More Microscopic Creatures From Bio Lab ✨

Jupiter’s giant red spot is also red hot

New evidence suggests the spot acts like a red-hot stove burner that warms the atmosphere above it. Scientists found the average temperature in the upper atmosphere above the red spot is a sizzling 1,600 degrees Kelvin (about 2,420 degrees Fahrenheit). The research team found evidence that the Great Red Spot generates two types of turbulent energy waves.

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This GIF shows how the toucan releases heat using its beak to cool itself off.

The toucan beak isn’t just beautiful, it’s also an adjustable thermal radiator that the bird uses to warm and cool itself. When the bird is hot, the blood vessels in their beak open up to allow more circulation to enable heat to escape. Birds can’t sweat so evolution has come up with some life hacks to get the job done. [video]

There are SO many types of coders. Do any of these remind you of someone you know? 🤔  Tag em! 

Top 10 Most Uncomfortable Physics Facts

While physics can show us amazing things about our universe, it doesn’t always agree with how we think things should work. Sometimes, physics can be very counter-intuitive, and often unsettling. So, here’s my list of physics facts that can be a bit unnerving.

10: Weight doesn’t matter

If it wasn’t for air resistance, everything would fall at exactly the same speed. If you let go of a hammer and a feather from the same height at the same time on the Moon, they would hit the ground simultaneously. 

9: Gyroscopic precession

It doesn’t matter how much you know about physics; gyroscopes are weird. The way they seem to defy gravity makes you rethink everything you know about physics, despite being fairly simple toys. Still, it’s all just Newton’s laws of motion.

8: Neutrinos and dark matter

We like to think that we can interact with most of the world around us, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Neutrinos and dark matter are passing through your body right now, as if you weren’t even there. The fact that 65 billion neutrinos pass through each square centimeter of your body every second is weird enough, who knows what we’ll learn about dark matter.

7: Photons are particles

Light travels like a wave, but can only interact like a particle. It can interfere and have a frequency, but it can only take and give energy in discrete quantities. It behaves like nothing else in our macroscopic world, and can be very difficult to imagine.

6: Electrons are waves

We’ve established how photons act like waves and particles, but surely massive particles act normally. Nope! Even electrons have wave-like properties. In fact, everything acts like a wave! Except these waves come in discrete quantities, which we’ll call particles. This won’t get confusing.

5: E=mc^2

Einstein’s most famous contribution to physics states that matter is simply another form of energy, which has very profound consequences. A wound-up Jack-in-a-box would weigh ever so slightly more than a released Jack-in-a-box, due to the potential energy stored within.

4: Time is relative

The core of special relativity states that time passes differently for different observers. If you took a trip to Alpha Centauri at 99% the speed of light, everyone on Earth would see the trip take 4.4 years, while you would only experience 7.5 months. Time travel is real!

3: The (not so empty) vacuum

Something can be created from nothing, as long as it goes right back to being nothing quickly. In seemingly empty space, particles pop in and out of existence all the time as a result of the uncertainty principle. Not to mention, space is inflating at an accelerated rate due to “dark energy”. To the vacuum, the law of conservation of energy is more of a suggestion.

2: c is the fastest speed

Another important point in special relativity is that nothing could ever go faster than light. This doesn’t sit well with a lot of people, but the math doesn’t lie. To even get something with mass to travel at the speed of light would require infinite energy. Even if you somehow get around this, there are just too many mathematical problems with superluminal travel. Like it or not, the universe has a speed limit.

1: The cat is dead and alive

How could it not be this? The nature of quantum mechanics allows for objects to take on two seemingly contradictory states in a ‘superposition’. An electron can be in two places at once, or in a more extreme example, a cat can be both dead and alive. Of course, this weird property goes away once someone makes an observation. It’s as if there are tiny physics trolls messing with nature whenever we’re not looking.

Of course, there’s plenty more unsettling physics facts, like the space-bending nature of general relativity, or the “spooky action at a distance” that is quantum entanglement, but these are my top 10. I’d like to hear any unsettling physics facts you think I’ve missed, though!

* Assuming that the whole planet stays intact, and that the whole core of Saturn will not slide down from the gaseous atmosphere. (I do not wish to see the destruction of the whole planet.) Saturn will only float in theory because it is lighter than water. Of course if you literally get Saturn into a tub of water, there would be a lot of issues. They are addressed in his article. But overall, for something so huge and stellar, it can still be less dense than water! 

pls disragard these questions if you arent feeling like explaining anthropology that is probably not within your specific field, but i have questions and somehow youre the most accessible source for answers about ancient-ass humans. so: why are humans so much hardier than other animals? like if you break a horse's bone that horse is kaput, but people bounce back from shit like missing limbs. how are we so cool? also, how prevalent (and when) was pursuit predation? also, thanks! have a nice day

OH no worries, this is something I teach every year and it’s REALLY COOL. There’s footnotes and works cited below the jump if you want them, and I can point you at some other work if this is something you’re interested in reading about. Humans are ridiculously resilient. The reason for this has a lot to do with the tradeoffs we made for endurance rather than speed. Human walking is really energy efficient (it’s really just controlled falling) compared to a horse’s galloping, and we have pretty well-muscled legs. Our plantigrade feet mean that there’s not as much energy when we spring off compared to an animal that runs on their toes, but at the same time, we spend a lot less energy moving around. 

Our muscles and leg anatomy have a lot to do with it, too. Let’s look at a horse’s leg compared to a human’s.

Horses in particular have a hard time with broken legs because they have a LOT of mass resting on on those legs. Horses’ legs are basically built to go fast- their leg bones are actually quite light, and below the ankle there’s… well, basically nothing. Just tendon and skin- there’s no big muscles to stabilize or cushion the bone. This means that there’s less weight to drag around so the horse can escape a predator more quickly, but it comes with a major tradeoff- if a horse breaks their lower leg, it tends to shatter. In the wild, this is going to make the horse extremely easy to pick off. But like I said up there, humans- unlike horses- don’t run on our toes. Our ankle bones are chunky and strong, and our lower legs are cushioned with muscle and fat. But our healing ability goes beyond just basic anatomy! Our group dynamics also play into this, too. If a horse breaks a leg, what can the other horses do about it? The injured horse still has its biological needs to fulfill; it has to eat, drink, and evade predators. It has to keep moving- it can’t lie down for a few weeks and let the leg heal. But that’s not true of humans and our closest relatives! I’ll use Neanderthals for this example because I like them a lot, but the same goes for early modern humans, too. 

Let’s say that some Neanderthals are out on the hunt, and Thog gets knocked against a tree trunk by a mammoth and she breaks her leg. Because Thog’s a member of a social species, it’s not the end of the world for her or her group. The rest of her crew can keep hunting and Thog can limp back home, where her grandfather looks after her and her younger sister brings her water. She’s able to rest and keep weight off the broken leg, which means that so long as she keeps whatever wounds there might be relatively clean, sepsis is less likely. Group living means that you don’t have to be self-sufficient; no hominin is an island. Part of why we’re so successful is that our ability to care for each other ensures better group survival. If your reproductive-age individuals are also providers, group care means that you’re less likely to lose them. 

We know from looking at Neanderthal skeletons that they were injured frequently and were able to shake it off and survive; even elderly individuals with severe arthritis are often found in group contexts, suggesting they weren’t left behind. And we are talking serious injuries here- not just broken legs, but head and neck trauma, too. There’s a famous paper* that says that most Neanderthal injuries came from close contact hunting (due to them being mostly head and neck injuries rather than lower body injuries), but more up-to-date research notes that actually, Neanderthals could- and did- get hurt pretty much everywhere**. 

As to when pursuit predation came into effect, the best guess we have is “probably sometime around two million years ago, practiced by Homo erectus/ergaster.” One way we can tell this is by diet. Mandibles are very quick to adapt to dietary pressures, so by comparing mandibles to things with known diets, we’re able to tell what’s going on. Add that to dental wear and morphology studies and chemical analysis of subfossils’*** teeth and we can get a pretty good picture of who’s eating what. What we see with the H. erectus/ergaster complex of species is that they’re eating a wide variety of very tough foods; their jaws and molars suggest that they were eating root vegetables, tough meat, tubers, bone marrow, honey- really, anything they could find. We also know that they were eating a fairly high calorie diet compared to their predecessors; this was necessary for brain development- and we know that these calories came from meat. As average brain mass increases, so does evidence of meat-eating. Brain development is expensive- you have to put a lot of nutrients into it- nutrients that are really hard to get from plants alone. One way to feed the family is by hunting- though realistically this didn’t happen all that regularly. Rather, it’s more likely that hunting supplemented gathering, as it does with many forager groups today; hunting takes a lot of energy and can be dangerous.Archaeology also points to the “around two million years ago” date based on stone tool deposits and fossil prey species. One good example of this is Kanjera in Kenya; it’s a site by Lake Victoria that has good evidence for persistence hunting. There’s quite a lot of gazelle and antelope skeletons that aside from stone tool marks, don’t have a lot of damage. It looks like these were brought to the site for butchering- and they would have had to be hunted because hyenas, lions, and other predators and scavengers will actually eat those bones. Gazelles are a lot faster than humans, and the hominins of the time didn’t really do projectiles; rather, it’s more likely they ran the gazelles down until they were exhausted, then dragged them back to this lakeside camp site to process and eat. It’s likely that this strategy helped fuel the migration of Homo into Asia; once you’re able to hunt big game, your movement is less restricted by the availability of small animals, scavenged meat, and seasonal plants; you can follow herd animals and just chase one whenever you need to eat. However, the exact role that hunting and scavenging played in the development of the Homo genus is something that archaeologists and physical anthropologists do not agree on- when you’re trying to figure out what a species eats and how they got their food, you gotta realize that this can vary heavily by what’s available, what predators are in the area, your own group’s composition, and myriad other factors that can affect food acquisition. 

One thing we do know for sure: Persistence hunting works. Our species is super good at it, even today. If you’d like to see some persistence hunting in action, it’s actually still used by San groups in Africa.

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“Though her features were strong, she was not unattractive, and might have been quite stunning had she taken even a mild interest in clothes. This she did not.” -James Watson

This woman played a crucial role in the discovery of the structure of DNA and Watson said himself that her work with X-ray crystallography was key, but he says her name did not deserve to be on the paper. Why you might ask? Probably because she was a women and only ever look down on during her entire career. She brought the world close to arguable the biggest scientific discovery, yet the only thing she was commented on were her looks. 

Today would have marked Rosalind Elsie Franklin’s 97th birthday, so keep her in your heart. Women in science are still not taken as serious as men. So remember her and what she went through. If you are a women in science follow her example of being strong and confident, if not, respect the women around you and take them seriously! 👩‍🔬🔬💕

Art by @peachistudy 

Fibonacci all day, every day [http://bit.ly/2jiUBF6]

Last year’s Halloween special looked at the chemistry of blood: http://wp.me/s4aPLT-blood