180 posts tagged with linkstothedamnpaper.
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Dreams of an Earth-like Venus
In November 1959, balloonists on Strato-Lab IV reached an altutide of 81,000 feet (25,000 m) to perform spectrographic analysis of Venus (Wikipedia), which was reported on in Life magazine a month later, with the article "Target: Venus—There May Be Life There" (Google books), and fostered the dream that "life—even as we know it on earth—may exist on Venus." Three years later, Mariner crushed those dreams (NASA), but what about the Venus of the past?
The Romantic Venus We Never Knew—Venus used to be as fit for life as Earth (David Grinspoon, Nautilus). [more inside]
Solved: the mystery of Por-Bajin, ruins on a Mongolian island
In the Tyva Republic, which lies southern Russia and includes one of the geographical midpoints of Asia (Wikipedia; user-made panorama in Google maps ), is the Mystery of the Tere-Khol Lake (Earth Chronicles; Google maps), the ruins of a 3.3 hectare (8.15 acre) structure with no confirmed history, but associated with local legend. It was Russia's most mysterious archaeological site (Archaeology, 2010). Until recently, that is, when radiocarbon-based approach capable of subannual precision resolves the origins of the site of Por-Bajin (PNAS, open article). In other words, solar radiation and dead trees tell us when Por-Bajin was built—and why it was neither palace nor fortress (Atlas Obsura). [more inside]
Behold the Three-Toed Skink, who can pick live birth or eggs
In the broadest of terms, animals are generally born one of two ways*: egg laying (oviparity) and live birth (viviparity), which raises the question: When and why did live birth evolve? Enter the Australian three-toed skink (Saiphos equalis), which can it both lay eggs and bear live young, and can do both within a single litter of offspring. Egg Laying or Live Birth: How Evolution Chooses (Quanta Magazine). [more inside]
The mysterious desert dwellers
A shapeshifting fungus lives in the dust. It’s infecting across the American West, Lauren J. Young
Coccidioides is a fungus endemic to the western USA that causes (San Joaquin) Valley Fever, or coccidioidomycosis. It thrives in hot, dry environments and is carried along in dust. [more inside]
Coccidioides is a fungus endemic to the western USA that causes (San Joaquin) Valley Fever, or coccidioidomycosis. It thrives in hot, dry environments and is carried along in dust. [more inside]
so-called "Grand" "Canyon"
Earle E. Spamer, a (now retired) member of the editorial board of the Annals Of Improbable Research, archivist of the American Philosophical Society and longtime researcher in and supporter of The Grand Canyon asks, over a long career: What Grand Canyon?
Is The Grand Canyon A Fake? [PDF], Spamer 2006, AIR 12-2 [PDF], see also Spamer's Other Grand Canyons, ibid.
What Lies Behind The Grand Canyon? (AIR 16-5 [PDF]) [more inside]
Is The Grand Canyon A Fake? [PDF], Spamer 2006, AIR 12-2 [PDF], see also Spamer's Other Grand Canyons, ibid.
What Lies Behind The Grand Canyon? (AIR 16-5 [PDF]) [more inside]
meet HANK
On the podcast Macro Musings, Ben Moll is interviewed about Heterogenous Agent New Keynsian economic models [transcript] and how cutting-edge modeling applies to economic policymaking. ButHeterogeneous agents macroeconomics has a long history, even if these particular models are new: "Recent [2017] economic events cast doubt on the standard macroeconomic models. This column looks at new economic models built on the idea that inequality and income risk matter for the business cycle and long-run outcomes. While still in their infancy, these models show promise in addressing the concerns about the old New Keynesian models, and in bringing about a shift in the way that macroeconomists think about aggregate fluctuations and stabilisation policy." [more inside]
USAF diagrams that look like shitposts
The Parasite Fighters "The idea of using an aircraft to launch another aircraft has been around since at least the First World War. Such "composite" aircraft became nothing particularly unusual, with experimental aircraft like the Bell X-1 and drones being launched off carrier aircraft platforms on a routine basis. However, the notion of actually launching and then recovering an aircraft in mid-air -- for example, a heavy bomber carrying its own "parasite" fighters for escort -- was more ambitious, and in fact nobody's ever really made a go of it, if not for lack of effort." Including a mid-70's idea of using a heavily modified 747 for midflight launch and recovery of 17.5 foot wide and 10000 lb "micro-fighters." [more inside]
New report on oldest, largest mammoth bone building found to date
Mammoth-bone buildings are well-known to archaeologists (previously). Similar structures have been found across Eastern Europe, typically a few meters in diameter, have been dated back as far as 22,000 years. Researchers have generally considered them to be dwellings or “mammoth houses” that helped their builders cope with frigid temperatures near the nadir of the last Ice Age. The new structure, first discovered at Kostenki (Wikipedia) in 2014, is 3,000 years older than those, and the largest mammoth bone structure found to date, consisting of the bones of 60 mammoths (Smithsonian; full academic paper).
congenital blindness and schizophrenia
People Born Blind Are Mysteriously Protected From Schizophrenia (Vice): Over the past 60-some years, scientists around the world have been writing about this mystery. They've analyzed past studies, combed the wards of psychiatric hospitals, and looked through agencies that treat blind people, trying to find a case. [...] These findings suggest that something about congenital blindness may protect a person from schizophrenia. This is especially surprising, since congenital blindness often results from infections, brain trauma, or genetic mutation -- all factors that are independently associated with greater risk of psychotic disorders. [more inside]
Toffee planets: hard sci-fi with a crispy outer shell and gooey center
The Geology of Toffee Planets (PDF): A world with a lithosphere too thin to subduct (or with no lithosphere at all) could not support plate tectonics, with implications for heat loss, style of volcanism, atmospheric composition, and the frequency with which new reactive minerals reach the surface. Bodies with masses sufficient to yield thin lithospheres, then, might host tectonic and volcanic features similar to those that characterize the Venus lowlands [21] or Archean Earth [22], with high-standing terrain the exception, not the rule. This inference can be tested by efforts to search for exoplanet topography [23]. “Toffee Planets” Hint at Earth’s Cosmic Rarity -- Exoplanets with stretchy, flowing rock may be bereft of plate tectonics—and of complex life (Scientific American)
Chasing ancient goldbugs
Pyrite fossils can be shiny and sparkly (Fossil Identification), but they can also be very informative. Markus Martin, an amateur paleontologist, returned to Beecher's Trilobit Bed (archived Yale page) in upstate New York, and discovered Martin Quarry, named after himself as the discoverer, where he found ancient arthropods turned into fool’s gold, preserved in exquisite detail (Atlas Obscura). He posts some of his finds and collaborations on Instagram as goldbugsofficial. [more inside]
Imagining Titan: creating an otherworldly molecular mineral on Earth
Morgan Cable crafts alien environments in miniature. She can stir up a shot-glass-size lake, unleash gentle spritzes of rain, and whip up other wonders to mimic the bizarre surface of Saturn’s moon Titan. In this far-flung world, temperatures plunge hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit below zero, and rivers of liquid methane and ethane sculpt valleys into a frozen landscape of water ice. “We can, in a way, touch Titan here in the lab—even though it’s millions of miles away,” says Cable, who is a scientist in the Astrobiology and Oceans Worlds Group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. New kind of alien 'mineral' created on Earth (National Geographic, with a spiffy virtual sphere of Titan) [more inside]
44,000-Year-Old Indonesian Cave Painting Is Rewriting The History Of Art
In the 1950s, scientists evaluated primitive rock art discovered in caves on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia (Google maps), but assumed it younger than 10,000 years old because they thought older paintings could not survive in a tropical climate. Then, as reported in 2014, more recent analysis of the pictures by an Australian-Indonesian team has stunned researchers by dating one hand marking to at least 39,900 years old (The Guardian; paywalled article in Nature), placing it close to, if not pre-dating, art from the Chauvet Cave in France (Archeologie.Culture.Fr) that is dated as old as 37,000 years (PNAS). In 2017, the scientists in Indonesia found a massive hunting scene, stretching across about 16 feet of a cave wall. And after testing it, they say it's the oldest known figurative art attributed to early modern humans (NPR). They published their findings in the journal Nature (paywalled).
Japan's Ghost Wolf, or wild dog? Good pupper, not mythical, 14/10
For more than two decades, Hiroshi Yagi has been searching for the Japanese or Honshū wolf (Wikipedia; Canis lupus hodophilax, whose binomial name derives from the Greek Hodos (path) and phylax (guardian), in reference to Japanese folklore, which portrayed wolves as the protectors of travelers). Believed to be extinct for over 100 years, Yagi took photos of a wolf-like animal in 1996, and recently captured a howl (BBC), which was compared to another wolf howl, and considered a close match. Skeptics see a German Shepherd hybrid (Japan Times), but Yagi isn't alone in seeing and hearing animals that seem more wolf than dog. [more inside]
Ghosts in the (Genetic) Code, in living bonobos and Denisovan fossils
Genes from an extinct “ghost ape” live on in modern bonobos (Ars Technica). Because apes have their natural habitat in the trees of the rainy tropical forest, with an acidic soil where the organic matter decomposes very quickly, the fossil record for our closest relatives is poor, but genetic data in living bonobos could help fill in gaps (BioTech Spain, paywalled Nature Ecology & Evolution article). Similar, but different: earlier this year, David Gokhman summoned a ghost, using information for 32 skeletal features encoded in DNA that was extracted from a pinky bone. DNA reveals first look at enigmatic human relative, providing more details of the physical structure of Denisovans (National Geographic; full article from Cell).
Baby, talk to me
When babies babble, they are communicating exactly what they want. Even if they don't know it, parents are listening. (Fatherly summary) “Infants are actually shaping their own learning environments in ways that make learning easier to do,” study co-author Steven Elmlinger, a psychology graduate student at Cornell University, said in a statement. The report -- The ecology of prelinguistic vocal learning: parents simplify the structure of their speech in response to babbling (Journal of Child Language; full PDF) More from Cornell's B.A.B.Y. Lab from prior studies.
National Geographic likes to describe spiders by what they could hug
Sri Lanka is home to a new[ly discovered] species of tarantula—and its females are fuzzy, turquoise-tinged, and big enough to comfortably hug a donut (National Geographic), as recently reported in the British Tarantula Society Journal, with more pictures of Chilobrachys jonitriantisvansicklei. [more inside]
Five for Friday: new discoveries clarify, tangle evolving human history
3.8 million-year-old hominin skull fills in “a major gap” in the fossil record | Humans may have reached Europe by 210,000 years ago; by 40,000 years later, Neanderthals had taken over the site | Neanderthals’ history is as complicated as ours; new study hints at Neanderthal population turnover in Siberia 90,000-120,000 years ago. | Stone tools suggest the first Americans came from Japan | Not vikings this time — New archaeological layer discovered at L’Anse aux Meadows || All articles by Kiona N. Smith for Ars Technica. [more inside]
Coquina, the stone that absorbs cannon balls
Coquina (Wikipedia) is a sedimentary rock that is composed of fragments of invertebrate shells, and it has been used as a building stone in Florida for over 400 years. At a distance, it might appear like a coarse sandstone, and it is very porous, requiring extensive preparation to use as a building material, such as in Castillo de San Marcos (YouTube clip). But its porousness can be a benefit, as seen in The Mystery of Florida's Cannonball-Eating Spanish Fort (Atlas Obscura), where coquina behaves very differently when struck by cannonballs or bullets. The material was studied recently, and here's the full report on The Impact Response of Coquina: Unlocking the Mystery Behind the Endurance of the Oldest Fort in the United States (Journal of Dynamic Behavior of Materials).
Yeah, we know, it should have been called T. rex Necropsy
Cretaceous Chainsaw Massacre! Four years ago, National Geographic aired a special called T. Rex Autopsy (YT, full "documentary"), and it was awesome. And bloody. (Washington Post) Bonus clips: T. rex: Behind the Build -- Check out the workshop, Crawley Creatures, with some of the designers and sculptors who created the massive T. rex; and The Gross Stuff | T.rex Autopsy: Behind the Scenes. And in case you missed it: Taking Dinosaur Temperatures with Eggshells (CalTech press release, October 13, 2015; full paper in Nature Communications).
Theories on Māori moa hunting methods, based on practices and words
As early humans spread across the earth, they persistently hunted down the largest beasts around. Along with climate changes and human-caused ecosystem change, many researchers implicate hunting as a death knell for creatures from the giant ground sloth (Inverse; full paper) to the wooly mammoth and other megafauna (Geology Page; full paper in PDF). From this perspective, humanity’s late arrival to New Zealand simply delayed the moa’s execution date. When the Māori First Settled New Zealand, They Hunted Flightless, 500-Pound Birds (Atlas Obscura) -- but how did Māori best these beasts? [more inside]
cyclopean design
The Archigram of Mammoth Bones: Some of the earliest found human dwellings were constructed of interlocking bones of mammoths, what is Perhaps the Oldest Surviving Architecture [more inside]
I am not afraid of falling over the edge, but of throwing myself over
Why You Feel the Urge to Jump -- Jessica Seigel looks into the science and philosophy of looking down from a high place for Nautilus, from the way threat modulates perception of looming visual stimuli (PDF, full article, Emory University) to the fact that not everyone can accurately estimate heights, though all individuals studied had roughly accurate horizontal distance estimates (abstract only, Springer). If you've experienced the urge to jump, it doesn't mean you want to die, but may rather imply an urge to live, with a healthy dose of anxiety (full article, Academia.edu).
the futility of all human striving
The Unintended Impact of Academic Research on Asset Returns: The CAPM Alpha, Alex R. Horenstein - "This paper explores a channel whereby asset-pricing anomalies can appear as investors alter portfolios according to findings in academic research. In particular, I find that assets with low realized CAPM alphas [wiki] outperform those with high ones, but only after the CAPM’s publication in the 1960s." [more inside]
Archaeology isn’t just for primates anymore
Expanding the already growing scope of archaeology from primate archaeology (Academia.edu): Sea otter archaeology exists, and it’s awesome (Ars Technica). Sea otters' tool use leaves behind distinctive archaeological evidence. (Phys.org) The paper in question: Wild sea otter mussel pounding leaves archaeological traces (Nature Scientific Reports, open access)
Rapa Nui (Easter Island) monument locations explained by freshwater
Carl Lipo, Terry Hunt and their colleagues continue to identify possible descriptions to the mysteries of Easter Island’s culture and statues (Ars Technica): Rapa Nui islanders survived by building strong communities around limited resources, contrary to Jared Diamond's proclamations (An annotated version of Jared Diamond’s 1995 article “Easter’s End” – Part I, Part II and Part III). Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo: The Statues That Walked | Nat Geo Live (32:28, YouTube) [more inside]
💔
Breaking Heart Syndrome Linked with Brain’s Control of Emotions (Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News). Scientists in Switzerland have for the first time identified a tangible link between how different areas of the brain communicate with each other, and Takotsubo syndrome. TTS is a rare, potentially fatal cardiac disorder brought on by a sudden temporary weakening of the heart muscle -- typically triggered by episodes of severe emotional distress, including grief, anger, or fear, or by reactions to joyful events -- leading to heart attack and death. It's more common in women but how the disease occurs has not yet been explained (ScienceDaily). (European Society of Cardiology press release, study full text) [more inside]
Simply gazing somewhere around the face/head area will suffice
Here’s A Simple Trick For Anyone Who Finds Eye Contact Too Intense. tl;dr: Look at the person's mouth region. The perception of eye contact is driven by the other person looking in the general direction of your face, not into your eyes specifically. Study PDF, press release. [more inside]
Unless, of course, somebody comes up with 6-Minute Abs.
Until recently, most health authorities prescribed activity lasting for at least 10 continuous minutes, although there was no credible scientific evidence behind this. This recommendation was recently refuted by the 2018 US Physical Activity Guidelines Advisory Report. The new guidelines state any movement matters for health, no matter how long it lasts. The benefits of high-intensity incidental physical activity (Emmanuel Stamatakis, co-author of Short and sporadic bouts in the 2018 US physical activity guidelines: is high-intensity incidental physical activity the new HIIT?, British Journal of Sports Medicine; via Quartz). You can experience the benefits of "high-intensity interval training" (BJSM) without needing to focus on exercising.
The science of Hula-Hooping, as individual hoops or with a TON of hoops
Swiveling Science: Applying Physics to Hula-Hooping Have you ever wondered how Hula-Hoops work or what makes them able to spin around a person's waist or arm—seeming to defy gravity? The answer can be explained by physics, which can help you determine what makes an effective Hula-Hoop. In this activity you'll get to create your own Hula-Hoops and investigate how their weights affect how they spin. Which do you think will spin better, a heavy hoop or a lighter one? Get ready to do some hula-hooping to find out! Got it? Good. Now try it with 300 Hula-Hoops. It's almost impossible (Wired), but not quite, if you're as good as Marawa Ibrahim—aka Marawa the Amazing. [more inside]
Megachile pluto is Rotu ofu, (once and still) Queen of the bees
In the 1850s, Alfred Russel Wallace (Wikipedia), a tall, skinny, reserved young explorer, went traipsing through tropical forests in the Malay Archipelago (Wiki), collecting specimens to be sold back in England. One of them was a specimen a local brought to him, “a large black wasp-like insect, with immense jaws like a stag-beetle,” (The Malay Archipelago, 1890 edition via Archive.org), and it was the largest bee known in the world. Megachile pluto (Wiki) was presumed extinct into the early 1980s, when it was re-discovered (abstract), only to disappear from sight again. Clay Bolt, Natural History and Conservation Photographer, wrote about rediscovering Wallace’s Giant Bee for Global Wildlife.org, and he shared a video of a specimen in action with Wired. [more inside]
They're spiny and they're ancient, the sauropod family
Two for Tuesday: the Sauropoda family got a bit bigger, weirder and older in the last few years, with two discoveries in Argentina. Most recently, Bajadasaurus pronuspinax gave Amargasaurus cazaui (Wikipedia) a spiked- or frilled-neck cousin, but unlike the Amargasaurus, Bajadasaurus's spines point forward, for use as defense, to attract a mate, or regulate temperature (Phys.org; "A new long-spined dinosaur from Patagonia sheds light on sauropod defense system" - Science Reports, full article on Nature.com). Last year, a fossil of 'first giant' dinosaur discovered in Argentina (BBC). [more inside]
"crowded congregations could be unpleasant to unbearably irritating"
There are moths that drink tears from sleeping birds' eyes. There are butterflies that feed on turtle tears. And then there are the wild bees that drink from human eyes. [CW: literally closeup photos of bees drinking from a person's eyes.] [more inside]
58% Interest + 25% Confusion +8 Awe + 8% Realization
Here's an interactive map of the 2,032 sounds humans use to communicate without words. Based on new research [PDF] that found brief vocal bursts can convey at least 24 distinct kinds of emotion. Previous studies had estimated the number at around 13.
someone once told me the real action was in the footnotes
Illuminating Women’s Hidden Contribution to Historical Theoretical Population Genetics [preprint bioRxiv], Samantha Kristin Dung, Andrea López, Ezequiel Lopez Barragan, Rochelle-Jan Reyes, Ricky Thu, Edgar Castellanos, Francisca Catalan, Emilia Huerta-Sánchez and Rori V. Rohlfs, GENETICS February 1, 2019 vol. 211 no. 2 363-366; https://doi.org/10.1534/genetics.118.301277
While productivity in academia is measured through authorship, not all scientific contributors have been recognized as authors. We consider nonauthor “acknowledged programmers” (APs), who developed, ran, and sometimes analyzed the results of computer programs. We identified APs in Theoretical Population Biology articles published between 1970 and 1990, finding that APs were disproportionately women (P = 4.0 × 10−10). We note recurrent APs who contributed to several highly-cited manuscripts. The occurrence of APs decreased over time, corresponding to the masculinization of computer programming and the shift of programming responsibilities to individuals credited as authors. We conclude that, while previously overlooked, historically, women have made substantial contributions to computational biology.The Women Who Contributed to Science but Were Buried in Footnotes [more inside]
round, fast, spiky, ugly, fat, pleased
In The Beginning Was The Word - David Robson: "A special class of vivid, textural words defy linguistic theory: could ‘ideophones’ unlock the secrets of humans’ first utterances?" [more inside]
Flying squirrels secretly glow pink
Flying squirrels were already exceptional, as far as rodents go. Gifted with a flap of skin between their limbs, they can glide long distances between the trees where they live. But new research [abstract] suggests some of the critters hide a bizarre secret—their fur glows a brilliant, bubble-gum pink under ultraviolet light. The discovery happened entirely by accident when the paper's coauthor was doing an exploratory forest survey with an ultraviolet flashlight and happened to flash it at a nearby flying squirrel.
Three for Thursday: studies of evolution and longevity
Sometimes scientific studies are fast, and some are slow. On the fast side, a study of anole lizard before and after Hurricanes Irma and Maria battered the Caribbean islands of Turks and Caicos was fortuitously timed and able to document significant differences in the remaining population in a few short months, while a study of evolution in deer mice in Nebraska was completed in 14 months, thanks in part to a chance encounter at a bar in Valentine, NE. On the other end, scientists at the University of Edinburgh are only four years into a 500 year study on the longevity of bacteria (The Atlantic x 3). [more inside]
I scream, you scream, actually that's still me screaming
Human screams occupy a privileged niche in the communication soundscape: "We found that screams occupy a reserved chunk of the auditory spectrum, but we wanted to go through a whole bunch of sounds to verify that this area is unique to screams," says Poeppel, who also directs the Frankfurt Max-Planck-Institute Department of Neuroscience. "In a series of experiments, we saw [that] this observation remained true when we compared screaming to singing and speaking, even across different languages. The only exception--and what was peculiar and cool--is that alarm signals (car alarms, house alarms, etc.) also activate the range set aside for screams." [paper pdf]
Effin' itinerant ferromagnetism, this is how it works
Back in the late 1800s, the 15 Puzzle (also known as Game of Fifteen, Gem Puzzle, Boss Puzzle, and Mystic Square) [Wikipedia] "drove the whole world crazy" (perhaps in part because half of the scenarios were unsolvable) [Geeks for Geeks]. Now, this "child's puzzle" helped uncover how magnets really work, as summarized in the title of Marcus Woo's article for Wired. More specifically, Eric Bobrow, Keaton Stubis, and Yi Li recently described Exact results on itinerant ferromagnetism and the 15-puzzle problem [Physical Review B with the abstract; arXiv with the full paper]. [more inside]
“How often do you feel left out?”
How well can we sense each other’s loneliness? [study abstract] "As the correlation scores show, the participants’ partners tended to be better at judging their loneliness than did their friends and parents. In fact, there was no significant difference in statistical terms between participants’ ratings of their own loneliness and the ratings given to them by their partners. In contrast, parents and friends tended to underestimate the participants’ loneliness."
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chuck it around before you chow down
Dolphins beat up octopuses before eating them, and the reason is kind of horrifying: "Dolphins have two basic tactics here. One is to hold the octopus in their mouths, swim up out of the water, then slam back down to force the octopus’ body apart. The second is for the dolphin to move their head sideways and throw the octopus, essentially achieving the same slamming effect. Their reward for this trick is a high-protein meal, which is apparently worth the energy it takes to fully disarm dinner first." [study PDF]
Discovery of pious Medieval women who quietly painted and wrote books
Anthropologist Christina Warinner of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and her colleagues took samples of [...] fossilized dental plaque, or calculus, [from a woman who lived sometime between 997 and 1162 CE] in 2014 to check for microscopic remains of plants, which would offer clues about the medieval woman’s diet. But when they dissolved the sample to extract the plant bits, the process also released hundreds of tiny blue particles. [Ars Technica] Medieval women’s early involvement in manuscript production suggested by lapis lazuli identification in dental calculus [Science Advances | Anthropology - full paper] [more inside]
an evolutionary cyclic approach to data-sharing
Alice goes to the hospital in the United States. Her doctor and health insurance company know the details ― and often, so does her state government. Thirty-three of the states that know those details do not keep the information to themselves or limit their sharing to researchers . Instead, they give away or sell a version of this information, and often they’re legally required to do so. The states turn to you as a computer scientist, IT specialist, policy expert, consultant, or privacy officer and ask, are the data anonymous? Can anyone be identified? Chances are you have no idea whether real-world risks exist. Here is how I matched patient names to publicly available health data sold by Washington State, and how the state responded. Doing this kind of experiment helps improve data-sharing practices, reduce privacy risks, and encourage the development of better technological solutions.- Only You, Your Doctor, and Many Others May Know, Latanya Sweeney . Technology Science. 2015092903. September 29, 2015. [more inside]
Well, do they?
Upon observing the behavior of his Welsh corgi, Elvis, when chasing a thrown tennis ball, Professor Tim Pennings asked: Do Dogs Know Calculus? [PDF] [more inside]
Humongous fungus: ancient invaders of old-growth forests
In 1992, Anderson and his colleagues estimated that the honey mushroom, which is growing in a forest on Michigan's Upper Peninsula, was 1,500 years old, weighed 100,000 kilograms (~220,460 pounds or ~110 tons) and covered 15 hectares (~37 acres). Based on additional samples taken between 2015 and 2017, the new estimate is that this mushroom is at least 2,500 years old, weighs 400,000 kilograms (881,849 lb or ~441 tons) and covers about 70 hectares (~173 acres) (Phys.org). According to the researchers, "any temporally continuous forest could support large , old Armillaria individuals," and this isn't the biggest, or oldest (BBC; previously). Worse, Armillaria doesn't share well, and tends to kill off trees. The Secrets of the 'Humongous Fungus' (The Atlantic).
A painting as habitat: art as food to eat and protect, by microbes
If you could zoom in for a microscopic look at an oil painting on canvas, you would see many thin, overlapping layers of pigments—powdered bits of insects, plants, or minerals—held together with oils or glue made from animal collagens. Many of those pigments and binding materials are surprisingly edible to bacteria and fungi. Each patch of color and each layer of paint and varnish in an oil painting offers a different microbial habitat. So when you look at a painting, you’re not just looking at a work of art; you’re looking at a whole ecosystem. What’s eating this 400-year-old painting? A whole ecosystem of microbes (Kiona N. Smith for Ars Technica, on a study of the microbes on a Renaissance painting called “Incoronazione della Virgine,” by painter Carlo Bononi) [more inside]
Coffee + (short) Nap = new, improved Coffee Nap
Scientists agree: Coffee naps are better than coffee or naps alone (short Vox explainer video; related article with links to the three studies cited)
Bad medicine sings false
Musical instrument goes flat in presence of adulterated medicine (Ars Technica). Heran C. Bhakta, Vamsi K. Choday, and William H. Grover at the Grover Lab in the Department of Bioengineering, University of California, Riverside have figured out a way to modify an mbira to turn the instrument into or allow people to make an inexpensive sensor, when paired with a digital audio recorder, such as an iOS or Android phone, and the lab's online sound analysis tool. Full description in their paper Musical Instruments As Sensors (ACS Omega, 2018, DOI: 10.1021/acsomega.8b01673). [more inside]
we all fall down
Humanity has left a world-wide mark on the planet, in trees, rocks, coral, and lifeforms. We can call this era the Anthropocene, a period of time distinguished by our presence and effects. And one of most terrific results is our head-long plunge into the Sixth Mass Extinction. [more inside]