wednesday. In its nearly three decades of operation, Hubble has made over 1.4 million observations of almost 45,000 objects in space. It’s orbited Earth more than 169,000 times—a distance nearly equivalent to traveling from Earth to the outer edges of our solar system.

Hubble has one of the most perfectly made mirrors of any telescope, and its position above the atmosphere allows it to capture light that can’t be seen from earth’s surface, or gets muddied by the atmosphere. Its resolution has allowed it to peer so deep into space (and so far back in time) that it’s helping astronomers see closer to the birth of the universe.

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Say hello to the bird world’s newest additions: the Wakatobi white-eye and the Wangi-wangi white-eye. Discovered in the Wakatobi Archipelago southeast of Sulawesi, Indonesia, these birds could reveal more about how other species of white-eye have evolved.

Zoologists from Trinity College Dublin led by Nicola Marples, along with researchers from Halu Oleo University in Sulawesi and with support from research expedition organization Operation Wallacea, had been studying birds in and around Sulawesi for 20 years. The pinwheel-like island is the fourth largest in Indonesia, spanning over 69,000 square miles.

Geologists believe Sulawesi formed when fragments of the Asian and Australian tectonic plates collided, creating a biogeographic crossroads in the form of an island. When British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace visited Indonesia in the 19th Century, he identified two distinct areas of biodiversity: The western half of the archipelago contained species related to those identified in Asia, while the eastern half’s species had Australian origins. He drew a line along the Makassar Strait, between Borneo and Sulawesi, to separate these regions.

But Wallace called Sulawesi “the anomalous island” because it contained species from both sides of that line. It’s the only place in the world, for example, where you can find both Australian marsupials and Asian old world monkeys. This has made classifying new species difficult—it’s really helpful during classification to have an idea of an organism’s long-term geographic lineage. Birds often muddy things up in this way, since they can migrate between isolated islands and form new populations.

Marples’s team identified differences in the birds’ body sizes, genes, and songs to see which bird populations had branched off into new species. When groups of birds separate and develop different songs, they won’t mate with each other—after generations, the animals might change so much that scientists classify them as different species. In the case of white-eyes, which researchers say are especially keen to colonize islands and genetically isolate themselves, Sulawesi’s Wakatobi Islands provided the perfect evolutionary playground.

A family of tropical and subtropical birds, white-eyes spread rapidly throughout the Eastern Hemisphere—they’re native to sub-Saharan Africa, South and East Asia, most Indian Ocean islands, and the western Pacific. Scientists were aware of the Wakatobi white-eye’s existence—named for its native range throughout the Wakatobi Archipelago—for years, but only now have they officially decided to classify it as its own species, as they note in their study published Tuesday in the journal Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. The Wangi-wangi white-eye, on the other hand, has only just been found on one island in the group—Wangi-Wangi, of course—and its closest relatives are thousands of miles away.

“To find two new species from the same genus of birds in the same island is remarkable,” Marples says in a press release.

Researchers believe the discoveries will be important for conservation groups, who are trying to get the Wakatobi Islands recognized as an Endemic Bird Area—that’d give their wildlife more support and protection. For now, at least the two white-eyes can revel in their novel species-hood.

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Mating can be a real battle in the animal world, but peacock spiders leave their helmets behind—literally. This arachnid exoskeleton came from an adult male Maratus velutinus that shed his skin one last time before mating. And that’s not fancy carpeting it’s sitting on, it’s Australian photographer Adam Fletcher’s fingertip. Talk about an itsy-bitsy spider.

Fletcher used a specialized 65mm macro lens, which can shoot minuscule objects with striking sharpness. He’s been an amateur photographer for over three decades, specializing in capturing spellbinding images of some of the tiniest and most intricate spiders on the planet.

“I love the fact that I can find small things anywhere and photograph them to show everyone the exquisite beauty of all the patterns, colors, and details,” Fletcher says. Peacock spiders are native mostly to Australia, and over different 70 species can be found all over the continent. Most measure only a couple millimeters across, but they have powerful adaptations worthy of their feathery name.

Peacock spiders are a type of jumping spider, which are known for their two big, bulgy (dare we say, cute?) front eyes, accompanied by six smaller peepers. While most other spiders have six or eight eyes of more modest stature and can’t produce much more than a blurry, black and white interpretation of their surroundings, jumping spiders have a complex retina and focusing system that helps them see in technicolor.

Because they can see so well, jumping spiders can spot prey many feet away and leap distances that measure over 20 times their body lengths to catch ants, wasps, and other small insects. They hunt so successfully this way that they don’t even bother building webs. But peacock spiders use their exceptional eyesight for an additional purpose: picking up the ladies.

Each species of male peacock spider sports a unique, colorful pattern that typically develops through several moltings. But the design reaches its peak vibrancy after the final molt of adulthood, a process that also unveils fully functional genitalia. Orange and white head stripes and a glossy jet black abdomen (velutinus means “velvety” in Latin) distinguish an eligible Maratus velutinus bachelor, and when confronted with an available female, he will display his opulence proudly—just like a peacock. If the female likes what she sees, they’ll mate.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder—in this case, it never hurts to have a few extra eyes.

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