Latest Posts by feralscienceguy - Page 3

do you feel positive, negative, or neutral about inaccurate plastic skeleton halloween decorations? like what's going on with this guy's everything?

you may not know this, but I am something of a specialist on amphibian skeletal anatomy, and this… thing is a sin against my entire field.

Frogs do not have ribs. Where is its pectoral girdle? Why does it have mammal feet? What even happened to its hips? Why does it have SO MANY VERTEBRAE‽ And what in the seven hells happened to its skull? Hypertrophy is one thing, but this… this is just lazy. They seem to have decided to give it a beak??? And the nostril is super far back and also somehow integrated into a bone¿?¿?

What in the name of Eru Ilúvatar is going on‽

Saddest thing ever is reading an academic paper about a threatened or declining species where you can tell the author is really trying to come up with ways the animal could hypothetically be useful to humans in a desperate attempt to get someone to care. Nobody gives a shit about the animals that “don’t affect” us and it seriously breaks my heart

The first mobile phone call was made on this day in 1973. Martin Cooper, using a prototype of the Motorola DynaTAC, placed a call from the streets of New York to Bell Labs in New Jersey. The device was 9 inches tall, had a talk-time of 35 minutes, and took 10 hours to recharge.

I might be a little biased but I’m honestly starting to believe that there’s no purer form of love than the defensive spite you see from biologists that have devoted their life to the study of a maligned or misunderstood species. For example:

The hyena biologist that arranged for Disney animators to come sketch captive  hyenas for The Lion King film (Laurence Frank) was so incensed when the animals were depicted as villains in the movie that he later included boycotting the film on a list of ways the average person could help hyena conservation.

Though it’s commonly known that Charles Darwin’s distaste for parasitic wasps played a role in his development of evolution theory (since he felt no loving God would create animals with such a disturbing life cycle), the biologists who study these wasps find it an unfair characterization. When they were tasked with coming up with a common name for the family of parasitic wasps (Ichneumonidae) that old Charles so disliked, they proposed the name “Darwin Wasps” to spite the famous naturalist who had insulted their beloved family of insects.

Parasitologist Tommy Leung was so frustrated with the way people write about parasites to evoke horror and gore that he started writing a Parasite of the Day blog, that specifically avoids inflammatory or unsettling language to describe them. He also illustrates different species in colorful anime art on Twitter in a series called Parasite Monster Girls—which he calls his “love letter to parasites.”

I guess I’m just saying that if you’re a biologist studying an unpopular species and you have a little bit of a chip on your shoulder about it you can always count on me to be in your corner if you want to get a little petty with the public!

Absolutely beautiful! I hope everyone took this in! Makes you think just how small we are. A moment the world comes together as one! That’s true humanity . We will be uploading more amazing photos to this same post. So come back later on and check out our 2024 once in a lifetime eclipse photos.

This is a fascinating cosmic scene captured by Hubble: jets firing out from the rotational poles of a newly-ignited star illuminate gas and dust inside the Orion B cloud, 1,350 light-years away, forming what's called a Herbig-Haro object. 

Credit: Jason Major

Long Tail of Comet Pons-Brooks ©

A unique view of Mars and its scarred surface!

The autoclave is designed to kill schmucks I think

The Chemical Structure of Redstone

So I was curious about what the chemical structure of Redstone looks like, and Minecraft Education Edition, albeit unintentionally, gives us a canon look into what Redstone is made of:

In Minecraft Education Edition, putting a Redstone Block into a Material Reducer shows that it's composed of 31 Carbon, 31 Uranium, and 38 Unobtanium, which we can assume to be measured in grams

Dividing the Redstone Block into Redstone Dust, each Redstone Dust is then composed of approximately 3.4 Carbon, 3.4 Uranium, and 4.2 Unobtanium

Again assuming that's measured in grams, that's 0.17 cm³ of Uranium, 1.496 cm³ of Carbon, and ???³ of Unobtanium per Redstone Dust

So what does this tell us about the chemical structure of Redstone? Basing this on Redstone Dust's composition, we can estimate that each Redstone molecule is composed of 3 Carbon atoms, 3 Uranium atoms, 4 Unobtanium atoms, a little under half of the time it binds to an extra Uranium and/or Carbon, and 20% of the time it binds to an extra Unobtanium

This also has some horrifying implications for how Redstone works:

Redstone would be extremely volatile as the radioactive decay from Unobtanium and Uranium would occasionally release Helium ions through alpha radiation, sometimes breaking apart Carbon into two Beryllium atoms (as it absorbs the extra proton and neutron from the Uranium) or merging into Oxygen

So Redstone should, in theory, be extremely flammable and potentially explosive, which implies that cave static, or the player mining Redstone with an Iron Pickaxe, could lead to a spark that causes an explosive cave-in

As Unobtanium is just a placeholder for unobtainable elements (hence the name), I'm going to estimate Unobtanium in this case as Unbinilium, the placeholder name for element 120

Why?

I'm estimating the Unobtanium as Redstone as being larger than the largest man-made element, Oganesson, which holds an impressive 118 protons

Each valence electron shell, from innermost to outermost, can bind with 2, 8, 18, 32, 32, 18, and 8 shells respectively, so I'd like Unobtanium to be an element we haven't discovered yet, and consequently I'd like to jump up to the next shell

While I could estimate with element 119's placeholder, Ununennium, it would have one electron in the next shell, so Unbinilium allows for easier chemical binding

So what does this molecule look like then? Well, horrifyingly...

It looks like this. As Redstone forms in crystal lattices, and only two Carbon atoms are free to bind, I can absolutely see why it's so brittle that it breaks into powder.

This makes the structure of Redstone:

C3U3Uno4 (55% of molecules) C4U3Uno4 (13% of molecules) C3U4Uno4 (13% of molecules) C4U4Uno4 (7% of molecules) C3U3Uno5 (5% of molecules) C4U3Uno5 (3% of molecules) C3U4Uno5 (3% of molecules) C4U4Uno5 (1% of molecules)

An extremely radioactive, flammable, and explosive compound.

look, I know I've talked about this essay (?) before but like,

If you ever needed a good demonstration of the quote "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", have I got an exercise for you.

Somebody made a small article explaining the basics of atomic theory but it's written in Anglish. Anglish is basically a made-up version of English where they remove any elements (words, prefixes, etc) that were originally borrowed from romance languages like french and latin, as well as greek and other foreign loanwords, keeping only those of germanic origin.

What happens is an english which is for the most part intelligible, but since a lot everyday english, and especially the scientific vocabulary, has has heavy latin and greek influence, they have to make up new words from the existing germanic-english vocabulary. For me it kind of reads super viking-ey.

Anyway when you read this article on atomic theory, in Anglish called Uncleftish Beholding, you get this text which kind of reads like a fantasy novel. Like in my mind it feels like it recontextualizes advanced scientific concepts to explain it to a viking audience from ancient times.

Even though you're familiar with the scientific ideas, because it bypasses the normal language we use for these concepts, you get a chance to examine these ideas as if you were a visitor from another civilization - and guess what, it does feel like it's about magic. It has a mythical quality to it, like it feels like a book about magic written during viking times. For me this has the same vibe as reading deep magic lore from a Robert Jordan book.

ScienceAlert

New 'Exercise Pill' Could Induce Fitness Benefits Without Exercise

Scientists in the US claim to have boiled down some of the health benefits of exercise into a swallowable pill.

Scientists in the US claim to have boiled down some of the health benefits of exercise into a swallowable pill. The novel drug is in the very early stages of development, but in initial experiments on rodents, the medicine appears to tap into a natural metabolic pathway usually triggered by exercise. When administered to mice daily, the drug, called SLU-PP-332, seems to improve muscle function, fitness, and endurance – all without the animals having to move more than they're used to.

Continue Reading.

Cesium-133, let it be. Cesium-134, let it be even more.

Periodic Table Regions [Explained]

Transcript

[A periodic table with regions labeled.]

[Hydrogen:] Slightly fancy protons [Lithium and Beryllium:] Weird dirt [Group 1 & 2 metals, Periods 3-4:] Regular dirt [Group 1 & 2 metals, Periods 5-7:] Ends in a number, let it slumber ends in a letter, not much better [Left side of the transition metals group:] Boring alloy metals Probably critical to the spark plug industry or something (but one of them is radioactive so stay on your toes) [Most of the top row of the transition metals + aluminum:] Regular metals [Below the rightmost "regular metals" - the "ordinary metals" and some transition metals:] Weird metals [The platinum group:] $$$$ [Boron:] Boron (fool's carbon) [Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, and Phosphorus:] You are here [The Halogens:] Safety goggles required [Noble Gases:] Lawful neutral [Iodine and Radon:] Very specific health problems [Ordinary metals and metalloids - Arsenic, Antimony, Tellurium, Thallium, Lead, Bismuth, Polonium] Murder weapons [Astatine and Period 7 from Rutherfordium onwards:] Don't bother learning their names - they're not staying long [Lanthanides and Actinides:] Whoever figures out a better way to fit these up there gets the next Nobel Prize