Drive by science

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by Ari

Yes it’s an hour and a half long but

[JoeP]

Eurasian jays shun reward for tastier delayed treat, study finds | Birds | The Guardian

Interesting

Birds showing most self-control score higher in cognitive tests, suggesting they are more intelligent

OK now I feel attacked

[JoeP]

Boy's discovery reveals highly complex plant-insect interaction

Some plants produce nutritious caps on their seeds to encourage ants to take them back to their nests, spreading them.

Gall wasps get oaks to produce galls with nutritious caps to get their larvae taken to the safety of the ant nest.

[JoeP]

: About two quettagrams

[ceptimus]

Originally Posted by JoeP

: About two quettagrams

Convention dictates that the larger prefixes end in an A, and the smaller ones in an O.

...except for kilo, of course, which should really be kila, by that convention. Also conventional is that multiplying prefixes are shortened to a capital letter, and dividing ones to a lower case letter. So we have, for example, GW for gigawatts, and pW for picowatts. But again, kilo is a non-conformist, and we usually write kg for kilograms - not Kg.

There are other non-conforming prefixes: most notably, milli should be millo. hecto, deci, and centi also don't conform - but they're not for powers that are multiples of three anyway - so we try to ignore them

[LarsMac]

That's some heavy shit.

[ceptimus]

Today's Google Doodle celebrates Marie Tharp, an American oceanic cartographer whose work helped to prove the theory of continental drift.

https://www.google.com/doodles/celebrating-marie-tharp

The animations have sound, but annoyingly the sonar sound is wrong: it has the ship 'hearing' the sonar echo when the sound waves hit the sea bottom; in reality, of course, the ship only hears the sound after it has travelled back to the ship.

It seems strange that someone would go to all the trouble of making this Doodle, and make such a fundamental mistake. Seems it was made by an artist rather than a scientist or engineer, but you would have thought that someone at a tech company, like Google, would have pointed out the error and had the artist correct it, before publishing.

Also, the animation of what I think is supposed to show the rotating Earth, is terrible - scrolling a Mercator projection across a circular disc, so the perspective is entirely wrong.

Try harder, Google.

[BrotherMan]

They never should have let steve go. This never happened when they worked there.

[Ensign Steve]

scrolling a Mercator projection across a circular disc

I dunno, that's a pretty hilarious troll.

[Ari]

More like drive by math, this was exceptional, it’s all about curvy lines and how to math them.

The Continuity of Splines - YouTube

[Ensign Steve]

That showed up on my feed but I didn't trust an unfamiliar channel enough to dive into an hour+ video. I'm glad you recommend it, it was worth going back for.

[JoeP]

Scientists claim first discovery of mammal eaten by dinosaur | Dinosaurs | The Guardian

Microraptors lived in the ancient forests of what is now China, somewhere between 125m and 113m years ago.

They were the size of crows, or small cats, and moved from tree to tree to prey on small animals.

[JoeP]

Miisa spotted this but I claim the credit for finding an English language version.

Our Body Temperatures Have Grown Colder Since the 19th Century

Today's standard temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit may not be correct.

"Inflammation produces all sorts of proteins and cytokines that rev up your metabolism and raise your temperature," Parsonnet said.

There is no doubt that today we have much better public health than 200 years ago. We also live more comfortable lives at constant ambient temperature reducing inflammation and other health problems.

So in fact, "healthy" body temperature may be lower than we thought - it's just that we were all fighting infection and ambient cold most of the time.

Scholarly article:
Decreasing human body temperature in the United States since the Industrial Revolution | eLife

mean body temperature in men and women, after adjusting for age, height, weight and, in some models date and time of day, has decreased monotonically by 0.03°C per birth decade

The science uses °C whereas the dumbed-down version uses F.

[Ensign Steve]

Freedom units!

[beyelzu]

How Cockatoos Outsmart Humans To Open Trash Bins...

[Ari]

Future avian archeologists should feel extremely lucky the extinct monkey’s cataloged their evolution so effectively.

(Also if I were to die by Otter attack, I want that on my tomb stone with a statue of a screaming Otter.)