Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
"Disproving evolution is easy"
I followed a YouTube link from the "Obey Authority" kid rockers and it turned out to be surprisingly entertaining:
MONSTER MASH-UP: THE SEQUEL (iPod shuffle challenge!)
This worked out awesomely last year, so let's do it again! You remember the deal: you're scoring the trailers for several upcoming horror movies, so put your iPod or MP3 player of choice on shuffle and post the first song you hit for each trailer. That song is the centerpiece of the trailer, and you should write a few lines about how it'd fit the trailer or where it kicks in. Does it make it a comedy? Does it make it a teen movie? A freaky foreign flick? Follow the link to last year's challenge for bitchin' examples.
Here're the new trailer concepts:
Reminder: You might want to skip the orchestral stuff to avoid being too on the nose and go with mainly pop music.
Here're the new trailer concepts:
1) Haunted House
2) Mad Scientist
3) The Devil!
4) Creepy Aliens
5) SEQUEL! (Choose one of your movies from last year and score its sequel trailer. Pick the movie first, then hit shuffle - no cheats! If you didn't participate last year, your trailer topic is...MUMMY!)
Reminder: You might want to skip the orchestral stuff to avoid being too on the nose and go with mainly pop music.
The Scale of the Universe
I figure everyone's seen the genius Powers of Ten at some point in their life (if not, follow the link!) Here's a nice accompaniment with a touch more interactivity. Go feel humble:
THE SCALE OF THE UNIVERSE
THE SCALE OF THE UNIVERSE
Death Dogs of Moscow
Fear them.
Moscow's Stray Dogs Evolving Greater Intelligence, Including a Mastery of the Subway
For every 300 Muscovites, there's a stray dog wandering the streets of Russia's capital. And according to Andrei Poyarkov, a researcher at the A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution, the fierce pressure of urban living has driven the dogs to evolve wolf-like traits, increased intelligence, and even the ability to navigate the subway.
Poyarkov has studied the dogs, which number about 35,000, for the last 30 years. Over that time, he observed the stray dog population lose the spotted coats, wagging tails, and friendliness that separate dogs from wolves, while at the same time evolving social structures and behaviors optimized to four ecological niches occupied by what Poyarkov calls guard dogs, scavengers, wild dogs, and beggars.
The guard dogs follow around, and receive food from, the security personnel at Moscow's many fenced in sites. They think the guards are their masters, and serve as semi-feral assistants. The scavengers roam the city eating garbage. The wild dogs are the most wolf-like, hunting mice, rats, and cats under the cover of night.
But beggar dogs have evolved the most specialized behavior. Relying on scraps of food from commuters, the beggar dogs can not only recognize which humans are most likely to give them something to eat, but have evolved to ride the subway. Using scents, and the ability to recognize the train conductor's names for different stops, they incorporate many stations into their territories.
Additionally, Poyarkov says the pack structure of the beggars reflects a reliance on brain over brawn for survival. In the beggar packs, the smartest dog, not the most physically dominant, occupies the alpha male position.
The evolution of Moscow's stray dogs has been going on since at least the mid-1800s, when Russian writers first mentioned the stray dog problem in the city. And that evolution has been propelled by deadly selective pressure. Most of the strays arrive on the streets as rejected house pets. Of those dogs kicked out of their homes, Poyarkov estimates fewer than 3 percent live long enough to breed. To survive those odds, a dog really does have to be the fittest.
Important Sex Tips
From the guys at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. The setup is funny, but the punchline, I thought, was killer.
Ben's Hot List
I begin by noting my disdain for previously-posted "hot" lists. I have yet to see a single item that reaches even 40 °C; positively frigid by comparison to my list.
Number Three: The Sun
While it is outclassed by the remainder of the list at a with a tepid surface of temperature of just 5900° C, I include it here because of its personal significance. In fact, it's quite likely that without it, I would never have been born!
Number Two: HD 93129A
When it comes to astronomical phenomena, now we're getting somewhere. At 52,000° C on its surface, HD 93129A is one of the brightest stars in our galaxy, and positively balmy. HD 93129A isn't for those who prefer their hotties pint-sized, however, as most of you seem to do; its radius is 25 times that of our sun. (Personally, I think it's long past time for the trend towards skeletal, boyish hotties to be taken out back and shot.)
Number One: The Large Hadron Collider
Spanning the French-Swiss border, 100 meters underground, lurks a 27 km long beast capable of melting protons. Firing ions at 99.99% the speed of light, the Large Hadron Collider will produce 600 million collisions per second, each at a temperature (well, energy) of 166,306,000,000,000,000 °C. Incidentally, this is how the world ends: the Swiss accidentally make a black hole and crack the Earth in half.
I'd like to see Angelina Jolie try that.
Number Three: The Sun
While it is outclassed by the remainder of the list at a with a tepid surface of temperature of just 5900° C, I include it here because of its personal significance. In fact, it's quite likely that without it, I would never have been born!
Number Two: HD 93129A
When it comes to astronomical phenomena, now we're getting somewhere. At 52,000° C on its surface, HD 93129A is one of the brightest stars in our galaxy, and positively balmy. HD 93129A isn't for those who prefer their hotties pint-sized, however, as most of you seem to do; its radius is 25 times that of our sun. (Personally, I think it's long past time for the trend towards skeletal, boyish hotties to be taken out back and shot.)
Number One: The Large Hadron Collider
Spanning the French-Swiss border, 100 meters underground, lurks a 27 km long beast capable of melting protons. Firing ions at 99.99% the speed of light, the Large Hadron Collider will produce 600 million collisions per second, each at a temperature (well, energy) of 166,306,000,000,000,000 °C. Incidentally, this is how the world ends: the Swiss accidentally make a black hole and crack the Earth in half.
I'd like to see Angelina Jolie try that.
Runaway Brain
Was reading an interview with EPIC MICKEY designer Warren Spector and he mentioned this little gem, an Oscar-nominated short from 1995 that he cites as one of the rare modern Mickey Mouse cartoons of merit.I gave it a watch and really enjoyed it.
I, for one, would like to welcome our new insect overlords...
Cool BBC science story. I boldfaced the highlights.
Ant mega-colony takes over world
A single mega-colony of ants has colonised much of the world, scientists have discovered.
Argentine ants living in vast numbers across Europe, the US and Japan belong to the same inter-related colony, and will refuse to fight one another.
The colony may be the largest of its type ever known for any insect species, and could rival humans in the scale of its world domination.
What's more, people are unwittingly helping the mega-colony stick together.
Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) were once native to South America. But people have unintentionally introduced the ants to all continents except Antarctica.
These introduced Argentine ants are renowned for forming large colonies, and for becoming a significant pest, attacking native animals and crops.
In Europe, one vast colony of Argentine ants is thought to stretch for 6,000km (3,700 miles) along the Mediterranean coast, while another in the US, known as the "Californian large", extends over 900km (560 miles) along the coast of California. A third huge colony exists on the west coast of Japan.
While ants are usually highly territorial, those living within each super-colony are tolerant of one another, even if they live tens or hundreds of kilometres apart. Each super-colony, however, was thought to be quite distinct.
But it now appears that billions of Argentine ants around the world all actually belong to one single global mega-colony.
Researchers in Japan and Spain led by Eiriki Sunamura of the University of Tokyo found that Argentine ants living in Europe, Japan and California shared a strikingly similar chemical profile of hydrocarbons on their cuticles.
But further experiments revealed the true extent of the insects' global ambition.
The team selected wild ants from the main European super-colony, from another smaller one called the Catalonian super-colony which lives on the Iberian coast, the Californian super-colony and from the super-colony in west Japan, as well as another in Kobe, Japan.
They then matched up the ants in a series of one-on-one tests to see how aggressive individuals from different colonies would be to one another.
Ants from the smaller super-colonies were always aggressive to one another. So ants from the west coast of Japan fought their rivals from Kobe, while ants from the European super-colony didn't get on with those from the Iberian colony.
But whenever ants from the main European and Californian super-colonies and those from the largest colony in Japan came into contact, they acted as if they were old friends.
These ants rubbed antennae with one another and never became aggressive or tried to avoid one another.
In short, they acted as if they all belonged to the same colony, despite living on different continents separated by vast oceans.
The most plausible explanation is that ants from these three super-colonies are indeed family, and are all genetically related, say the researchers. When they come into contact, they recognise each other by the chemical composition of their cuticles.
"The enormous extent of this population is paralleled only by human society," the researchers write in the journal Insect Sociaux, in which they report their findings.
However, the irony is that it is us who likely created the ant mega-colony by initially transporting the insects around the world, and by continually introducing ants from the three continents to each other, ensuring the mega-colony continues to mingle.
"Humans created this great non-aggressive ant population," the researchers write.
As some of you may know, I fear technology.
But this is still a cool demo of where the future might be leading us...
Morph Concept Phone:
Morph Concept Phone:
Batman's doing it wrong
Here we see Batman and I, Vampire in Brave and the Bold 195. Obviously, Batman has no idea how the whole 'vampire' thing is supposed to work. Most of them just skip the blood transfusion and get straight to the biting...
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