#ryan f. mandelbaum

[squawkoverflow]

A new variant has been added!

Line-cheeked Spinetail (Cranioleuca antisiensis) © Ryan F. Mandelbaum

It hatches from bright, brown, central, few, handsome, northern, sharp, southern, typical, vocal, and white eggs.

squawkoverflow - the ultimate bird collecting game          🥚 hatch    ❤️ collect     🤝 connect

[dearpeopleonthesubway]

Dear people on the subway, Let's read about "how to make a black hole in a science lab" Love, me

[hinge]

Hinge presents an anthology of love stories almost never told. Read more on https://no-ordinary-love.co

[midnightfunk]

Why, so we can build a wall around it?

[wishmachines]

In Dead Astronauts, there’s a character called a dark bird that’s basically a duck with a broken wing. but it doesn’t really have a broken wing, it’s a way of luring in its prey. I think about the habits of certain animals and invert it. A bird pretending to be wounded is trying to lead a predator away from its chicks, not trying to lead its prey to it...I still take a trait that’s real and apply it differently. Especially in these places where I think about biotech being manipulated by humans beings.

Jeff VanderMeer, interviewed by Ryan F. Mandelbaum for Gizmodo

[sciencespies]

Groundbreaking Fossil Suggests Spinosaurus Is First Known Swimming Dinosaur

https://sciencespies.com/news/groundbreaking-fossil-suggests-spinosaurus-is-first-known-swimming-dinosaur/

Groundbreaking Fossil Suggests Spinosaurus Is First Known Swimming Dinosaur

When Munich’s Paleontological Museum was bombed in 1944, the institution’s collections were destroyed. Included in the wreckage was the only known partial skeleton of Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, a peculiar dinosaur that would later ignite an intense debate among paleontologists. The fossilized bits, first discovered in Egypt in the early 1910s, seemed to challenge the idea that all dinosaurs were strictly land-dwellers. Sporting a mix of odd features, including a skull that hinted at a fish-based diet, Spinosaurus may have spent some of its time swimming in open water.

In the decades since, a smattering of other Spinosaurus remains—all sparse and incomplete—have been found, fueling debate on both sides. Dinosaurs are considered, after all, to be complete landlubbers. Most Mesozoic-Era ocean-dwelling creatures were actually marine reptiles called plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, or mosasaurs, which, despite their appearance, are not considered dinosaurs. Claims of an exception demanded extraordinary evidence.

Now, a striking find from Morocco may finally be putting the matter to bed. Reporting this week in the journal Nature, a team of researchers has uncovered a 95-million-year old Spinosaurus tail with an unusual paddle shape. Structured like a thick, bony oar that could have rocked from side to side, the two-foot-long appendage is unmistakably aquatic, researchers argue, and likely propelled the gargantuan dinosaur through the water depths of rivers, where it snared and snacked on fish.

“This was basically a dinosaur trying to build a fish tail,” study author Nizar Ibrahim, a vertebrate paleontologist at University of Detroit Mercy, tells Michael Greshko at National Geographic.

Paleontologist Diego Mattarelli examines two unearthed fossils from a Spinosaurus tail.

(Gabriele Bindellini)

The discovery bucks years of speculation that Spinosaurus simply dabbled in watery activities, wading into the shallows to hunt before quickly retreating back ashore. It also represents one of the most unusual traits ever attributed to a large, predatory dinosaur, Matthew Lamanna, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, who reviewed the paper for Nature, tells Carolyn Gramling at Science News.

“The tail was just so awesomely weird-looking,” Lamanna tells Science News. “I’d never seen anything like it.”

For Ibrahim and his team, the finding was less of a surprise. Several years ago, they analyzed a set of Spinosaurus bones, found in Morocco in 2008, that seemed to have unusually thick walls, a feature that helps animals like penguins and manatees control how buoyant they are in water. The researchers argued—controversially—that the dinosaur might have been more dexterous in the water than its distant, land-dwelling relatives like Tyrannosaurus rex. Though some, like Lindsay Zanno, a paleontologist at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, praised the findings at the time, others pushed back, according to National Geographic.

So Ibrahim and his colleagues returned to the site of the 2008 fossil. In 2018, they “struck gold,” unearthing a tail that was nearly 80 percent complete, Ibrahim tells Science News. Bristling with long spines that branched out into a fin shape, the tail was wide, strong and flexible, modeling studies suggested. Unlike the long, narrowing tails of land-living dinosaurs, Spinosaurus’ rearmost appendage seemed built to whip back and forth like that of a crocodile or a newt—a theory that seemed borne out when the researchers modeled its motion in a water tank.

An artist’s reconstruction of Spinosaurus, showing long, narrow jaws with cone-shaped teeth, useful for snaring fish.

(Davide Bonadonna)

If Spinosaurus truly was the sort of swimmer its tail suggests it was, paleontologists may need to rework their definitions of dinosaurs—a group whose members must lay their eggs on land, and have traditionally been thought of as terrestrial, Ryan F. Mandelbaum reports for Gizmodo.

But boundaries have been broken on the tree of life before, points out Thomas Holtz, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Maryland in College Park who was not involved in the study, in an interview with Science News: “We think of mammals as a terrestrial group, but we have whales and bats.”

Speaking with Gizmodo, Steven Brusatte, a paleontologist from the University of Edinburgh who wasn’t involved in the study, notes that Spinosaurus’ fishy tail wouldn’t have precluded it from making a living on land, too—at least some of the time. “Its fossils are also found inland,” he says, “so it probably was comfortable on land and in water.”

And when it did venture out for a swim, Spinosaurus probably stuck to the shallows, keeping within a safe distance of the shore, Brusatte notes. But in dipping its toes—and its tail—in the water at all, this versatile dinosaur may still have made quite the evolutionary splash.

#News

[the-telescope-times]

Jupiter’s Magnetic Field Is Super Weird and Has Two South Poles

Analysis of data from the Juno probe shows the giant planet’s field is much different from our own and suggests it has a dissolved core

Researchers have known for awhile that Jupiter has a huge magnetic field that dwarfs our own. Most assumed that the field was similar to Earth's with magnetic force lines exiting one pole of the planet and re-entering at the other pole, creating north and south poles similar to a bar magnet.

The gas giant’s field is actually quite different, a new study published in the journal Nature shows. Chris Jones at Nature News & Comment reports that a recent analysis of data collected by the Juno space probe, which has been orbiting the planet since 2016, suggests the internal structure of the planet is more complicated than we thought, reports Juno dives into Jupiter’s gravitational field every 53 days while using fluxgate magnetometers to map the magnetic field.

Camille M. Carlisle at Sky & Telescope reports that investigators used data from eight of these flybys to construct a map of the planet’s field, revealing northern and southern poles that are radically different.

When mapping magnetic fields, researchers often color lines emerging from a planet red and lines where they re-enter blue. In the case of Earth, the red lines would emerge at the magnetic north pole, curl around the planet, re-enter and turn blue at the south pole. Charles Q. Choi at Popular Science explains that Jupiter’s field isn’t so clean.

There’s a band of red near the north pole where the force lines emerge, but there are two blue areas, one near the equator that researchers dubbed “The Great Blue Spot” where they re-enter as well as another blue area near the south pole, in essence giving it two south poles.

A large part of the magnetic field also appears to be concentrated in the northern hemisphere instead of being evenly distributed between the poles. “It’s a baffling puzzle,” Kimberly Moore, a planetary scientist at Harvard University and first author of the study tells Ryan F. Mandelbaum at Gizmodo.

“Why is it so complicated in the northern hemisphere but so simple in the southern hemisphere?”The freaky field probably has a lot to do with the mysterious interior of the gas giant, and gives researchers some new clues to figuring out what’s happening inside.

Read more ~ smithsonianmag.com/

[hinge]

Hinge presents an anthology of love stories almost never told. Read more on https://no-ordinary-love.co

[psychbuilder]

China's Latest Cloned-Monkey Experiment Is an Ethical Mess

Ryan F. Mandelbaum

www.gizmodo.com Originally published January 19, 2019 Chinese researchers have cloned five gene-edited monkeys with a host of genetic disease symptoms, according to two scientific papers published today. The researchers say they want to use the gene-edited macaques for biomedical research; basically, they hope that engineering sick primates will reduce the total number of macaques used in research around the world. But their experiment is a minefield of ethical quandaries—and makes you wonder whether the potential benefits to science are enough to warrant all of the harm to these monkeys. The researchers began by using CRISPR/Cas9 to alter the DNA of a donor macaque. CRISPR/Cas9 is the often-discussed gene editing tool derived from bacteria that combines repeating sequences of DNA and a DNA-cutting enzyme in order to customize DNA sequences. Experts and the press have heralded it as an important advance due to how quickly and cheaply it can alter DNA, but recent research has demonstrated it may cause more unintended effects than previously thought. (cut) This research combines a ton of ethical issues into one package, from those surrounding animal rights to cloning to gene editing. As bioethicist Carolyn Neuhaus from The Hastings Center summarized her reaction to the announcement: “Whoa, this is a doozy.” The info is here.

[innocentamit]

New Shazam Merlin Bird Bird ID ID Will Recognize That It Is Growing Up

New Shazam Merlin Bird Bird ID ID Will Recognize That It Is Growing Up

Figure: Photos: Ryan F. Mandelbaum Photo Gallery: Merlin Bird ID Recently I was just walking around and cutting down the trees for a woodcut park in Brooklyn with my iPhone in hand. Birds were singing everywhere, but in the evening, I was recording a strange song: This was a steady, metal whistle of Bicknell. Although a colorful, spotless bird, these sticks are very popular with New York City…

[justbeingnamaste]

News ~ Scientists have found evidence of a ‘fourth dimension’

By

Ancient Code

Eureka!

For a long time have scientists thought that the universe had three spatial dimensions: top-down, left-right, front-back.

In 1905, Albert Einstein helped us with his theory of relativity to understand “the dimension of time”. But the new fourth spatial dimension has remained hidden so far.

The truth is that the fur dimension is as mysterious as it gets.

Two groups of scientists from America and Europe claim to have discovered the fourth dimension, and their findings have been published in the journal Nature.

Researchers carried out two experiments in which they could observe the quantum Hall effect – the movement of electrons within a material limited to two dimensions as this material passes through a magnetic field in a perpendicular way – and they demonstrated— theoretically—that this effect can be extended in four spatial dimensions.

Despite the fact that the papers focused on two different experimental approaches, they arrived at a similar conclusion.

European scientists created a 2D system with supercooled atoms held in position with a special grid made of lasers. Referred to as ‘charge pump’, scientists used it to test the flow of electrical charge while monitoring how the atoms behaved. Scientists noted how variations in the movement match up with how a 4D quantum Hall effect would ripple out, which gives us hope that a fourth spatial dimension may somehow be accessed.

The second group of scientists created a system with light particles which were set to move through a special glass that has the ability to bounce light back and forth between the edges. Scientists simulated the effects of electrical charges via physical input and observed how the light behaved. Experts looked for irregularities that could only exist if there was a fourth dimension. Again, researchers observed a 4D quantum Hall effect.

Speaking about the discovery to Ryan F. Mandelbaum at Gizmodo, Mikael Rechtsman from Penn State University said: “Physically, we don’t have a 4D spatial system, but we can access 4D quantum Hall physics using this lower-dimensional system because the higher-dimensional system is coded in the complexity of the structure.”

“Maybe we can come up with new physics in the higher dimension and then design devices that take advantage the higher-dimensional physics in lower dimensions.”

The discovery is perhaps best explained by Science Alert writer David Nield who wrote: “just as a 3D object casts a 2D shadow, scientists have managed to observe a 3D shadow potentially cast by a 4D object – even if we can’t actually see the 4D object itself. That could unlock some new findings in the very fundamentals of science.”

“I think that the two experiments nicely complement each other,” one of the European researchers, Michael Lohse from the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Germany, said in an interview with Gizmodo.

The findings from the two experiments have been published in Nature here and here.

[newsedgepoint095kthworld]

Sketchy Science Journal Publishes Article Titled 'What's the Deal With Birds?'

Sketchy Science Journal Publishes Article Titled ‘What’s the Deal With Birds?’

A fowl. What’s the take care of it?Picture: Ryan F. Mandelbaum

This previous week, assistant zoology professor Daniel Baldassarre at SUNY Oswego revealed a paper in a supposedly scientific journal with the next summary:

Many individuals surprise: what’s the take care of birds? It is a widespread question. Birds are fairly bizarre. I imply, they’ve feathers. WTF? Most different animals…

[hinge]

Hinge presents an anthology of love stories almost never told. Read more on https://no-ordinary-love.co

[squawkoverflow]

A new variant has been added!

Buffy Tuftedcheek (Pseudocolaptes lawrencii) © Ryan F. Mandelbaum

It hatches from chunky, diffuse, large, long, obvious, other, puffy, similar, tan, upper, and white eggs.

squawkoverflow - the ultimate bird collecting game          🥚 hatch    ❤️ collect     🤝 connect

[kjunichi]

隕石から超伝導物質みつかる。宇宙では自然発生するってことか！ | ギズモード・ジャパン [はてなブックマーク]

隕石から超伝導物質みつかる。宇宙では自然発生するってことか！ | ギズモード・ジャパン

隕石から超伝導物質みつかる。宇宙では自然発生するってことか！2020.03.26 10:0015,041 Ryan F. Mandelbaum - Gizmodo US ［原文］ （ 山田ちとら ） Photo: Graeme Churchard (Wikimedia Commons) via Gizmodo US 1966年にオーストラリアで見つかったマンドラビラ隕石Ⅰ。細かい粒子に超伝導性が確認された 超電導への...

from kjw_junichiのはてなブックマーク https://ift.tt/2wu3Agl

[nemolian]

Mathematicians No Longer Stumped by the Number 3

It’s 3.

Image: Ryan F. Mandelbaum

Just on the heels of finding three cubed numbers that sum to 42, scientists have passed another important milestone by finding three enormous cubes that sum to 3.

After finding three-cubes solutions for each integer less than 100, mathematicians set their sites on another milestone: finding another sum-of-three-cubes solution for the number 3. As simple as it sounds, it’s something researchers have been hunting for decades.

“While it may not be as exciting to Douglas Adams fans, for mathematicians, finding a new solution for 3 is much more significant,” Andrew Sutherland, MIT mathematician, told Gizmodo.

We all know that 42 is the answer to life, the universe, and everything, thanks to The Hitchhiker’s …

Read more Read

The solution for the first non-trivial sum of three cubes that add to 3 is:

5699368212219623807203 + (-569936821113563493509)3 + (-472715493453327032)3 = 3

For decades, scientists have sought a’s, b’s, and c’s that satisfy the a3+b3+c3 = n equation, where n is a given integer. The number 3 has been a special example, though. While 1 and 2 have infinitely many solutions to this problem, based on a pattern, 3 only has two trivial solutions: 13+13+13 and 43+43+(-5)3.

In 1953, British mathematician Louis Mordell said it would be difficult to figure out if there are any others, and scientists went looking, unsuccessfully. Some even conjectured that no further solution existed.

Similar to the 42 announcement earlier this month, Sutherland and Andrew Booker of the University of Bristol found the answer using the Charity Engine, which lets scientists perform calculations with unused processing power from home computers. The calculation took approximately 4 million computing hours, according to a press release from the university. Finding the solution was obviously difficult, but researchers were able to add an additional constraint to make the search faster: According to a previous proof, any answer requires the a, b, and c be a certain distance away from a multiple of nine.

As we’ve written, these sorts of problems are mainly interesting for cryptographic purposes. But from a mathematician’s perspective, they’re also just plain fun.

“For computational number theorists like me, having access to this kind of computational power is like giving an astronomer a new telescope that is 100 times more powerful than any that existed before,” Sutherland said. “There is no telling what you’ll see when you point it at what you thought was a dark patch of the sky.”

via:Gizmodo, September 18, 2019 at 01:36PM

[wishmachines]

I think that for me specifically, I don’t see a lot of people dealing with animals in interesting ways in their fiction. I see that a lot of writers are more willing to research physics than they are current animal behavior science when they’re writing something. You end up with depictions of animals 30-40 years out of date with regards to animal intelligence in a novel that’s up to date how it handles other things. Maybe it’s the ignorance of the characters, but sometimes it’s simply the fact that the writer hasn’t interrogated the underlying ideas of the natural world that are often so received as propaganda that allows us to disregard the individual so we can kill more animals without thinking about what we put them through.

Jeff VanderMeer, interviewed by Ryan F. Mandelbaum for Gizmodo

[hinge]

Hinge presents an anthology of love stories almost never told. Read more on https://no-ordinary-love.co

[sciencespies]

NASA Photos Reveal a Lake of Water—Not Lava—on Kīlauea Volcano

https://sciencespies.com/news/nasa-photos-reveal-a-lake-of-water-not-lava-on-kilauea-volcano/

NASA Photos Reveal a Lake of Water—Not Lava—on Kīlauea Volcano

In 2018, Hawai’i’s Kīlauea volcano erupted dramatically in the spring and summer. Huge plumes of ash, smog, and lava bombs spurted from its fissures. Flowing lava permanently altered the surrounding landscape and destroyed more than 700 homes, Brigit Katz reported for Smithsonian magazine at the time. Things have cooled off since then and earlier this month, new satellite images from NASA show something else forming on Kīlauea’s summit: a huge, rust-colored lake filled with water, not lava.

Photos taken by NASA’s Landsat 8 satellite show that water has been collecting in the Halema‘uma‘u crater in the summit of Kīlauea since July 2019, the Earth Observatory announced in a statement. This marks the first recorded instance of a pond of water of this size appearing in the crater, Aristos Georgiou reports for Newsweek.

Kīlauea, a 4,091-foot-tall shield volcano, is located on the southeastern side of the island of Hawai’i. The volcano erupted continuously from 1983 until 2018, when it emitted its largest eruption in at least 200 years, according to the United States Geological Survey.

When Kīlauea erupted in 2018, its lava pool emptied and the floor of its caldera—the large, basin-shaped depression that surrounds its vents—collapsed. This event created a much-deeper Halema‘uma‘u crater that reaches 920 feet below the former level of the crater floor, per the statement.

Satellite photos show the Halema‘uma‘u crater before the lava lake drained (left), after the caldera floor collapsed (middle), and after water pooled in the crater for nine months (right).

(Photographs by Joshua Stevens, via NASA Earth Observatory)

Now, water is pooling in a pond in the lowest part of the crater. This new lake spans the length of five football fields and reaches about 100 feet deep. The water’s rusty brown color comes from chemical reactions taking place in the water, per Newsweek.

Water is collecting in the crater because it’s located below the water table level, according to Don Swanson, a volcanologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory quoted in the statement. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, the water table is the upper level of underground surfaces that are permanently saturated with groundwater.

“We know that the crater floor dropped a little more than 70 meters below the water table in 2018. Any time that you punch a hole below the level of the water table, water is eventually going to come in and fill that hole,” says Swanson.

As Ryan F. Mandelbaum reports for Gizmodo, the pooling of water in Kīlauea’s crater might lead to even more explosive eruptions in the future. When water dissolves into magma, it can create a build-up of steam and pressure, which can lead to dramatic explosions.

More explosive eruptions would not be totally surprising, given Kīlauea’s history. As Swanson points out, about 60 percent of Kīlauea’s eruptions in the last 2,500 years have been explosive ones. Besides the 2018 eruption, the relatively calm lava flows witnessed in the last 200 years were the exception, not the norm.

“We do not want to be alarmist, but we also need to point out to the public that there is an increasing possibility of explosive eruptions at Kilauea,” says Swanson. “Is the volcano in the process of reverting back to an explosive period that may last for centuries? Or is this just a little blip, and we are going to return to quiet lava flows like we had during the 19th and 20th centuries? Only time will tell.”

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#News

[chicoterra]

Cientistas desenvolvem material para criar áreas habitáveis em Marte

Cientistas desenvolvem material para criar áreas habitáveis em Marte

Ryan F. Mandelbaum

A superfície de Marte, até onde podemos dizer, não é habitável para os humanos. Mas eventualmente, a humanidade gostaria de estabelecer um posto avançado no Planeta Vermelho. Isso claramente vai exigir um pouco de aquecimento. No entanto, como fazer isso?

Cientistas agora propõem usar um material isolante chamado aerogel de sílica para tornar as partes das superfície marciana…