science

In a new study released Wednesday, Kleinberger; Megan McMahon, an undergraduate studying behavioral neuroscience; and collaborators Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas at the University of Glasgow and Jennifer Cunha in Florida used a bare-bones, Balloon Pop-style tablet game to collect data on a group of 20 pet birds’ tactile interactions with their touchscreens.

Last year, the team showed a group of parrots how to video call one another, finding that the birds both overwhelmingly enjoyed the activity and could make the calls themselves, when given the option.

I never thought much about the insides of the gas giants but it's fascinating how the phase transitions are so discrete. I suppose that's to be expected given how phase transitions work. Water to steam is a binary, not a spectrum. But the planets themselves can be put on a spectrum of rocky to gaseous based on how much solid, liquid, and gas comprise them.

Gotta double check.

I'm a little perturbed by the meme phrasing in the title and how quickly I recognized it. But I guess they saw the opportunity and took it, even at the risk of looking unserious, in my view.

Some nice news for once :) I have devised a genius plan to end global warming, engineer a super coral that is photosynthetic and plant it everywhere. As it accumulates and deposits carbonate it will suck CO2 out of the ocean and therefore the atmosphere. We will end up living on gigantic coral structures because the sea level rose, but at least the corals will save us.

So as I understand it most covid rapid tests test for the nucleocapsid protein. But the nucleocapsid protein is generally enveloped by the viral envelope in covid, as I understand it. How then are antibodies able to bind to, and covid rapid tests able to detect, this nucleocapsid protein if it's enveloped by the viral envelope? Would it not be better to test for the spike protein or something else on the viral envelope itself?

I don't understand that much about virology etc. but I was reading about this and now I'm going down a rabbit hole and hoping someone can clear this up for me.

:shocked-pikachu: It turns out it was colonialism and unequal exchange all along.

There were article headlines and NPR shows about this like this 15 years ago.

National Geographic article from a few days ago

2009 Mother Jones article

Photo caption

Researchers at Hebrew University reconstructed the face of a Denisovan based on DNA alone. Almost no fossils of Denisovans have been found.

archive.today • On the Trail of the Denisovans - The New York Times

Neanderthals may have vanished 40,000 years ago, but they are no strangers to us today. Their stocky skeletons dazzle in museums around the world. Their imagined personas star in television ads. When Kevin Bacon noted on Instagram that his morning habits are like those of a Neanderthal, he did not stop to explain that our ancient cousins interbred with modern humans expanding out of Africa.

But there’s no such familiarity with the Denisovans, a group of humans that split from the Neanderthal line and survived for hundreds of thousands of years before going extinct. That’s largely because we have so few of their bones. In a new review paper, anthropologists tally all of the fossils that have been clearly identified as Denisovan since the first discovery in 2010. The entire list consists of half a broken jaw, a finger bone, a skull fragment, three loose teeth and four other chips of bone.

• Accelerating Arctic warming threatens to thaw more and more carbon-rich permafrost and release vast amounts of greenhouse gases into the Earth’s atmosphere, but scientists don’t know when such a tipping point event might occur.
• The potential for large and abrupt permafrost emissions adds urgency to better understanding the factors that could turn permafrost from a carbon sink into a carbon source.
• However, more than half of all Arctic permafrost lies under Russian soil, and a two-year freeze on collaborations between Russian scientists and the international scientific community — prompted by the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022 — is disrupting data flows and hamstringing the polar research community.
• Despite an uncertain geopolitical landscape, scientists are determined to close the data gap with work-arounds such as pivoting to “proxy” field sites, ramping up remote sensing with AI, and mining archived data for new insights. But reintegrating Russian research with other Arctic research is a priority of the scientific community.

Warming temperatures in the Arctic are accelerating the thaw of carbon-rich permafrost and threatening to add massive amounts of carbon dioxide and methane to an atmosphere already overheating from the buildup of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

More than half that permafrost lies beneath remote Russian soil, where scientists have long worked in an international research community that freely shared its field stations, climate sensors and data sets to better understand the rapidly changing polar region’s planetary impacts.

Researchers are especially eager to know when a dangerous tipping point may be reached that would trigger the release of vast amounts of greenhouse gases stored in frozen soils.

But then came the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and all that cooperation came to a halt, part of the fallout of Western sanctions on Russia. Since then, international researchers outside Russia have applied creative workarounds in order to continue their research, but problems remain.

full article

Things seem dire...

We must act now and do actual activism, imho.

Not just "educate" people on these issues.

Preexisting research into bugs circling lights was mainly to see what properties of the lights attracted the bugs, which is how we know that certain LED lights can prevent the bugs from flying towards it.

This study, however, showed that the bugs aren't trying to get to the light at all. The light triggers their dorsal reflex, causing them to recalibrate their sense of direction to keep the light at a fixed angle from their perspective. The bugs think they are going in a straight line, forever, and they never get to where they are going.

Sorry that the narrator has a super annoying voice

i never knew sharks and stingrays were closely related enough to cross breed. neat!