Let's keep the SCIENCE!!!! coming in 2026

Welcome to Wondercafe2!

A community where we discuss, share, and have some fun together. Join today and become a part of it!

Register Log in
Mendalla

Mendalla

Happy headbanging ape!!
Pronouns
He/Him/His
Here we go. The year ticks over but science stops for nothing. In fact, scientifically speaking, years based on the Earth's orbit around the Sun are a purely arbitrary choice of measure. We could have a purely lunar calendar (e.g. the ancient Chinese, Jewish, and Arabic calendars) tied tightly to the movements of the moon. While most nations/societies have now adopted the Western solar calendar for day to day use, those lunar calendars are still widely used to calculate religious and cultural festivals, which is why events like the Asian Lunar New Year, Passover, and Ramadan don't have fixed dates on the solar calendar. It even influences Christian festivals since Easter is tied to Passover.

Anyhow, enough rambling about calendars. Here's the first SciShow of the new year, exploring an interesting geographical and geological puzzle: Why doesn't the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico have any rivers? It's not the only place like that, either, as host Savannah Geary points out towards the end.

 
SciShow has a new mini-series going called Field Trips. You know, like when you were in school and got to go out of the building to see and do stuff? In this case, Jaida Elcock, one of their regular hosts, is traveling to meet working scientists in their labs. And the first two have certainly been interesting. Both work out of the Broad Institute in Boston, Massachusetts but in rather different fields.

First up, Dr. Feng Zhang, currently of MIT. He was one of the early researchers on CRISPR, the famed gene editing technology. Not part of the original group that won the Nobel, but did some critical follow-up research. And he's still doing work in that area, investigating another gene sequence that might be even better for some applications.


Then we have Dr. Beth Stevens of Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital, a neurology researcher who focuses on the role of the glia. The glia are cells in the brain that people used to think just provided the infrastructure with the neurons doing the real work. Now Dr. Stevens, building on the work by her doctoral supervisors and colleagues, is showing that glia do a lot more and may even be a factor in things like dementia and ALS.

 
And from paleontology channel ExtinctZoo, a look at the Triassic mass extinction. This is another of the 5 mass extinction events in the Earth's evolutionary history (we are probably causing the sixth) but tends to get less press than the Permian "Great Dying" and the Cretaceous asteroid. And, yet, it presents an interesting irony. We talk a lot about how the Cretaceous event killed off the non-avian dinosaurs and their flying cousins pterosaurs (which were, to be clear, neither dinosaurs nor birds but were the first vertebrates to evolve flight). However, both groups actually owed their dominance to this mass extinction, which took out a lot of competing lineages. Much like the Cretaceous event cleared them out of the way, allowing for the birds (offshoots of the theropod dinosaurs) and mammals to take over.

 
Quintessence; like the 5 portions of Nobel Presentations ... dash the first 4 and peace ensues ... vast silence?

Now if you get into physics, chemistry, medicine and literature you might go to Oxford as they say they do to examine reading material ... in the vernacular ... they go to Oxford to read! Some cannot ... they believe they have no need ...

It is a long challenge ... as it goes on and on ... what if it is entirely related? Dame ...

Is that Capital as a kind of Eire? We are directed that we cannot say because of unknown rationale ... pieces gone missing ... mist! Entertains the vast spread ...

Mores to look into ... round-about's ...

Does it in total; appear seminal? Can it transpose? Involves spin factors ...
 
Last edited:
So many mistakes ... you'd wonder if we know anything at all, or are just an impulsive, irrational race ... thought is out there!
 
Interesting evolutionary story here from PBS Eons. Apparently, rye and oats actually started as weeds. They grew in Neolithic wheat and barley fields and evolved to resemble those plants since ones that didn't look like the crop were pulled by the farmers when they were weeding, leaving only the ones that did to reproduce. Eventually, the seeds got mixed with the crop seeds and people discovered that they, too, made a good staple grain and started specifically cultivating them. Which is how we got rye whiskey, pumpernickel bread, and oatmeal. However, there is also a cautionary tale, because a grass that is a nuisance weed in rice paddies in Asia developed in the same way. Sadly, the Soviet biologist who first figured a lot of this out fell afoul of Stalinism and died during one of Stalin's purges.

 
Last edited:
Plants play a big part in biodiversity of drugs, vitamins and toxic effects ... balance is a major consideration for the "WOKE" to such science.

The historical significance of Hogwarts even reaching into literary depictions ...
 
I don't usually post 7 Days of Science here (but do watch it, it's an excellent science news channel) but this week's regular show is one of the more succinct versions of the story I want to talk about. It's the first story. For a long time, we have known that in the distant past, a weird lifeform called Prototaxites existed, basically a kind of living pillar that could grow to c. 8m high. And for a long time, people have classed it as a fungus though there has been debate. Now some new work on fossils of Prototaxites suggest that it was, in fact, not a fungus. Nor was it a plant. Nor was it an animal. In short, we have no f-ing idea what this thing was and it now appears that it may actually be a previously unknown, and apparently 100% extinct, branch of the tree of life.


And a write-up of the story from Sci News: Prototaxites May Be Completely Unknown Branch of Complex Life | Sci.News

There's also a link to the original paper in the description of the video.

And a cute Canadian note. If you look at the right (her right) shoulder of Emilia, the host, there's a set of L. M. Montgomery's books.
 
Maybe just a bone-here for contention as someone would render it down to boner so to stiff someone ... thus spines in some novels ...
 
Evolution. The way lifeforms adapt to their environment is as marvellous as any Biblical miracle in my books. So lets look at a couple interesting stories.

We think of wildfires as horribly destructive events. And for our society, they are. However, natural wildfires are actually important drivers of evolution. They sweep away old vegetation and open the door for new vegetation better adapted to new conditions. And they may even have helped with one of the most revolutionary changes in the evolution of life: The rise of angiosperms (aka flowering plants).


In the evolution of humanity, one of the big questions is how our complex language abilities evolved. Many animals communicate in very simple ways. For instance (to give an example from this video) mongooses use different warning sounds if a threat is coming from above (e.g. an eagle) or on the ground (e.g. a big cat). But we are the only lifeform we have known of that can string together ideas in a complex way to create new meaning. So a mongoose can go "Bird!!" but a human can go "Eagle coming in at 4 o'clock high from the North so get your ass into a hole." Now, we have found a very simple version of this complexity in the sounds made by orangutans. They are not our closest relatives (all of the African apes are closer), but it does provide some hints of how this behaviour might have started in our ancestors.

 
Those established will say this is ape's height ... how Shiites can spread pyre weed ... just by wandering in an arid spot ... spots difficult shake ...

Imagine getting put in a spot ... without mass or volume ... and heis off! Synaptic origin ... snapdragons ... also toxic if over consumed ... like belle flowers ... upended ... Lil ether?
 
So how about some more? We know well from our own time that humans and our societies impact nature. It's well documented. Here's an interesting example, though, looking at how the development of agriculture and human societies affected the size of animals, not just the ones we domesticated, but also wild ones.

 
Mendalla said:
So how about some more? We know well from our own time that humans and our societies impact nature. It's well documented. Here's an interesting example, though, looking at how the development of agriculture and human societies affected the size of animals, not just the ones we domesticated, but also wild ones.

Click to expand...

You make it sound all connected or related in the flux ... before relaxation set it ...
 
Mendalla said:
It is. Everything is connected. We UUs have it built in to our principles as the "interdependent web of all life of which we are a part".
Click to expand...

Then why the great enigma of dissemination, etc. Like skitz-oid ... in that dual vision? A complex enigma until the opposites fuse and disappear in a flash ... such reactions remind me of another metaphor ... collapse of materialism into a dark hole item? There could be a myth buried there ... a man made gap eh?
 
It is all built into the gap created by what took off to the right and left a hollow remaining ... what was given up had a consequence in the remaining portions ...

What remains is a great fear to them that took off wilfully ... cultivated by fear it grows into terrorism that we are mum about ... kind Ave poetic ... as a massacre ... between 13 and the third hand ... emotional collapse? Therefore the reach beyond the pool ... like that hand in the lake, lady!

Xi shows up in many stores ... but at the end ... that mysterious "i" ... as jeopardized ... without doubt abstract and dark to the core! The grand mum theory to be silent about ... how she covered up ... pro trussing? Like a brace ... and yet there was nothing in it ... virtual emptiness ... before you know it ... there it was ... gone with some moving Eire ... kind 've ethereal eh so it can get on ... often impetuous! Why? Often it occurred without ac Lue ... base thought?

In high places thinking is considered evil ... do you need examples? These are to remain mum as autonomous ... material of the great unknown ... out the in conjunction with a large piece of time ... may incarnate as a dream ... some colorful seer ... life can burn you up! The cycle of Ignacio us ... it is sad how it goes about like Phoenix ... in there para dice is ... Ca Duces? Twinned ... that's Du bi ... us as one real and another unreal reflex contained in the unlikely mine ... how's your Doppelganger ... one feels the urge to wander ... turned up in Eire ... mine is always mistaken ... so I'm told by those aggrandized ... approbated?

Some find it hard to be simple ... others hard to get into the opposed (as complex) ... a tough drag? Yet brother will be against brother ... because of ...

Is it something we don't know?

Loci in the cosmos logical stir ... 4 degrees! The forth coming when they step into the great beyond ... out-a-here! Had enough ...
 
Last edited:
Years ago, when I did science threads on here, one of my go to channels for content was Physics Girl, the channel of American science educator Dianne Cowern. Sadly, the channel has been silent for several years other than occasional reruns and health updates. Dianne came down with COVID just after her wedding and developed a serious post-COVID condition that left her bedridden for years. So I was delighted and heartened when this video went up today. TLDR: She's baaaaaack!

 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top