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Why whale urine is so important to life in the sea

Kirsten Freja Young and Marion Rossi for The Conversation:

Even biologists only capture a glimpse of the lives of whales. There are still many species whose lives are largely a mystery, particularly the deep diving whales.

But scientists are learning more about the role that whales play in marine ecosystems and the services that they provide. Recent research is showing that even whale urine is important for the planet.

Previous work suggested that whale faeces was important to ecosystems. These giant mammals bring nutrients from the depths where they feed to shallow waters.

Can't even go one day around here without hearing someone say they want to get peed on by a whale

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Woman dies when a bomb she is carrying explodes in the Greek city of Thessaloniki, police say

Costas Kantouris for the AP:

A woman was killed early Saturday in the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki when a bomb she was carrying exploded in her hands, police said.

The 38-year-old woman apparently was carrying the bomb to place outside a nearby bank around 5 a.m., police said.

God I hate when this happens to me, am I right folks

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Humans Take Longer to Heal Than Other Primates, Likely Thanks to Our Lack of Fur

Sam Walters for Discover magazine:

That scratch on your arm, that scrape on your knee — they're taking their sweet time to heal, and it's likely the fault of your fur, or, really, your lack thereof. Testing the speed of skin healing in an assortment of animals, a team of researchers has found that skin takes a lot longer to heal in humans than it does in other primates and mammals.

Publishing their results in a study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, the researchers say that the reason may be because of the loss of fur in humans around 2 million years ago.

"Human wound-healing rates were found to be markedly slower," the researchers report in their study. In fact, the rates were "approximately three times slower than those observed in non-human primates."

Every day there's just more and more evidence that being a small furry creature instead of a person would be a flat improvement

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A Cosmic Explosion Forged Heavy Elements Like Gold and Platinum

News release by Christopher D. Shea for Columbia University:

The lightest elements, hydrogen and helium, were formed mainly in the Big Bang that gave birth to the Universe. Somewhat heavier elements, such as oxygen and iron, are forged inside the hot cores of ordinary stars like the Sun and expelled into space when they die in supernova explosions. Rare elements much heavier than iron, such as gold and platinum, however, are only created in far more extreme conditions than those found in ordinary stars. For decades, nuclear astrophysicists have been working to identify the events in nature that can synthesize these heavy elements.

Now, a multi-institutional group of researchers led by Professor Brian Metzger and doctoral candidate Anirudh Patel have a fresh answer to this question, which challenges existing ideas about where heavy elements are created. In a new paper, they demonstrate that elements much heavier than iron were created in a famous cosmic event from over 20 years ago, which released more energy in half a second than our Sun produces in a quarter of a million years. The finding from that single event offers important insight into how these elements are synthesized in general.

"Comparing our theoretical models to observed data, we found evidence that one of the brightest explosions ever observed in our Galaxy—a powerful burst of gamma-ray radiation in 2004—produced a huge amount of heavy elements exceeding in mass the planet Mars," said Patel.

Gonna go trigger a magnetar blast right now and get filthy stinkin' rich

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Scientists Just Confirmed a 67-Year-Old Hypothesis About Vitamin B1

David Nield for ScienceAlert:

You often need a lot of patience to be a scientist, and that's certainly been the case for researchers who have now found solid evidence for a hypothesis around vitamin B1 (or thiamine) that was first put forward almost 70 years ago.

In 1958, Columbia University chemist Ronald Breslow proposed that vitamin B1 performs key metabolic processes in the body by forming a molecular structure known as a carbene.

The problem: carbenes are highly unstable and reactive, and usually break down instantly in water. They should, by all accounts, be incompatible with the body's high water content.

Immediately thought this was going to be a lead-in to a Bee Movie joke so I definitely gotta go to bed

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Quick music post because I'm traveling today, here's "Andaraí" by Azymuth, released as a preview for their upcoming album Marca Passo releasing on June 6.

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Mount Fuji climber rescued twice after going back for lost phone

Joel Guinto for BBC News:

A 27-year-old university student who climbed Mount Fuji outside of its official climbing season was rescued twice in four days, after he returned to look for his mobile phone.

Do you have any idea how long it took me to get all those games on my phone????

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Lightning strikes usually kill trees. This one just grows stronger

Bill Chappell for NPR:

Lightning strikes kill millions of trees each year — but it turns out that some large tropical trees can not only survive a strike, but also benefit from its effects, according to a recent study.

The lightning's immense power cleanses these trees of parasitic vines. It also zaps trees nearby, reducing competition. One tree called Dipteryx oleifera, a towering presence in Panama's forests, is particularly adept at thriving after enduring events that are deadly to most other trees.

"I think to our whole team, it still feels remarkable that this tree can get exposed to 30,000 amps of current and be OK. And not just OK: have almost no damage at all, while having all these additional benefits," Evan Gora, an author of the study published in the journal New Phytologist, tells NPR.

Folks, we did it: we found the world's first masochist tree

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A carnivorous 'bone collector' caterpillar dresses in the remains of its prey

Adithi Ramakrishnan for the AP:

A new carnivorous caterpillar that wears the remains of its prey has been dubbed the "bone collector."

The odd insect is only found on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. It creeps along spiderwebs, feeding on trapped insects and decorating its silk case with their body parts.

Just like us fr

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Vatican asks visitors not to take selfies with late pope

Issy Ronald and Lauren Said-Moorhouse, CNN:

Vatican officials are asking visitors not to take selfies with the late Pope Francis as he lies in state inside St. Peter's Basilica, telling them to put their phones away as they passed by the coffin.

Well I wasn't before, but now I'm going to

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Astronomers discover a planet that's rapidly disintegrating, producing a comet-like tail

Jennifer Chu with a news post for MIT:

MIT astronomers have discovered a planet some 140 light-years from Earth that is rapidly crumbling to pieces.

The disintegrating world is about the mass of Mercury, although it circles about 20 times closer to its star than Mercury does to the sun, completing an orbit every 30.5 hours. At such close proximity to its star, the planet is likely covered in magma that is boiling off into space. As the roasting planet whizzes around its star, it is shedding an enormous amount of surface minerals and effectively evaporating away.

This is how I want to go out

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Where do whale sharks mate? St. Helena's waters may hold the clues

Maria Cheng for the AP:

Whale sharks shouldn't be hard for scientists to find. They are enormous — they are the biggest fish in the sea and perhaps the biggest fish to have ever lived. They are found in warm oceans all around the world. By shark standards, they are slow swimmers.

But they somehow manage to also be very private: Scientists don't know where they mate, and they've never observed it before.

They do finally have some clues, though. Scientists suspect the magic may be happening in the waters around St. Helena, a remote volcanic island in the South Atlantic Ocean where Napoleon Bonaparte was once exiled and died. It's the only place in the world where adult male and female whale sharks are known to regularly gather in roughly equal numbers — and food doesn't seem to be the main attraction.

Stalker behavior from the scientists, quite frankly, let them fuck in peace

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Hope everyone's excited for yet another Tuesday where I post music by someone I'm just getting into a little bit as a result of them working on a video game soundtrack. Here's "love" by Tarpit, who composed the soundtrack to Animyst, which is, well... honestly it's pretty like this song, except without vocals and also maybe Paulstretched a bit

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Crows can recognize geometric regularity

Bob Yirka for Phys.org:

A trio of animal physiologists at the University of Tübingen, in Germany, has found that at least one species of crow has the ability to recognize geometric regularity. In their study published in the journal Science Advances, Philipp Schmidbauer, Madita Hahn and Andreas Nieder conducted several experiments that involved testing crows on their ability to recognize geometric shapes.

Recognizing regularity in geometric shapes means being able to pick out one shape that is different from others in a group—picking out a plastic star, for example, when it is placed among several plastic moons. Testing for the ability to recognize geometric regularity has been done with many animals, including chimps and bonobos. Until now, this ability has never been observed in any creature except for humans.

Chimps and bonobos in shambles rn

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Origins Uncertain: 'Skull Hill' Rock

Margaret Deahn with a blog post for NASA:

Last week, NASA's Mars 2020 rover continued its journey down lower 'Witch Hazel Hill' on the Jezero crater rim. The rover stopped along a boundary visible from orbit dividing light and dark rock outcrop (also known as a contact) at a site the team has called 'Port Anson'. In addition to this contact, the rover has encountered a variety of neat rocks that may have originated from elsewhere and transported to their current location, also known as float.

Pictured above is an observation named 'Skull Hill' taken by the rover's Mastcam-Z instrument. This float rock uniquely contrasts the surrounding light-toned outcrop with its dark tone and angular surface, and it features a few pits in the rock.

Wonder what it tastes like

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'Bad Omen': Ancient Pyramid in Mexico Collapsed Into A Pile of Rubble

Carly Cassella for ScienceAlert:

Extreme weather events and rising seas are putting precious heritage sites around the world in harm's way.

A stunning example of this phenomenon in 2024 was a stone pyramid in Mexico succumbing to an increasingly chaotic global climate.

On the night of July 29, the 15-meter-high (roughly 50-foot-high) square monument located in the state of Michoacán suddenly slumped under the pressure of incessant rain, its south wall crumbling into a pile of rubble.

Honestly relatable

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Company apologizes after AI support agent invents policy that causes user uproar

Benj Edwards for Ars Technica:

On Monday, a developer using the popular AI-powered code editor Cursor noticed something strange: Switching between machines instantly logged them out, breaking a common workflow for programmers who use multiple devices. When the user contacted Cursor support, an agent named "Sam" told them it was expected behavior under a new policy. But no such policy existed, and Sam was a bot. The AI model made the policy up, sparking a wave of complaints and cancellation threats documented on Hacker News and Reddit.

Okay, so I know that I say that technology well and truly sucks a lot here, but the root cause of the issue is that technology well and truly sucks