bones rocks and dirt

• 2013-04-16 10 notes

  

  The Science of Subway Riders:

  Perhaps most telling is the authors’ account of rider decisions when a fellow traveler rises from a seat. “Customers do change seats as seats become available due to passengers disembarking,” the report said, in language riders would be unlikely to use: “but seat-change maneuvers incur utility costs (movement effort, and risk of desired seat becoming occupied midmaneuver).”

  To mitigate this risk, the authors found, riders must often “relinquish their current less-desirable seats in advance of busy stops” to better position themselves near to where “seat-turnover” seems more likely.

  “We cannot fully explain seating preference,” the authors added; they “only can describe it.”

  Photo: Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times

  Source: The New York Times

• 2013-03-28 11 notes

  endling - noun, \ˈend-liŋ\ - an individual animal that is the last of its species or subspecies. Once the endling dies, the species becomes extinct.

  Examples:

  The passenger pigeon became extinct on 1 September 1914, when the endling Martha died at the Cincinnati Zoo.

  “Incas,” the last Carolina Parakeet, died at the Cincinnati Zoo on 21 February 1918.

  “Booming Ben,” a solitary Heath Hen, was last seen 11 March 1932 on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.

  ‘Benjamin’ (probably actually a female), the last thylacine, also known as Tasmanian tiger died on 7 September 1936 at Hobart Zoo. 

  On 24 June 2012, Lonesome George, who was the last known Pinta Island tortoise (Chelonoidis nigra abingdoni), died in his habitat.

  Taken almost fully from Wikipedia. Inspired by Lucas Brouwers.

• 2013-03-14 86 notes

  

  Swan song of the corals: Corals naturally fluoresce, but their algal symbionts block the light. But when the water gets too warm and the algae die… the glow brightly one last time before they die.

  So sad.

  oceanportal:

  Turns out that, before they die from overheating, corals glow brightly—a fluorescent signal that could help scientists sense the health of a reef.

  Warming water causes the algae that live in (and provide food for) corals to abandon ship, leaving the corals with no food source—a process called coral bleaching. These algae (zooxanthellae) usually mask the corals’ natural fluorescent glow. But when they’re driven out, the corals true colors shine bright: a swan song before their inevitable death.

  “Like a supernova before a star’s final collapse, the corals send out a steady stream of intense glow just before their inevitable demise,” wrote Rachel Nuwer at Smithsonian.com.

  (via Stressed Corals Glow Brightly Before They Die | Surprising Science)

  Source: blogs.smithsonianmag.com

• 2013-03-08 3 notes

  As you study [these images], you are, in a sense, seeing sound. Those agitated turquoise lines and violet ellipses represent a four-second recording of the songs of [four different bird species]. These images are just four of a colorful collection, created by software programmer Mark Fischer, that depicts songs produced by cetaceans and birds.

  Read more: Visualizing Birdsong: Avian Calls Like You’ve Never Seen Them Before by Julie Liebach

  Images: AGUASONIC® by Mark Fischer

  Source: audubonmagazine.org

• 2013-02-15 6 notes

  [M]eteorites are actually very easy to come by, and are wonderful in the sense that they are ancient relicts of the formation of our Solar System that you can actually hold in your hand.

  — IAmA Smithsonian meteorite scientist. Ask me anything! : IAmA

  Source: reddit.com

• 2013-02-04 1 note

  if you look at the historical record of philosophers, it’s pretty disastrous. This is little acknowledged. Lots of people from 150 years ago said the same thing about life: “You shall never understand what life is. It requires a special force, élan vital.” It didn’t turn out to be true. The laws of physics describe life. Roughly 200 years ago, famous philosophers said we’ll never know what stars are made of. That was 20 years before they discovered spectroscopy, and of course they realized you can analyze the elements out of which stars are made. So I’m profoundly skeptical when philosophers tell us, once again, what we’ll never know. Science has a spectacular record of understanding the universe.

  — The Nature of Consciousness: How the Internet Could Learn to Feel - Steve Paulson - The Atlantic

  Source: The Atlantic

• 2012-10-09 23 notes

  these are way too cool: aluminum casts of ant colonies!

• 2012-10-01 4 notes

  

  let’s do this ASAP

• 2012-08-08 7 notes

  

  (via This is how sperm whales sleep. Yes, really.)

  Source: io9.com

• 2012-03-26 0 notes

  The science of farts: tears from laughing and bad fart smells

  Love Scicurious’s exploration of the psychology of farting. The story behind this study and its jabs at science/psychology are wonderful. Terk jerking in humor and odor

  The basic question behind this paper is: how does a fart in social context affect a person’s views of the farter? In order to study this, Lippman took a bunch of college students, and gave them a series of hypothetical situations in which someone farted. He asked them to rate their opinions of that person. It’s really sad to me that the situations were all hypothetical. This was part of Dr. Lippman’s caricature of many social psychology studies being performed at the time, which tended to rely on pen and paper rankings while college students considered hypothetical situations. While it makes for a good caricature, I’m sad to know that my idealized vision of little knots of people with someone letting loose a silent’n’deadly never actually happened. And really, you have to think this would be a hard thing to plan. After all, how many people do you know can release a silent, deadly fart ON COMMAND?

  Source: scientopia.org