science

A tweet thread by the author...

My new article just got released in Science Advances today. The article is open access. I try to both describe the nature of America's "systemically high poverty" and review explanations of it.

By "systemically high" I mean U.S. poverty is (i) a huge share of the pop., (ii) a perennial outlier among rich democ's; (iii) staggeringly high for certain groups, (iv) unexpectedly high even among those who "play by the rules," & (v) pervasive across various groups & places.

I critique 3 prevailing approaches focused on the poor not poverty. First, behavioralists aim to "fix" the poor, but cannot explain macro-level variation, the causality bw behaviors & poverty is questionable, & wrongly focus on prevalences but neglect the more salient penalties.

Second, "dramatizing the poor" aims to elicit emotion and compassion through humanizing narratives. But, this approach overemphasizes unrepresentative groups of the poor, disproportionately focuses on symptoms rather than underlying causes, & downplays effective social policies.

Third, "culturalists" "fix" AND "dramatize" - claiming pathological culture -> counterproductive behavior -> poverty. This is "hopelessly endogenous", & suffers from selection biases & subjective biases, & lacks contrast against rival explanations & comparison groups.

Rather than these prevailing approaches focused on the poor, I advance political explanations aiming to explain America's systemically high poverty. According to political explanations, power, policies, and institutions are the pivotal cause of poverty.

Political explanations emphasize: (1) the essential role of social policy, (2) political choices to penalize risks, (3) power resources of collective political actors, and (4) institutions.

Over the past couple of years, I've been posting drafts of some of the figures that ended up in this piece. Here are a few of the ones I'd highlight now:

[charts]

Nitter

by Christie Wilcox

Nearly everyone has fun on a carousel—including, possibly, fruit flies. Scientists observed some flies embarking on a spinning platform voluntarily and repeatedly, suggesting the animals may find the movement appealing for some reason, according to a study posted on the bioRxiv preprint server earlier this month.

“The flies are fulfilling all the criteria of play as we understand it in other animals,” says Samadi Galpayage, a behavioral scientist at Queen Mary University of London who discovered bumble bees play with objects and who was not involved in the work. “There isn't really an alternative explanation so far. Whether that’s [evidence of] fun in itself—that’s the next question.”

Sergio Pellis, a behavioral scientist at the University of Lethbridge, says he finds the study—which has yet to be peer reviewed—“very exciting.” If confirmed, he notes, it would add to the small but growing pile of evidence for play in invertebrates—and would be the first instance of a type called “locomotor play” in these animals. Locomotor play involves the movement of one’s own body, such as running, jumping, or swinging. It’s different from object play, as bees have been observed doing, or social play, which has been observed in certain wasps and spiders.

The idea behind the study was inspired, ultimately, by a duck. Years before co-author Wolf Hütteroth became a neurobiologist, he remembers one day seeing a lone duck floating down a fast-moving river. Just as the animal was nearly out of sight, it flew back upriver, alit on the water, and floated back down—over and over again. “I never stopped wondering what motivated the duck to perform such curious behavior,” he says.

In February 2016, Hütteroth attended a symposium where researchers were discussing whether insects can act with intention. He pondered how to test whether flies would do something similar to the rapids-running duck.

He and Tilman Triphan, a colleague then at the University of Konstanz, decided to build a carousel of sorts. They’d offer male laboratory fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) the chance to hop onto a spinning section of floor in a stress-free, if otherwise unexciting, environment. He didn’t think the flies would actually go for it. “My expectations were extremely low,” he says. Some of the flies ignored the contraption. But a small group of them acted as if they’d just discovered Disneyland.

Triphan and Hütteroth—who have both since moved to the University of Leipzig—report in their preprint that a subset of the flies spent 5% or more of their time on the turning wheel. When the researchers put two disks in the arena that alternated spinning every 5 minutes, some flies spent their time bouncing back and forth between whichever carousel was spinning.

Fruit flies are excellent spatial learners, Hütteroth notes, so if they didn’t like to spin, they could have simply avoided the disk, as some did. The majority were somewhere in between—not overly enthusiastic, but also not avoidant of the spinning disks.

So, were the flies riding the carousels—for lack of a better word—playing? It’s certainly possible, Pellis says. “It’s clear that at least some of the flies are engaging in this locomotor behavior just for the hell of it.”

The fact that some flies apparently liked the carousel and others didn’t came as no surprise to University of Tennessee, Knoxville, behavioral scientist Gordon Burghardt, an expert on play in nonhuman animals who wasn’t involved in the study. “You take a bunch of kids to the fairground, and some are really anxious to get on the rides while others are a little more hesitant.”

Still, Hütteroth hesitates to claim the flies were having fun. After all, the flies didn’t reveal their motivations to the researchers. But to Pellis and Burghardt, the idea isn’t so crazy. According to Burghardt, the flies could be experiencing something akin to what we feel when we ride a roller coaster or go down a slide. “I see no reason why other species, even invertebrates, could not share in this aspect of life,” he says.

The next steps in solving this riddle may come from studying the flies’ brains to uncover the neural circuitry involved in the carousel behavior, Hütteroth says. Such research could help explain what benefit flies—or any other animal—might derive from locomotor play. “What is the adaptive value of this kind of play behavior? Is it good for anything?” Hütteroth asks. For example, does it perhaps refine an animal’s perception of their own body, a sense known as proprioception?

Pellis notes there has been resistance to the idea that animals outside of mammals engage in play. He recalls research in the 1970s on roughhousing in cockroaches, for example, that would immediately be considered an example of play if puppies were doing it. Now, he says, there are enough solid examples of play in other species that it makes sense to ask just how widespread various kinds of play are across the animal kingdom.

Ultimately, the findings suggest locomotor play “might really be deeply rooted in our evolutionary history,” Burghardt says. So, it’s possible it’s happening all around us—and we’ve just been too focused on the playful antics of furry critters to notice.

Disappointed to be wrong, but intrigued about further developments coming from these findings

Stegodyphus dumicola, commonly known as the African social spider, is a species of spider of the family Eresidae or the velvet spider family. It is native to Central and southern Africa. This spider is one of three Stegodyphus spiders that lives a social lifestyle (S. lineatus, S. mimosarum, S. dumicola). This spider has been studied living in large natal colonies (ranging from tens to hundreds of highly related spiders) in large, unkempt webs. Each colony is composed mainly of females, where a minority (forty percent) act as reproducers, and a majority (sixty percent) remain childless and take care of the young. Males live a shorter lifespan and will largely remain in the natal nest throughout its life. Females are known for extreme allomaternal care, since all females, even unmated virgin females will take care of the young until they are eventually consumed by the brood.

The Stegodyphus dumicola is one of only twenty to thirty spider species that is considered social. Sociality in spiders is defined as cooperative breeding in spiders that are non-territorial and permanently social. Although the Stegodyphus dumicola, mainly live-in groups, they have also been found to live solitarily. The Stegodyphus dumicola groups range from a few individuals to a few hundred spiders. They colonize, construct, and maintain the same web. They cooperate in childcare and gathering prey. Spiders will tend to live in the same colony they were born in, leading to a group that is made of several generations of related individuals. Foraging behavior has been observed to be equally divided amongst members of the colony.

Group foraging behavior varies between colonies of different size and composition. It is more likely that smaller colonies will initiate attack early and begin an attack more quickly than larger colonies. If a group has a wide range in spider behavior or boldness level personality types, the group was found to initiate a response more quickly to prey. If a group was made of spiders that were morphologically diverse (varying prosoma width), they also mounted a faster attack.

Within the large, webbed nest, several prey-capture regions are interspersed within housing tunnels. Spiders are compelled to retrieve snagged prey upon vibratory cues. The Stegodyphus dumicola have been found to follow a “shy” and a “bold” personality, where shy spiders are latent and do not respond to prey capture stimuli, and bold spiders are active and seek to forage. Smaller spiders tend to have a bold personality.

Bagheera kiplingi is a species of jumping spider found in Central America, including Mexico, Costa Rica, and Guatemala. It is the type species of the genus Bagheera, which includes three other species, including B. prosper.

B. kiplingi is notable for its peculiar diet, which is mostly herbivorous. No other known species of omnivorous spider has such a markedly herbivorous diet.

Bagheera kiplingi is a colorful, sexually dimorphic species. The male has amber legs, a dark cephalothorax that is greenish in the upper region near the front, and a slender reddish abdomen with green transversal lines. The female's amber front legs are sturdier than the other, slender legs, which are light yellow. It has a reddish-brown cephalothorax with the top region near the front black. The female's rather large abdomen is light brown with dark brown and greenish markings.

Bagheera kiplingi inhabits Mimosaceae trees, Vachellia in particular, where it consumes specialized protein- and fat-rich nubs called Beltian bodies. The nubs form at the leaf tips of the acacia as part of a symbiotic relationship with certain species of ants. The spiders actively avoid the ants that attempt to guard the Beltian bodies (their food source) against intruders. Although the Beltian bodies account for over 90% of B. kiplingi diet, the spiders also consume nectar and occasionally steal ant larvae from passing worker ants for food. Sometimes, they cannibalize conspecifics, especially during the dry season.

Despite their occasional acts of predation, the spiders' tissues have been found to exhibit isotopic signatures typical of herbivorous animals, implying that most of their food comes from plants. The mechanism by which they process, ingest, and metabolize the Beltian bodies is still unresearched. The vast majority of spiders liquefy their prey using digestive enzymes before sucking it in.

The degree of herbivory varies depending on environment. In Mexico, B. kiplingi inhabit more than 50% of Vachellia collinsii trees and feed almost exclusively on an herbivorous diet. In Costa Rica, the B. kiplingi population inhabit less than 5% of Acacia trees and their diet is less herbivorous. Although this species is mostly territorial and forages solitarily, populations of several hundred specimens have been found on individual acacias in Mexico, with more than twice as many females as males. B. kiplingi appears to breed throughout the year. Observations of adult females guarding hatchlings and clutches suggest that the species is quasisocial.

Bulbasaurus (meaning "bulbous reptile") is an extinct genus of dicynodont that is known from the Lopingian epoch of the Late Permian period of what is now South Africa, containing the type and only species B. phylloxyron. It was formerly considered as belonging to Tropidostoma; however, due to numerous differences from Tropidostoma in terms of skull morphology and size, it has been reclassified the earliest known member of the family Geikiidae, and the only member of the group known from the Tropidostoma Assemblage Zone. Within the Geikiidae, it has been placed close to Aulacocephalodon, although a more basal position is not implausible.

Bulbasaurus was ostensibly not directly named after the Pokémon Bulbasaur, but rather after its nasal bosses, which are unusually bulbous among geikiids; however, the describers noted that the similarity in name "may not be entirely coincidental." Additionally, the specific name of the type species means "leaf razor", which is most directly a reference to its keratin-covered jaws. Other distinguishing characteristics of Bulbasaurus among the geikiids include the hook-like beak, very large tusks, and absence of bossing on the prefrontal bone.

Bulbasaurus was described by Christian Kammerer and Smith in 2017. The description states that the generic name combines the Latin bulbus, referring to the very large and bulbous nasal bosses, with the common suffix -saurus. As for the specific name phylloxyron, meaning literally "leaf razor", it is derived from the Greek phyllos and xyron, and apparently refers to the keratinous covering on the premaxilla, maxilla, and palate that would have been used to shear plant material. Thus, as published, the name of Bulbasaurus does not directly refer to Pokémon, or specifically the similarly-named Bulbasaur. However, Kammerer noted that "if one wished to read between the lines concerning certain similarities, I wouldn't stop them", and later added that "similarities between this species and certain other squat, tusked quadrupeds may not be entirely coincidental."

The images we have nowadays are of course significantly clearer, but there's something about this low quality photo that is far more awe inspiring given the context.

It's a brief impression of something that no creature on Earth was ever meant to see. Nearly every Earthling has seen the near side of the moon, but the far side was supposed to be forever just out of reach. A sort of forbidden knowledge that we nevertheless barely obtained by the skin of our teeth through monumental scientific and engineering progress that would have been unthinkable for the vast majority of human history.

I can't imagine what went through the minds of the very first people to view this image after compiling the raw data from Luna 3's instruments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_3

[Fermilab scientists] have found more evidence that sub-atomic particles, called muons, are not behaving in the way predicted by the current theory of sub-atomic physics.

Scientists believe that an unknown force could be acting on the muons.

All of the forces we experience every day can be reduced to just four categories: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force. These four fundamental forces govern how all the objects and particles in the Universe interact with each other.

The findings have been made at a US particle accelerator facility called Fermilab. They build on results announced in 2021 in which the Fermilab team first suggested the possibility of a fifth force of nature.

Xavier Hernandez, professor at UNAM in Mexico who first suggested wide binary tests of gravity a decade ago, says, "It is exciting that the departure from Newtonian gravity that my group has claimed for some time has now been independently confirmed, and impressive that this departure has for the first time been correctly identified as accurately corresponding to a detailed MOND model. The unprecedented accuracy of the Gaia satellite, the large and meticulously selected sample Chae uses and his detailed analysis, make his results sufficiently robust to qualify as a discovery."

Pavel Kroupa, professor at Bonn University and at Charles University in Prague, has come to the same conclusions concerning the law of gravitation. He says, "With this test on wide binaries as well as our tests on open star clusters nearby the sun, the data now compellingly imply that gravitation is Milgromian rather than Newtonian. The implications for all of astrophysics are immense."

This perfect lad is Perucetus Colossus, a newly discovered 39-37 million year old fossil of an extinct whale that was even heavier than todays blue whale.

Look at that tiny head, remarkable.

[Wikipedia:]

Perucetus is an extinct genus of early whale from the Eocene of Peru. With an estimated length exceeding 17.0–20.1 meters (55.8–65.9 ft) and weight ranging from 85–340 t (84–335 long tons; 94–375 short tons), Perucetus may have rivalled, if not exceeded, the modern blue whale in weight. This is in part due to the incredibly thick and dense bones this animal possessed, coupled with its already great size. The ecology of Perucetus, however, remains largely mysterious. Based on the fossils, it was likely a slow-moving inhabitant of shallow waters. Its diet can only be speculated upon, but one suggestion proposes that it may have fed on benthic animals like crustaceans and molluscs that live on the ocean floor. Only a single species is currently known, P. colossus.

The most characteristic feature of Perucetus is the high degree of pachyosteosclerosis present in the bones of the body, which means that the bones are simultaneously thicker (pachyostotic) and denser (osteosclerotic) than in any other known cetacean. Due to pachyostosis, the vertebrae are greatly inflated, making them nearly twice as voluminous as those of a 25 m (82 ft) long blue whale. The increase in bone mass is also observed in the microanatomy of the bone. The ribs are entirely composed of dense bone and lack the medullary cavity seen in the bones of other animals. The vascular channels that penetrate the bone are narrow, not only indicating the maturity of the animal but also adding to the already dense nature of the bones.

Perucetus may have ranged in weight from 85–340 t (84–335 long tons; 94–375 short tons) with an average of 180 t (180 long tons; 200 short tons). The 17–20-meter (56–66 ft) skeletal structure alone would have accounted for 5.3–7.6 t (5.2–7.5 long tons; 5.8–8.4 short tons), which is already two to three times the weight of the skeleton of a 25 m (82 ft) long blue whale. The weight estimates are based around the relation between skeletal and total body mass of modern mammals. Notably, whales have much lighter skeletons compared to their total mass, whereas sirenians (dugongs and manatees) are similar to land mammals in having much denser skeletons that contribute more to their total weight. Bianucci and colleagues note the difficulties in determining the weight of basilosaurids. They suggest that the increase in skeletal mass could have been compensated for by larger amounts of blubber, which is less dense than other soft tissue. Ultimately, extreme values were used in the calculations, leading to the wide range for the weight estimate present in the type description. Basing the math on sirenians, a weight of 85 t (84 long tons; 94 short tons) was calculated. Combining the lowest skeletal-weight–to–total-weight ratio found in cetaceans with the highest estimated skeletal mass yields a weight of up to 340 t (330 long tons; 370 short tons). Mean values, on the other hand, result in a weight of 180 t (180 long tons; 200 short tons). This may indicate that, although not as long, the species could have been heavier than modern blue whales.

The immense size and bone density both make it impossible for Perucetus to have gone on land, which is in line with its classification as a basilosaurid. The pachyosteosclerosis is taken as a sign that Perucetus lived in shallow waters, using it as buoyancy control as modern manatees do. Given its size and weight, Perucetus could have resisted crashing waves in more turbulent waters, something inferred for the similarly buoyant Steller's sea cow. The animal's affinity for shallow waters is congruent with the interpretation that basilosaurids preferred coastal waters, rather than living in the open ocean.

While the fragmentary nature of this animal renders precise statements on its locomotion uncertain, some suggestions have been made. The elongated centra of the vertebrae for instance may suggest that it, like manatees but not dugongs, swam with the use of axial undulation. This further indicates shallow waters rather than pelagic habitats for the animal. The great size of the vertebrae does impose limits on the swimming style of Perucetus, as does the shape of the transverse processes of the vertebrae. Using the methods of a previous study would suggest that Perucetus was limited in its ability to flex upwards and from side to side but possessed an increased ability to flex downward (ventrally). This could suggest that Perucetus swam with slow up and down movements of its tail while not making use of any side to side movements as has been suggested for Basilosaurus. The strong ventral flexion in particular may have been of great importance for the animal when pushing itself off the ocean floor in order to breathe at the surface. The precise function of this combination of pachyosteosclerosis and gigantism is not fully understood, but may be linked to the energetic cost of undulating movements or the ability to dive for longer periods of time.

The diet and feeding style remain even more mysterious, since no skull material of this animal is currently known. Still, some possibilities can be inferred based on the lifestyle deduced from the postcrania. While the many noted similarities to sirenians could be taken as a sign of a grazing lifestyle, this notion is deemed unlikely, as no other cetacean is known to have been herbivorous. It is deemed more likely that Perucetus fed on molluscs, crustaceans and other animals on the sea floor, either through suction feeding or filter feeding. Such a lifestyle would be comparable to that of the modern grey whale. Another hypothesis mentioned by Bianucci et al. is that Perucetus could have been a scavenger like large demersal sharks. Ultimately, until better material is found, the precise ecology of Perucetus will remain unknown.

My new favorite extinct animal. No one steal him, hes my new best friend.

Here, let's have Walter White explain things...

...Nah jk, it's just Sabine Hossenfelder.

Astronomers had once calculated that billions of planets had gone rogue in the Milky Way. Now, scientists at NASA and Osaka University in Japan are upping the estimate to trillions. Detailed in two papers accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal, the researchers have deduced that these planets are six times more abundant than worlds orbiting their own suns, and they identified the second Earth-size free floater ever detected.

[...]

Previous findings suggested that most of these planets were about the size of Jupiter, our solar system’s most massive planet. But that conclusion garnered a lot of pushback. [...] They estimate that there are about 20 times more free-floating worlds in our Milky Way than stars, with Earth-mass planets 180 times more common than rogue Jupiters.

[...]

Could any of these planets be habitable? Possibly, Dr. Bennett surmised, explaining that they’d be dark without a host star, but not necessarily frigid. Hydrogen in a planet’s atmosphere could act like a greenhouse and trap heat emanating from its interior — which is what sustains microbial life in deep sea vents on Earth.

[...]

The team didn’t look beyond the bounds of the Milky Way. “But we expect that other galaxies are pretty similar,” Dr. Bennett said — meaning that these outcasts might be sprinkled across our entire universe.

Scientists excavating in a Peruvian desert have found the fossilized bones of what they argue may have been the heaviest animal ever to live: a strange ancient whale that may have had a teensy head attached to a giant, bloated body.

The long-lost whale, now dubbed Perucetus colossus, had a skeleton that may have weighed two to three times that of a blue whale. Tipping the scales at up to 330,000 pounds, the blue whale is the heaviest animal alive today. Until now, paleontologists hadn’t found anything that could even compare to that behemoth.

“It’s an extraordinary claim—the heaviest animal yet described—so that requires pretty extraordinary evidence, and I think they convincingly demonstrated that,” says Annalisa Berta, a retired paleontologist and a professor emerita at San Diego State University, who was not involved in the new research. The study was published on August 2 in the journal Nature.

Paleontologist and study co-author Mario Urbina first stumbled on one of P. colossus’s vertebrae around a decade ago, says his colleague Rodolfo Salas-Gismondi, a paleontologist at Cayetano Heredia University in Peru, who is also a co-author of the paper. Urbina believed he’d found a fossil, but Salas-Gismondi wasn’t convinced. “I was skeptical about these fossils. I said to him, ‘It doesn’t look like real bone,’” Salas-Gismondi says, noting that the structure of the bone was very different from most finds. “It looked like a rock, in fact.”

But analyses showed that Urbina was correct. And since the initial find, the team has excavated 13 vertebrae, four ribs and part of a hip. The vertebrae are so weighty that the team could excavate only one or two each year, Salas-Gismondi says. “An animal of this size has never been found before in the fossil record anywhere in the world,” he says.

Other scientists agree that the bones are unprecedented. “It’s an astonishing specimen,” says Philip Gingerich, a paleontologist at the University of Michigan, who was not involved in the new research. “These vertebrae are nearly the size of beer kegs or something. They’re unlike anything certainly that I’ve ever seen—that anyone’s ever seen.”

As described by Salas-Gismondi and his colleagues, the fossils are extremely massive in two different ways. First, they are particularly dense. Bones usually have a spongy structure, but these have deposits filling those pores—hence his initial reaction that the vertebra fossil looked like a rock. Second, the bones are large and look like they’ve been inflated.

“It’s just incredibly bulbous,” says Emily Buchholtz, a paleontologist at Wellesley College, referring to a vertebra pictured in the paper. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she adds, noting that blue whale vertebrae are also massive but sleek, whereas the bones of P. colossus are swollen.

Salas-Gismondi and his colleagues argue that the bones’ incredible mass represents an adaptation to coastal living in shallow waters. The dense bones, the researchers say, balanced the buoyancy of blubber and lungs filled with air—essentially they acted as ballast to let P. colossus whales remain underwater with less effort. “Scuba divers put on weight belts,” Berta says. “What these whales did was: they increased the density of their bones.”

The bones are nearly 40 million years old, which means the bizarre animal would have swam the seas just a couple of million years before primitive whales began their evolutionary split into the toothed and baleen whales we know today.

But scientists can’t know what P. colossus ate—or much else about how it lived—because they have only excavated the core of the body. “They’ve got the middle of the skeleton. I think they need the front end of it or the back end of it before we’ll really understand what this thing was doing,” Gingerich says. newsletter promo

For now, the researchers have filled in the gaps about P. colossus’s appearance by using what they know from its less extreme relatives. These animals tended to have a small head, which the scientists incorporated into the reconstruction, although they emphasize that the picture is speculative.

All known cetaceans—whales, dolphins and porpoises—are carnivores, so the scientists assume the massive whale was, too. But it would have needed an incredible amount of fuel to survive. Today’s blue whales eat tiny crustaceans called krill. The whales feast on massive numbers of krill to make up for their meager serving size, but near-coast waters can’t support large populations of animals, even small ones.

“I do like the hypothesis of a large scavenger that would just eat sunken carcasses,” says study co-author Eli Amson, a paleontologist at the State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart in Germany. “But it would be a first for a cetacean; that’s really weird.” Another possibility is that P. colossus was vegetarian like the manatees whose silhouette it echoes, although Amson says that would be even stranger. But without teeth or a jaw, everything is guesswork.

The skeleton was found with its head pointing into a hillside, and the researchers still hope to find the funding to uncover more of the lost animal. In the meantime, the bones excavated to date will reside at the Natural History Museum in Lima, Peru, where both Salas-Gismondi and Urbina work. There they will first be on display for a few months and will then move behind the scenes.

And scientists will continue to marvel at the evolutionary mysteries the bones pose. “Basically,” Buchholtz says, “my entire reaction to this is: ‘Oh wow. Oh wow.’”

Largest animal ever?

Interesting analysis from my favorite severe no nonsense physics youtuber gal (who also used to randomly post vids of her doing cover songs to peoples' general confusion lol).

Good bit at the end speculating on the material economic basis for this (useless) way of doing science. People make careers on this fluff that amounts to nothing.