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Insect-killing plant found by Australian highway is new to science

Penny Sarchet
New Scientist
Tue, 17 Aug 2021 13:46 UTC
Nicotiana insecticida
© Maarten Christenhusz
Nicotiana insecticida, a newly described tobacco plant that kills insects
A newly described species of wild tobacco that scientists found growing next to a highway truck stop in Western Australia is covered in sticky glands that trap and kill small insects, including gnats, aphids and flies.

While a range of carnivorous plants are known across the plant kingdom, this is the first wild tobacco plant discovered to kill insects. Dubbed Nicotiana insecticida, it was uncovered by a project looking for tobacco plants across Australia.

The team, which included Mark Chase of London's Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, collected seeds from the insecticidal plant at a truck stop on the Northwest Coastal Highway, and then cultivated them at Kew, where the plants went on to develop the same sticky glandular hairs and to kill insects inside the greenhouses.
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Black Cat 2

Study finds 'contrafreeloading' rare in domestic cats

Amy Quinton
University of California, Davis
Mon, 09 Aug 2021 19:07 UTC
Cats and Free Food
© Mikel Delgado/UC Davis
When cats were offered the choice of readily available food in a tray or working for it using a simple puzzle, cats most often chose the free food.
When given the choice between a free meal and performing a task for a meal, cats would prefer the meal that doesn't require much effort. While that might not come as a surprise to some cat lovers, it does to cat behaviorists. Most animals prefer to work for their food — a behavior called contrafreeloading.

A new study from researchers at the University of California, Davis, School of Veterinary Medicine showed most domestic cats choose not to contrafreeload. The study found that cats would rather eat from a tray of easily available food rather than work out a simple puzzle to get their food.

"There is an entire body of research that shows that most species including birds, rodents, wolves, primates — even giraffes — prefer to work for their food," said lead author Mikel Delgado, a cat behaviorist and research affiliate at UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. "What's surprising is out of all these species cats seem to be the only ones that showed no strong tendency to contrafreeload."

In the study, Delgado, along with co-authors Melissa Bain and Brandon Han of the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, provided 17 cats a food puzzle and a tray of food. The puzzle allowed the cats to easily see the food but required some manipulation to extract it. Some of the cats even had food puzzle experience.

"It wasn't that cats never used the food puzzle, but cats ate more food from the tray, spent more time at the tray and made more first choices to approach and eat from the tray rather than the puzzle," said Delgado.
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Blackbox

Research study finds Buddhist monks' bodies decay very slowly at death


mindmatters.ai
Sun, 15 Aug 2021 16:47 UTC
buddhist monk
© Claro Cortes / Reuters
According to traditional meditation lore, they are in a meditative state (thukdam) until their consciousness is clear; only then does the body begins to decay
We are told that one of the more remarkable effects of a lifetime of meditation can be a comparatively slow decay process for the body. Recent evidence for that emerged in the death of Tibetan Buddhist monk Geshe Lhundub Sopa, August 28, 2014, at the age of 91.

Geshe Lhundub Sopa, who had been tutor to the Dalai Lama in Tibet, moved to Wisconsin in 1967. There he co-founded the Deer Park Buddhist Center and taught South Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin, becoming a friend of prominent American neuroscientist Richard J. Davidson.
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Galaxy

Jordan Peterson encounters the God Hypothesis

Elizabeth Whately
Evolution News
Sun, 15 Aug 2021 15:36 UTC
Jordan Peterson

Dr. Jordan Peterson
Here at Evolution News, I've written about the popular public intellectual Jordan Peterson, whose political controversies have unfortunately often overshadowed his fascinating contributions to the cultural discourse on religion, science, and psychology. Although I'm unconvinced by his attempts to weave together an evolutionarily grounded unifying narrative of all these things, I've always admired him and always learn something from his lectures.

When I interviewed Stephen Meyer for his new book Return of the God Hypothesis, we chatted a little about Peterson and various other public intellectuals who seem to stand on the shores of theism with one foot in and one foot out. Commenting here on Jonathan Van Maren's recent survey of these "New New Atheists" (which also included figures like Douglas Murray, Tom Holland, and Niall Ferguson), David Klinghoffer expressed his hope that this might be a new window of opportunity for intelligent design to gain a hearing in the public square.

Comment: Uncommon Descent also noted Peterson's reactions to the God Hypothesis:
Readers will recall the well-known Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson

On The Return of the God Hypothesis he has tweeted,
Reading Stephen C. Meyer's Return of the God Hypothesis. It's a difficult book, well-written, densely informative. He claims (p. 211) "without functional criteria to guide a search through the vast space of possible sequences, random variation is probabilistically doomed."

*

Is this an accurate claim? He makes the case very carefully. It's not often that I encounter a book that contains so much that I did not know....

*

Which neo-Darwinists effectively address critiques of neo-Darwinism's putative inability to deal with the problem of combinatorial explosion with regard to protein folding (to say nothing of DNA mutation.

*

I lack the capacity to substantively critique Meyer's claims. What about the fact, however, that micro-evolution at least is often observed? Take Covid variants as a painfully evident example. Is that not a consequence of random variation and natural selection?

*

But those assumptions add immense complexity to what was once a theory typified by its elegance. If you have to posit whole universes to maintain the credibility of your assumptions is that not a problem?
The responses under the tweets are most interesting.

But now ...

Jordan, if you believe Meyer is right or even partways right or is making a good case, stand your ground. You have already faced some of the most incomprehensibly vicious mobs that Cancel Culture has spewed and you are still standing. Follow the evidence, not the crybullies. You, of all people, can afford to and it would do immense good.


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Fireball 2

Unexpected Perseid meteor outburst 2021, 300% more fireballs than normal

Peter Jenniskens, Koen Miskotte
Meteor News
Sun, 15 Aug 2021 10:31 UTC
Perseid outburst 2021

Figure 1 – 2021 Perseid rates according to CAMS Texas and CAMS California video data. The vertical scale is logarithmic. The dashed line is the level of normal annual Perseid activity.
Abstract: An unexpected outburst of Perseids was detected by low-light video observations on August 14, 2021. The outburst peaked at solar longitude 141.474 ± 0.005 degrees (equinox J2000.0) and the activity profile had a Full-Width-at-Half-Maximum of 0.08 degrees solar longitude and a peak rate of ZHR = 130 ± 20 per hour above the normal ~45 per hour annual Perseid activity. The Perseids had a steeper magnitude size distribution index than the normal annual shower component. The activity profile is similar to that derived from visual and forward meteor scatter observations. This activity may be related to the earlier smaller enhancements observed in 2018 and 2019.
Introduction

Comment: More reporting from Twitter, with one camera capturing the flashes of the outburst, but not direct footage, and all thanks to the owner's cat walking past their motion detecting camera:



It's notable that the last outburst occurred just a few years ago, and that the origin of this particular one was not expected nor, as of yet, has its origin been ascertained.

Taken together with all the other Fire In The Sky activity being documented these days, it's looking like there's been a significant increase, and that there's likely more to come: See also: Something Wicked This Way Comes

And check out SOTT radio's:

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Chalkboard

How do we decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics and other ancient languages?

Owen Jarus
LiveScience
Sat, 14 Aug 2021 11:22 UTC
Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs
© Paul Biris via Getty Images
Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs on the ceiling of Hypostyle Hall within the Temple of Hathor in Egypt.
Some ancient societies had written languages, but deciphering their texts can be a Sisyphean task. So, how do experts figure out how to translate ancient words into modern ones?

The answer is multifaceted, but one famous example embodies some of the best practices: the decoding of the Rosetta stone, discovered by a French military expedition in Egypt in July 1799, which helped pave the way to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The stone contains a decree of Ptolemy V that was inscribed in three writing systems: Egyptian hieroglyphics, demotic script (used by the Egyptians between the seventh century B.C. and the fifth century A.D.) and ancient Greek. Written in 196 B.C., the decree stated that Egyptian priests agreed to crown Ptolemy V pharaoh in exchange for tax breaks. At the time, Egypt was governed by a dynasty of rulers descended from Ptolemy I, one of Alexander the Great's Macedonian generals.

At the time the stone was discovered, both hieroglyphics and demotic script were undeciphered, but ancient Greek was known. The fact that the same decree was preserved in three languages meant that scholars could read the Greek portion of the text and compare it with the hieroglyphic and demotic portions to determine what the equivalent parts were.
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Document

Fake science: The misinformation pandemic in scientific journals

Mike Hearn
The Daily Sceptic
Tue, 10 Aug 2021 15:53 UTC
fakefact blocks
© unknown
Another cluster of fake scientific papers has been discovered, this time primarily about electronic medical devices and software. A group of three researchers has published an exposé of papers in which ordinary terms like artificial intelligence and facial recognition are replaced with bizarre alternatives auto-generated from a thesaurus. This appears to be an attempt to hide plagiarism, AI-driven paper auto-generation and/or "paper mill" activity, in which companies generate forged research and sell it to (pseudo-)scientists who want to get promoted.
Box genuine
Often these papers originate in China, where the CCP has mandated that every single medical doctor must publish research papers to get promoted (i.e. in their non-existent spare time). If you're new to this topic, my previous article on Photoshopped images and impossible numbers in scientific papers provides some background along with an entertaining begging letter from a Chinese doctor who got busted.
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Chalkboard

Physicists reveal strongest evidence yet of matter created by light collisions

Brad Bergan
Interesting Engineering
Sat, 14 Aug 2021 18:12 UTC
particle accelerator artist conception
© sakkmesterke / iStock
Artist's conception of a futuristic particle accelerator.
And they accelerated gold ions to near the speed of light.

In particle physics, high-speed collisions are usually a good thing.

And, when two photons are smashed into one another with enough force, the output is matter, according to Einstein's theory of special relativity. This process would yield an electron-positron pair, representing the conversion of light into mass, which seemed beyond our reach. But not for long.

Physicists have discovered a means of doing this in real life using the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory, directly witnessing this reaction, which is called the Briet-Wheeler process, according to a recent paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

This is a substantial discovery, building on a theoretical wall that seemed insurmountable only decades ago.
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Nebula

NASA shares new image of bright 'rings' circling distant black hole

Andrei Dergalin
Sputnik
Fri, 13 Aug 2021 19:04 UTC
black hole
© CC0
A black hole
The black hole emitting the X-rays in question is located in a binary system some 7,800 light years from Earth. A new image of what looks like a set of rings around a black hole has been released by NASA.

According a statement by the US space agency, the image, produced with data obtained via NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, shows a set of separate, concentric rings circling the black hole that is part of a binary system called V404 Cygni and is located about 7,800 light years away from our planet.

This spectacle is apparently a product of X-rays emitted by the black hole, with NASA explaining how an X-ray burst from V404 Cygni detected in 2015 "created the high-energy rings from a phenomenon known as light echoes."

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Doberman

Animals are able to count and use zero. How far does their number sense go?

Jordana Cepelewicz
Quanta Magazine
Mon, 09 Aug 2021 14:36 UTC
two crows snow play
© June Hunter
Crows are known for play behavior, a marker for intelligence
Crows recently demonstrated an understanding of the concept of zero. It's only the latest evidence of animals' talents for numerical abstraction — which may still differ from our own grasp of numbers.

The intelligence of corvids like ravens and crows is well known. Recently, crows were even shown to have a numerical ability seen in few other species so far: a grasp of the concept of the empty set — the numerosity zero.

An understanding of numbers is often viewed as a distinctly human faculty — a hallmark of our intelligence that, along with language, sets us apart from all other animals.

But that couldn't be further from the truth. Honeybees count landmarks when navigating toward sources of nectar. Lionesses tally the number of roars they hear from an intruding pride before deciding whether to attack or retreat. Some ants keep track of their steps; some spiders keep track of how many prey are caught in their web. One species of frog bases its entire mating ritual on number: If a male calls out — a whining pew followed by a brief pulsing note called a chuck — his rival responds by placing two chucks at the end of his own call. The first frog then responds with three, the other with four, and so on up to around six, when they run out of breath.
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