Tag: science

Underwater Pareidolia

They believe the structures began forming as early as 5M years ago, when a hidden rupture in the seabed sent methane and other gases bubbling upward. Microbes living in underwater sediment devoured the carbon in these gases, instigating a chemical process that gave the mud the consistency of cement. Hard columns formed around the gas seeps, and marine creatures boring into the sediment gave rise to other strange “doughnut” shapes

sometimes strangely geometric shapes have an entirely natural explanation

Evolutionary Biochemistry

Bloom and others are part of a growing group of scientists who practice “evolutionary biochemistry.” They seek to explain life’s tremendous diversity and determine exactly how that diversity emerged. Rather than focusing on how plants or animals adapted to different environments, however, these researchers consider diversity on a much smaller scale: Their work aims to explain how the small set of proteins that powered primitive life-forms evolved into the millions of specialized proteins that drive biological processes today.

Exploiting the genetic records, Bloom can assemble virus proteins that existed in bygone times, then reconstruct how they evolved, 1 amino acid at a time. Other researchers are analyzing modern species to resurrect the ancestral forms of biological molecules that have evolved over millions of years.

Beeeeees

“One theory was that the queen was trapped in my car and the swarm were following,. But they couldn’t find the queen anywhere so I’ve no idea if that was right. Apparently bees can swarm at this time of the year and it is a very strong instinct for them to follow the queen. I still don’t really understand why because they couldn’t see the queen anywhere. Perhaps they just like the heat of my car. It is possible the queen had been attracted to something in the car – perhaps a sweet or food in the car. ” The swarm of around 20K had followed her and were sat around on the boot of the car.


The level of eusociality required for this is breathtaking.
2022-12-02: How eusociality may have evolved

Ant pupae—which are equivalent to the chrysalis stage of the butterfly—produce a milklike substance derived from molting fluid that is eaten by both adult ants and larvae. Typically, when insects molt, they secrete a fluid that’s simply resorbed by the animal when the molt is complete. But in ants, this nutrition-rich substance serves as a kind of “metabolic currency” within the colony and may have played a role in the ants’ evolutionary transition from a group of loosely cooperating individuals into a truly integrated superorganism

Baby sideshow performers

Couney created and ran incubator-baby exhibits on the island from 1903 to the early 1940s, and though he died in relative obscurity, he was one of the great champions of this lifesaving technology and is credited with saving the lives of 1000s of the country’s premature babies.

this is a great example why the fight against luddites is always one of the most important

Pilot Wave Theory

The experiment that Steinberg and his team conducted was analogous to the standard 2-slit experiment. They used photons rather than electrons, and instead of sending those photons through a pair of slits, they passed through a beam splitter, a device that directs a photon along one of 2 paths, depending on the photon’s polarization. The photons eventually reach a single-photon camera (equivalent to the screen in the traditional experiment) that records their final position. The question “Which of 2 slits did the particle pass through?” becomes “Which of 2 paths did the photon take?”

Searching for Hannibal

this is insane:

they were scouting for a spot that could have been a watering hole during Hannibal’s era. they found a layer of “churned” soil they call the MAD, for “mass animal deposition”—a euphemism for dung. they discovered genetic material from several types of bacteria, including a high concentration of DNA fragments from Clostridia, which is frequently found in feces. Clostridia are pervasive in soil as well, but the team also detected fatty compounds that come from the gut. That combination is what they would expect to see in a place where a great number—100s if not 1000s—of mammals had defecated.