Science & TechnologyS


Lemon

Snakes disembowel toads and feast on the living animal's organs one by one

Mindy Weisberger
Live Science
Mon, 05 Oct 2020 10:35 UTC
snake toad
© Winai SuthanthangjaiA small-banded kukri snake with its head inserted through the right side of the abdomen of an Asian black-spotted toad, in order to extract and eat the organs. Tissue of a collapsed lung (above, left), and possibly fat tissue, is covered by clear liquid that foams as it mixes with air bubbles from the lung. The upper part of the front leg is likewise covered by foaming blood, mixed with air bubbles from the collapsed lung.
Pity the toads that encounter Asian kukri snakes in Thailand. These snakes use enlarged, knifelike teeth in their upper jaws to slash and disembowel toad prey, plunging their heads into the abdominal cavities and feasting on the organs one at a time while the toads are still alive, leaving the rest of the corpse untouched.

While you're recovering from the horror of that sentence, "perhaps you'd be pleased to know that kukri snakes are, thankfully, harmless to humans," amateur herpetologist and naturalist Henrik Bringsøe, lead author in a new study describing the gruesome technique, said in a statement.

This grisly dining habit was previously unknown in snakes; while some rip chunks from their prey, most snakes gulp down their meals whole. Scientists had never before seen a snake Bury its head inside an animal's body to slurp up organs — sometimes taking hours to do so, Bringsøe and his colleagues reported.

Comment: See also:

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Battery

Physicists build circuit that generates clean, limitless power from graphene

University of Arkansas
Phys.org
Fri, 02 Oct 2020 06:26 UTC
graphene circuit
© University of Arkansas
A team of University of Arkansas physicists has successfully developed a circuit capable of capturing graphene's thermal motion and converting it into an electrical current.

"An energy-harvesting circuit based on graphene could be incorporated into a chip to provide clean, limitless, low-voltage power for small devices or sensors," said Paul Thibado, professor of physics and lead researcher in the discovery.

The findings, published in the journal Physical Review E, are proof of a theory the physicists developed at the U of A three years ago that freestanding graphene — a single layer of carbon atoms — ripples and buckles in a way that holds promise for energy harvesting.

The idea of harvesting energy from graphene is controversial because it refutes physicist Richard Feynman's well-known assertion that the thermal motion of atoms, known as Brownian motion, cannot do work. Thibado's team found that at room temperature the thermal motion of graphene does in fact induce an alternating current (AC) in a circuit, an achievement thought to be impossible.
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Blue Planet

Despite Darwinists' cancel culture, intelligent design achieves breakthrough in mainstream biology journal

John G. West
Evolution News
Fri, 02 Oct 2020 17:18 UTC
intelligent design
In its September 21 issue, the Journal of Theoretical Biology published a major peer-reviewed article on fine-tuning in biology that favorably discusses intelligent design.

The article explicitly cites work by Discovery Institute Fellows such as Stephen Meyer, Günter Bechly, Ann Gauger, Douglas Axe, and Robert J. Marks. The article is co-authored by Steinar Thorvaldsen and Ola Hössjer. Hössjer is a professor of mathematical statistics at Stockholm University who is favorable to intelligent design.

This is a big deal for the mainstreaming of ID.
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Boat

New study sheds light on 'dead water' phenomenon

Tom Metcalfe
Hakai Magazine
Fri, 02 Oct 2020 04:32 UTC
Fram Sailing Ship
© Photo by Sueddeutsche Zeitung/Alamy Stock PhotoThe Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen first described the phenomenon of dead water while sailing the Fram in Arctic waters in 1893.
Norwegian mariners called it dødvann — dead water. They'd known for centuries that patches of seawater in narrow fjords could mysteriously sap a ship's speed, drastically slowing it or stopping it altogether. In his 1897 book, Farthest North, explorer Fridtjof Nansen wrote of his encounter with dead water north of Siberia in 1893: "We could hardly get on at all for the dead-water, and we swept the whole sea along with us." Dead water, Nansen noted, occurred "where a layer of fresh water rests upon the salt water of the sea," as happens in northern fjords when snow and ice from mountains melt into the ocean.

Nansen's report of dead water was investigated by scientists at the time, including the Swedish oceanographer Vagn Walfrid Ekman. In 1904, Ekman published research that showed dead water was caused by hidden waves in a dense subsurface layer of salt water that slowed the forward motion of a ship. Today's speedy ships easily overcome these submerged waves, and for most mariners dead water is now largely forgotten.

But more than 100 years later, scientists are still exploring the phenomenon, and a new investigation has uncovered more details about its underlying mechanics.

In France, physicist Germain Rousseaux and his colleagues at the National Centre for Scientific Research re-created the laboratory experiments conducted by Ekman using modern techniques. They also investigated a different oceanographic phenomenon that Ekman first described, in which a ship repeatedly slows down before surging forward — an oscillation they've dubbed the "Ekman effect."
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Info

Memristor - First single device to act like a neuron

Samuel K Moore
IEEE Spectrum
Thu, 01 Oct 2020 20:04 UTC
Mott Memristor
© Research Group of R. Stanley WilliamsThe new device combines resistance, capacitance, and Mott memristance. The most crucial part is the nanometers-thin niobium oxide (NbO2) layer.
One thing that's kept engineers from copying the brain's power efficiency and quirky computational skill is the lack of an electronic device that can, all on its own, act like a neuron. It would take a special kind of device to do that, one whose behavior is more complex than any yet created.

Suhas Kumar of Hewlett Packard Laboratories, R. Stanley Williams now at Texas A&M, and the late Stanford student Ziwen Wang have invented a device that meets those requirements. On its own, using a simple DC voltage as the input, the device outputs not just simple spikes, as some other devices can manage, but the whole array of neural activity — bursts of spikes, self-sustained oscillations, and other stuff that goes on in your brain. They described the device last week in Nature.

It combines resistance, capacitance, and what's called a Mott memristor all in the same device. Memristors are devices that hold a memory, in the form of resistance, of the current that has flowed through them. Mott memristors have an added ability in that they can also reflect a temperature-driven change in resistance. Materials in a Mott transition go between insulating and conducting according to their temperature. It's a property seen since the 1960s, but only recently explored in nanoscale devices.
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Eye 1

Ancient humans' eyes were nearly black

Ross Pomeroy
Real Clear Science
Thu, 01 Oct 2020 21:21 UTC
Black Iris
© Horro Land
Of all human bodily organs, the eye is especially alluring. Seemingly alive as it twitches to and fro within the socket, the eye permits sighted interaction with the physical world and allows us - in a superficial, yet meaningful way - to gaze into the minds of others.

The human eye's hallmark trait is its medley of colors. The iris, which surrounds the pupil, can appear blue, green, gray, hazel, brown, and even red. Differences in levels of the pigment melanin primarily account for the varying hues - more melanin renders the eyes darker, while less leaves eyes reflecting light blue. How much melanin dwells within the iris depends on the expression of around a dozen different genes, and perhaps more. The two most important by far are OCA2 and HERC2. OCA2 produces a protein that controls the maturation of melanin-producing melanosomes. HERC2 controls the expression of OCA2.

When humans arose in the horn of Africa at least a quarter of a million years ago, human eyes were extremely dark brown or nearly black. That's because OCA2 was expressed at high levels, in turn leading to the production of more melanin, which colored skin dark brown and, as a side effect, darkened irises. Brown skin is less likely to be sunburned or to develop skin cancer, benefits which served humans well in Central Africa's sunny, equatorial climate.
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Info

41 genetic variants found to influence left-handedness

Lily Nothling
ABC News, Australia
Wed, 30 Sep 2020 21:13 UTC
Left-handedness
© QIMR BerghoferThe study is one of the largest investigations of its kind.
About 10 per cent of Australians are left-handed and genetic analysis of more than 1.7 million people has brought scientists a step closer to understanding why.

Researchers from QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute and the University of Queensland have identified 48 genetic variants that influence if a person is left-handed, right-handed or ambidextrous.

Forty-one variants were linked to left-handedness and seven were associated with ambidexterity.

"Handedness is one of those things where both genetics and environment play a large role and what we've been able to do is advance the knowledge quite a bit further in the genetics side," Professor Sarah Medland from QIMR Berghofer's Psychiatric Genetics Group said.

"Each of these [variants] are just little changes in the DNA — each of them individually have very, very small effects — but when you consider all the effects together, they start to add up."

Researchers tapped into international biobanks to analyse genetic data from more than 1.7 million samples, making it one of the largest investigations of its kind.

The findings were published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.
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Eye 2

Virtually blind mole-rats use their eyes to 'see' magnetic fields

Tessa Koumoundouros
Science Alert
Wed, 30 Sep 2020 00:00 UTC
mole-rats
© Kai Robert CasparA cuddle pile of mole-rats in the lab
In the gloom of subterranean tunnels, chonky little mole-rats build their nests, tucked safely away, deep inside the earth. Strangely, one species always carefully builds these nests in the south-eastern part of their den.

Why they do this remains unclear, but even in total darkness, it seems, these burrowing rodents - animals that can barely see in the best of conditions - can still sense direction.

We've long known animals like birds can sense magnetic fields, and recently discovered dogs navigate via them too. But the biological mechanisms behind this sense - and how it might function in mole-rats - are still very much a mystery. We didn't even know where in the body these magnetic detectors, whatever they prove to be, are located.

A recent theory suggests this sensory ability may somehow occur via magnetotactic bacteria living within these species. But so far clues about mole-rats' magnetoreceptors suggest that their mechanism is magnetite-based.
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Meteor

Why are so many asteroids having close calls with Earth in 2020?

Michael Snyder
End of the American Dream
Wed, 23 Sep 2020 00:00 UTC
asteroids
Have you noticed that it seems like stories about asteroids that are approaching the Earth are constantly in the news this year? It wasn't always this way. In the old days, maybe there would be a story about an asteroid every once in a while, and those stories were never a big deal. But now asteroids are zipping by our planet with frightening regularity, and several more very notable passes will happen over the next few weeks. For example, an asteroid that was just discovered on September 18th will come very, very close to the Earth on Thursday. According to NASA, it will actually come closer to our planet than many of our weather satellites...
An asteroid about the size of an RV or small school bus will zoom past the Earth on Thursday, NASA announced, passing within 13,000 miles of the Earth's surface.

That's much closer than the moon and is actually closer than some of our weather satellites.
This asteroid will speed by at more than 17,000 mph, but the good news is that it is so small that it would not be a serious threat even if it hit us.

But two other very large asteroids are also going to pass the Earth by the end of this month, and both of them are large enough to do an enormous amount of damage...

Comment: No, dear author, it is not just our imagination that the close calls with asteroids and other near-earth objects are increasing in frequency.

And here is why we think they are - from Sott.net in 2007:
War, rumors of war, corrupt governments run by psychopaths, phony terrorism, burgeoning police states...but is that all we have to worry about? What if there was something to put it all in context? Or rather, what if there is something else we are missing, something that is beyond the control of even the political and corporate elite; something that is driving them to attempt to herd the global population to an ever finer order of control...

A new sott.net video production:



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Galaxy

Solar system has two planes of orbital alignment, radical new discovery suggests

Michelle Starr
Science Alert
Wed, 30 Sep 2020 12:00 UTC
ecliptics
© NAOJIllustration of the two ecliptics.
If you could zoom out and look at the Solar System from a distance, you'd see that the illustrations have at least one thing right: the planets are, more or less, aligned on a flat plane, circling the Sun's equator.

This is called the ecliptic, and it's thought to be a remnant of how the Solar System formed - a flattish disc of dust swirling around the Sun that gradually clumped together into planets, asteroids, and other chunks of rock.

There are, however, a few bodies that move around outside this plane - mainly long-period comets with orbits of hundreds to tens of thousands of years, orbiting at the farthest reaches of the Solar System, in the Oort Cloud of icy bodies.

Comment: See also: And check out SOTT radio's:

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