Tennis balls were already yellow when I grew up, and, I admit, I didn’t really pay much attention to that detail and pretty much took it for granted. But really, why are tennis balls colored yellow?

Believe it or not, tennis balls before were white, and the reason for its color change was quite simple. Check it out on CNN.

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A new poll finds that almost 3 out of 4 Americans see disasters, such as Hurricane Dorian, worsening, with most of them blaming global warming to an extent, and scientists say they’re correct.

The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey shows 72% of Americans think catastrophic weather is more severe, while 4% see it as less nasty. About one-quarter say those disasters are about as extreme as they always were.

Half of the people who believe that the catastrophic weather is becoming severe say that the reason behind this is man-made climate change. Another 37% say that randomness and climate change are equally to blame.

See more details of this survey over at AP News.

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Before he became a dad, 37-year-old Yaka Oyo was terrified of the thought of soothing his crying baby. He, like other first-time parents, worried that he would misread the cries of his newborn baby.

"I pictured myself pleading with my baby saying, 'What do you want?' "

Oyo's anxieties are common to many first-time mothers and fathers. One reason parents-to-be sign up for prenatal classes, is to have their questions, such as 'What's the toughest part of parenting?' and 'How do I care for my newborn baby?' answered by childcare experts.

Prenatal classes, however, are usually focused at the mom and not at the dad, and discuss her shifting role and how she could cope up with the roller coaster of emotions she would experience in motherhood.

With that focus, "Dad's parenting questions can fall to the wayside," says Dr. Craig Garfield, an associate professor at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine and an attending physician at Lurie Children's Hospital in Chicago. And the lack of attention to a new father's needs can have ripple effects that impact the whole family — in the short-run and later, Garfield says.

Around the U.S., a number of health care providers, such as Garfield in Chicago and the non-profit 'Bootcamp for New Dads' in New York City, have begun trying to change their approach to such classes. Some go so far as to hold single-sex prenatal classes specifically for men.

Know more about this over at NPR.

What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: Jason LeCras for NPR)

While others travel or live in a van with a partner, she travels alone. While everyone else has dogs, she has a snake.

This is Jennelle Eliana, a solo female traveler who is taking YouTube by storm. In her first three weeks in the video sharing website, Eliana has already garnered over 1.3 million subscribers. She is projected to hit 2 million subscribers in the coming month. (As of this writing, she is already on 1.9 million subscribers).

Part of what makes Eliana’s success so fascinating is that she essentially came out of nowhere. It takes most YouTube vloggers years to gain an audience, but Eliana, a seemingly average girl living in a beat-up van, did it in a matter of weeks.

Know more about her and her channel over at Outside.

(Video Credit: Jenelle Eliana/ YouTube)

This is a dyeing poison arrow frog, a frog toxic to predators such as birds due to their skin containing high amounts of alkaloid.

Throughout the animal kingdom, the prey has used warning colors to warn their potential predators that they are dangerous or toxic to consume. An example of this is the black-and-yellow stripes of wasps.

This arrow frog is a bit different, though, as it has two colour forms: yellow stripes on a black background, or white stripes on a black background.

This diversity of colour signals goes against the accepted theory that warning signal colouration should be subject to strong, frequency-dependent selection.

In Amazonian butterflies, for example, it has been demonstrated that the fitness of a phenotype increases with its frequency – the more of these colour forms are around, the more chance a predator population learns to understand the signal and avoid the prey. Warning signals that are novel or unusual should be selected against due to their rarity.

And yet these two colour forms persist.

See the reason behind this phenomenon over at Cosmos.

(Image Credit: University of Jyvaskyla)

John Chambers may have just turned 70, but he still displays the vigor that he had back in 1995, when he became CEO at Cisco Systems. During his term, Chambers grew Cisco’s annual revenue from $2.2 billion in 1995 to $49 billion in the year 2015, when he stepped down.

He prefers to call himself a mentor to startup CEOs rather than a venture capitalist. When he’s not in Silicon Valley he can often be found in India, where he advises Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government on digital transformation and the economy.

Rich Kaarlgard of Forbes had a chance to talk with Chambers about AI, in which he says will “produce an impact two or three times what the Internet did and in a much faster pace.” See the interview over at the site.

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Marissa Martinelli is a longtime reader of Randall Munroe’s webcomic xkcd. Martinelli used to chuckle at the disclaimer that was attached for over a decade at the webcomic, as she is an English major. It states:

Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors).

Before creating webcomics full time, Munroe worked at NASA’s Langley Research Center (he has a degree in physics).

… while he often uses pop culture or his personal life as fodder for his work, it’s true that sometimes understanding the joke requires knowledge of computer programming or the differences between branches of science. In 2016, though, the warning quietly disappeared from xkcd. When I asked Munroe this week why he took it down, he said he’s less worried about offending liberal arts majors than he is about encouraging others in his field who might genuinely look down on other majors.

“I get along with almost everyone I meet who did physics, but I think the flaw we have is that we think we could do everyone else’s field as well if we tried,” he said. “That attitude has done a little bit more harm than good. It’s nice to have a friendly rivalry, but sometimes that rivalry is only going in one direction, and then maybe it’s not really a rivalry. Maybe you’re just being a jerk. I’m trying not to be a jerk.”

It would be interesting, though, to see a physicist approach different fields, and this is what Munroe does in his new book called How to: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems.

But he does not come off as a jerk, and in fact consults plenty of experts from those other fields and beyond, interviewing Col. Chris Hadfield about how to make an emergency landing and asking Serena Williams to test his theories for catching a drone by hitting tennis balls at one…

The book, according to Monroe, comes from the same way of thinking that inspired “What If?”, the blog in which he answers questions submitted by his readers — weird questions like “how much Force power can Yoda output?” and “If there were a kind of a fireman's pole from the Moon down to the Earth, how long would it take to slide all the way from the Moon to the Earth?”

Check out more about this on Slate.

(Image Credit: Randall Munroe)

This is the galaxy nicknamed “DF2”. Found some 60 million light-years from Earth, this galaxy has scientists baffled as it doesn’t have dark matter.

Because DF2 would be the very first known galaxy without the mysterious substance, the news of its discovery in 2018 quickly spread throughout the astronomical community. If confirmed, a galaxy without dark matter would throw a wrench into our understanding of how galaxies form and evolve. Every galaxy we know of so far has a sizeable chunk of the invisible matter, so finding one without it would mean one of two things: Either DF2 never had any dark matter to begin with, or it somehow managed to shed its dark matter during the course of its life.

Astronomers have different theories about the galaxy. Check them out on Discover.

(Image Credit: NASA/ESA/P. van Dokkum (Yale University))

A mass of identical runners flooded the starting line. This was not your usual 5k. The scientists behind this contest will test both speed and the navigational ability of the competitors as they travel through a maze and choose the correct way on every intersection. Postdocs Mehdi Salek and Francesco Carrara stand by at the end of the course as they wait to identify each of the finishers. The participants, however, are not human. They are Escherichia coli bacteria. But what was the goal of the contest? It was individuality.

That there could be individual winners at all is a notion that has shaken the foundations of microbiology in recent years. Working in the lab of Roman Stocker at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich), a team of microbiologists and engineers invented this unique endurance event. The cells at the starting line of Stocker’s microbial marathon were genetically identical, which implied, according to decades of biological dogma, that their resulting physiology and behavior should also be more or less the same, as long as all the cells experienced identical environmental conditions. At the DNA level, every E. coli cell had a roughly equal encoded ability to swim and steer through the course. A pack of cells that started the race at the same time would in theory all finish around the same time.

But that’s not what Salek and Carrara found. Instead, some bacteria raced through the maze substantially more quickly than others, largely because of varying aptitude for moving toward higher concentrations of food, a process called chemotaxis. What appeared to Salek and Carrara as a mass of indistinguishable cells at the beginning was actually a conglomerate of unique individuals.

Check out more of this study over at Quanta Magazine.

(Image Credit: CDC/Janice Haney Carr./ Wikimedia Commons)

For much of his life, Blair Bigham thought that there was an irrefutable line between alive and dead. When he worked for a decade as a paramedic in the Toronto area, he saw the body as simple: Oxygen would flow into the lungs, absorbed into the blood, got pumped to cells which broke it down along with glucose absorbed from the gut, and then goes down to create the microscopic bits of energy a person needs to live. He thought death as something simple as well. For him, it was the time “when no new energy was generated, when the batteries drained, and when the lights went out.”

I had pronounced dozens of people dead. In particularly horrific cases, when someone had, for example, been the victim of a house fire or blunt-force head trauma, I didn’t even need to check a pulse. The pallid colour of the skin, the emptiness of the eyes, and the body’s acquiescence to gravity said it all.

But when he began medical school in 2012, his way of thinking was challenged.

In the hospital, people seemed to die, well, slower than they did in the field. There were often no car accidents or bullets or torn aortas that I could point to as the cause of their demise. Death was no longer sudden. Instead, I tended to people who were dying—a process that could take days, weeks, months, or even years. The line between life and death started to feel blurry. When I started working in the intensive-care unit (ICU) as a senior medical student, that line became even harder to bring into focus.

Inside the hospital, Bigham would experience something that would shake his view about life and death down to its core. Know more about his experience over at The Walrus.

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Robert Sapolsky has been able to fix the floatation device on the toilet water tank the other day, which was a rare moment for him. As he called what he did a good day’s work, he smugly thought to himself, “There. It’s not just chimps who can use tools.”

We humans are unique in ways more than one, or rather, we used to be. Throughout time, we were the only species able to create tools, pass on culture, and kill each other. These traits which were identified to be unique to us have now been demonstrated by other species, so it seems that we’re not so unique after all. However, we still stand alone in some ways, and of these is “hugely important” — the capacity to think symbolically.

Metaphors, similes, parables, figures of speech—they exert enormous power over us. We kill for symbols, die for them. Yet symbols generate one of the most magnificent human inventions: art.

[...]

Symbols serve as a simplifying stand-in for something complex. (A rectangle of cloth with stars and stripes represents all of American history and values.) And this is very useful. To see why, start by considering basic language—communication without a lot of symbolic content. Suppose you are being menaced by something terrifying and so scream your head off. Someone listening can’t tell if the blood-curdling “Aiiiii!” means an approaching comet, right-wing death squad, or Komodo dragon. It just means that things are majorly not right, a generic scream where the message is the meaning. This present-tense emotionality is what communication by animals is mostly about.

Symbolic language brought huge evolutionary advantages. This can be seen even in the baby steps of symbolism of other species. When vervet monkeys, for instance, spot a predator, they don’t just generically scream. They use distinct vocalizations, different “proto-words,” where one means, “Aiiiiii!, predator on the ground, run up the tree,” and the other means, “Aiiiiii!, predator in the air, run down the tree.” It’s mighty useful to have evolved the cognitive capacity to make that distinction. Who would want to guess wrong and dash up to the top of a tree when the problem is a raptor swooping down?

Learn more about this over at Nautilus.

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In the 1946 film The Big Sleep, private detective Philip Marlowe is called to the house of General Sternwood to discuss matters about the latter’s daughters. The two sit in the greenhouse, and the general recounts a blackmail incident involving his younger daughter. At one point of the conversation, Marlowe suddenly gives an interesting and knowing “hmm”, to which Sternwood asks, “What does that mean?”

Marlowe lets out a clipped chuckle and says: ‘It means, “Hmm”.’

Despite the private detective’s reply being impertinent and evasive, it is also an accurate reply. The word “hmm” does mean “hmm”.

Our language is full of interjections and verbal gestures that don’t necessarily mean anything beyond themselves. Most of our words – ‘baseball’, ‘thunder’, ‘ideology’ – seem to have a meaning outside themselves – to designate or stand for some concept. The way the word looks and sounds is only arbitrarily connected to the concept that it represents.

But the meanings of other expressions – including our hmms, hars and huhs – seem much more closely tied to the individual utterance. The meaning is inseparable from or immanent in the expression. These kinds of expressions seem to have meaning more how a particular action might have meaning.

Head over to Aeon as Alexander Stern discusses how our words mean.

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Over the last few years, Samsung has created smartphones with great specs. Throughout the years, the company has managed to find both good and not-so-good ideas and build upon these ideas, and because of this they are able to continually create high-quality Android phones which make a good competitor against the iPhones of Apple.

This year, Samsung goes big as it released the 6.4-inch and 6.7-inch versions of its Galaxy S10, the company’s flagship smartphone, in February, and the Galaxy Fold, a smartphone with a 6.3-inch foldable display, which they showed off in April. Finally, in August, Samsung has revealed the latest version of the Galaxy Note 10, the phone series that has been traditionally the largest of Samsung’s phones.

It also produced a plus-sized version of the Note for the first time. The Note 10+ has a display that’s only about half an inch smaller than the one on the Fold.

But is the Samsung Galaxy Note 10 worth buying? Head over to Quartz as they tell the good and the not-so-good things about the phone and be the one to judge.

What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: Samsung/ Quartz)

A red-tailed hawk shrieks in the background. Upon hearing the shriek, the squirrels shift into danger mode, as they alternately freeze in place to search the skies, or flee.

New research suggests that these rodents are not solely aware of avian alarms. According to a PLoS One journal report by three scientists from Ohio’s Berlin College, squirrels also rely on the sounds of everyday bird calls in order to sense whether threats have passed. In other words, they eavesdrop on the environment.

As Katherine J. Wu of NOVA Next reports, the researchers found that squirrels wary of predators resume their normal activities more quickly after hearing nearby birds’ casual chatter. Distinct from “all clear” alerts, these exchanges essentially act as background noise, signaling a return to normalcy for animals in the vicinity.

“There’s a lot of information in alarm calls,” explains Oberlin behavioral ecologist Keith Tarvin. “It dawned on us that cues of safety might be equally informative.”

More details of this study over at Smithsonian.com.

What clever little creatures!

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One of the saddest design projects a person can create is making a poster for a lost pet. But it is also perhaps one of the most beautiful creations a person can make. After all, it came from the heart.

… as Canadian artist Ian Phillips reveals in Lost: Lost and Found Pet Posters from Around the World, many of these posters end up as moving artistic homages to our animals. “The posters are like little mystery stories,” Philips writes in an email. “They’re quickly made and filled with so many emotions.”

In the 1990s, after helping his roommate find her lost cat, Philips became obsessed with finding and collecting missing pet posters–he sent out an open call for people around the world to send them to him, to be compiled in a zine circulated among his art-world friends. His collection, now published in a book, comes from six continents, harvested from telephone poles, car windshields, and bulletin boards. (Phillips instructed submitters to make photocopies of the posters they sent and to hang up more than they took down.)

Via Amusing Planet

Have you made a missing pet poster before? How was your experience in doing so?

(Image Credit: The Amusing Planet)