theperpetualscholar
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Latest Posts by theperpetualscholar
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker
THIS BOOK is life changing. (Even Bill Gates thought so!) I learned so much, and not just scientific facts that satisfy my curiosity. My (seemingly defunct) sleep habits have been validated, and I’m now empowered with ways to drastically improve my physical, mental, and emotional health. Ever since finishing the book I’ve been enthusiastically telling others to please read it.
Some things I’ve personally learned:
Being a night owl, early bird, or somewhere in the middle is genetic. We literally can not change this “habit”, because it’s not a habit; it’s a biological function. About 40% of people are early birds, 30% are night owls, and 30% are in the middle. The theory as to why we’ve evolved this way is because as a social species, this natural ability to take turns keeping watch at night improves our survival as a whole. Thus we as a society need to rethink and rework the ways that our world favors early birds and shuns night owls.
All teenagers have a shift in circadian rhythm that is different than young children and adults. They literally can not naturally fall asleep until well past midnight, and thus should not be waken up until after their 8 hours of sleep. What parents–and society–expecting teens to go to bed by 10 pm and wake up by 6 or 7 am for school is like asking an adult to go to bed at 7 or 8 pm, and then wake up at 4 am. Horrible, right? And yes, that chronic sleep-deprivation does have real consequences, such as a link to increased physical and mental illness.
The natural human sleep schedule is a continuous 7-8 hours at night, and a brief 30 - 60 min nap in the afternoon. Studies have shown that in cultures where this schedule has been suddenly disrupted (like a study in Greece), people with no history of cardiovascular disease suddenly showed a 37% increase in the chance of dying from heart disease (vs those who still maintained a mid-day napping schedule) over the 6-year study period. Yikes.
Oh, btw, that whole observation in Western Europe about people sleeping in 2 segments in the night (and waking up in the middle to eat, socialize, etc) is not a biological thing, but rather, cultural. That is not how humans have evolved to sleep.
I think we’re all kind of familiar with knowing that sleep is attached to remembering facts, but sleep is also necessary for learning new facts. Thus a good night’s rest is not just essential for doing well on tomorrow’s exam, but also for remembering tomorrow’s lecture in another class. To put it another way: you retain short-term memories in the hippocampus, but it has a storage limit (like a USB stick). Thus sleep helps move those memories into long-term storage so you can remember them, and by doing so, also frees up that space for new memories.
Sleep is also essential for learning new motor skills. If you’re having trouble with say, playing a difficult piece on the piano, try again after a full night’s rest. When you’re sleeping, your brain is still actively working perfecting that sequence of piano keys you need to press. Thus the adage of “practice makes perfect” should be amended to “practice and sleep makes perfect”.
Sleeping 6 hours/night for 10 days straight will cause a cognitive decline equivalent to staying up for 24 hours straight. And for those of us who keeps that exact same sleep schedule and think we’re “fine”, we really don’t realize how not fine we are because we think that’s our baseline normal. If you’ve ever wished to have more energy and be more productive, sleeping more may just be your magical wish-granting-genie.
Every hour in the US someone dies from a car accident caused by someone behind the wheel not getting enough sleep, due to the brain essentially “blacking out” to outside stimulus for a few seconds during a micro-sleep. As a perspective: a drunk driver is merely slow at reacting to say, slamming the brakes; a sleep-deprived driver going through a micro-sleep doesn’t react at all.
Heart attacks across the US spike significantly the day following daylights savings when everyone loses an hour of sleep. The opposite is true when we gain back that hour in the fall: heart attacks drop the following day. And that’s just one piece of evidence that sleep supports a healthy heart.
Sleeping 4 hours/night for just six nights increases your blood glucose levels so much you would be classified as pre-diabetic.
It’s well known that alcohol can disrupt REM sleep. What was interesting is that alcohol-disrupted sleep can interfere with memory (and thus learning) even up to three nights later, even if you get 2 full nights of sleep before consuming alcohol. Therefore, if you have an exam on Monday, drinking on the Friday before will interfere with remembering everything you’ve studied the previous 2 days.
Blue light, like those emitted from LED lightbulbs and the phone/tablet/computer screen you’re reading this from, stimulates our brain to wake-up and to stay awake. The evolutionary hypothesis for this is that we–and all land animals–evolved from marine life in the ocean, where the only visible light is blue, and therefore our brains recognize blue light as a cue to wake up.
And that’s just a small fraction of the super interesting life-changing things I gained from this book. So if you found these tid-bits fascinating, I highly suggest checking it out!
SPEAKING OF WASPS I bet everyone with a soul considers caterpillars cute but you know what’s cutest of all????
Yeah these look like “caterpillars” but they’re the larvae of a stingless wasp group, the sawflies; they just happen to live like caterpillars do so they evolved very similarly. Anyway the angle of the last one makes me think someone told it to stop eating that leaf and it just started eating a lot faster while looking them dead in the eye
The Arrival of Summer (Grand Indoor Gardens)
1. The University of Dundee Botanic Garden, Dundee, Scotland
2. Yumenoshima Tropical Greenhouse, Tokyo Japan
3. Oman Botanical Gardens, Oman
4. David Welch Winter Garden, Duthie Park in Aberdeen, Scotland
5. Castle Ashby Orangery, Northamptonshire, England, UK
6. Royal Botanical Gardens, London, England
7. Sherman Library and Gardens, Corona Del Mar, Newport Beach, California
8. Ny Carlsberg Glyptoteket, Copenhagen,Denmark
9. Atocha Station, Madrid, Spain
10. Siam Hotel, Bangkok, Thailand
“This is the perfect time to pick up a new hobby and exercise your creativity!!!”
Me: Gets really into taking photos of bugs and making them into depressing memes
Fantastic Fungi (2019)
Cool Tip
If you are like me and always need to be working on something to keep your anxiety under control, during this quarentine why not helping scientists by looking at pictures of some neat penguins? or even galaxies? There’s this site call Zooniverse, where you can help on scientific projects by analyzing pictures and data! Right now my favorite project has returned, called Penguin Watch (where yeah, you get to watch penguins, it’s amazing)
you basically have to analyse photos looking for penguins, their chicks, eggs or even predators and human interaction But there are lots of interesting projects you can help in areas such as biology, physics, history or even art:
Oh and the best part, some institutions even accept it as volunteering/service hour requirements for graduation and scholarships!! It’s helping me a lot during this time, so I thought it was worth sharing
AKA “why so many animals have white bellies”
Both predators and prey use countershading! It’s really widespread, once you know about it you’ll start to see it everywhere.
Transcript below the cut.
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Here, more useless knowledge for your Friday.
Transcript under the cut.
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do I dare to tag toes and feet on tumblr dot com y/n?
More on birds since y’all seem to be really into birds. Transcript under the cut.
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Chinstrap penguin (Pygoscelis antarcticus)
The chinstrap penguin is a species of penguin that inhabits a variety of islands and shores in the Southern Pacific and the Antarctic Oceans. Its name stems from the narrow black band under its head, which makes it appear as if it were wearing a black helmet, making it easy to identify. The chinstrap penguin grows to a length of 68–76 cm and a weight of 3.2–5.3 kg, with the weight varying with the time of year. Males are greater in weight and height than females. The diet of the chinstrap penguin consists of small fish, krill, shrimp, and squid, for which they swim up to 80 km offshore each day to obtain. The chinstrap penguin’s tightly packed feathers provide a waterproof coat, enabling it to swim in freezing waters. Additionally, thick blubber deposits and intricate blood vessels in the flippers and legs assist in the preservation of heat.
photo credits: Godot13, US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Bond of Brothers, the winner of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year, by David Lloyd:⠀
“These two adult male lions, probably brothers, greeted each other by rubbing faces for 30 seconds before settling down. Most people never have the opportunity to witness such animal sentience.”
Figure 1. Bun (Lepus townsendii) approaching ideal bun form (ei. a perfect fluffy orb) over the course of 5.2 hours. Ambient temperature -6°C to -15°C.
smithsonianzoo 🐣Our kiwi chick at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute is 2 weeks old! She is eating a mixture of meat, fruit and vegetables. Kiwi chick look like adults when they hatch, but are not fully grown until they are about 18 months old.
🌲Hooray!🌲 • The first piece from our Modern Wolf chronicle is ‘in the air'🖤🖤 • check out the Czech page👉🏻👉🏻https://m.facebook.com/prichazejivlci/
. Photo by @d.arkhipov The tribe of Mundari people. Thousands of years they live on their land of South Sudan with theirs cows. All their life they move along the White Nile in search of new pastures and they have to defend the cows against other tribes with the arm. #wild #nature #sudan #cow #wildlife #animals #africa #tribe #people #igs_africa #wildeyesa #earthcapture #southsudan #earthofficial #awesomeearth https://www.instagram.com/p/B9MvKDDAcFU/?igshid=18u5b82hqa05l
What does it take to teach a bee to use tools? A little time, a good teacher and an enticing incentive. Read more here: http://to.pbs.org/2mpRUAz
Credit: O.J. Loukola et al., Science (2017)
Do you want to see what lies beneath the surface of Echo Lake?
Grover and Clyde
Grover Sanders Krantz was an American anthropologist and cryptozoologist. He was one of few scientists not only to research Bigfoot, but also to express his belief in the animal’s existence. Krantz’s specialty as an anthropologist included all aspects of human evolution, but he was best known outside of academia as the first serious researcher to devote his professional energies to the scientific study of Bigfoot, beginning in 1963.
When he died, his body was donated to science (as per his wish). It was used to study human body decay rates for forensic science. He had only one condition to which was that he wished that his body be laid to rest alongside the bones of his three favorite Irish Wolfhounds – Clyde, Icky, and Yahoo.
The picture above is of Grover and Clyde. You can see their skeletons on display at the Smithsonian: Written in Bone: Forensic Files of the 17th Century Chesapeake
SOURCE
Diversity Maps of vertebrate groups in the United Statest
Find out how these maps were generated here:
https://biodiversitymapping.org/wordpress/index.php/home/
New fossils suggest that spinosaurus was fully aquatic, meaning we have to re-imagine this bigger-than-T. Rex dino’s looks and behavior. Video and article from National Geographic.
Crow parent waiting patiently for some snacks, teenage crow waiting not so patiently.
Desert Rain Frog Breviceps macrops
The Six Pack Turtle ~ Often, when humans discard their garbage, there is little to no consideration where it goes or what it affects. In the case of this unfortunate turtle, he found a six-pack soda ring that became tightly fixed around his shell. As the turtle grew, the ring constricted his shell growth as well as internal organ development. This turtle ultimately died as result of this man-made deformation. Thank you so much to SkeletonMuseum on Instagram for sharing.
Frogs Anura
“Animal blood comes in a rainbow of hues because of the varying chemistry of the molecules it uses to carry oxygen. Humans use hemoglobin, whose iron content imparts a crimson color to our red blood cells. Octopuses, lobsters, and horseshoe crabs use hemocyanin, which has copper instead of iron, and is blue instead of red—that’s why these creatures bleed blue. Other related molecules are responsible for the violet blood of some marine worms, and the green blood of leeches. But the green-blooded lizards use good old hemoglobin. Their red blood cells are, well, red. Their green has a stranger origin: Biliverdin.
They should be dead. Biliverdin can damage DNA, kill cells, and destroy neurons. And yet, the lizards have the highest levels of biliverdin ever seen in an animal. Their blood contains up to 20 times more of it than the highest concentration ever recorded in a human—an amount that proved to be fatal. And yet, not only are the lizards still alive, they’re not even jaundiced. How do they tolerate the chemical? Why did they evolve such high levels of biliverdin in the first place? And why, as Austin’s colleague Zachary Rodriguez has just discovered, did they do so on several occasions?”
Source: TheAtlantic
Nictitating Membrane: a transparent or translucent third eyelid present in some animals that can be drawn across the eye for protection and to moisten it while maintaining vision
If you’re a white person like me, please take a second to watch this video and learn a little bit about African American death culture.
There’s so much in this video that I didn’t know, but should have. Living in a place like the United States, where there are so many cultures present, everyone should try to educate themselves about the important traditions of other groups.
“Because in the end to learn a language, to feel connected to it, you have to have a dialogue, however childlike, however imperfect.”
— Jhumpa Lahiri, Teach Yourself Italian (via kxowledge)
Monks in masks perform during the Lamaist devil dance ceremony at Tsurpu Monastery, about 70 kilometers of Lhasa, capital of southwest China’s Tibet Autonomous Region, Feb. 23, 2009.