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
An interesting story on evolution of another branch of life from 7DOS. A fossil from the Triassic of a new archosauromorph (early reptile predating and possibly ancestral to the archosaurs, the branch that includes crocs, dinos, and birds) that actually fossilized tissues and whole organs.

 
Mendalla said:
I think this is one of the most fascinating human evolution stories this year and it's been covered in all the big science media. I mean, it's one thing for us to have DNA from known species like Neanderthals and Homo Longi/Denisovans. It's quite another to have DNA from species we don't even know yet. I mean, maybe they are a known species we don't have DNA from like erectus, antecessor, or naledi, but it's equally likely it's another species we haven't even found yet. We have come far from those simple, and inaccurate even then, pictures that showed a linear progression from ape to homo sapiens. Now it's a tree with multiple branches and the amount of, um, interaction between those branches would make a porn star blush.
Click to expand...

What do we believe we know and what do we know about what we don't ... creating an enigma for those that will tell us all about good will and bad thoughts counter to the opposing bad will and good thought?

This is a discussion for somewhere else because many just won't have it as they can't get their head around it ... and some will declare that head is power ... resulting in a discussion thread about cleaning heads ... where sweat lodges ...

So much jabberwocky according to one person who messed in the uncertainty field ... field being designated a theory in some domains where people just wouldn't go there ... agoraphobia? Get out wit yah ... game theory gets a push ... especially in essence of some that would never agree with any thing ... as essence of thought ... like nothing!

Mortals are beasts as when down they disagree ... when up they do the same thing ... and no one wants to get to the middle of the enigma ... a well rounded debate ... until someone is deflated! Raisin designs on dah flate ... the function what's behind?

Expect flukes on sheep disease and brain resistance as spongiform irregularities ... stuff in the entire brew ... as PRION! Formerly on instead of off ...

A mysterious power needs a place to put this obstinance ...
 
Last edited:
A few year's back, there was a burst of excitement about a weirdly behaving star nicknamed Tabby's Star. The light from the star was fluctuating in strange ways, not the familiar dips of a planet in orbit transiting the star. And a few wags speculated that is was ... ALIENS!! Specifically a hypothetical megastructure known as a Dyson Sphere in which a civilization basically strips down all the planets in its solar system for resources to build a kind of shell of orbiting platforms around its star. The goal would be to maximize their ability to utilize energy from the star.

Of course, to quote a familiar line, "It's never aliens .... until it is." With more observations, a more prosaic hypothesis eventually came along in the form of dust clouds around the star. This was a simpler explanation and fit the observations better. IOW, a good scientific hypothesis. But where was this dust coming from? PBS Space Time has the latest.

 
So many people are so well laid out and founded on what they don't know ... they don't even miss a lot of it ... it just goes .. sinking as if sanq tiffied ...
 
We often think of hands with opposable digits for gripping things as a mammalian, even primate, trait. However, as often happens, our hands are actually convergent evolution and hands with the ability to grip things have evolved before. Why? They are a useful adaptation for living in trees. And one of the earliest tree dwelling (vs. ground dwelling creatures that are able to climb like a cat or squirrel or, well, human) vertebrates lived in the late Permian, making for a nice overlap between this new PBS Eons video and their series on the Permian currently running on PBS's website. Here is a look at how the first tree climbing and dwelling vertebrates, some in the reptile/bird lineage, some in the mammal lineage, evolved in the Carboniferous and Permian periods.

 
One of the strangest natural disasters in history occured at Lake Nyos in Cameroon. Thousands of people and animals in the area around the lake mysteriously died on August 21, 1986. The culprit turned out to be a thick cloud of carbon dioxide that was released from the lake, which sits atop a major volcanic region in Africa. Subsequent research finally figured out how it happened. Even better, a mechanism for doing controlled releases of CO2 from the lake and a neighbouring lake where a similar event happened has been developed as a way to prevent a repeat. SciShow has the story.

 
Mendalla said:
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.

Click to expand...
Very interesting video
 
There's a lot of interesting stuff that matters ... beyond us ... cos of limited understanding is undertaken to be hypo ... musing?

Something to get into ... stray thoughts as out there ... beyond the motivations! Remote ...
 
I posted before about the amazing discovery that the ancient lifeform prototaxites might represent a previously unknown lineage of life rather than belonging to either plants or fungi as previously thought. Here's a nice detailed discussion of prototaxites, including why we ruled out the known lineages and some history and updates on research about it. The hypothesis that it is a new kingdom of life is still controversial and the subject of much discussion but just the fact that these giant "trees" are different enough from everything else that lived then and since to provoke this kind of discussion makes them interesting.

 
Consider and contemplate that no many mortals are interested in such Que Rio stasis ... they are beyond that ...
 
Another Eons about the Permian. This time they look at the phenomenon of sail-backed animals. At least four unrelated species in the Permian sported "sails" on their backs, most famously the alpha predator Dimetrodon. This odd bit of convergent evolution has appeared rarely since then (e.g. some species of Spinosaurus in the Cretaceous Period, the still extent basilisk lizard) but was strangely common in the late Carboniferous and early Permian.

Why? Well, we aren't really sure since we aren't really sure what it was for. It was not, as one famous early paleontologist suggested, an actual sail. These creatures were mostly very clearly land dwellers. And the hypothesis that dominated in my youth, that it was a radiator to help maintain an even body temperature in these cold-blooded creatures, has failed some subsequent tests. Sexual display, similar to the feathers of peacocks or weird head crests of some modern birds, has been suggested but that's a hard one to test with fossils and tends to get trotted out for any weird physical features. So the short answer, there's lots of interesting ideas about them, but no hard answer as of right now.

 
Between AI, flying cars, self-driving cars, and delivery robots (yes, those are a thing in the US), the world is looking more and more like s-f, eh.:giggle: Now if we can just convince Elon Musk to include Donald Trump and his cabinet on the first colonization trip to Mars, we are set.:sneaky:
 
The way they drive in my area ... they appear like flying ... incarnating towards a killing field! Its one approach to leaving ...
 
Nice run of science news from various channels yesterday. Here's the rundown.

7DOS, in a rare diversion from their usual focus on paleontology (the founder, Ben Thomas, is doing his doctorate in that field), looks at recent studies of the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies and their possible impact on star formation.


Then SciShow takes an interesting look at how the strength of gravity actually varies measurably at different spots around the world, including some history of how we found and mapped these variances. The suspected culprit is density differences in the various layers of the Earth. As host Niba jokes, you can technically lose a tiny bit of weight (not mass, weight, there is a difference) just by moving to Sri Lanka or the Ross Sea area of Antarctica.


And finally, PBS Eons looks at the strange proliferation of mutant spores and pollen grains from the end of the Permian, i.e. the "Great Dying" mass extinction and how that knowledge might help us study other similar events as well as our own impact on the planet.

 
Are mute ants quiet or in just the way they change around at the picnic?

Roars and rants ensue ...

Speaking of rants; I run into another this morning as a driver got emotional about a large truck trying to maneuver the street ... no fundamental patience ...

The anxious one acted quite haggis ... perhaps his brain went to mush as his middle finger flashed about ... I understand emotional disturbances can do that ...
 
Scientists have discovered the first new species of cat in something like a century. And interestingly, it was basically hiding under our noses all the time. The new species is Leopardus tilcayo and is a type of small (as in smaller than most domestic cats) feline from South America commonly called a tiger cat. Tiger cats used to be regarded as a single species because they all look basically the same. However, genetic analyses have shown they are probably a family of cats, not a single species. And the tilcayo (which is, by the way, the local name for the cat) was indeed found through genetics. The tilcayo lives in the Yungas Forest in Bolivia and is likely to be listed as endangered due to its rarity (we only have two living individuals known) and range.

 
Some SCIENCE!!! from this past week. All have a biology aspect to them but beyond that, they range pretty far and wide.

First up, an interesting short documentary on the Algonquin Wolf, the wolves who live in Algonquin Park here in Ontario. Are they a distinct species of wolf? A variant of gray wolf? A wolf-coyote hybrid? What does this mean for conservation efforts?


Then we go back c. 100 million years to look at an octopus family that includes both a giant that could be the largest ever invertebrate (and certainly ties the giant squid for that honour at minimum) and also what may be the oldest confirmed octopus.


And finally, a look at Enceladus, a moon of the planet Saturn that might harbour life or at least prebiotic conditions that could lead to it.

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