I was skeptical thank you for the confirmation. Especially because the time it takes to lock depends on the relative size of the bodies. Our moon being exceptionally big relatively to our planet, if it has locked, then relatively smaller moons should have locked long before.
Btw, the locking is not perfect, there’s a little oscillation of the moon called libration, so we can actually see about 59% of it over the years.
Pedantically speaking, yes. At least some small moons do freely rotate. But they are all very small and very far from their parent planet. If you were on the surface, you wouldn’t see details.
Mars has two small moons close to it, but neither rotate relative to the surface. They’re also really small and zip about super fast so they’re cool for other reasons.
The problem is they they’re just designed to eat and get chonky. If they had invested in cool ninja combat during evolution, scientists believe they would be not only more likely to survive, but be a lot cooler.
sometimes i wonder if life is sort of designed to be like that though. not in a strictly intentional intelligent way but also not in a fully accidental coincidental way.
somebody has to turn plant into food right? without them and homies like them our food system don’t work.
It’s designed that way in the same way as a hole was designed for a puddle*. The caterpillars are evolutionarily successful because of a “spray and pray” strategy, and other species are successful because of the easy food.
Biology is an arms race, in a sense: so everything is interlinked, and affected by everything else, even if only by distant, myriad links in an unbroken web of chains. It’s the reason a lot of biologists like myself are anxious about the ecological destruction that’s been unfolding for so long. Life finds a way in the long term, but short term…it sucks to be alive when many of the things you depend on aren’t.
Most caterpillars are mildly poisonous since they only eat a single type of plant so they are immune to the plants poisonous effect. That gets into their fleshy hotdog body. Unfortunately most birds are also mostly immune.
The joke is that the British have an incredibly problematic history literally centuries-old of taking things from other cultures and going “well, it’s ours the world’s now.“ Many of these communities have been asking them literally for decades to return them, but they simply won’t even to this day.
There was a time where they could maybe make the claim “this is the best way to preserve them,“ but for the vast majority of cases that time has long since passed and it was flimsy to begin with.
It's mostly due to early "archeologists" being almost entirely trust fund babies born into the aristocracy and to whom it was a contest to make the craziest claims possible.
See the OG trench at Troy that went completely past the end of the Bronze Age and dumped all of the important artifacts into a refuse pile that is apparently still being sifted through today.
Also see early "paleontologists" who seemed to use Dino bones in an attempt to make monsters scary enough to make kids cry.
Frustrating to say the least. I feel my PhD accelerated learning in all directions. Not from the program content itself, but the skills involved in the ingestion of high volumes of dense information. This idea that the borders of my world don’t extend past some yadda yadda about some tiny subclass of a field is some silly goosery.
Can those “skills involved” be learned elsewhere? Sure, this is just the path I took. Can phDoctors be single minded or general idiots? Sure, I’m an idiot. Do we need some single minded people? Sure, amazing things can be accomplished by singular focus.
But it isn’t a mandatory condition or experience of a floppy hat assed (sword in some countries) recipient of this degree.
Had a prof tell horror stories about this kind of thing happening. Peers who started at a similar time were already postdocs or in industry, meanwhile their colleague had yet to defend cause their PI just would not let them go.
In the UK the regulation is very strict, especially for foreign students. Need to submit by the end of 4th year and finish viva within five. years. If not, end up with complimentary MPhil or nothing.
Got a fellow candidate who submit against his supervisor’s advice. Thesis end up below par, given another year to submit (first draft) but still not satisfactory. Five years wasted.
Heard quite a lot of story like that. My office mate was even stuck during proposal session at the end of the first year. The school changed their course offer to MPhil instead. So they quit rather than doing MPhil.
Another story I heard, a student failed their viva, twice. Luckily given a third chsnce and passed at the end.
Because this is Lemmy and we like anecdotes here, I have one for ya.
A couple years ago, during one of my many attempts to get fit, I went for a walk. At some point between my venturing forth and returning home, a wild turkey had come between me and my home.
I think it was female but I have no idea. The point here is, they're pretty big in person, and I had to decide as I was walking toward it... if the turkey didn't move? What if it charged me? What if it was aggressive, like a goose? I was stunned how unprepared I was to deal with this wild animal that I had apparently been living near for most of my life.
Anyways, long story short, I decided I could take a turkey in a fight. The turkey seemed to know that I had come to that decision, because as soon as I prepared myself to kick a turkey, it got out of my way.
The lesson here is, turkeys read minds, and as soon as you're sure you can defeat the turkey, it will allow you to proceed unmolested.*
*Just my opinion. Don't sue me if you lose a fight against a turkey. Also, if you lose a fight against a turkey, that just proves you didn't believe in yourself hard enough.
When I was a kid I was convinced that I could do it if I honed my mind sharp enough, and mastered my body. I’m still not convinced that it’s impossible, because I didn’t have the discipline to achieve perfection.
Anyone who - upon learning they are made of atoms - does not try to align them with another object so they may pass through it, lacks a scientific mind.
He also had a history of being screwed by people. The guy did a lot of good work, and arguably his attempt at patenting it was instrumental in preventing it from being patented. I don’t think that was his intention, but good came from it.
I mean… as someone who (many moons ago) won a golden horseshoe for my knowledge of WV: both of those geographic features are also partially located in West Virginia.
I always wanted to hear the original version where he sings about how they strip mined all of that away for the coal and it now looks like something out of Mad Max.
Classic meditation method: don’t block any thoughts, just accept any thought that pops up, and visualise it floating away. Usually does the trick for me.
Or visualize a water flow like a river streaming through your mind, taking all the thoughts with it.
There are lots of visualisations you can do to help clear your mind or control your emotions.
I honestly don’t know what that silence would be like. I’ve spent my programming career jumping between domains, becoming an expert then moving on to find a new challenge. Now I’m building AI stuff for medicine.
In my down time I learn languages, watch videos about physics and math, and play puzzle games.
My brain actually won’t let me stop. Boredom = pain.
You sound like you’re way smarter than I am, but I can absolutely relate to bordom=pain.
I’m constantly learning new things, or delving deeper into subjects I’m already familiar with. I can’t help it. My brain won’t have it any other way (otherwise I get destructive)
I could just be further down the path due to lucky opportunities. 20 years ago I had no ambitions beyond game programming. It was only when I got a biology-related job that learning in my free time started displacing mindless entertainment. The whole field is one big nerd snipe - there are endless opportunities where you can advance the frontier of knowledge by combining a few existing ideas and working out the kinks. The more you read, the more opportunities you see. It’s thrilling. I don’t think I can go back to non-science work.
I think the dopamine from constant learning also helps to keep my ADHD in check. If I start the weekend with some study, I’ll usually also get the housework done. If I start with a video game or TV show, I’ll probably spend the rest of the weekend stressing about my todo list and not getting anything done.
I learned to sketch, and paint miniatures. It gave me some kind of silence. I have to study painting techniques also. So, if I want to keep my mind occupied, but not too heavy, then I could watch some painting tutorials.
The edge to overoptimize yourself is very close and thats even more a hassle when hobbies become hustles and the brain doesnt distinguish anymore between work and hobby and freetime and me time.
Its a spiral which can lead fast to burnout or other related stuff.
Kudos to you that you made it this far and successfull in a challenging field.
As someone with ADHD with severe hyperfocus, I feel you. Just once I want to think about nothing. Even with meds, it only helps me defocus. Doesn’t stop the thinking.
Under the first headline it shows that the sailors were using online platforms to share this tip. This reminds me of those viral messages of recharging your batteries in the microwave.
Interestingly, the journal editors have released an expression of concern earlier this year for this article and others by the same author.
SAGE Publishing has been made aware of scientific concerns regarding the work of Dr. Nicholas Guéguen. Multiple concerns have been raised regarding the integrity of the research including but not limited to concerns around data fidelity, replicability of findings, and ethical consent and oversight for studies involving human participants. SAGE Publishing’s Research Integrity Team, in cooperation with this journal’s editors, are currently conducting an investigation into these articles.
This expression of concern will remain in place until the investigation is completed and any further needs for appropriate action have been taken.
Alright, I am certainly not an expert when it comes to transformation of caterpillars into butterflies but this is very likely a massive and incorrect oversimplification of the process.
I mean this makes it sound like if you poke a hole into the cocoon it will just drip goo out until its empty.
Happy to be corrected by a real expert but very likely transformation occurs in coordinated small steps and not just everything melts and rematerializes.
I’m not an expert, but there’s a good overview of the process here: Nat Geo. You can de-paywall it at the usual places. They describe it more as “an organised broth full of chunky bits” as some organs don’t break down.
Insects that undergo complete metamorphosis experience enormous changes in both morphology and lifestyle. The current study examines whether larval experience can persist through pupation into adulthood in Lepidoptera, and assesses two possible mechanisms that could underlie such behavior: exposure of emerging adults to chemicals from the larval environment, or associative learning transferred to adulthood via maintenance of intact synaptic connections. Fifth instar Manduca sexta caterpillars received an electrical shock associatively paired with a specific odor in order to create a conditioned odor aversion, and were assayed for learning in a Y choice apparatus as larvae and again as adult moths. We show that larvae learned to avoid the training odor, and that this aversion was still present in the adults. The adult aversion did not result from carryover of chemicals from the larval environment, as neither applying odorants to naïve pupae nor washing the pupae of trained caterpillars resulted in a change in behavior. In addition, we report that larvae trained at third instar still showed odor aversion after two molts, as fifth instars, but did not avoid the odor as adults, consistent with the idea that post-metamorphic recall involves regions of the brain that are not produced until later in larval development. The present study, the first to demonstrate conclusively that associative memory survives metamorphosis in Lepidoptera, provokes intriguing new questions about the organization and persistence of the central nervous system during metamorphosis. Our results have both ecological and evolutionary implications, as retention of memory through metamorphosis could influence host choice by polyphagous insects, shape habitat selection, and lead to eventual sympatric speciation.
Yes, a paper that they retain “memories”. I didn’t doubt that. I doubted the “turns completely into goo and then solidifies as butterfly” part. And from what I can tell after skimming the introduction of the paper this is only covering the behavioural aspect.
Yeah, but again, this says “turns completely into goo” and thats not at all what you are describing either. Its just over-sensationalising an already impressive process. But I can see I am alone with that opinion, so whatever. Total goo it is.
So, if you happen to know them… I have a question.
How doped up on hormones are they? Like, maybe they’re just having the time of their life, Brain riding high on dopamine or whatever butterfly’s have for pleasure, and they don’t even realize what’s going on.
Then, when they pop out and realize what they’ve been doing run off to the shower trying not to think about it
So from what I can find, you’re right in that it’s not 100% goo, but it’s not really “coordinated small steps either”. It’s a messy fluid process that all sort of happens at once. When caterpillars are inside their chrysalises, they first digest themselves by releasing an enzyme. But this enzyme doesn’t break down everything. Some organs are completely dissolved and completely new ones are grown from the goo, but most only partially, and are moved around remodeled into their butterfly counterparts. As for the entirely new parts, like wings, they’ve actually been inside the caterpillar since before the cocoon as these tiny clumps of cells call imaginal discs, and it’s only during metamorphosis that they begin to develop into their full size organ. It’s really cool, and you should read more about it. I’m no expert, so I’m sure I explained it badly, but here’s some good links.
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