Three papers to distract from the awfulness

Here are three papers that may briefly divert you from doomscrolling about the horrific situation in Ukraine.

• 
  This paper from the Feb 11 issue of Science shows some amazing images of the calcite structures that make up starfish skeletons, with order on multiple length scales that leads to remarkable mechanical properties.   Biomineralization is amazing, especially when you think about how it works.  Cells generate protein structures that can have charge patterns that allow templating of inorganic crystal growth in specific phases and orientations.  See here for examples of experiments that get at how this works.  The cover image from the Science paper is really eye-popping.
  
• Then there's this paper from the Young group at UCSB, which shows that ordinary Bernal-stacked bilayer graphene can also superconduct, albeit at 30 mK.  The really interesting bit here is that to get superconductivity requires both a large c-directed electric field (obtained by having a voltage difference between top and bottom graphite gate electrodes above and below the bilayer) and an in-plane magnetic field.  That latter requirement suggests that this might be an exotic superconductivity where the electron pairs are spin triplets rather than the conventional singlets of ordinary superconductors.
• Finally, enjoy this paper, which was published as a commentary in ACS Photonics, and is absolutely worth reading for the tone alone.