Octopus Overlords

Ralph-Wiggum wrote: ↑Sat Mar 30, 2019 9:36 am And while good science is published in all sorts of journals and PNAS is a highly regarded journal (although it has its own issues), a find of this magnitude almost certainly means that De Palma initially tried to publish in Nature and Science (a publication in one of those two journals almost guarantees getting a tenure-track job). If so, I'd be curious to know why reviewers from those journals rejected it...

The great white shark—a fast, powerful, 16-foot-long torpedo that’s armed to the teeth with teeth—has little to fear except fear itself. But also: killer whales.

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In October 1997, fishing vessels near Southeast Farallon Island observed a young white shark interrupting a pair of orcas that were eating a sea lion. One of the whales rammed and killed the shark, and the duo proceeded to eat its liver. More recently, after orcas passed by a South African beach, five great-white carcasses washed ashore. All were, suspiciously, missing their liver.

A great white’s liver can account for a quarter of its body weight, and is even richer in fats and oils than whale blubber. It’s “one of the densest sources of calories you can find in the ocean,” Jorgensen says. “The orcas know their business, and they know where that organ lies.”

Rather than ripping their prey apart, it seems that orcas can extract livers with surprising finesse, despite lacking arms and hands. No one has observed their technique, but the wounds on otherwise intact carcasses suggest that they bite their victims near their pectoral fins and then squeeze the liver out through the wounds. “It’s like squeezing toothpaste,” Jorgensen says.

Daehawk wrote: ↑Fri Apr 19, 2019 9:27 pm First movie I ever saw alone as a 8 year old...

Could Transparent Wood Become The Way We Build And Heat Our Homes?

Small amounts of cocaine, pesticides and other contaminants have been detected in U.K. freshwater shrimp.

"We found that the most frequently detected compounds were illicit drugs, including cocaine and ketamine and a banned pesticide, fenuron," said King's College London environmental toxicologist Thomas Miller.
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For years, scientists have found trace amounts of illicit drugs, pharmaceuticals and pesticides in drinking water around the world. A newer area of study is looking at how these chemicals impact wildlife living in these ecosystems.
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The researchers from King's College London and the University of Suffolk collected samples of Gammarus pulex shrimp in 15 locations in the county of Suffolk, northeast of London. They tested the shrimp for a wide range of pharmaceuticals, pesticides and illicit drugs.

Cocaine was found in samples at every single site. The researchers' paper, published recently in Environment International, says the concentration of cocaine did not fluctuate much between sites, "showing widespread contamination."

Lidocaine, which is used as a local anesthetic and sometimes in tandem with cocaine, was the second most common substance found. The study also detected ketamine, alprazolam and diazepam.
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The researchers also found traces of pesticides that are currently banned in the U.K., such as fenuron. Barron added: "The presence of pesticides which have long been banned in the UK also poses a particular challenge as the sources of these remain unclear."
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Rosi concluded in a paper published last year that more than 60 pharmaceutical compounds could be detected in aquatic invertebrates and spiders in streams near Melbourne, Australia. In the Nature Communications study, her team also found that animals higher up the food chain like platypuses and gray trout "could in principle be exposed to certain drugs in their diets at levels comparable (up to 50%) to prescribed human doses."

A laser one-tenth of the sun’s power on Earth officially debuted in March when researchers in Romania ran the first successful test at 10 petawatts (PW). The laser is one of three in an international project in Europe known as Extreme Light Infrastructure. To date, it is the most powerful laser ever built, and it’s the most concentrated power on the planet.

It’s hard to overstate the enormity of 10PW, which equates to 10 million billion watts. It was only a few years ago that this site referred to a mere 1PW laser as a Death Star. The new one is 10 times as strong. As a point of comparison, laser pointers sold in the US are limited to being at most 0.005-watt for safety.

But rather than simply being structurally useful, the wood has some properties that could make it extremely useful as cladding, covering the exterior of a building. While most of the cellulose fibers are aligned along the grain of the wood, that alignment is very rough—there's plenty of variability in their orientation. That means light that strikes the processed wood will bounce around within a dense mesh of cellulose fibers, scattering widely in the process. The end result is a material that looks remarkably white, in the same way a sugar cube looks white even though each sugar crystal in it is transparent.

As a result, the material is really bad at absorbing sunlight, and thus it doesn't capture the heat in the same way regular wood does.

But it gets better. The sugars in cellulose are effective emitters of infrared radiation, and they do so in two areas of the spectrum where none of our atmospheric gases is able to reabsorb it. The end result is that, if the treated wood absorbs some of the heat of a structure, wood can radiate it away so that it leaves the planet entirely.

new study by researchers at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business has found that information acts on the brain’s dopamine-producing reward system in the same way as money or food.

“To the brain, information is its own reward, above and beyond whether it’s useful,” says Assoc. Prof. Ming Hsu, a neuroeconomist whose research employs functional magnetic imaging (fMRI), psychological theory, economic modeling, and machine learning. “And just as our brains like empty calories from junk food, they can overvalue information that makes us feel good but may not be useful—what some may call idle curiosity.”

The paper, “Common neural code for reward and information value,” was published this month by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Authored by Hsu and graduate student Kenji Kobayashi, now a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, it demonstrates that the brain converts information into the same common scale as it does for money. It also lays the groundwork for unraveling the neuroscience behind how we consume information—and perhaps even digital addiction.

The dimension of the problem is so large that it is possible our current era will generate an anthropogenic marker horizon of plastic in earth's sedimentary record. Here we present a new type of plastic pollution, the ‘plasticrusts’, plastic debris encrusting the rocky surface, recently discovered in the intertidal rocky shores of a volcanic Atlantic island.

Imagine a colony of yellow jackets the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, filled with 15,000 of the stinging insects. Now, imagine more than 90 of these super nests in Alabama. It happened in 2006, and Charles Ray, an entomologist working with the Alabama Cooperative Extension System, said that 2019 may be shaping up to mirror that year.

It’s called a perennial yellow jacket nest. Entomologists believe that milder winters combined with an abundant food supply allow some colonies to survive and enter spring with much larger numbers. Additionally, the normal cues that would cause queens to disperse may not happen. Researchers have documented that these massive colonies often have multiple queens.

To demonstrate the rapid decline, a lab technician holds up two bottles: one from 1994 contains 1,400 grammes of trapped insects, the newest one just 300 grammes.

The mirror world, assuming it exists, would have its own laws of mirror-physics and its own mirror-history. You wouldn’t find a mirror version of yourself there (and no evil Spock with a goatee — sorry "Star Trek" fans). But current theory allows that you might find mirror atoms and mirror rocks, maybe even mirror planets and stars. Collectively, they could form an entire shadow world, just as real as our own but almost completely cut off from us.

"Einstein couldn't accept this," J.C. Séamus Davis, a physicist at Cornell University who studies quantum mechanics, previously told Business Insider. "He essentially went to his grave not accepting this as fact, but it's now been shown millions of times to work."

Smoove_B wrote: ↑Mon Jul 01, 2019 2:05 pm Good luck Alabama residents. It would appear your yellow jacket overlords have come:

Imagine a colony of yellow jackets the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, filled with 15,000 of the stinging insects. Now, imagine more than 90 of these super nests in Alabama. It happened in 2006, and Charles Ray, an entomologist working with the Alabama Cooperative Extension System, said that 2019 may be shaping up to mirror that year.

So what's happening?

It’s called a perennial yellow jacket nest. Entomologists believe that milder winters combined with an abundant food supply allow some colonies to survive and enter spring with much larger numbers. Additionally, the normal cues that would cause queens to disperse may not happen. Researchers have documented that these massive colonies often have multiple queens.

More pictures in the cooperative extension link.

Etienne Burdet is one of those people. He’s a bioengineer at Imperial College London in England. His team worked with a 52-year-old woman and her 17-year-old son. Both were born with six fingers on each hand. Their extra fingers grew between the thumb and index finger. And they resemble thumbs in how they can move.

The researchers studied the anatomy of the subjects’ hands with magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI. It can map body structures. They also looked at activity in the parts of the brain that control the hands. Those scans revealed a dedicated brain system that controls the extra fingers. The sixth digits had their own muscles and tendons. That means they don’t just piggyback on the muscles that move the other fingers, as some doctors had thought.

Scientists from the national Forest Service announced Tuesday that they discovered a new species of beetle in Green-Wood Cemetery, claiming the insect touts a never-before-seen package that’s got biologists all worked up, according to a federal forestry technician.

“The male genitalia didn’t match anything we have on file,” said Marc DiGirolomo, the Forest Health Technician who first spotted the beetle, known as Agrilus 9898, during the Forest Service’s survey of the cemetery in 2017.