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Nerds and Words: Week 20
Digging through the web this week, I uncovered all this geeky goodness. You can find the thousands of links from previous weeks here.
I have marked my favorite links with a ∞. Enjoy.
Science to Read, Watch
∞ Why a dead blue whale is so important to science
The third picture in this BBC piece on remote-controlled surgery completely blows my mind
What Seven Years at the Bottom of the Sea Does to a Shipping Container
Potentially the biggest dinosaur ever discovered has man-sized bones
Everything tastes salty, and only salty, to whales. They’re unlike all other mammals
GE has made new MRIs that are getting ever closer to frog levitation
Title of study including 1.2 million children: “Vaccines are not associated with autism”
More than 10,000 American toddlers 2 or 3 years old are being medicated for ADHD outside pediatric guidelines
The scariest inhabitant of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Petrichor: The smell after it rains
The Water That The Coast Guard Won’t Save You From
About 25 miles south of Chicago lies a stretch of water that nothing lives in. It’s not pollution or over-fishing that has wiped out nearly everything save for insects and bacteria here, it’s electricity. At the river bottom there are multiple 160-foot wide grids of electrodes issuing 2.3 volts per inch every 2.5 milliseconds.
The Chicago Electric Dispersal Barrier was implemented to repel fish traveling up the shipping and sanitary canals to the Great Lakes. Specifically, the barrier’s voltage was meant to turn away Asian Carp—a voracious invasive species that most worry would destroy Great Lakes fisheries. And the electricity does its job. It turns away larger fish, and so far the Great Lakes haven’t been overrun.
Nerds and Words: Week 19
Digging through the web this week, I uncovered all this geeky goodness. You can find the thousands of links from previous weeks here.
I have marked my favorite links with a ∞. Enjoy.
Science to Read, Watch
Dead Whale Diaries, Day 3: a ribcage emerges
How far should we take anesthesia? The Hidden Dangers of Going Under
In Defense of GIFs in Science Writing
“…A law designed to satisfy the unfounded fears of foodies.” This Economist piece on Vermont is spot-on
The Cyanometer Is a 225-Year-Old Tool for Measuring the Blueness of the Sky
Confirmation bias is the better reason as to why we think dolphins “protect” us from sharks
“The universe’s story is already written…Isn’t that a cheery thought.”
∞ The undersea master of slime whose teeth look ridiculously like the cover of Tremors
The biggest creature on earth is definitely not a blue whale
This is aluminum powder exploding like a supernova
Was Yoda’s Advice Any Good Psychologically?
Something always bothered me about Star Wars. It wasn’t Lucas’ re-editing or the three prequels damned to sci-fi hell by angry nerds—I always thought Yoda made no sense. The little green guru was supposed to be profound and insightful but what emerged from his backwards speech struck me as banal. Yoda’s lines about fear and bravery sounded less like philosophy honed by 900 years and more like the vacuous pronouncements of a life coach. On top of all that, I wasn’t sure that Yoda’s advice was even helpful. Instructing Luke to never get angry, to never fear his enemies, seemed ignorant of human nature—perhaps even psychologically harmful. So I asked a psychologist to find out if Yoda’s advice was psychologically any good.
Nerds and Words: Week 18
Digging through the web this week, I uncovered all this geeky goodness. You can find the thousands of links from previous weeks here.
I have marked my favorite links with a ∞. Enjoy.
Science to Read, Watch
New periodic charts with have a 117th element: “ununseptium”
∞ “And so it seems that in perpetually dangerous Australia, even the sex can kill you.”
The Baltimore “sinkhole” was actually a landslide, because geology
Parasites can indeed be a cuisine, depending on how you feel about lampreys…
Do you even know what you’re saying? Depends on if a psychologist is messing with you
From now on, use your middle initial, or make one up: One letter makes you seem smarter
Birds chirping in Chernobyl adapting to low doses of radiation
∞ You can see the eyes of this jumping spider move inside of its head
Your “lip dimple” betrays how your face formed
What’s the Pressure Inside an Exploding Whale?
A Star Fox Barrel Roll Isn’t, And Wouldn’t Even Help
On my 8th birthday I opened up a large box to find a Nintendo 64. A few weeks later I opened up a smaller box to find a game about the adventures of a space-faring fox. A few years later the Internet helped create a meme that became larger than the game itself.
“Do a Barrel Roll!” spun its way into pop culture in 1997, when team member Peppy Hare encouraged the player in Star Fox 64 to deflect incoming enemy barrages by performing a horizontal spin. Peppy’s urgent advice lived on in the minds of nerds everywhere—an inside joke for gaming enthusiasts. The saying eventually became a meme, with the zenith of its popularity coming after Google used the phrase to make its whole search page do the roll.
While gaming aficionados laughed, aviation aficionados cringed. It can’t be stated more clearly, you never did a barrel roll.
Nerds and Words: Week 17
Digging through the web this week, I uncovered all this geeky goodness. You can find the thousands of links from previous weeks here.
I have marked my favorite links with a ∞. Enjoy.
Science to Read, Watch
Chernobyl’s Bugs: Illustrating and tracking the curious effects of radioactive exposure
∞ Forget Icarus, Fly As Close To The Sun As You Want!
180 years ago, a “sponging EVE” laid the groundwork for changing these clever dolphin’s diets
What happens if you chill water in a full, indestructible container? “Ice VI“!
The Real-Life Pokémon That Can Regenerate Missing Limbs
How we know that the Earth is literally older than dirt
Foam rollers are actually good for a workout
Why you get clumsier in space and get a stuffy nose and loss of taste and a spherical heart and…
“Oh, evolution. You were doing so well with the lynx—and then you made it sound like this”
Finally! Watch the Virus Hunters short series, based on David Quammen’s amazing book
∞ If we ever build photon torpedoes, we’ll have also solved the energy crisis
Forget Icarus, Fly As Close To The Sun As You Want!
Then he caught sight of the feathers on the waves, and cursed his inventions. He laid the body to rest, in a tomb, and the island was named Icaria after his buried child. —Metamorphoses Book VIII
In a mythology beset by monsters created by malice (and sometimes bestiality) shines one crafted out of hope and ultimately hubris—the ill-fated Icarus. Though his fatal flight was mentioned only in passing over 2,000 years ago, Icarus remains an enduring symbol of human folly. The fate of Icarus—flying too close to the Sun—proliferated into Western culture as a warning against excessive ambition and a tale of its consequences. But in reality, Icarus should have flown as close to the Sun as he could. Read More
Nerds and Words: Week 16
Digging through the Internet this week, I uncovered all this geeky goodness. You can find the thousands of links from previous weeks here.
I have marked my favorite links with a ∞. Enjoy.
Science to Read, Watch
We found a new sex organ in insects. It’s a female “penis”, and it’s the only one.
∞ To make video games feel more realistic, you have to slow them down. Less Sonic, more Call of Duty
New study about the cognitive dangers of marijuana may be half-baked
MIT has made a material that is both mirror and window
Another perpetually recycled workout myth bites the dust: “Cool downs” have no real benefit
∞ You are a forgery and stubbing your toe on a rock is actually a family squabble
Using nearly every form of media to explore the peeps and suspended animation of a frozen frog
Breathe deep and inhale the dust–the story of the universe, our planet, and our world
∞ “We’re confident that ballistic methods are reliable ways of computing pi, should the apocalypse occur”
This unlucky viper messed with the wrong centipede
Why You Never Actually Feel the Need For Speed In Video Games
You might have the need for speed, but in video games, you never feel it. Maybe that’s why we went from sprinting at super-human speeds in Doom to trudging along in Call of Duty.
The grand father of modern first-person shooters, Doom.
Video games have to fool us into thinking we are going fast or slow. Like how you judge the speed of traffic when merging onto a highway, video game developers use the relative positions of objects to give players a sense of speed. When you hit the gas in GTA V, for example, you get the impression that you are moving quickly because the clueless pedestrians move past the car (or hit it) at a faster rate. But you never quite feel like you are moving faster.
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