There's no doubt this is a much-loved dog. But humans can't be there all the time, school and all. Bear has figured out how to harness the power of the trampoline to toss a ball for him to catch! Yes, Bear is pretty smart. -via Tastefully Offensive
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Modern DNA sequencing is adding to our knowledge of human migration and evolution at an astonishing rate. Back 100,000 years or so, there were several hominin species wandering the earth: Homo sapiens, Homo floresiensis, Neanderthals, and Denisovans -and possibly others. We know that these humans interbred and left traces of DNA, but now we have an example of a human whose two parents were different species. A bone fragment of a girl found in a Russian cave in 2012 was the offspring of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father.
The fragment was identified from among 2,000 bone fragments excavated from the Denisova Cave. With a technique called collagen peptide mass fingerprinting, Slon and her colleagues determined that the bone had a hominin origin, though they didn’t know the species. From the bone’s cortical thickness, they inferred that Denisova 11 was at least 13 years old at the time of her death; six DNA extractions and subsequent genome sequencing revealed her sex. Meanwhile, radiocarbon dating determined the bone was at least 50,000 years old, an estimate that was refined as more data were recovered. Slon says that “from genetic data, we can make a rough estimate of the individual’s age, and we think she lived around 90,000 years ago.”
Comparing her DNA to known gene alleles belonging to Neanderthals, Denisovans, and present-day humans in Africa revealed her unique parentage.
What's really amazing is that so much information can be gleaned from one fragment of a bone. Read about the discovery at Inverse. -via reddit
(image credit: Petra Korlević)
Teddy the Dobby Cat (previously at Neatorama) loves doing the laundry. Specifically, he and his sibling oriental shorthair cats enjoy sitting in the dryer with the warm laundry. In this video, he beeps while waiting for the dryer door to open. Here he is with Stache, Bindi, and Dexter.
Dexter is the black cat, and you can guess which ones are Stache and Bindi. See more of these cats at Instagram and Facebook. -via Laughing Squid
Australian comedian Troy Kinne demonstrates how a phrase can mean two completely different things depending on what phase of life you are in, specifically before and after you have children. This video contains NSFW language. -via Tastefully Offensive
Pandas often give birth to twins, but only nurse one of them, which is a tragic waste of pandas. Scientists have found a workaround that relies on their innate obliviousness, as you can see in this clip from BBC Earth. One may argue that this only perpetuates the survival of less-intelligent pandas, but that's akin to closing the barn door after the horse has escaped. But is it possible that they're smarter than we know?
Oh she knows. She's just milking it for more of that sweet sweet honey water.
-via reddit
Okay, here's something to suck up your entire weekend. Enter some text, and let an online algorithm generate an image for you via artificial intelligence! Cris Valenzuela's online text-to-image generator makes it really simple for non-geeks. The image on the left was my first attempt, when I entered "flying bat." The right image was "flower garden." I'll be generating a lot more today. Read more about it at Digg.
The Twilight Zone will always be remembered as a creepy, entertaining anthology series that made us think. A story was presented, and then there's a twist that revealed some allegorical truth to ponder. While some viewers just enjoyed the science fiction and horror stories, others reveled in the allegories, which sometimes referred to historical events, but often just revealed something disturbing about human nature. How old you were when you watched a particular episode could vastly affect how you saw it, because everything in the script had more than one meaning if you were able to catch it. Zane Whitener of In Praise of Shadows explains what made The Twilight Zone so special. -via Laughing Squid
The cover story of the September National Geographic magazine is a detailed account of Katie Stubblefield's face transplant. At 21, she's the youngest American to ever receive a facial transplant. Before the transplant, Stubblefield underwent multiple surgeries for years to save and improve her life, but she sustained so much damage that the repairs didn't quite resemble a face. Her story is fascinating, but may be difficult for some because of the graphic images, including the surgery and one picture of the donor's disembodied face. The issues raised in the article are thought-provoking, and may also be disturbing: suicide, drug addiction, health insurance, guns, medical decisions, family caregiving, military experiments, and the ethics of non-lifesaving transplantation. The article at National Geographic traces Stubblefield's life as well as that of her donor, Adrea Schneider, their families, and the groundbreaking surgery itself.
Most of us, especially those in the food or shipping industries, know that you can save a lot of weight by dehydrating food. What if you had 100 pounds of potatoes, and each potato was 99% water. If you dehydrated those potatoes just a little, to the point that they were 98% water, how much would they weigh?
They would weigh 50 pounds. Believe it or not.
Wikipedia gives us a couple of explanations for the Potato Paradox.
Method 1
One explanation begins by saying that initially the non-water weight is 1 pound, which is 1% of 100 pounds. Then one asks: 1 pound is 2% of how many pounds? In order for that percentage to be twice as big, the total weight must be half as big.Method 2
100 lb of potatoes, 99% water (by weight), means that there's 99 lb of water, and 1 lb of solids. It's a 1:99 ratio.
If the water decreases to 98%, then the solids account for 2% of the weight. The 2:98 ratio reduces to 1:49. Since the solids still weigh 1 lb, the water must weigh 49 lb for a total of 50 lbs for the answer.
You can also find the algebraic explanations on the same page, if you want to check further. By the way, potatoes are only around 79% water, but the paradox is in the math as a normal person would visualize it, not the food. Don't confuse pounds and percentage. -via TYWKIWDBI
You might think of the Normans (if you ever think of them at all) as French, but they were actually Vikings who converted to Christianity after they settled in the northern part of France (which became known as Normandy). They conquered England in the Battle of Hastings in 1066, but that was only the first leg of the path of conquests. This TED-Ed video gives us the short version of the long story of the vast influence of Norman conquerors in Europe, including our language. -via Digg
If you went to school after 1980, you probably learned that the dinosaurs went extinct because of a huge asteroid smashing into the earth 66 millions years ago. If you went to school before 1980, you probably heard that it could be any one of a dozen different reasons and we possibly might never know the exact cause of the dinosaurs extinction. One of the competing ideas is that the mass extinction was caused by the Deccan Traps, a group of volcanoes that erupted for thousands of years, so long that they poisoned the entire earth. This hypothesis has been promoted by paleontologist Gerta Keller for decades, but it was overshadowed by physicist Luis Alvarez' discovery of the iridium layer that pinpointed the date of the asteroid. Scientists are still arguing over the reason for the death of the dinos, which you can read about at The Atlantic. -via Digg
When Jennifer Anne Kaufman fled the stolen vehicle she was driving Monday, she cut across some pastureland, trying to evade police. After all, it was dark and maybe the Seminole County Sheriff’s helicopter couldn't see her well. But she didn't count on a herd of cows following her! Cows know that a person in their field might mean getting fed, or at least something novel to see. In this case, they saw an arrest. A search of the stolen SUV yielded a gram of cocaine. Read the story at the Tampa Bay Times. -via Boing Boing
This is a watermelon. It's been skinned, brined, smoked, basted, and grilled like a ham, so it resembles a ham. Duck's Eatery in New York City offers it as an entree, but you could make it at home, with some skill, particular ingredients and tools, and lots of time. What does it taste like? My guess is that it tastes like a watermelon, no matter what it looks like. My guess is also that it looks better than it tastes. -via Laughing Squid
Americans are known around the world for our size. The country is big, our people stand tall, and in the last 50 years, we've become increasing fat. There are quite a few reasons why, and some of them multiply each other. You can probably guess some of those reasons, but you may not know them all, and you might be shocked at the extent of the changes over time. As you can see here, portion sizes have increased greatly. We're also eating out more. We consume more sugar. But there's more, including ideas for what we can do about it at Vox. -via Digg
Even when "we" are doing nothing at all, our bodies are busy. Sustaining life is an miraculous feat, and every organ of your body must work together around the clock to keep it going. For your entire lifetime. When you know all the stuff going on, you'll have a real sense of accomplishment -or else you'll be exhausted. -via Nag on the Lake
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