The European Space Agency's Faint Object Camera on board NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has provided astronomers with the most detailed image ever taken of the gravitational lens G2237 + 0305 — sometimes referred to as the Einstein Cross. The photograph shows four images of a very distant quasar which has been multiple-imaged by a relatively nearby galaxy acting as a gravitational lens. The angular separation between the upper and lower images is 1.6 arcseconds.

Many animals are covered in protective armor—shells, scales, plates, and frills that protect their soft bodies. But one group of little-known sea creatures called chitons have evolved armor that's unlike anything else in nature.

Because it contains eyes. Hundreds of eyes.

With lenses made from rock, that erode as the animals age and have to be continuously replaced.

Chitons are mollusks, related to snails, clams, and octopuses. Their oval bodies are covered by a hard shell consisting of eight overlapping plates, which makes them look a bit like a woodlouse with a skirt, or perhaps like the forehead of a Klingon. In many species, these plates are dotted with hundreds of tiny beads, each less than a tenth of a millimeter across. These are eyes. Each contains a lens, a light-sensitive retina, and a layer of black pigment.

Yes, polls are stupid (at this stage of the election). But as Nate Silver, famed poll-cruncher and editor-in-chief of the data news site FiveThirtyEight has observed, polls -- no matter how unscientific -- do fuel media narratives. And those narratives can affect voters, and thus influence polls. It's a question of which comes first: the media egg or the chicken poll.

To find the answer to the question, On the Media and FiveThirtyEight are working together this election season to track the push and pull between polling, media coverage, and public interest in 2016 candidates.

Watch this space for our series of data-driven conversations and commentary.