December 10, 2013

Why animals hurt the same way we do

Animals are often surprisingly like us.

Johnny Cash’s incredibly powerful song Hurt narrates a person’s self-destruction in the depths of sorrow.

You’d think depression and self-mutilation are uniquely human things, but they’re not.

Caged birds that are not allowed to get out and indulge their instincts sometimes obsessively pluck their own feathers out, in an echo of human self-mutilation.

featherless_parrot

Picture by Kathy Milani of the Humane Society

Most parrots sold in the U.S. are bred in captivity in inhumane conditions. The Humane Society reports:

These highly social creatures are usually kept alone and rarely allowed to fly—many parrots’ wings are clipped. Often their relatively small cages have little in the way of stimulation and “enrichment,” or toys. For an animal that’s as emotionally complex as a chimpanzee or dolphin, it amounts to an unimaginably bleak existence.

It’s surprising how much animals can have in common with us. In the excellent 2012 book Zoobiquity, cardiologist Barbara Natterson-Horowitz explores the intersection of human and animal medicine:

Dinosaurs suffered from brain cancer. Koalas catch chlamydia. Reindeer seek out narcotic escape in hallucinogenic mushrooms. Stallions self-mutilate. Gorillas experience clinical depression.

All living things are different branches of the same tree, so there are bound to be similarities.

744px-Homology_vertebrates.svg

Barbara Natterson-Horowitz’s point is that, given these similarities, doctors and veterinarians can learn from each other:

“Animals suffer from almost all of the diseases that human beings do, but veterinarians and physicians never talk about this,” she said. “Physicians have not typically, traditionally, seen veterinarians as their clinical peers and that’s unfortunate.”

December 9, 2013

What an old Patriots NFL game reveals about Amazon Prime Air

Amazon recently announced plans to try to develop the ability to deliver packages with autonomous flying machines. It’s funny, I blogged about the same idea back in April. The venture will face huge challenges. One of them is safety.

Thirty-four years ago today, a fan was killed at a Jets-Patriots game by a flying lawnmower.

No, really.

Some nut combined a lawnmower’s body and a model airplane’s machinery for the half-time show. It crashed into the stands and hurt two people, killing one of them. I don’t think this is the one that was at the half-time show, but it probably looked a lot like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNWfqVWC2KI

(Links via Bob’s Blitz. The Jets won, by the way.)

The point is that these things can be dangerous, especially if there’s no one piloting it. Amazon’s promo video at the top shows the drones delivering things in perfect weather, but there’s no mention of how it would handle strong wind, rain, snow, vandals or thieves. Drones also raise important privacy concerns. Lawsuits about faulty or misused drones are inevitable. (The Jets were sued for having such a dangerous halftime show.)

Despite the challenges, there’s definitely a place for drones in the private market. Amazon is also testing out using robots for warehouse sorting and loading. This year Mesa County, Colorado saved almost $10,000 by doing an annual air survey of a landfill with a drone instead of a piloted craft. There are places where drone delivery can definitely be useful: In Alaska, things often have to be delivered by air anyway.

A hundred years ago, it would have seemed crazy to suggest that mail could be delivered through the air. Today, regular first-class interstate mail is delivered by airplanes every day. All mail is Air Mail.

The military has already begun to use drones for delivery.

December 5, 2013

What the world really looks like Part 2: Every map tells lies

Recently I blogged about VSauce’s guide to “what the world really looks like.” Something I didn’t touch on yet is that every map of the world necessarily twists things because they try to make a round world flat. The most common map projection distorts the world so badly that relatively tiny Greenland looks like it’s the same size as the whole continent of Africa.

MercatorProjectionDistortionExample-MercatorPuzzle

Here, a silhouette of Mexico is moved north and distorted as much as Greenland is, while Greenland is moved as far south as Mexico. Moving Australia just a little to the south makes it almost unrecognizable. You can play around with the way the Mercator projection distorts things here.

If a human head was distorted the way the Mercator map is distorted, it would look pretty weird.

A graphic artist named Eric Testroete made himself an awesome Halloween costume a few years ago: A 3-D image of own head, made unnaturally huge.

EricTestroete_HeadProjection_Combined

Eric Testroete is an amazing artist.

Eric made a polygon map of his own head, the same way Robert Buckminster Fuller made his “Dymaxion Map” out of polygons. The Dymaxion Map is famous for minimizing distortion of the shapes and sizes of the continents:

BigDymaxionMap_blue_marble_fuller_Small

The landmasses are distorted as little as possible. But doing the same thing with a human head shows how weirdly changed they really are:

EricTestroete_FlattenedHeadProjection

Eewww.

Every map of the world you’ve ever seen is at least as bizarrely distorted as this. Weird as that is, the sizes are less distorted than the Mercator projection.

707px-Mercator_projection_SW

Eewww.

From now on, my reaction to every world map is: Man, that is so gross.

National Geographic now uses the “Winkel tripel projection” because it’s the best compromise of distortions. Even the best projection is still all out of wack:

National Geographic has a one-minute guide to the weirdness of maps.

December 4, 2013

What the world really looks like

The science show VSauce presents a bewildering hail of facts that change the way you look at the world. They might even change the way you look at looking.

I’ve posted before about the fact that the spectrum of light we see is only a tiny fraction of light’s total spectrum, but I never realized how tiny.

If the entire practical spectrum of wavelengths was laid out linearly from New York to Los Angeles, the visual portion we see would only be the size of 100 nanometers.

This chart necessarily distorts the scale. The rainbow in the middle should really be so tiny you can't see it.

This chart necessarily distorts the scale. The rainbow in the middle representing visible light should be so tiny you can’t see it.

So there’s the light we see, and then there’s light that we can’t see. Radio waves and microwaves are really just different frequencies of light, or what scientists call “electromagnetic waves”. The full spectrum goes from a wavelength of 1,000 meters (extremely low-frequency radio waves) to 0.0000000000001 meters (gamma rays). Visible light goes from .0000004 meters (purple) to .0000007 meters (red). The difference between 400 nanometers and 700 nanometers is nothing compared to the size of the whole spectrum.

IfTheElectromagneticSpectrumWasLaidOutFromLAtoNYvisibleLightWouldOccupyOnlyTheDistanceOfAvirus

If the whole crazy rainbow of electromagnetic waves had a chart as big as the distance from LA to New York, the visible light part of the spectrum would be the size of the AIDS virus (green dots), and it would be about nine feet from the start of the line.

So that’s how small a fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum we see.

Then again, maybe just laying out the full range of practical wavelengths doesn’t really give a meaningful idea of how “big” the spectrum is. It could be that visible light is a bigger sliver than this visualization would suggest. I’m no physicist, so correct me if I’m missing something here. Or just tell me what you think.

Another surprising thing:

A cell-phone camera can reveal that your TV’s remote control is really a flashlight that shines an invisible color. Take video of the remote’s tip while you press its buttons, and you’ll see it lighting up on the cell phone’s screen even though you can’t see it with your own eyes. It’s shining an infrared color that’s invisible to our eyes.

December 3, 2013

Why ancient treasure is buried beneath your feet

Construction workers keep accidentally turning up important archaeological finds all over the world just by digging. One minute it’s just a shovelful of dirt and crud; the next you have a priceless artifact.

KnightsTomb-ParkingLotArchaeology

Just this year:

Discoveries like this happen several times a year nowadays. We’re just beginning to wake up to what’s right under our noses.

Paul Mullins has some great insights on the contrast between the banality of parking lots and the excitement of discovery: What seems ordinary in one age becomes a priceless artifact in another. “There is a story to be told in all of these non-descript parking lots,” he says. “In the end it is not as banal as it might seem on first glance.”

The explosion of new discoveries goes beyond archaeology, too. For example: We’re just starting to realize how common meteor strikes are. We know that shooting stars happen every night, but only recently have scientists realized that 60 meteors have detonated in midair air since 1990 with enough force to register on devices meant to listen for nuclear bomb explosions. They usually go unnoticed at the time, happening over unpopulated areas.

The Guardian Newspaper collected records of every meteorite strike recorded since 861 AD and made this awesome animation from it. (And a global map). You can see that it’s only in the recent past that mankind has begun to notice and remember these things.

We’re living in a miraculous age.

December 2, 2013

How to: Deactivate a cat

via io9

I just found out that most cats suddenly become nearly immobile when you pinch the backs of their necks.

I knew you could pick them up that way, but I haven’t done it because it seemed like a mean thing to do. But it turns out that the back of a cat’s neck is kind of like your elbow: Try pinching your elbow and see if it hurts. Unless you pinch and twist really hard, it won’t. Even then it hurts much less than any other area of skin. Cats are like that on part of the back of the neck.

It doesn’t hurt the cat; if it did, it would loudly let you know.

Some scientists think the reason why the Vulcan Nerve Pinch works for cats might have something to do with the fact that that’s the way their mothers carry them.

The effect is amazing. This might make it easier to give a cat a bath or some medicine. An important consideration is that you have to be sure to hit the right spot on the back of the neck, and it may not work on all cats.

Is it cruel? Would you try this with your cat?

November 29, 2013

See a flock of endangered birds led to safety by a daring pilot – Live!

OperationMigration

Sometimes a species is so endangered their numbers can only be increased by raising some of them in captivity. Birds raised this way never learn to migrate right.

Operation Migration is a project to help endangered birds learn to migrate by leading them along the right path with an ultralight aircraft they’ve been taught to follow.

They’re in the middle of a flight right now and you can watch them in action:



Live streaming video by Ustream

November 28, 2013

You’re all wrong: The ISS is the 8th Wonder Of The World

They say the Great Wall of China is the only man-made object you can see from space. That’s not true, but if you turn the idea on its head you have something that IS true: The world has about 1,000 functioning satellites right now and they’re the only man-made objects you can see from anywhere in the world. The International Space Station is by far the most awesome of them. Look up at the right time tonight and you’ll see it. It’s the real eighth wonder of the world.

Lists of the wonders of the ancient world always include a big pile of stone blocks called the Great Pyramid. Lists of the wonders of the modern world usually include the Golden Gate Bridge and Canada’s CN Tower. Those are cool enough, but miles above them is a football-field-sized flying mansion and laboratory that the world’s 16 most powerful nations united to create. It literally runs circles around all the other wonders.

Space_tracy-caldwell-dyson-in-the-cupola-module-of-the-international-space-station-observing-the-earth

It’s a stepping-stone into the rest of the universe. It’s the only wonder of the world that brought the world’s nations together in cooperation. It has a giant robot arm that on Earth could lift 220,000 pounds. They make their own air from water up there. It has brought us some amazing new scientific achievements, including finding clues to the mystery of dark matter. More than 300 astronauts from around the world have worked and trained up there, preparing for the future. Like Kennedy said about the mission to the Moon: “We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

If you live in the middle of the U.S. (Wichita specifically), the International Space Station will fly directly above your head tonight at about 6:28.

You can find out when it’s visible in your area using a tool called The Astroviewer. Or find out from NASA. Looking up you’ll see what looks like a lone star following its own path across the sky.

So tonight, look up.

And realize that this is what they’re seeing when they look back down at night:

If you could see the Earth illuminated when you were in a place as dark as night, it would look to you more splendid than the moon.

-Galileo Galilei

Give thanks tonight that we live in a world of such wonder.

November 27, 2013

Earth got two new islands this year.

A few days ago, a new island began to appear south of Japan. This volcano is exploding like crazy.

In September, an earthquake in Pakistan caused a volcano of mud to erupt off the country’s southern shore. You can set fire to the gases bubbling out of it.

Over the past decade, an island has been slowly building up off the coast of Germany. This one had nothing to do with volcanoes: The island of Norderoogsand is basically a giant sandbar in the sea. The waves have pushed sand and silt into a crescent shape that in recent years finally became a respectable island.

Any of these new islands could disappear again soon. The Japanese island is the only one that has a chance of lasting. New islands like these typically sink back beneath the waves within a few years. Even the Hawaiian islands will eventually descend into the ocean again. In a sense, they’re all temporary.

Those aren’t the only ways that islands are made, though. Dubai has some awesome man-made islands:

What would you do with your own private island?

November 26, 2013

Magic from the cupboard: How to summon a horrifying tiny tentacle monster (with cornstarch)

You probably already know about the stuff you can do with cornstarch. You can mix it with water to make a weird fluid that will flow like syrup, but if you slam a hammer into it, it will suddenly transform from a liquid to a solid and crack. You can punch your fist into a bowl of it and instead of splashing everywhere, it just stiffens up and takes it like a man.

(The proportions are 1.5 cups of water for every 1 cup of cornstarch.)

Here’s two uses for it I’d never seen before:

1. Pour it on a cookie sheet. Put the sheet on top of a subwoofer or other big speaker with strong bass. Play music and hold the sheet down with your fingernails.

This is the secret ritual to summon a terrifying tiny tentacle monster.

2. Fill up a swimming pool with it and dance merrily on top.

Have you ever used cornstarch for fun? Tell us about it in the comments.