Amusing Science

[Witness]

Light never ceases to surprise:

[Rob Lister]

That was pretty fucking neat. It might take the next 20 years but something useful will come of that.

[Witness]

[sparks]

Yep. Could also be restructured as "Every other science. Physics. Math." But lots of chemists, biologists, etc. would get all pissy about that, so we'll let it be.

[Doctor X]

I remember back in 8th grade being told by my social studies teacher that there was a "flat earth society" but that it was all just for fun and of course none of them actually believed it.

Around a similar time, I knew a lad who said his father belonged to one, and it was basically an excuse to drink as college students. I recall that they joked that Columbus did not sail off the edge of the Earth because Newton had not invented gravity yet.

Years later I encountered a student who tried to claim that the P Creation Myth was accurate since gravity did not exist back then. He was, unfortunately, serious.

– J.D.

[robinson]

The flat earth thing is what made it obvious that an intelligent educated person can believe the most absurd nonsense, and they are not kidding.

[robinson]

It’s not even stranger than a highly educated surgeon who also believes that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and will return and the dead will rise in the whole Christian thing, they actually believe that.

[sparks]

They provisionally buy it because the reward is eternal life and they're scared shitless of death. The whole goddamned mess is motivated by fear. Sorry chreeeeeeeeeeeestians. You get to die just like everyone else.

Getting back to all the other idjit bleeeeeeefs, when did we start glorifying teh dumbth and why? I could be wrong, but I recall a time in this fucking country when we thought highly of better and better education and those who pursued same were rewarded and respected for same. The youngsters coming up now all seem to be in a race for the stupidest sumbitch on the planet and proud of it. Not all of course, there's the occasional young person who makes a life for themselves with a major part of that being a higher education and those are quite refreshing. Always great fun to talk with and not just because they can form real sentences without additional help from Dick and Jane. And you've just got to smile at the dumbest of the dumb when they get on a tirade about not being able to find rewarding work.

[Witness]

[sparks]

The Blob. Antarctica.

You're welcome.

[Anaxagoras]

What is it and where can I get some?

Some kind of magnetic goo. Fucking magnets. How do they work?

[Anaxagoras]

Maybe something like this:

[robinson]

[Witness]

[Witness]

Scientists Revive 32,000-Year-Old Plant Right Out of the Pleistocene

The oldest plant ever to be “resurrected” has been grown from 32,000-year-old seeds, beating the previous record holder by some 30,000 years.

Fruiting (at left) and flowering plants of Silene stenophylla regenerated from tissue of fossil fruits (S. Yashina et al)

Back in 2007, a team of scientists from Russia, Hungary and the United States recovered frozen Silene stenophylla seeds and remains from the Pleistocene, while investigating about 70 ancient ground squirrel hibernation burrows or caches, hidden in permanently frozen loess-ice deposits in northeastern Siberia, in the plant’s present-day range.

Using radiocarbon dating, the age of the seeds was estimated at between 20,000 and 40,000 years, dating the seeds to the Pleistocene epoch. Rodents would normally eat the food in their larders, but in this case a flood or some other weather event got the whole area buried. Since the rodents had placed the larders at the level of the permafrost, the material froze almost immediately, and did not thaw out at any time since. More than 600,000 fruits and seeds thus preserved were located at the site.

Years later, a team of scientists at the Russian Academy of Sciences went on to successfully revive one of them: a flowering plant from a 32,000-year-old fruit!

The accomplishment surpasses the previous record for the oldest plant material brought back to life, of 2000 years set by Judean date palm seeds. The team led by David Gilichinsky used material recovered in the 2007 research project.

https://www.earthlymission.com/scientis ... ermafrost/ for the technical details.

[robinson]

This is how the movie Pleistocene Park starts

[Witness]

Neanderthal reconstruction, once and now:

[robinson2]

What T rex actually looked like

[robinson]

No fucking way!

[robinson]

My childhood is ruined

[Anaxagoras]

Neanderthal reconstruction, once and now:

They look human, in the second one anyway.

Were neanderthals in fact a separate species or just other humans? Could homo sapiens and neanderthals breed?
If so, is it wrong to classify them as another species?

I wonder if we even know how they really looked.

I'm skeptical of both the old version and the new one. They both may be influenced by the various researcher's agendas. The earlier version may be because the person's image was more ape-like, while the latter may be because they wanted to humanize them and anthropomorphize them, not "other" them. I can imagine ideological motivations and personal preferences affecting it either way.

[Witness]

Were neanderthals in fact a separate species

Yes. (Or at least subspecies.)

or just other humans?

Yes.

Could homo sapiens and neanderthals breed?

Yes.

If so, is it wrong to classify them as another species?

No.

Hope that stumps you, ha ha!

I wonder if we even know how they really looked.

Yes and no.
A lot can already be deduced from their artifacts, cave paintings attributed to them, where they preferred to live, how they made and used their tools, &c.
Great progress has been made in the reconstruction of fleshy parts from bones (e. g. in legal medicine), including facial features. (At least that's what I read; one could be skeptical.) And as said bones also provide genetic material, we can somewhat infer skin, eye and hair color. This wasn't available to the paleontologists before.
The bones also provide clues about pathology. (I read somewhere that the only modern group suffering the same type of accidents are rodeo riders, but can't remember if it was specifically about Neanderthals or just generic "cave man" living dangerously.)

I'm skeptical of both the old version and the new one. They both may be influenced by the various researcher's agendas. The earlier version may be because the person's image was more ape-like, while the latter may be because they wanted to humanize them and anthropomorphize them, not "other" them. I can imagine ideological motivations and personal preferences affecting it either way.

Of course. But the more new finds are made about Neanderthals, the more they appear fully human in their abilities. It's quite possible we got a lot of tricks (or technology) from them. Difficult to know if that extends to language, social structures or religion…

[Witness]

[Witness]

If somebody's interested, I found a reconstruction/interpretation/fantasy art of a Neanderthal woman:

NSFW:

[Hotarubi]

If somebody's interested, I found a reconstruction/interpretation/fantasy art of a Neanderthal woman:

NSFW:

[Anaxagoras]

If somebody's interested, I found a reconstruction/interpretation/fantasy art of a Neanderthal woman:

NSFW:

Except for the clothes she could a modern human. I really can't see much obvious difference.

Let's just say I'm skeptical. I can't say it's wrong because I don't know what they truly looked like, but I bet they would have looked a little more different.

[Witness]

There are anatomical differences:


(from their Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal)

Big, strong, barrel-chested and with brains bigger than ours. Take that, Homo sapiens!

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[Witness]

Engineer Builds Barber Robot That Gives Quarantine Haircuts

[Witness]

[Witness]

'Spooky' quantum movements seen happening to large objects, scientists say

'What’s special about this experiment is we’ve seen quantum effects on something as large as a human'

Scientists have seen "spooky" quantum behaviour happening to objects at the human scale, according to a new paper.

Researchers have seen quantum fluctuations "kick" large objects such as mirrors, moving them by a tiny degree but one big enough to measure.

Such behaviour has previously been predicted by quantum physicists. But it has never before been measured.

The movements are the result of the way the universe is structured, when seen at the level of quantum mechanics: researchers describe it as a "noisy" space, where particles are constantly switching in and out of existence, which creates a low-level fuzz at all times.

Normally, that background of quantum "noise" is too subtle to detect in objects that are visible at the human-scale. But the new research shows that scientists have finally detected those movements, using new technology to watch for those fluctuations.

Researchers at the MIT LIGO Laboratory saw that the those fluctuations could move an object as big as a 40-kilogram mirror. The movement pushed the large mirrors a tiny amount, as predicted theoretically, allowing it to be measured by scientists.

The researchers were able to use special equipment called a quantum squeezer that allowed them to "manipulate" the noise so that it could be better observed.

"What's special about this experiment is we've seen quantum effects on something as large as a human," said Nergis Mavalvala, the Marble Professor and associate head of the physics department at MIT, in a statement.

"We too, every nanosecond of our existence, are being kicked around, buffeted by these quantum fluctuations. It's just that the jitter of our existence, our thermal energy, is too large for these quantum vacuum fluctuations to affect our motion measurably. With LIGO's mirrors, we've done all this work to isolate them from thermally driven motion and other forces, so that they are now still enough to be kicked around by quantum fluctuations and this spooky popcorn of the universe."

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-styl ... 96056.html for the technical details.

[robinson]

The Universe is not only strange, it’s stranger than we can imagine

[Anaxagoras]

This one is a bit of a science shitpost but it's amusing.

Bisexual men are real, study finds

Really? This was controversial?

A scientist who refused to believe bisexual men exist has proved they in fact, do.

Gerulf Rieger of the University of Essex once authored a study which concluded men who claimed to be sexually aroused by both men and women were probably lying.

"Regardless of whether the men were gay, straight or bisexual, they showed about four times more arousal" to one sex or the other, he told the New York Times in 2005, concluding most were gay but didn't want to admit it.

But he's now changed his mind. He and a team of British and American scientists took numerous studies conducted over the past 20 years, weeding out poor quality data, "potentially invalid statistical tests" and "inconsistent findings" and combined them for a larger, more comprehensive look at male sexuality.

"Although some men identify as bisexual and have sexual experiences with men and women, the extent to which this reflects an underlying bisexual orientation has been questioned," their new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, reads.

"Early sex researchers... believed that bisexual behavior and identification occurred primarily among monosexual (ie, either heterosexual or homosexual) men for reasons other than a bisexual orientation. For example, some homosexual men identify as bisexual, or engage in sex with women, due to social pressures that favour heterosexuality."

Others perhaps doubted the existence of bisexuals because they found it easier to understand monosexuality - either totally gay or totally straight, "because both have strong sexual attraction to one sex and virtually none to the other".

"Furthermore, bisexual individuals may be mistrusted and stigmatised by both heterosexual and homosexual people, and perceived as untrustworthy, promiscuous and unable to commit."

[Witness]

↑ The universal tendency to shoehorn everything into one's own preconceptions/preferences.
[Comment intended for Anax's post, but AA ninja'd me.]

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Sisyphus 2020.

[Witness]

Most gay men

What about the women?

From the very small sample of people I know I'd say bisexuality is more common in the fair sex. (But then I have mostly female friends, so …)

[Witness]

[Rob Lister]

We'll soon be seeing that as a special effect in a hollywood production

[robinson]

[robinson]

Fucking eels how do they work?

[Witness]

[Anaxagoras]

https://phet.colorado.edu/sims/html/gas ... es_en.html

(Found while watching this video)