Weird Science

[CiG]

Rare western ground parrot caught on camera in the wild.

It took seven years and 355,700 snaps, but a rare parrot has finally been photographed on a heat-activated camera for the first time.

The critically endangered western ground parrot is found on Western Australia's south coast, where bushfires in recent years have decimated its habitat.

The green-feathered bird spends most of its life on the ground and cannot fly far, making it an easy target for feral cats and foxes.

In an effort to monitor and manage the predators, camera traps were installed in 2013 across the Nuytsland Nature Reserve and Cape Arid National Park near Esperance.

Ecologist Sarah Comer said her team at the Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions (DBCA), along with volunteers, processed images from the cameras but had never seen the bird before.

With less than 150 left in the wild, sightings of the parrot are so rare that only one or two members of the support group have ever seen one.

The DBCA even has a public identification guide that mostly convinces people the bird they saw was probably a different green-feathered parrot found in the same location.

But Ms Comer said she knew the bird in the photo was a western ground parrot because of its body shape, head shape, tail and the barring of the feathers.

That's a plump fella.

 

[CiG]

 

[Einherjar86]

Rare western ground parrot caught on camera in the wild.


That's a plump fella.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/human-made-stuff-now-outweighs-all-life-on-earth/

Roads, houses, shopping malls, fishing vessels, printer paper, coffee mugs, smartphones and all the other infrastructure of daily life now weigh in at approximately 1.1 trillion metric tons—equal to the combined dry weight of all plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, archaea and protists on the planet. The creation of this human-made mass has rapidly accelerated over the past 120 years: Artificial objects have gone from just 3 percent of the world’s biomass in 1900 to on par with it today. And the amount of new stuff being produced every week is equivalent to the average body weight of all 7.7 billion people.

The implications of these findings, published on Wednesday in Nature, are staggering. The world’s plastics alone now weigh twice as much as the planet’s marine and terrestrial animals. Buildings and infrastructure outweigh trees and shrubs. “We cannot hide behind the feeling that we’re just a small species, one out of many,” says study co-author Ron Milo, who researches plant and environmental sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. These numbers should be a wake-up call, he adds. They tell us “something about the responsibility that we have, given that we have become a dominant force,” Milo says.

Well done, 2020.

 

[Baroque]

https://www.scientificamerican.com/...tretches-mouse-sight-beyond-visible-spectrum/

How cool is this if it works

 

[Bloopy]

The Blob

They’re calling it ‘The Blob’—a pool of unusually warm water off the east coast of New Zealand, which is believed to be responsible for a 10-year megadrought in parts of South America.

 

[Einherjar86]

That's fascinating.

 

[Bloopy]

Electron ptychography to take images of atoms:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/see-the-highest-resolution-atomic-image-ever-captured/

Cornell physicist David Muller likens the technique to playing dodgeball against opponents who are standing in the dark. The dodgeballs are electrons, and their targets are individual atoms. Although Muller cannot see the targets, he can detect where the “dodgeballs” end up. Based on the speckle pattern generated by billions of these electrons as they hit a detector, machine-learning algorithms can calculate where the atoms were in the sample and what their shapes might be, thus creating an image.

 

[Blurry_Dreams]

Electron ptychography to take images of atoms:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/see-the-highest-resolution-atomic-image-ever-captured/

this is what i saw

help develop materials for designing more powerful and efficient phones, computers and other electronics, as well as longer-lasting batteries.

 

[Blurry_Dreams]

https://www.scientificamerican.com/...tretches-mouse-sight-beyond-visible-spectrum/

How cool is this if it works

in my head this kinda looks like it might end up being the USA military using tech that civilians aren't allowed to have access to

 

[Blurry_Dreams]

View attachment 26893

increase in milk yield
woo-hoo

 

[Einherjar86]

This could probably go in the philosophy thread, but I felt like there's enough "weird science" to it.

FEM [free energy minimization] describes the brain as a prediction engine, modeling its surroundings at t-now and using that model to guess what happens at t-now+1. Sensory input tells it what actually happens, and the model updates to reflect the new data. The point is to reduce the difference between prediction and observation—in the parlance of the theory, to minimize the free energy of the system—and consciousness is what happens when prediction and observation diverge, when the universe surprises us with unexpected outcomes. That’s when the self has to “wake up” to figure out where the model went wrong, and how to improve it going forward.

This aligns so well with so much we already know: the conscious intensity required to learn new skills, and the automatic deprecation of consciousness once those skills are learned. The zombiesque unawareness with which we drive vehicles along familiar routes, the sudden hyper-aware focus when that route is disrupted by some child running onto the street. Consciousness occurs when the brain’s predictions fail, when model and reality don’t line up. According to FEM, the brain’s goal is to minimize that divergence—that error space where, also according to FEM, consciousness exists. The brain’s ultimate goal is to reduce that space to zero.

If Friston et al are right, the brain aspires to zombiehood.

https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=10225

I used to spend a lot more time than I do these days contemplating the "hard problem" of consciousness. Peter Watts always has helpful things to say, if you can wade through the technical jargon (he does a decent job dumbing shit down for us neophytes though; and he himself is a biologist, not a neuroscientist, as he reminds us). Anyway, I don't ultimately think the consciousness problem is solvable by conscious things. I think it was Ted Chiang who wrote a short little sci-fi spiel on "meta-humans," for whom consciousness is fully comprehensible in terms of its internal logic and mechanics because it appears to them, figuratively speaking, as a lower dimension. Something about the immersive experience of consciousness makes it too difficult (maybe impossible) for us to visualize schematically.

Not that neuroscience won't keep offering compelling accounts, arguments, and findings. It may even offer an accurate solution to "the problem." But I'm not sure we'll ever be able to prove such accuracy. It might just be an unprovable truth in the Gödelian sense.

 

[Bloopy]

Scientist Captures Rare Footage of a 30-Minute-Long Tardigrade Threesome

As Weiss watched, he said the two males continued jabbing the female as she pooped, which Weiss suggested could be a way to attract males.

 

[Blurry_Dreams]

@Bloopy
"the brain aspires to zombiehood"
hahahaha

 

[Bloopy]

 

[Bloopy]

These could probably usher in the first robot apocalypse. They're basically a bullet that can fire itself. They take a while to reload, but they're lightweight so you could drop hundreds of thousands of them in enemy territory, all programmed to jump off in different directions and aim for anything that looks vaguely like a human's head moving.