A grand challenge ·

The Earth BioGenome Project (EBP) is a moonshot for biology, aims to sequence, catalog and characterize the genomes of all of Earth’s eukaryotic biodiversity over a period of ten years. The articles in this special issue of PNAS explore aspects of the project including a review of progress, descriptions of major scientific goals, exemplar projects, examinations of ethical, legal, and social issues, and applications of biodiversity genomics.

It's Snowing in my CPU — a Snowflake catalogue

Go ahead, meet some snowflakes.

liegilee

chini

jarkiul

thadnere

lenberd

ellna

jonsie

Somewhere in the world, it's snowing. But you don't need to go far—it's always snowing on this page. Explore random flurries, snowflake families and individual flakes. There are many unusual snowflakes and snowflake family 12 and family 46 are very interesting.

But don't settle for only pixel snowflakes—make an STL file and 3D print your own flakes!

Ad blockers may interfere with some flake images—the names of flakes can trigger ad filters.

And if after reading about my flakes you want more, get your frozen fix with Kenneth Libbrecht's excellent work and Paul Gallico's Snowflake.

This page uses code contributed by Alexander Pruss to generate an STL file for any of the flakes in the catalogue. The code is now hosted here to cross-origin requests.

authentically-grown flakes for your tree

Here is the 3D printed snowflake morptel. Yes, they all have names—snowflakes are people too.

▲ The physical manifestation of the snowflake `morptel`.

Snowflake to STL conversion

You are about to generate STL for snowflake lengoy (shown below).

To generate STL for a different flake, browse to the flake's page and click the Generate STL file for 3D printing link in the section SNOWFLAKE FILES AND RESOURCES.

It takes only a few seconds to generate the STL file.