Drive by science

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Spying on Beavers From Space Could Help Save California | WIRED

Nice headline, nerds.

But anyway, University of Utah has been working on this for awhile, restoring wetlands and keejng the water table up instead of running dry in the summer by… learning how and where to put beavers, to build dams, where we want them to build dams.

[JoeP]

In 2010, a Canadian researcher discovered the world’s longest beaver dam

Castor canadensis

This is just publicity for , isn't it?

[Crumb]

It is beaver propaganda!

[LarsMac]

Them Beavers is plumb clever.

[fragment]

The Wilde Knights - Beaver Patrol(1965)***** -...

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

On the other hand:

Beaver ponds may exacerbate warming in Arctic, scientists say | Animals | The Guardian

[-FX-]

Oh Jeez, more extirpation don't you know

[LarsMac]

There ya go.
Effects of growing beaver population on habitat and methane gas emissions
They'll be blaming "Global Warming" on Beavers, next.
Give Big Oil a break, there.

[JoeP]

Torille!

APOD: 2024 January 25 - Jyväskylä in the Sky

You might not immediately recognize this street map of a neighborhood in Jyväskylä, Finland ... The temperature was around minus 20 degrees Celsius. As ice crystals formed in the atmosphere overhead, street lights spilling illumination into the sky above produced visible light pillars, their ethereal appearance due to specular reflections from the fluttering crystals' flat surfaces. Of course, the projected light pillars trace a map of the brightly lit local streets, though reversed right to left in the upward looking camera's view.

[ceptimus]

...a map of the brightly lit local streets, though reversed right to left...

This is the oft-repeated fallacy of mirrors reversing right-to-left, and raising the obvious question of how a mirror (or the sky reflecting the light pillars of street lights in this case) knows to reverse right-to-left rather than up-to-down. In the case of looking straight up into the sky, there's not even a clear meaning of 'right-to-left': different people standing in different orientations would each have their own concept of its meaning.

What mirrors really do, is reverse front-to-back. The whole left-right reversal idea is mainly down to humans happening to be mostly bilaterally symmetrical about their vertical axis, when upright, and asking themselves how they could reposition their bodies in order to superimpose them with their image in a mirror.

[viscousmemories]

I was just thinking about this yesterday and I'm still not sure I understand. I was watching a TikTok and the person was talking about their left eye while pointing at, presumably, their left eye. The eye they were pointing at was on the left side of their face from my perspective, and that confused me because it seems to me that if I were to spin around and face me the way they are, that would be my right eye.

[ceptimus]

The person was probably using a smartphone in selfie mode to shoot the TikTok video?

Selfie mode on smartphones really does reverse right-to-left (the right and left of the phone, that is). This makes it easier to use, because people are used to holding and manipulating mirrors when looking at themselves - if the camera didn't flip the image, people would tend to turn the phone the wrong way, when their image was off-centre.

There is an option in the camera settings to flip the image (or video) the correct way round for storage, but no option to view the live image (from the front camera) the correct way round, at least not on Android, as far as I know. By default, the 'flip image for storage' option is usually turned off, which is why you can't easily read the slogans printed on shirts in most selfie photos or videos.

If you want to really confuse yourself, you can try to work out why the smartphone image still appears exactly like the one in a mirror, when you turn the phone at an angle, or point it straight up at the ceiling and spin it around. It's still flipping the image left-to-right on its screen, so you might expect the image to sometimes appear upside-down, compared to what you'd see in a mirror? Of course, the smartphone has gyros and accelerometers, so it knows which way is up, but that's no use to it, for knowing the best way to flip an image, when it's pointing straight up or down.

[It's Me!]

Originally Posted by LarsMac

There ya go.
Effects of growing beaver population on habitat and methane gas emissions
They'll be blaming "Global Warming" on Beavers, next.

Cow Flatulence Lobbyists FTW!

[Ari]

Yeah you've totally outed yourself as an old, grandpa!
People who live in the flipped video land of the selfie camera are so used to seeing video of themselves in that way that they get the uncanny vibes when seeing the video unflipped, and in some cases have gained the ability of fast backwards reading from constantly seeing script backwards.

[-FX-]

Originally Posted by LadyShea

I think we need a Miscellany thread for science stuff we come across.

AI researchers found that widely used safety training techniques failed to remove malicious behavior from large language models — and one technique even backfired, teaching the AI to recognize its triggers and better hide its bad behavior from the researchers.

Poisoned AI went rogue during training and couldn't be taught to behave again in 'legitimately scary' study

[-FX-]

It's like they never watched a single science fiction movie involving an AI

(the first one was 2001 A space Odyssey)

[Ari]

Why do Moths,
Suddenly appear,
Everytime,
my phone is near.

According to this research moths and other bugs fly around lights due to their dorsal light response, a reflex which orients their back to the brightest area, it's thought it's to help to quickly gauge which way is up as the sky is often brighter than the ground. The loops we see are because the light source is so close only a small change causes them to reorient again and again, getting trapped in loops. They always seem to find phone screens at night as light underneath them will cause them to flip over and plummet.

‘Like a moth to a flame’ — this strange...

[256 colors]

"Brookesia nana nano-chameleon, Madagascar" "You come and go, you come and go... "



Who’s the smallest of them all? Meet the world’s amazing tiniest creatures | Wildlife | The Guardian

THE TINIEST CREATURES. "With much of life on Earth still unknown, scientists are discovering new tiny organisms every year, redefining what is considered the smallest of their kind – and some claims about who is the smallest of them all are hotly contested.

Tiny creatures can sometimes struggle to get the same conservation attention as their larger, charismatic counterparts. “The small species often get over looked or missed,” says Paul Rees, a nursery manager at Kew Gardens. We asked scientists to tell us about the smallest creatures of their kind."

"Every day is like survival (survival)..."

[Crumb]

Zoozve — the strange 'moon' of Venus that earned its name by accident | Space

[JoeP]

Covfefe...

[beyelzu]

First Photographs Of Humpback Whale Sex Feature Two Males | HuffPost Latest News

A study published by the Marine Mammal Science journal details researchers’ first-ever observation of humpback intercourse, which was captured by photographers off the coast of Maui, Hawaii in January 2022.

Homosexuality so unnatural that we see it everywhere in the natural world.



Like the title says, it was two dudes.

[Crumb]

They're turning the whales gay!

[JoeP]

You don't understand. God gave us the Bible so we could learn that homersexshualerdee is wrong for humans!

[LarsMac]

So, not necessarily to change the subject, or anything, ...
I was reading in another forum that Elon claims his new roadster will be able to do 0-60 mph in one second.

I'm still chuckling.

I suppose that they can find a way to manage traction control to keep the thing on the pavement for the whole second, maybe, but that is going to be quite the experiment.

I've been passenger in more than a few attempts at breaking the quarter mile record in various strips in my day, and we've pulled a G and a half or so for a good quarter in around 7 seconds.
That first 60 mph is the hard part.

So, Who will volunteer to be the first passenger?
(I suppose they'll want to take one of those Bibles along, too.)

[ceptimus]

60 mph is 26.82 metres per second. Using the formula v = u + at, we see that to reach a final velocity, v, of 26.82 mps, in one second, with an initial velocity, u, of zero, requires a constant acceleration of 26.82 metres per second squared.

Acceleration due to gravity, g, is 9.81 metres per second squared, so the (constant) acceleration required is only 2.73 g

The driver and passengers will still be experiencing the normal, downward, force of gravity during the run, so the total force they'll experience is sqrt(1 x 1 + 2.73 x 2.73) = 2.91 g. This assumes constant acceleration over the whole second, so the peak acceleration may be higher. Quite survivable, though probably not very enjoyable in a daily driver!

A bigger problem may be getting enough traction from the tyres to allow such acceleration. With ordinary road tyres, and no burnout to warm them up and get them sticky, you'd likely need a powered downforce system for the car, to suck it down onto the surface, like a reverse hovercraft: this, in turn, would require upgraded suspension to withstand the extra downward force on the wheels, over and above the normal vehicle weight.

Tom Scott recently drove such a car, capable of 0 to 62 mph (100 kmh) in less than a second, shown in the YouTube video below. It didn't quite beat a second with him driving, though it's supposed to be able to do so, when driven by a more lightweight driver.

Tom Scott YouTube video