Mildly interesting
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Zebra stripes not just for camouflage:
Seeking a potential solution to this situation, a team of Japanese researchers cleverly applied lessons from research on zebras. Animal scientists have long pondered the function of zebras' dsitinct stripes, and a growing consensus now suggests that they deter insects, possibly by confusing bugs' motion detection systems that control approach and landing.
And so, the researchers painted six Japanese Black cows with black-and-white stripes, which took just five minutes per cow. They then observed the cows for three days, taking high-resolution images of them at regular intervals to count the insects on the animals and also recording any fly-repelling behaviors like leg stamping, tail flicking, and skin twitching. The same cows were also observed for three days with painted-on black stripes (to see if it was the paint chemicals, not the coloring, that repelled flies) and and with no stripes at all.
The apparent effects of the stripes were remarkable. The number of biting flies observed on zebra-striped cows was less than half the number seen on unpainted cows and far less than cows painted with black stripes. Moreover, zebra-striping reduced fly-repelling behaviors by about 20%, indicating that the cows were less bothered by the insects
Oh, and for those who will say "TTIWWOP", here you go:
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@jon-nyc said in Mildly interesting:
It’s such an amazing result - that close but not equal.
If you were to guess the number of atoms in the universe and missed it by just one, that would an incomparably larger miss than this expression gets to pi
I wonder if that has something to do with Euler's identity.
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@jon-nyc said in Mildly interesting:
It’s such an amazing result - that close but not equal.
If you were to guess the number of atoms in the universe and missed it by just one, that would an incomparably larger miss than this expression gets to pi
Apparently not so amazing according to the comments. It’s a “discretization” of an infinite sun identity which is exactly equal to pi. The constants in the discretization can be chosen such that the sum is arbitrarily close to pi.
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Scientists in Israel are growing date palms from 2,000-year-old seeds.
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Scientists in Israel are growing date palms from 2,000-year-old seeds.
@mark said in Mildly interesting:
Scientists in Israel are growing date palms from 2,000-year-old seeds.
Now you can have a date with Jesus!
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@mark said in Mildly interesting:
Scientists in Israel are growing date palms from 2,000-year-old seeds.
Now you can have a date with Jesus!
@Doctor-Phibes said in Mildly interesting:
@mark said in Mildly interesting:
Scientists in Israel are growing date palms from 2,000-year-old seeds.
Now you can have a date with Jesus!
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A rare photo of a Big-Fin Squid, caught on camera on November 11th 2007 by a Shell Oil company ROV, at a depth of 2,386 meters (1.5 miles). This species of Squid dwell at extreme depths, and are characterised by their long, thin tentacles. They can reach almost 20ft long when fully grown.
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Utkan Demirci and Sean Wu use acoustics to manipulate heart cells into intricate patterns. A simple change in frequency and amplitude puts the cells in motion, guides them to a new position and holds them in place.
Wu and Demirci can then shepherd the heart cells into nearly any pattern they want. “You can make triangles, hexagonal shapes, circles, lines — you can even make a little human shape,” Demirci says.
“And,” Wu adds, “if you don’t like the pattern, for whatever reason, you can change it, literally, within five or six seconds. You change the frequency and amplitude, and the cells move into a new spot right in front of your eyes.”
Unlike other tissue engineering tactics, acoustics position the heart cells in a tight configuration that closely resembles natural cardiac tissue, turning the resulting, beating blob into something valuable for medicine.
Wu and Demirci think acoustic engineering could help foster more realistic cardiac disease modeling and drug screening. More distantly, but still on the horizon, the pair even see their generated tissue as an option for heart patches in patients who have weak cardiac walls or have damage from a heart attack.
Next, Demirci and Wu say that they plan to add vascularization — conduits that carry blood and oxygen to various parts of an organ — to make their generated heart tissue even more realistic.
Very interesting things are being performed with sound in the article. This is just one.
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