The lyrebird is a bird of many talents. This bird can mimic songs of other birds, which, I believe, is already amazing. It can also mimic artificial sounds, such as a camera click, which is more amazing, in my opinion. But compared to these talents, this ability of the lyrebird might just be the most amazing and most wonderful: the ability to shape ecosystems. This bird “moves more soil globally than any other land animal.”
Lead researcher Alex Maisley, from Australia’s La Trobe University, tracked wild superb lyrebirds for two years across three locations – Sherbrooke Forest, Yarra Ranges National Park and Britannia Creek catchment – in the Central Highlands of Victoria.
“In just one year, we calculated that each lyrebird in Sherbrooke Forest moved a load equivalent to that carried by 11 standard dump trucks,” he says.
“While seeking invertebrate prey, they use their sharp claws to expose bare earth, and mix and bury litter.”
As they move soil to search for food, the lyrebirds change litter decomposition and the structure of the soil on the forest floor, creating microhabitats for invertebrates as well as encouraging seed germination.
It is said that in about four billion years, the Andromeda Galaxy will collide with a neighboring galaxy, which is none other than our Milky Way Galaxy, and the phenomenon will cause a makeover in this part of the universe. But it seems that this wasn’t an accurate calculation.
Earlier this week, researchers working on a sky-mapping project called AMIGA reported that the early stages of the Andromeda-Milky Way collision will happen long before the main event. You don't have to wait 4 billion years to watch a galaxy smash-up. With a little vision enhancement, you can sense it happening right now... because the Andromeda-Milky Way collision has already begun.
But why did this happen way way earlier than expected?
The reason the collision is happening a few billion years ahead of schedule is that the Andromeda Galaxy is much bigger than it appears. The galaxy's bright, starry disk is about 120,000 light years in diameter, making it slightly larger than the Milky Way. In recent years, deep studies of Andromeda using the giant Keck telescopes in Hawaii revealed an extended population of stars that stretched the galaxy's total diameter to about 200,000 light years. That's nothing compared to what the latest study shows, however.
Nicolas Lehner of the University of Notre Dame and his colleagues determined that Andromeda's halo — its outer envelope of extremely thin, hot gas, kind of like a galactic atmosphere — keeps going up to 2 million light years away from its center.
Have you heard of the Calabi-Yau manifold in string theory? It is “a compact, complex Kähler manifold with a trivial first Chern class.”
Notice that before you understand this definition, you should be able to understand first the Kähler manifold, which is “a Hermitian manifold for which the Hermitian form is closed.”
But before you understand the Kähler manifold, you should be able to know what a Hermitian manifold is first. And before you understand a Hermitian manifold, you should know what a Riemannian manifold is first.
And you’re down the rabbit hole. When everything is named for its discoverer, it can be impossible even to track the outline of a debate without months of rote memorization. The discoverer’s name doesn’t tell you anything about what the landscape is like…
This nesting of proper nouns helps to make higher math impenetrable not just to outsiders, but also to working mathematicians trying to read their way from one subfield into another. The venerable Bill Thurston was known to complain about the perversity which, by the end of his career, had produced Thurston’s theorem, which says that Thurston maps are Thurston-equivalent to polynomials, unless they have Thurston obstructions. Every field has terms of art, but when those terms are descriptive, they are easier to memorize. Imagine how much steeper the learning curve would be in medicine or law if they used the same naming conventions, with the same number of layers to peel back...
The Ancient Greeks were better about this. Euclid’s Elements is full of common, descriptive names, even though he was drawing on discoveries made by many different people. If he needs a term for something like a triangle with two sides of the same length, he calls it “isosceles,” literally “equal-legged” in Greek. A triangle with sides of all different lengths is “scalene,” or “unequal.” Euclid doesn’t even name the Pythagorean Theorem we all learn in school after Pythagoras, preferring just to state it plainly. In ancient Greece, it was polite for students to attribute their work to their teachers rather than themselves, if attribution was needed at all, so in the same way that Plato credited his own insights to Socrates, the eight or more objects now named after Pythagoras on Wolfram MathWorld might well be due to his students.
So what went wrong? How did this naming practice become uncontrollable to the point that even mathematicians are overwhelmed?
Gerald Maguire is a psychiatrist at the University of California. When you talk to him, you won’t notice a problem with his speech, as he talks rather smoothly, and he only stutters when you try to make him pronounce multisyllabic words like “statistically”. But in reality, Maguire always stuttered, ever since childhood. So what happened?
For the past 25 years, Maguire… has been treating his disorder with antipsychotic medications not officially approved for the condition.
Maguire has plenty of company: More than 70 million people worldwide, including about 3 million Americans, stutter — that is, they have difficulty with the starting and timing of speech, resulting in halting and repetition. That number includes approximately 5 percent of children, many of whom outgrow the condition, and 1 percent of adults. Their numbers include presidential candidate Joe Biden, deep-voiced actor James Earl Jones and actress Emily Blunt. Though those people and many others, including Maguire, have achieved career success, stuttering can contribute to social anxiety and draw ridicule or discrimination by others.
But what causes stuttering? Therapists from the past believed that stuttering is caused by defects of the tongue and voice box, as well as anxiety and trauma. Some people today still believe that. But others believe that stuttering is caused by neurological problems.
The first data to back up that hunch came in 1991, Yaruss says, when researchers reported altered blood flow in the brains of people who stuttered. Over the past two decades, continuing research has made it more apparent that stuttering is all in the brain.
In the 2018 film The Meg, which starred Jason Statham, the megalodon was portrayed as a shark with a length of 25 meters. But this scientific analysis implies that the megalodon was shorter than that, which doesn’t change the fact that it was still a terrifying creature in the ocean.
The Megalodon went extinct around three million years ago, and nowadays almost all we have to show for it is, ominously, a pile of gigantic teeth. That’s because it, like modern sharks, would have had a skeleton mostly made of cartilage, which doesn’t fossilize well.
That lack of records means it’s hard to measure just how massive the Megalodon was. Past studies have extrapolated its size based on the proportions of its teeth, using the great white shark as a guide. From this, it was estimated to be between 15 and 18 m (49 and 59 ft) long.
The problem is, the great white shark isn’t the closest living relative of the Megalodon. So for the new study, scientists from the Universities of Bristol and Swansea compared it to five living relatives – the great white, the shortfin and longfin mako sharks, the porbeagle and the salmon shark.
Rabbits were very valuable animals in the medieval ages. Back then, rabbit meat was a delicacy, and their fur was an affordable alternative to an ermine’s fur, which was more expensive. This is why people did their best to breed them and protect them from the predators. This is where they bred the rabbits.
Back in medieval England rabbits were not bred in cages but in specially crafted earthen burrows called warrens, or pillow mounds. These were heaps of earth with multiple, well-ventilated inner chambers where rabbits mated, gave birth and raised their families. The pillow-like mounds were often built in oblong shape and sometimes were connected with each other with stone-lined tunnels. To prevent the rabbits from escaping, a field of pillow mounds was surrounded by a moat, or ditch filled with water. A fence provided protection from predators. Many warrens were accompanied by a lodge and a watchtower where the warrener lived.
[...]
Pillow mounds are an obsolete technology, and the majority of these structures have long since disappeared. But there still hundreds of these scattered across the islands, especially in dry areas like Brecklands and Dartmoor where the soil is poor for crops but ideal for burrowing. Some of these are now protected by English Heritage.
On December 10, 1993, id Software introduced to us a game that would help define the first-person shooter (FPS) genre of video games. That game was Doom. Throughout the years, the game became a series, spawning sequels, spin-offs, and two films. After almost three decades, the love for this franchise hasn’t died yet.
Last year, the video game publisher which acquired id Software, Bethesda, re-released Doom I, II, and 3. Now…
After adding 60fps support and community-made add-ons in January, the re-released Doom and Doom II are now getting official 16:9 widescreen support as well.
There are many things that could be considered a challenge when you’re in the kitchen, but the perhaps the greatest of them all is opening a stuck jar lid. I remember a time when I spent 20 minutes trying to open one. Thankfully, I was successful in my attempt.
Fortunately, you won’t have to experience that. Mental Floss has provided us with tips on how to open a stubborn jar lid. Here is one of them.
RUN THE JAR LID UNDER HOT WATER.
You may have heard this tip before, and it really works: If you run a stuck jar lid under hot water for about a minute and dry it off, it should be easier to twist open. This is due to the heat from the water expanding the metal in the lid. According to Spoon University, a hair dryer has the same effect. (Just be careful about making the jar too hot to hold.)
Some people just want to watch the world burn, and this person, whom we just know by his Reddit username, Benjolia, is one of those people. He does not play the game Fall Guys to win, but rather to annoy some, if not all the people who were unlucky enough to be matched with him. He will make sure that players will either go back to the starting line or get eliminated for the next round, by blocking their paths, or by grabbing them and then pushing them at the edge of a platform.
Candy-making is already art in itself. But take it to the next level and you get this: treats that look like creatures, so beautifully made that you wouldn’t want a bite of them, let alone a lick.
These candies are made by Kurokazu, a wagashi (traditional Japanese sweets) chef.
See more of his creations over at his Instagram and Twitter accounts.
If you are a gamer, then you know how much it means when your partner becomes interested in the game, or the games, that you play. It shows how much they want to know you. It’s an unforgettable moment.
It’s already difficult enough to raise a child. But there is something even more difficult than raising a child, and that is raising a genius one. They stand out from everybody else, as they are just more advanced than other kids. The education system also doesn’t help them much, because the system is catered towards average kids.
This article from Big Think gives us some advice on how to raise genius kids. But these tips are not only applicable to raising genius children, but also to children in general.
Here are some few tips.
Expose children to diverse experiences.
When a child exhibits strong interests or talents, provide opportunities to develop them.
Support both intellectual and emotional needs.
Help children to develop a 'growth mindset' by praising effort, not ability.
Dogs just might be the most wonderful creatures that have existed on our planet. They shower us with a lot of love and affection, and just through their presence they give us comfort and joy. Aside from that, they make us wonder about them. “What do they talk about with other dogs?” “How do they see us humans?” “What do they think about?” These are some questions that might be going inside our minds.
In these comic strips, Denise Natali-Paine gives us what she thinks goes on the minds of dogs. If you have a dog, then you might be able to relate to these strips.
Have you ever wondered how sharks would look if they had teeth and a tongue similar to ours? Would they look more terrifying? Would they look funny? Or would they look cute or beautiful?
There’s a new TikTok hack around, and it’s supposed to help you make your salad quicker than before. The hack is smashing the lettuce against the table, which would cause the leaves to fall out as if they’re flower petals. But is it true? LifeHackers Joel Kahn and Jordan Calhoun try out this hack so that we won’t have to. But I guess you already know the answer to the question.
