While looking at a sunflower the other day...

... I had an insight... and thought I'd share this with you.

I realized that there is a deep, underlying, common property that connects the sunflower to the skeleton of a snake to the Hawaiian archipelago. In other words, there's a fascinating connection that I hadn't thought about before.

This is a lovely observation, and it seems to be a great SearchResearch Challenge for us. Can you figure this out?

Challenge:

What's connects the archipelago of Hawai'i with the vertebrae of a snake? What then connects that to the flowers in a sunflower? Can you think of what these three very different things might share in common? (And no, it's not "they're made of atoms..." or something similar. It's actually an interesting commonality.)

Every day I'll post a hint in the comment thread of this post, giving small nudges as needed.

I know this is fairly abstract, but I'll shed a bit more light each day until you make the connection that I made last week.

Step back for a second and think to yourself, what's shared among these three things? Don't worry too much about trivial connections--think about the processes involved in how they came to be. What might that be?

Once you have an insight about what they could possibly have in common, then you'll need to figure out how to search for confirmation.

(Metacomment: Why is this an interesting SearchResearch Challenge? Because people are ALWAYS noticing connections between things. Sometimes they're deep and interesting, sometimes they're spurious--we have to know how to tell the difference. This is a Challenge about how to seek out and validate a suspected connection.)

Ready? Go.

Search on!