27 March 2018
How to make a Cheeto
I love Cheetos, and I was curious, and I initially intended to just use the timeline to browse the content, but I wound up watching the entire sixteen minutes of this video. What was most interesting to me was not "how to make a Cheeto," but rather how knowledgeable the chef was with regard to food science. A professional chef is different from you and me the way a professional golfer is different from a weekend duffer.
This is a totally impractical video. It will never be worth anyone's time and expense to make Cheetos at home rather than buy them, but for me it was enjoyable watching someone at the top of her game display her skill set.
And if you enjoyed this video, the Bon Appetit channel has lots more.
Via Neatorama.
Anglerfish
For nearly a half-hour, scientists filmed the female anglerfish as she tumbled gently along with the ocean current at a depth 2,600 feet. The footage features her parasitic mate, a male one-tenth her size, clutched to her belly... The pair was observed off the steep southern slope of São Jorge Island, located in the central Azorean archipelago of Portugal...
"One can't help but think these fin-rays form a network of sensory antennae, a kind of sphere of tactility around the fish -- akin to cat whiskers -- that functions to monitor the close presence of predators or prey," said Ted Pietsch, a professor of aquatic and fishery sciences at the University of Washington.
25 March 2018
Divertimento #150
A complete (and complicated) Harry Potter universe family tree.
"Pakistani police have arrested four people accused of stealing spinal fluid from women. The suspects told women they had to provide blood samples to qualify for financial assistance from the Punjab government, police told BBC Urdu. However, they extracted spinal fluid instead, and attempted to sell it on the black market, police added.
A history of ice skating wardrobe malfunctions.
"Trenton Lewis' legs ached from the 11-mile walk he made every morning to get to his 4 a.m. shift. And yet the 21-year-old dutifully did it for seven long months..."
A compilation of clips from movies that won cinematography Oscars.
More than 100,000 critically endangered orangutans have been killed in Borneo since 1999.
"An Irish drugmaker has jacked up the price of a painkiller to nearly $3,000 a bottle. The drug is 22 times more expensive than when the company acquired it in late 2013."
Kangaroo hunter vs. kangaroo. Kangaroo wins.
"... the first known instance of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers mounting human skulls on stakes."
"How Creedence Clearwater Revival Became the Soundtrack to Every Vietnam Movie."
An excellent longread about the archaeology of ancient Nubia.
"Beneath Congo’s soil lies an estimated (at 2011 prices) $24 trillion in natural resources, including rich supplies of oil, gold, diamonds, the coltan used in computer chips, the cobalt and nickel used in jet engines and car batteries, the copper for bathroom pipes, the uranium for bombs and power plants, the iron for nearly everything. This wealth is the source of untold suffering."
An impressive example from the Power Washing Porn subreddit. Professional advice re powerwashing.
"Florida lawmakers on Tuesday passed a resolution declaring pornography a public health risk, less than an hour after they rejected a motion to consider a bill that would ban assault rifles."
The symbol for plutonium is PU. “The obvious choice for the symbol would have been Pl,” wrote chemists David Clark and David Hobart in 2000, “but facetiously, Seaborg suggested Pu, like the words a child would exclaim, Pee-yoo!” when smelling something bad... “he just thought it would be fun” to treat this element as if it were stinky.”
"Sweden’s latest fitness craze — plogging — is making its way to U.S. shores. The term is a mash-up of jogging and the Swedish “plocka upp,” meaning pick up. In this case, litter."
Bird photobombs meteorologist.
Candles that smell like a bookstore (mix of leather, wood, and coffee).
The danger of working in a steel factory.
"Blanke was no anomaly, but was one of hundreds of West and Northern Africans living freely and working in England during the Tudor dynasty. Many came via Portuguese trading vessels that had enslaved Africans onboard, others came with merchants or from captured Spanish vessels. However once in England, Africans worked and lived like other English citizens, were able to testify in court, and climbed the social hierarchy of their time. A few of their stories are now captured in the book, Black Tudors by author and historian Miranda Kaufmann."
A discussion of mass mortality events. Here's an example ("Starfish Armageddon").
All the lyrics for The Dark Side of the Moon.
Handy reference site to listen to owl calls.
"The emperor had suffered from this same ailment, on-and-off, his whole life. In response, he poured money into research on the illness. It was a matter of survival: for the emperor, his family, and Japan’s ruling class. While most diseases ravage the poor and vulnerable, kakke afflicted the wealthy and powerful, especially city dwellers. This curious fact gave kakke its other name: Edo wazurai, the affliction of Edo (Edo being the old name for Tokyo). But for centuries, the culprit of kakke went unnoticed: fine, polished, white rice." [beriberi]
A trenchant reply to his question.
Awesome technology recovers lost movie footage.
If you enjoy my linkdumps, you should visit Things Magazine every week.
Video shows how to dig a snowhole for protection during a blizzard.
A man and his wife hacked the lottery (legally). "Right there, in the numbers on the page, he noticed a flaw—a strange and surprising pattern, like the cereal-box code, written into the fundamental machinery of the game. A loophole that would eventually make Jerry and Marge millionaires, spark an investigation by a Boston Globe Spotlight reporter, unleash a statewide political scandal and expose more than a few hypocrisies at the heart of America’s favorite form of legalized gambling."
Nice portrait of Elvis and Priscilla.
Cheerful story from a Waffle House (and others in the discussion thread). Followup.
"Work and life lessons from a former dominatrix."
Re stolen and missing Oscars.
"Gratuitous cruelty" by Homeland Security. "There is no allegation that the little girl, known in court filings only as S.S., is a terrorist, nor is there any suggestion her mother is one. Neither was involved with smuggling, nor contraband, nor lawbreaking of any other variety... officials decided that the right thing to do was to wrench S.S. from her mother, whereupon the mother “could hear her daughter in the next room frantically screaming that she wanted to remain with her mother..."
Advertisement for a camera shows where photographer's eye has to be.
"Trapped in the rigid structure of diamonds formed deep in the Earth's crust, scientists have discovered a form of water ice that was not previously known to occur naturally on our planet."
You do not have a mousepad as cool as this one.
Humorous name for salt water taffy.
A bear with a bucket.
The images embedded in this linkfest come from an interesting article in Public Domain Review. "Allison C. Meier looks at the wonderfully ornate float and costume designs from Carnival’s “Golden Age” and the group of New Orleans artists who created them."
24 March 2018
Divertimento #149
Another "gif-fest," sorted into categories for those with limited time or interests
Animals
Cow-scratcher is satisfying to watch
Moose in a house
This squirrel barely escaped death
Crow and kitten are buddies (excerpted from this longer documentary video)
Do you have any extra fish?
Baby chicks will go into a "hand house"
Dog shares his biscuit with a friend
Officer tolerates a woodpecker
Woman rescues an icebound moose
Lion vs. giraffe (giraffe wins)
"Please let me in"
Will he or won't he? Of course...
Cows interact with a remote-controlled toy car
Mother eagle on her nest in a snowstorm
Nature/Science
Neoboletus luridiformis mushroom tissue oxidizes to the color blue. Immediately.
An underwater air ring is a dynamic environment, as this jellyfish discovered.
A swimming feather star
Fossilised ammonites. Nice!
Red-eyed tree frog shows his nictitating membrane
Curiosities
A "cadogan form" teapot is basically a puzzle pot. Obvious explanation here.
Boston Dynamics robot has an unusual skill.
Puri (Indian bread), or a "bubble pancake"
Bicycling kites
"Indoor Rainbow" is an art installation
Cutting a deck of cards (with a hydraulic press)
Wheel from a race car rejoins its family
Colliding apples
A "stick bomb" made with popsicle sticks.
Andre the Giant had big hands.
Foot juggling (Ed Sullivan show, 1969)
How a fashion photographer created a special effect
Children
Stacking building blocks
Delighted with his success
Daughter surprises her father by changing her last name (cheerful)
Miscellaneous
Creating a 3-D perspective
Schoolteacher of the future getting dressed for work
The famous "Bigfoot video" stabilized.
Removing a popcorn ceiling.
Take a video while I stand in this oceanside blowhole ["fail" gif]
He's not a Darwin Award candidate only because he didn't die ["fail" gif]
Petals in the wind
When you're bored in the store
Exchange programs like this do exist and are very useful
A table for people who are serious about Mahjong
Tilly gets her new bionic hands
For basketball fans
Humor
Two drunks meet in a doorway
Guitarist breaks a string
How many licks are there in a lollipop?
Sudden stop
The embedded photos are of miniature staircases, crafted by master woodworkers in the 18th and 19th century, via Atlas Obscura, where their history is explained.
23 March 2018
How ancient Greeks COULD have sailed to Canada
There's no proof that they did, but there is a way they could have bypassed the problem of the easterly Gulf Stream current.
Now a team of Greek scholars proposes another—and much earlier—wave of European migration: the Hellenistic Greeks, in triremes powered by sail and oar in the first century CE, nearly a millennium before the Vikings. These ancient Greeks regularly visited what is now Newfoundland, the study’s authors say. They set up colonies that lasted centuries, and they mined gold...The source article is at Hakai magazine.
The idea is based entirely on a new examination of a dialogue written by the influential Roman author Plutarch, who lived from 46 to 119 CE. “Our intention is to prove, with modern science, that it was possible for this trip to be made,” Ioannis Liritzis, an archaeologist at the University of the Aegean who proposed that the ancient journeys took place...
For instance, Plutarch wrote that the “great continent” lies beyond the isle of Ogygia, which, according to the text, is itself a five-day trip by trireme west from Britain. Plutarch also wrote that the Greek settlers accessed the “great continent” through a bay that lines up with the Volga River delta, the northern entrance to the Caspian Sea. Using Google Earth, Liritzis drew a line from this location across the Atlantic, and found it led to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence...
Other archaeologists say the occurrence of such a voyage is implausible—though not necessarily impossible.
20 March 2018
The state of our oceans
Top photo: location of uninhabited Henderson Island
Bottom photo: a beach on the island
Discussed at The Atlantic:
Henderson Island is about the most remote place you can visit without leaving the planet. It sits squarely in the middle of the South Pacific, 3,500 miles from New Zealand in one direction and another 3,500 miles from South America in the other. To get there, Jennifer Lavers had to fly from Tasmania to Tahiti, catch a small, once-a-week plane to the Gambier Islands, join a freight ship that had already sailed for 10 days from New Zealand, and ask it to change course for Henderson. No ship travels there unless you specifically ask it to...
When Lavers actually arrived on Henderson, she found that the situation was even worse than the images had suggested. At her landing site, her team immediately came across a truck tire—so large and deeply buried that they couldn’t move it. “That was a warning,” she said. “It got worse and worse. There’s an area that we call the garbage patch, where you can’t put your foot down without stepping on a bottle cap. The sheer volume really took my breath away for all the wrong reasons.”
Henderson should be pristine. It is uninhabited. Tourists don’t go there. There’s no one around to drop any litter. The whole place was declared a World Heritage Site by the United Nations in 1988. The nearest settlement is 71 miles away, and has just 40 people on it. And yet, seafaring plastic has turned it into yet another of humanity’s scrapheaps. “It’s truly one of the last paradises left on earth, and one of the least visited but heavily protected bits of land on the planet,” Lavers says. “But I don’t think I’ve stood somewhere and been so utterly and completely surrounded by plastic.”
Of interest to those with AVMs
Researchers have found the genetic cause of a blood-vessel disorder that can cause deadly bleeds and stroke. Scientists at University College London Institute of Child Health and Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) who led the study, called it an "enormous step" towards understanding and treating arteriovenous malformation (AVM). And they now believe targeted cancer drugs may be able to treat it...More information and a brief video at the BBC source. The JCI is an absolutely top-notch peer-reviewed journal for cutting-edge basic medical science; the referenced article is here.
Teams in London, Edinburgh and Cambridge, collaborated on the research, published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. The researchers took biopsies from 160 children with blood vessel disorders including AVMs and sequenced the DNA in the affected tissue. They found four faulty genes that could trigger the condition, all involved in the signalling pathway between cell surface receptors and the nucleus. The same gene mutations are also involved in the growth of many cancers.
There are several licensed cancer drugs that target the faulty RAS-MAPK pathway. The discovery means doctors now have the potential to treat AVMs with cancer drugs.
Here is the link for the Butterfly AVM Charity.
19 March 2018
The history of "pouring one out"
The context for the photo is obvious from recent news, but the history of the phrase and the tradition was unknown to me. I found the following at Vinepair:
One of the oldest instances of pouring one out—technically known as making a libation—comes from Ancient Egypt, where the liquid offering for the dead was typically water (the rhythms of the Nile River being a source of life and death, that seems pretty apt). There’s even biblical... reference to the practice. Per Genesis 35:14, “Jacob set up a pillar in the place where he had spoken with him [God], even a pillar of stone. He poured out a drink offering on it and poured oil on it.” Not quite an offering for the dead so much as, well, Yahweh, but still, we have the concept of pouring liquid out as an act of reverence...And here's the etymology of the word "libation":
The Greeks had two kinds of libation, spondai and choai. Whereas choai were “poured out entirely and were used for libations to the gods of the underworld, the heroes and the dead,” spondai meant a “controlled outpouring of a small amount of liquid for the Olympian gods,” that liquid usually being wine.
Ancient Rome, unabashed copycat of Ancient Greece, also incorporated the practice of libation, both as an offering to the gods and as a means to honor the dead.
late 14c., "pouring out of wine in honor of a god," from Latin libationem (nominative libatio) "a drink-offering," noun of action from past participle stem of libare "pour out (an offering)," perhaps from PIE *lehi- "to pour out, drip" (source of Greek leibein "to pour, make a libation").
This is from an enlargement of the PIE root *lei- "to flow" (source also of Sanskrit riyati "to let run;" Greek aleison "a cup for wine, goblet;" Lithuanian lieju, lieti "to pour," lytus "rain;" Hittite lilai- "to let go;" Albanian lyse, lise "a stream;" Welsh lliant "a stream, a sea," llifo "to flow;" Old Irish lie "a flood;" Breton livad "inundation;" Gaelic lighe "a flood, overflow;" Gothic leithu "fruit wine;" Old Church Slavonic liti, lêju, Bulgarian leja "I pour;" Czech liti, leji, Old Polish lić "to pour"). Transferred sense of "liquid poured out to be drunk" is from 1751. .
Gary Oldman and his mom
TYWKIWDBI doesn't normally cover celebrities, but I thought this photo of Gary Oldman's mom hugging him the morning after he won his first Oscar is rather touching.
This comment was on the discussion thread:
"She was born just after the end of WWI and would have been 26 when the second world war ended. To live through Churchill's tenure and now her son won an Oscar for portraying him, that's pretty amazing."
16 March 2018
Meet the Denisovans - updated
Bence Viola from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig discovered the tooth fragments together with Russian colleagues in the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains. Initially, he thought the inconspicuous-looking object was the molar of a cave bear. But when the remaining fragments of the tooth turned up, it became obvious that the researchers had found the tooth of a hominid. It was too large, however, to be from a modern man or Neanderthal. When the researchers finally succeeded in decoding the DNA of the tooth, their suspicion was confirmed: it hailed from a previously unknown early human species living in Asia at least 30,000 years ago.More on the Denisovans:
Because of the cool climate in the location of the Denisova Cave, the discovery benefited from DNA's ability to survive for longer periods at lower temperatures. The average annual temperature of the cave remains at 0°C, which has contributed to the preservation of archaic DNA among the remains discovered. The analysis indicated that modern humans, Neanderthals, and the Denisova hominin last shared a common ancestor around 1 million years ago. The mtDNA analysis further suggested this new hominin species was the result of an early migration out of Africa, distinct from the later out-of-Africa migrations associated with Neanderthals and modern humans, but also distinct from the earlier African exodus of Homo erectus. Pääbo noted the existence of this distant branch creates a much more complex picture of humankind during the Late Pleistocene... David Reich of Harvard University, in collaboration with Mark Stoneking of the Planck Institute team, found genetic evidence that Denisovan ancestry is shared by Melanesians, Australian Aborigines, and smaller scattered groups of people in Southeast Asia, such as the Mamanwa, a Negrito people in the Philippines.And what a superb cave; no wonder it maintained its real estate value for tens of thousands of years. The narration accompanying the slideshow is concise and superb; this video will be of interest to anyone with even a smidgeon of curiosity about archaeology or human prehistory.
Addendum: To keep relevant material in one place, I'll insert here a post I wrote back in 2011 ("Denisovan genes as markers of migration") -
There's too much to cover here in a short post, but I'll sketch what I understand as the basics. Denisovans were ?pre-humans/proto-humans of the genus Homo who died out as a species. They were genetically distinct from us, but some of their genes are present in modern humans. The distribution of those genes today is not random, as shown by the figure above.
“We haven’t been a very exclusive species, with a very narrow origin,” said Martin Jacobsson. Interbreeding with other members of the human family tree “is not a unique event. It’s a more complex story than we thought before.”I'm interested in the South American hits because of my belief in early colonization of the Americas from Oceania. I believe there's good evidence that the chickens in Chile and Peru came from Polynesia in pre-Columbian times.
In a study published Oct. 31 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Jacobsson and co-author Pontus Skoglund searched through 1,500 human genome scans from around the world for genes found in Denisovans but not chimpanzees or Neanderthals.
While the previous finding of Denisovan inheritance involved analysis of ultra-high-resolution human genome scans, of which only a few exist, Jacobsson used low-resolution scans. These are more commonly available and allowed the researchers to detect Denisovan signals in genomes from mainland southeast Asia. A signal also appeared in South America, but Jacobsson said that’s probably a false positive.
Further information at Ars Technica, via Right-reading.
Reposted from 2014 to add new information about further interbreeding:
DNA from another human-like primate, the Denisovans, lurks in modern genomes, too. A molar and a chip of pinkie bone found in a Siberian cave provide what little information we have about this species. DNA extracted from the fragments previously revealed cross-species breeding. Yet a new study in the journal Cell shows the ancient hanky-panky did not stop in Siberia: Humans who traveled across South Asia mated with a separate group of Denisovans, as well.“This is a breakthrough paper,” said David Reich, who studies ancient DNA at Harvard University and was not involved with the study. “It's a definite third interbreeding event,” one that adds to the previously known Denisovan and Neanderthal mixtures.Humans and Neanderthals divided into separate groups as far back as 765,000 years ago. Denisovans and Neanderthals were closer cousins who split more recently and then vanished — perhaps because we absorbed their lineages...All groups studied, from British and Bengali people to Peruvians and Puerto Ricans, had a dense cluster that closely matched the Altai Neanderthals. Some populations also had a cluster that matched the Altai Denisovans, which was particularly pronounced in East Asians.
The surprise was a third cluster — not like the Neanderthal DNA and only partially resembling the Altai Denisovans. This, the authors concluded, was a second and separate pulse of Denisovan genes into the DNA blender.
More at the link.
14 March 2018
The ecology of driftwood
Logs the size of telephone poles drift along the shore of the Salish Sea. Erik Hammond turns the wheel of his aluminum skiff and closes in. He grabs his ax and towlines, then leaps atop the floating wood, much as his father did, and his father did before him. With the butt of his ax he drives anchor pegs into the choicest three and ties them to the stern... Hammond and Moore are beachcombers, or log salvors, based in Gibsons, British Columbia.. They are practitioners of an occupation once common on the Pacific Northwest coast...Excerpts from an interesting longread at Hakai Magazine. The magazine has an abundance of articles on coastal science and societies.
Driftwood makes an enormous if underappreciated contribution to the food web connecting the forests and the sea... Driftwood, it turns out, is also rapidly disappearing...
Immense logjams and floating rafts of naturally occurring wood were once common and well-documented features in rivers and estuaries before they were cleared for navigation. The Great Raft on Louisiana’s Red River, perhaps the most famous, existed for an estimated 375 years before its removal in 1830...
Kramer’s research shows that driftwood serves as building blocks for stable sand dunes and spits in estuaries, providing an important buffer from rising tides and waves. But shorelines around the world—especially in developed, temperate zones—are now severely wood impoverished compared to their condition before human settlement. As rivers lose driftwood, water travels through faster and there is less time for nutrient cycling...
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