Sapere Aude
Tag: science
A dinosaur fossil that was discovered in a bitumen pit in Alberta, Canada, in 2011 is the best-preserved specimen of a nodosaur ever discovered, and it is truly a spectacle to behold. The herbivore died 110 ma BP in a riverbed and was swept to sea where it was swiftly buried in the mud and sediment of the seabed. Resting on its back, the nodosaur’s soft tissues, armor plating and thorny ridges became mineralized, preserving its form in stone.
I’m making the matrix reference so you don’t have to.
Fetal lambs lived for weeks in a fluid-filled bag. Tests to help premature babies could begin in 3 years. The device, eyed as an improvement over incubators, kept fetal animals alive using a sterile, temperature-controlled plastic bag filled with amniotic fluid.
2022-06-02: Given that most countries are now below replacement fertility rates, we should be strongly in favor of Ectogenesis, on top of many other good reasons.
Horseshoe crab blood is an irreplaceable medical marvel—and so biomedical companies are bleeding 500K every year. Can this creature that’s been around since the dinosaurs be saved? He’d like to eventually take some of his discoveries to the medical labs with the hope that they can improve their bleeding practices. If we know the bleeding process reduces the crab’s hemocyanin, which compromises their immune system, feeding them a diet of copper before they are returned to the water might help bring their hemocyanin levels back up. He’d like to sell the idea to the bleeding labs. But to date, his attempts to reach them, —even to simply confirm that their bleeding simulations are accurate —have gone unanswered.
The scientists expected that the knots would come undone slowly. But their slow-motion footage — focused on the shoelaces of a runner on a treadmill — showed that the knots rapidly failed within 1 or 2 strides. To figure out why, O’Reilly and his colleagues used an accelerometer on the tongue of a shoe to measure the forces acting on a knot. They found that when walking, the combined impact and acceleration on a shoelace totals a whopping 7G
the motions of the Local Group—the cluster of galaxies that includes the Milky Way—are being driven by 2 primary sources, the previously known and incredibly massive Shapley Supercluster (Great Attractor) and a newly discovered repeller, which the researchers dub the Dipole Repeller.
By rights, the Martian atmosphere should have been scrubbed of its methane eons ago. So, the methane we see must come either from a source that is producing methane today or from a subsurface reservoir that is venting methane produced sometime in the past. On Earth, 95% of methane is biological in origin.
abundance everywhere
a team of planetary scientists have come together to propose a new meaning for the term “planet”. Based on their geophysical definition, the term would apply to over 100 bodies in the Solar System, including the Moon itself.
It is estimated that there may be 200 dwarf planets in the Kuiper belt of the outer Solar System and possibly more than 10K in the region beyond
On March 5, 1973, 30 people headed out to a farm in Ossineke, Michigan, to witness an unusual event: the burial of an estimated 30K frozen, family-size mushroom pizzas. The mood was somber, and a little cheesy. The Governor of Michigan gave a brief homily “on courage in the face of tragedy,” before bulldozers began shoving pizzas into an 6m hole.
We finally realize the promise of conditional computation, achieving greater than 1000x improvements in model capacity with only minor losses in computational efficiency on modern GPU clusters. We introduce a Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts layer (MoE), consisting of up to 1000s of feed-forward sub-networks. We present model architectures in which a MoE with up to 137B parameters is applied convolutionally between stacked LSTM layers. On large language modeling and machine translation benchmarks, these models achieve significantly better results than state-of-the-art at lower computational cost.
Monte Testaccio is an artificial mound in Rome composed almost entirely of fragments of broken amphorae dating from the time of the Roman Empire. It is one of the largest spoil heaps found anywhere in the ancient world, covering an area of 20k m2 at its base and with a volume of 580k cubic m, containing the remains of an estimated 53m amphorae. It has a circumference of nearly 1km and stands 35m high, though it was probably considerably higher in ancient times.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 