kottke.org posts about science
From Domain of Science, the Fascinating Map of Fungi.
The zombie ant fungus, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, infects ants by piercing the exoskeleton with enzymes and spreads fungal cells throughout the body. It then secretes special neurological compounds that hijack the ant’s central nervous system, forcing it to climb high into a tree and lock its mandibles onto a leaf with a death grip. This makes a nice stable platform for the fungus to grow a fruiting body to disperse spores in a large area to infect more hosts.
And here’s a video explanation of everything on the map.
Watch video on YouTube.
See also this Classification of Plants & Fungi poster and its corresponding video explanation.
For most of human history, around 50% of children used to die before they reached the end of puberty. In 2020, that number is 4.3%. It’s 0.3% in countries like Japan & Norway.
This dramatic decline has resulted from better nutrition, clean water, sanitation, neonatal healthcare, vaccinations, medicines, and reductions in poverty, conflicts, and famine.
Before ~1800, almost every parent lost a child; now it’s such an uncommon experience that people have forgotten and want to ban vaccines.
In a letter to the Times of London, Dr. Michael Baum tells how a line in Arcadia by Tom Stoppard sparked an idea which resulted in adjuvant systemic chemotherapy, a therapy Baum helped pioneer which greatly increased the survivability of breast cancer.
Sir, In 1993 my wife and I went to see the first production of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard (obituary, Dec 1), and in the interval I experienced a Damascene conversion. As a clinical scientist I was trying to understand the enigma of the behaviour of breast cancer, the assumption being that it grew in a linear trajectory spitting off metastases on its way. In the first act of Arcadia, Thomasina asks her tutor, Septimus: “If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?” With that Stoppard explains chaos theory, which better explains the behaviour of breast cancer. At the point of diagnosis, the cancer must have already scattered cancer cells into the circulation that nest latent in distant organs. The consequence of that hypothesis was the birth of “adjuvant systemic chemotherapy”, and rapidly we saw a striking fall of the curve that illustrated patients’ survival.
Stoppard never learnt how many lives he saved by writing Arcadia.
Michael Baum
Professor emeritus of surgery; visiting professor of medical humanities, UCL
Certainly drives home the value of a robust and diverse culture of humanities in contradiction to the current backlash. (via @harrywallop.co.uk)
We’ve talked before about how some people can picture things in their heads quite vividly and others can’t at all. The latter group has a condition called aphantasia.
As soon as I close my eyes, what I see are not everyday objects, animals, and vehicles, but the dark underside of my eyelids. I can’t willingly form the faintest of images in my mind.
Larissa MacFarquhar wrote a fascinating article about aphantasia (and its opposite, hyperphantasia) for the New Yorker: Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound.
Naturally, aphantasics usually had a very different experience of reading. Like most people, as they became absorbed, they stopped noticing the visual qualities of the words on the page, and, because their eyes were fully employed in reading, they also stopped noticing the visual world around them. But, because the words prompted no mental images, it was almost as if reading bypassed the visual world altogether and tunnelled directly into their minds.
Aphantasics might skip over descriptive passages in books — since description aroused no images in their minds, they found it dull — or, because of such passages, avoid fiction altogether. Some aphantasics found the movie versions of novels more compelling, since these supplied the pictures that they were unable to imagine. Of course, for people who did have imagery, seeing a book character in a movie was often unsettling — because they already had a sharp mental image of the character which didn’t look like the actor, or because their image was vague but just particular enough that the actor looked wrong, or because their image was barely there at all and the physical solidity of the actor conflicted with that amorphousness.
And also:
When aphantasics recovered from bereavement, or breakups, or trauma, more quickly than others, they worried that they were overly detached or emotionally deficient. When they didn’t see people regularly, even family, they tended not to think about them.
M.L.: “I do not miss people when they are not there. My children and grandchildren are dear to me, in a muffled way. I am fiercely protective of them but am not bothered if they don’t visit or call. … I think that leaves them feeling as if I don’t love them at all. I do, but only when they are with me, when they go away they really cease to exist, except as a ‘story.’”
The bits about hyperphantasia are just as interesting:
Hyperphantasia often seemed to function as an emotional amplifier in mental illness—heightening hypomania, worsening depression, causing intrusive traumatic imagery in P.T.S.D. to be more realistic and disturbing. Reshanne Reeder, a neuroscientist at the University of Liverpool, began interviewing hyperphantasics in 2021 and found that many of them had a fantasy world that they could enter at will. But they were also prone to what she called maladaptive daydreaming. They might become so absorbed while on a walk that they would wander, not noticing their surroundings, and get lost. It was difficult for them to control their imaginations: once they pictured something, it was hard to get rid of it. It was so easy for hyperphantasics to imagine scenes as lifelike as reality that they could later become unsure what had actually happened and what had not.
“I can imagine my hand burning, to the point where it’s painful. I’ve always been curious — if they put me in an fMRI, would that show up? That’s one of the biggest problems in my life: when I feel something, is it real?”
One hyperphantasic told a researcher that he had more than once walked into a wall because he had pictured a doorway.
The more I read about this, the more I think that for those at either end of the phantasic scale, their inability (or extreme ability) to see things in their minds is a major component of what we think of as personality. Even just thinking about myself, there are all sorts of behaviors and traits I can connect to not being able to visualize things in my head that clearly. In some ways, it might be one of the most me things about me. (thx, willy)
Watch video on YouTube.
Two reasons why XKCD’s What If? series is so compelling:
- Even when an answer seems straightforward, the devil is in the details.
- And with respect to the details, Munroe does his due diligence.
In this case, the answer to “what’s the longest possible sunset you can experience while driving, assuming you’re obeying the speed limit and driving on paved roads?” was fairly surprising and exact and the explanation delightful.
Btw, the ending of the video is a callback to an early XKCD comic about angular momentum.
Watch video on YouTube.
Stress in pre-modern times was a “biological superpower” that helped humans hunt for food and survive in harsh environments and situations. But our bodies can’t easily tell the difference between the stress of encountering a lion in the jungle and a worrying email from your boss.
Our world has changed so quickly and profoundly that our biology couldn’t keep up. Stress is still the same it was fifty thousand years ago: Sense a stressor. React immediately and with full force. Prioritize present moment survival, make sacrifices if necessary.
That works well when you have to jump out of the way of a car. But most stressors we encounter nowadays are abstract, acute and more numerous, often intangible, persist for much longer and usually don’t even require physical action. The tigers of the past are now angry emails, deadlines, online dating, rush hour traffic or doom scrolling the news and social media.
Note: Watching this video might actually stress you out, at least until you get to the solutions part of it.
Caveat: In places with a lot of economic insecurity & few social safety nets, like the US, the solutions presented by this video may not be super helpful. Slowing down, disconnecting, and taking time for mindfulness can be difficult under the best of conditions and nearly impossible if you’re working two jobs as a single mother to just make ends meet.
Watch video on YouTube.
From MinuteEarth, a quick tour of all the different kinds of cats in the world, extinct, wild, and domesticated, and how they are related to each other. Some interesting facts I learned:
- The saber-toothed tiger was the largest cat to ever live and researchers now believe it had a short tail rather than a long one.
- There was an American cheetah. It was bigger than the cheetah we know today and “almost as fast”. It went extinct around the time humans showed up in North America.
- Leopards and snow leopards aren’t actually that closely related.
- Domestic cats are mostly descended from wildcats (not to be confused with cats who are wild — wildcat refers to two specific species, the European wildcat (Felis silvestris) and the African wildcat (Felis lybica)).
See also All the Dogs, Explained: “Standing on his hind legs, [the tallest ever Great Dane] was taller than Shaq.”
Operation Space Station is a two-part PBS documentary series on the International Space Station. Here’s a very short teaser trailer:
Watch video on YouTube.
A synopsis:
The size of a football field, the International Space Station hurtles around Earth at 17,000 mph, shielding its astronauts from the most hostile environment humans have ever endured. After 25 years of continuous human presence in space, astronauts and Mission Control insiders reveal the most terrifying moments aboard this remarkable orbiting laboratory, where a single mistake could prove fatal. From ammonia leaks, meteor strikes, and docking disasters, to spacewalk horrors, potentially lethal showers of space junk, and the moment the entire ISS backflipped out of control, follow life-or-death dramas unfolding 250 miles above our planet — and the human ingenuity and teamwork that save the day.
(via installer)
Watch video on YouTube.
A few years ago, a researcher looked at every surviving print of Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa that she could find (113 in all) and, using differences caused by “woodblock wear”, developed a system for determining if a particular print was made early in the life of the woodblocks used, late, or somewhere in-between.
Did you know there are 113 identified copies of Hokusai’s The Great Wave. I know the title says 111, but scientist Capucine Korenberg found another 2 after completing her research. What research was that? Finding every print of The Great Wave around the world and then sequencing them, to find out when they were created during the life cycle of the woodblocks they were printed from.
This involved painstakingly documenting visible signs of wear to the keyblock that made the Great Wave, and tracking these visible changes as the keyblock continued to be used (fun fact; scholars estimate there were likely as many as 8000 prints of The Great Wave originally in circulation).
See also The Evolution of Hokusai’s Great Wave.
Watch video on YouTube.
The latest video from Kurzgesagt imagines a scenario in which an advanced civilization called the Noxans can potentially survive the heat death of the universe.
With five hours of the full energy emitted by the Sun, we could power present day humanity for about 10 billion years.
So the Noxans harvest the last stars and build a gigantic complex of batteries around their home star. In principle, this energy could keep them alive for a few hundred trillion years, a long time but not even close to forever.
So now the hard part of the plan begins. The Noxans need to change the nature of life itself.
Watch video on YouTube.
Steve Mould is always informative and entertaining, so I started watching his video on building the world’s tallest siphon, nodding along to what I thought was the reasonable conclusion. And then the video kicked into another gear — because with science, the simple solution is not always the whole story when extreme conditions are in play. (via the kid should see this)
Watch video on YouTube.
In the most recent episode of Howtown, Joss Fong explains how above-ground nuclear testing in the 50s and 60s left a signature in all life on Earth that can be used as a forensic tool for catching art forgers, shady ivory dealers, and even fraudulent wine sellers/cellars.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union (with contributions from the UK and France) conducted a series of above-ground nuclear tests that led to an increase in the radioactive carbon-14 concentration in the atmosphere. This global surge, known as the “bomb pulse” or the “bomb spike”, is one of the most distinctive chemical signatures of the Cold War. The radiocarbon spread worldwide, embedding into plants, animals, and humans.
Scientists later discovered that this bomb-pulse radiocarbon spike could be used as a precise dating tool. Bomb-pulse dating allows researchers to determine whether biological material formed before or after nuclear testing. This method has been applied to forensic science, medical research, and environmental monitoring. It has been used to identify forgeries in artwork, measure human cell turnover, and estimate the lifespan of Greenland sharks.
One of the most important applications has been in tracking the illegal ivory trade. Elephant tusks absorb atmospheric carbon while the animal is alive. By analyzing the carbon-14 content of ivory artifacts or raw ivory, investigators can determine whether the material comes from a legally antique source or from a recently killed elephant.
This intersection of nuclear history, atmospheric science, and conservation biology demonstrates how Cold War nuclear fallout became a forensic tool for fighting elephant poaching and wildlife trafficking. More broadly, it demonstrates the creativity and resourcefulness of scientific researchers, who find ingenious uses for datasets of unlikely origin.
A paper recently published in a behavioral sciences journal describes a high school student’s hyperthymesia, an extraordinary ability to retrieve autobiographical memories. Teenager With Hyperthymesia Exhibits Extraordinary Mental Time Travel Abilities:
The subject of the study, referred to as TL, was a 17-year-old high school student in France when she came to the researchers’ attention. She had long known her memory was different. As a child, she would casually mention her ability to mentally revisit past events to check for details, only to be accused of lying by her peers. Eventually, she disclosed this ability to her family at age 16.
TL’s recollections were not merely accurate — they were structured. She described a highly organized internal world where memories were stored in a large, rectangular “white room” with a low ceiling. Within this mental space, personal memories were arranged thematically. Sections were dedicated to family life, vacations, friends, and even her collection of soft toys. Each toy had its own memory tag, including information about when and from whom it was received.
Importantly, these recollections were not purely factual. They carried emotional weight and vivid perceptual details. TL could mentally relive events from both her original perspective and from an outside observer’s view. She described, for instance, her first day of school in striking detail: what she wore, the weather, and the precise visual memory of her mother watching her through the fence. These experiences were accompanied by a strong sense of re-experiencing.
Whoa. The paper’s authors refer to her abilities as “mental time travel”. And this is straight out of Pixar’s Inside Out:
Beyond memory storage, TL described three additional rooms in her internal world, each associated with specific emotional functions. A cold “pack ice” room helped her cool down when angry. A “problems room” was empty but served as a space for pacing and thinking. A more uncomfortable “military room,” associated with her father’s absence due to military service, was linked to guilt. These features suggest a broader internal architecture shaped by emotional needs and reflective processes, not just memory content.
My memory does not work like this and it’s always fascinating to discover how other people think and perceive the world; see Does Your Brain Picture Things? (via damn interesting)
Watch video on YouTube.
I didn’t know this about eels:
No one has ever seen an eel reproduce naturally. Not in the wild, not in captivity, not even once. And yet, eels are everywhere. In rivers, in lakes, in oceans, slippery, ancient, and inexplicably present.
For centuries, the world’s greatest thinkers tried to solve the mystery of the eel. Aristotle thought they emerged from mud. Others believe they simply appeared, formed by sunlight and dew. Even today, there’s only one place on Earth where we think all eels are born: somewhere deep in the Atlantic where mysteriously no adult eel has ever been found.
So why are eels like this? What evolutionary advantage lies in such an impossibly complex journey? And why does their life cycle still defy so much of what we know about biology? This isn’t just a story about a fish. It’s a story about a creature that breaks the rules of science.
I found this via Frank Chimero’s short essay on eels.
Watch video on YouTube.
Entertaining YouTuber Benn Jordan built a setup to record and analyze bird sounds, songs, and calls. He used it to record a starling who has mastered mimicking all sorts of manmade and artificial sounds in its environment, including things like the default iPhone camera shutter sound. Jordan drew an image of a bird, played it as a sound, the starling played the sound back, and Jordan was able to see his bird drawing in the decoded sound.1 That is, he uploaded a picture of a bird to a bird and then downloaded the bird picture from the bird. 🤯
That’s the hook of the video, but the whole thing is well-worth watching (perhaps save for the last 10 minutes, which is a nerdy deep-dive into equipment) — the explanation of bird acoustics is both interesting & entertaining.
Thanks to KDO reader Liana for sending me this video three days ago, a full 48 hours before it got linked to from everywhere yesterday. *sigh* Some days I wish there were four or five of me to handle all of the cool things I run across and that people send me.
P.S. The comments on the YouTube post are worth a read:
So for a few weeks I thought I was going crazy because I would hear my Samsung dryer “Load Complete” song play but I didn’t have the dryer going and it sounded far away but not like it was in the house. On Saturday, I was out working in the yard and heard it again and there was a bird perfectly emulating the “Load Complete” song note for note! I started the dryer and from the tree the bird was in, you can clearly hear the dryer which is I guess how it learned it. Nature is so cool!
Imagine teaching a whole species of birds one song that draws a bird on a spectrogram. Suppose it survives with the species for millennia. One hell of a trip for future civilisations to find.
yeah I host my files on an AAS (Avian Accessible Storage). It’s a cloud storage solution
A Rainbow Lorikeet chose me for a partner 4 years ago. Excellent mimic. He calls my two cats to the back door, ” Here Kitty Kitty, Here Puddy Puddy” in MY voice. The cats come, expecting and looking for me. The bird then proceeds to laugh at them, with MY laugh. I’m also attempting to teach him to whistle the last stanza of the Italian national anthem.
Can you run Doom… on a bird?
Ross Anderson writes about how scientific empires, from the ancient Sumerians to the Nazis to the Soviet Union in the 1950s, have crumbled (or been willfully dismantled by ideologues) and the clear signs that the same thing is happening here in the United States under the conservative regime.
The very best scientists are like elite basketball players: They come to America from all over the world so that they can spend their prime years working alongside top talent. “It’s very hard to find a leading scientist who has not done at least some research in the U.S. as an undergraduate or graduate student or postdoc or faculty,” Michael Gordin, a historian of science and the dean of Princeton University’s undergraduate academics, told me. That may no longer be the case a generation from now.
Foreign researchers have recently been made to feel unwelcome in the U.S. They have been surveilled and harassed. The Trump administration has made it more difficult for research institutions to enroll them. Top universities have been placed under federal investigation. Their accreditation and tax-exempt status have been threatened. The Trump administration has proposed severe budget cuts at the agencies that fund American science — the NSF, the NIH, and NASA, among others — and laid off staffers in large numbers. Existing research grants have been canceled or suspended en masse. Committees of expert scientists that once advised the government have been disbanded. In May, the president ordered that all federally funded research meet higher standards for rigor and reproducibility — or else be subject to correction by political appointees.
And so:
Funding for American science has fluctuated in the decades since [World War II]. It spiked after Sputnik and dipped at the end of the Cold War. But until Trump took power for the second time and began his multipronged assault on America’s research institutions, broad support for science was a given under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Trump’s interference in the sciences is something new. It shares features with the science-damaging policies of Stalin and Hitler, says David Wootton, a historian of science at the University of York. But in the English-speaking world, it has no precedent, he told me: “This is an unparalleled destruction from within.”
Watch video on YouTube.
From MinuteEarth, a quick tour of all the different kinds of dogs in the world, wild & domesticated, and how they are related to each other.
Great Danes are the tallest dogs in the world. Standing on his hind legs, the Great Dane Zeus was taller than Shaq. He could drink directly from the kitchen sink.
In looking over the shortlist for the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 competition, I thought about how I’ve seen thousands or even tens of thousands of incredible astronomical images and yet there are always new, mind-blowing things to see. Like this 500,000-km Solar Prominence Eruption by PengFei Chou:
Or Close-up of a Comet by Gerald Rhemann and Michael Jäger:
Or Electric Threads of the Lightning Spaghetti Nebula by Shaoyu Zhang (Lightning Spaghetti Nebula!!!):
Or Dragon Tree Trails by Benjamin Barakat:
Teasingly, the official site only has a selection of the shortlisted entries but if you poke through the posts at Colossal, PetaPixel, and DIY Photography, you can find some more of them. (via colossal)
Carl Zimmer writes about the results of a new genetic study of humans and the diseases that afflicted us over the past 37,000 years. It’s a really fascinating read — in part because of how scientific results can defy our expectations. For instance, the researchers expected to find the plague when people first started domesticating animals 11,000 years ago. But they didn’t:
But the ancient DNA defied that expectation. The scientists found that plague and a number of other diseases jumped to people from animals thousands of years later, starting about 6,000 years ago. And those microbes did not jump into early farmers.
Instead, the new study points to nomadic tribes in Russia and Asia. Thousands of years after the dawn of agriculture, those nomads started rearing vast herds of cattle and other livestock.
And then:
Those epidemics were so intense that they changed the genetic profile of the nomads. Last year, Dr. Willerslev and his colleagues found that the nomads experienced a spike in mutations that boosted their immune system and that may have helped them resist the diseases they contracted. But their active immune systems may have also attacked their own bodies, producing chronic diseases such as multiple sclerosis.
These diseases might have played a part in Bronze Age history. In previous research, Dr. Willerslev and other scientists have found evidence that nomads expanded from the steppes of Asia into Europe about 4,500 years ago.
The study published on Wednesday suggests that the nomads may have gotten help from their pathogens. European farmers and hunter-gatherers had not evolved resistance to diseases such as plague and may have died off in huge numbers, making it easier for the nomads to move in.
Read the whole thing — it’s interesting throughout.
Watch video on YouTube.
A question from a viewer of XKCD’s What If? series: “What would happen if the Moon were replaced with an equivalently-massed black hole? And what would a lunar (“holar”?) eclipse look like?” The answer to the first part of the question is: not that much. But the explanation of why that is is fascinating.
It’s worth reading the comments on the post as well…XKCD brings out the nerds and their interesting observations:
Imagine if a species grew up on a planet that had a black hole moon the mass of the moon. They’d have tides, they’d have an unobstructed view of the night sky, and they’d have no clue about this behemoth out there and would be unable to explain these bizarre perturbations in Earth’s orbit when they finally worked out Earth’s orbit.
EDIT: To everyone mentioning lensing effects: no. The eye can discern about 1 arc minute which at the distance of the moon is 280km. The lensing effect is detectable generally about double the event horizon. If the event horizon is about the size of a grain of sand, doubling it is not going to come close to being detectable with the naked eye from Earth. It is probably safe to assume that the same would be true of captured dust — that the particle size is too small to be detectable to the naked eye.
Another commenter points out that the video never explicitly answers the second question:
It never answered the part of the question about the eclipse. A grain of sand passing in front of the sun wouldn’t be visible, but if it’s a black hole, would lensing effects do anything weird?
The consensus in the comments seems to be that the effect would be minor and nearly imperceptible:
Lensing is dependent on two things: Mass of the object around which light passes, and how close by light passes. Since the black hole is one lunar mass, a very small mass on gravitational level, the lensing would be minor. Light could get a lot closer to the black hole, though. You might see a very slight “shimmer” at the edge of the sun when the black hole passes by the edge, but not much more than that. If the black hole happened to perfectly pass in front of a star that you’re observing with a telescope, you might very very briefly see a small ring instead of a point of light, but that’s about it.
Science!
Iris van Herpen has an on-going collaboration with CERN. The Dutch fashion designer’s latest project, with photographer Nick Knight, takes place in the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, which is maybe the most sci-fi looking thing on Earth.
(via susannah breslin)
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile is operational and will soon embark on its primary mission: to take a detailed image of the sky every night for the next ten years.
A powerful new observatory has unveiled its first images to the public, showing off what it can do as it gets ready to start its main mission: making a vivid time-lapse video of the night sky that will let astronomers study all the cosmic events that occur over ten years.
“As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. But a snapshot doesn’t tell the whole story. And what astronomy has given us mostly so far are just snapshots,” says Yusra AlSayyad, a Princeton University researcher who oversees image processing for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.
“The sky and the world aren’t static,” she points out. “There’s asteroids zipping by, supernovae exploding.”
And the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, conceived nearly 30 years ago, is designed to capture all of it.
These images will revolutionize how astronomy is done:
Astronomy is following in the path of scientific fields like biology, which today is awash in DNA sequences, and particle physics, in which scientists must sift through torrents of debris from particle collisions to tease out hints of something new.
“We produce lots of data for everyone,” said William O’Mullane, the associate director for data management at the observatory. “So this idea of coming to the telescope and making your observation doesn’t exist, right? Your observation was made already. You just have to find it.”
“Your observation was made already. You just have to find it.” I love that.
The Rubin team has released some images from the telescope’s initial run, to inform the public of what the project is capable of. In less than a half-day’s operation, the Rubin discovered 2,104 new asteroids in our solar system.
In about 10 hours of observations, NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory discovered 2104 never-before-seen asteroids in our Solar System, including seven near-Earth asteroids (which pose no danger). Annually, about 20,000 asteroids are discovered in total by all other ground and space-based observatories. Rubin Observatory alone will discover millions of new asteroids within the first two years of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time. Rubin will also be the most effective observatory at spotting interstellar objects passing through the Solar System.
Not bad, rook. The team has set up a dedicated image viewer for their massive images.
You can read more about the Rubin at The Atlantic, The Rubin Observatory Is a Cosmic Cathedral, written by Michael Jones McKean, the observatory’s artist in residence:
Rubin is also a rare scientific megaproject that feels excitingly relatable. Instruments such as particle accelerators, neutrino detectors, and even radio telescopes might command our awe, but they roam in realms far outside sensorial experience. At its core, Rubin is an optical telescope. This links it to a long continuum of prosthetic tools that help our bodies better do what they already do naturally — see and process light.
And a trio of videos on how the observatory works from BBC News, New Scientist, and astrophysicist Becky Smethurst.
Watch video on YouTube.
In a recent Vlogbrothers video and in his newsletter, Hank Green talked about how we don’t take enough notice of the things that quietly keep us alive, healthy, and safe.
The tragedy of prevention goes like this: The most effective way to save lives (prevention) is the least noticeable, which leads us to undervaluing it in our individual choices, in what we celebrate, and in public policy. That undervaluing of prevention leads to a great deal of needless death and suffering.
But there’s a second tragedy here, which is that we spend way less time celebrating the accomplishments of humanity than I think we should. If every person who had their life saved by a vaccine, or an airbag, or a clean air regulation felt the same as a firefighter carrying an unconscious person out of a burning building, I think we’d feel a lot better about humanity, and maybe that would help us move forward more effectively.
This follows Green’s Bluesky post from early April:
A tricky thing about modern society is that no one has any idea when they don’t die.
Like, the number of lives saved by controlling air pollution in America is probably over 200,000 per year, but the number of people who think their life was saved by controlling air pollution is zero.
In the early days of the pandemic, I wrote about a related concept: The Paradox of Preparation.
Preparation, prevention, regulations, and safeguards prevent catastrophes all the time, but we seldom think or hear about it because “world continues to function” is not interesting news. We have to rely on statistical analysis and the expert opinions of planners and officials in order to evaluate both crucial next steps and the effectiveness of preparatory measures after the fact, and that can be challenging for us to pay attention to. So we tend to forget that preparation & prevention is necessary and discount it the next time around.
Watch video on YouTube.
In this video, musician Armin Küpper performs a saxophone duet with the echo of his past self by playing near the end of a large pipe. That’s pretty cool. And it’s also a learning opportunity! Hey wait, come back…you haven’t finished your bowl of physics yet:
What you hear after each note is an echo, a sound wave reflecting off the far end of the pipe and traveling back to him.
Sound travels at around 343 meters per second (1,235 km/h or 767 mph) through air. In this video, the echo takes about 1.5 seconds to return. That means the reflected sound traveled about 514.5 meters (1,688 feet) round-trip, so the end of the pipe is at around 257 meters (843 ft) away.
It seems more like a second to me (so ~563 feet), but whatever…still cool.
I’ve posted before about Charles Brooks’ fantastic series of photographs of the insides of musical instruments. Recently, Brooks had the opportunity to apply his technique to capture the innards of a particle accelerator.
Brooks says of the photo:
Despite being a scientific instrument, it behaves a lot like a musical instrument. Electrons pulse through this tunnel in tight, synchronized waves. The powerful magnets above and below make them undulate — just like the vibrating string of a fine cello — creating an intense X-ray beam used to probe hidden structures of our world.
As part of the project, accelerator physicist Eugene Tan converted the pulsing of the electrons in the chamber into sound, “letting us hear the movement of electrons at nearly the speed of light”.
Petapixel has a lot more on how this image was captured.
“This was an instant yes for me,” Brooks tells PetaPixel. “It ticked so many boxes: I’m always drawn to photographing hidden or complex spaces, and this was one of the most intricate objects I could possibly shoot.”
(via colossal)
We all recall the revelation last year that the ocean’s rebellious teenagers, orcas, have started wearing salmon on their heads. Again. (The official state animal of Connecticut is the sperm whale, which is wholly unrelated to this post, except insofar as whales were just mentioned in the previous sentence. It’s only I just learned this fact 5 weeks ago and can’t stop shoehorning it into every conversation.) And then the recent discovery of the carnivorous caterpillars crawling around spider webs wearing the desiccated carcasses of other bugs either as a defense or disguise, or because they think it looks really cool and who are you to say otherwise.
More recently, scientists announced a new discovery about the parasite Entamoeba histolytica which kills 50K-100K people a year by going through their colon to attack their liver before moving on to their brains and lungs. This parasite wears pieces of dead human cells to evade the body’s immune system, making it difficult for us to fight an invasion.
In 2022, Ralston discovered a major reason behind the parasite’s tenacity: the amoeba develops an ability to evade a crucial part of the human immune system known as complement proteins. These proteins are vital to identifying and eradicating foreign cells. To escape them, E. histolytica ingests specific proteins from human cell outer membranes, then places those proteins on its own outer surface. Two of those molecules block those important compliment proteins from attaching themselves and fighting back. Essentially, E. histolytica wears chunks of human cells as a disguise against its host’s immune system.
Further, gorillas and orangutans have inconclusively been seen wearing leaves in the rain, pom pom crabs carry sea anemone everywhere, dolphins in Shark Bay, Australia carry sea sponges around in their mouths, and, well, decorator crabs.
The NY Times has a nice feature on NASA astronaut Don Pettit’s photography from his latest stay in space, a 220-day mission aboard the ISS.
Now, you know I like a good astronomical image (like the one above of an ISS sunrise), but the thing that really caught my eye was the video of Pettit’s experiment involving charged water droplets and a teflon needle:
Watch video on YouTube.
I could watch that allllll day long.
More Pettit: Swirling Green Aurora Captured From the ISS.
Watch video on YouTube.
I don’t have a whole lot to say about this video except wow. Wow wow. It’s almost inconceivable that we live in a world of sights like this. Feels like science fiction but is actually real. Captured by NASA astronaut Don Pettit aboard the ISS.
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