The most interesting teeth I've seen all week

To work out whether ancient whales were predators or filter feeders, the scientists created 3D models of the teeth of the eight extinct whale species.

They also created 3D tooth models of four land-dwelling carnivores — the coyote, the lion, the dingo and the puma — and five seals (some of which filter-feed with their teeth).

"We wondered which teeth are the fossil whale teeth more like: the seals that filter feed, or the carnivores that live on land and definitely use their teeth to cut up food?" Dr Evans said.

They found that two species of seal — leopard and crabeater — were clearly distinct from the rest of the group analysed. Those species had blunt, rounded teeth that fit in with their known use of filter-feeding, Dr Evans said.

But the whale teeth were far closer to terrestrial carnivores like the lion than they were to those seals.

Today I learned that walruses can whistle

YouTube link.

Via Boing Boing.  This video below, from the Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium, shows a broad range of vocalizations in a trained walrus:

YouTube link.

I am truly impressed.  You learn something every day.

"People-catchers"

Fishing lures removed from patients in an emergency room, via.

Coping with a bad situation

Physicians identifying themselves to their patients (cropped for size from the via), and below an adaptation for working with lip-reading deaf and hard-of-hearing patients (via).

Library bench

At the British Library.  Via, and pix of similars.

Humor scrapbook, part VIII

This is the eighth of what will eventually be ten weekly posts with material from my old "humor" scrapbook.  The content varies from priceless to junky (especially the case with humor, which often doesn't age well), but there's no time to sort things out or curate the content (which may include material from the 1970s that would be "politically incorrect" nowadays).

The text on "scrapbook" pages can be very difficult to read. One possible workaround is to right-click on a page to open it in a new tab, then zoom the image on that tab.

Pollinator bat after a busy night

Lesser Long-nose bats are connoisseurs of cactus. With tongues as long as their bodies, lesser long-nosed bats (Leptonycteris yerbabuena) are unsung heroes in maintaining fragile desert ecosystems...

Being agile fliers, the bats hover over the blossoms as they poke their slender noses deep within. Using their long, brush-tipped tongues to lap up sweet nectar, the bats then emerge from their banquet with heads covered in pollen.

Photo and text from the National Park Service, via.

"Accelerationist’ groups aim to sow chaos" during the pandemic

Excerpts from a disturbing article in The Guardian:

The watchdog group the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) raised the alarm last week about opportunism from far-right so-called “accelerationist” groups who believe sowing chaos and violence will hasten the collapse of society, allowing them to build a white supremacist one in its place.

Late last month, the FBI warned such extremist groups were encouraging members to deliberately spread the virus to Jewish people and police officers. Similarly, British hate monitors Hope Not Hate warned these groups are expressing “gleeful expectation of social turmoil”...

One channel issued an eight-point plan for “the boog” – a term used on the far right to denote what they believe to be a looming civil war. Their advice included acts of terrorism and sabotage and asks people to “encourage locals to join your cause, if have to do it by force”, and “attack key locations for federal entities, NATO outposts, and military presence”...

An SPLC researcher, Cassie Miller, said these groups have always talked about ways that western democracies might be destabilized, but “this time the political opportunity has come to them. They haven’t had to do anything to sow chaos at this point.

“They’re saying, ‘see, this is what we told you. Modern society is unsustainable. It is eventually headed towards collapse’,” Miller added. “And they think that they’re going to be the revolutionary vanguard that is going to be in place to handle the situation when it eventually breaks down.”

One upside of the pandemic

"The coronavirus pandemic is shutting down industrial activity and temporarily slashing air pollution levels around the world, satellite imagery from the European Space Agency shows.  One expert said the sudden shift represented the “largest-scale experiment ever,” in terms of the reduction of industrial emissions...

One of the largest drops in pollution levels could be seen over the city of Wuhan, in central China, which was put under a strict lockdown in late January."

"The changes over northern Italy are particularly striking because smoke from a dense cluster of factories tends to get trapped against the Alps at the end of the Po Valley, making this one of western Europe’s pollution hot spots...

“What I think will come out of this is a realization—because we are forced to—that there is considerable potential to change working practices and lifestyles."

I am reminded of the days just after 9/11, when I was driving between Toledo, Ohio and Madison, and for several days the sky was strikingly free of contrails.

A quote from Victor Hugo

Found this yesterday while sorting memorabilia, in an old notebook that had entries from the Vietnam War period.

Nature is pitiless; she never withholds her flowers, her melodies, her perfumes, her sunbeams, from human abominations. She overwhelms man by the contrast between divine beauty and social ugliness; she spares him nothing, neither the wing of butterfly, nor song of bird; on the verge of murder, in the act of vengeance or barbarity, she brings him face to face with those holy things; nowhere can he escape the eternal reproach of universal benevolence and the implacable serenity of the sky. Human law in all its hideous deformity must stand forth naked in the presence of the eternal radiance. Man breaks and crushes, lays waste, destroys; but the summer, the lily, and the star remain ever the same...

In the presence of a world all flowery and fragrant, tender and charming, the glorious sky bathed both the Tourgue and the guillotine with the light of dawn, as though it said to man: "Behold my work, and yours."

-- from the closing chapter of his book "Ninety-three."

Aquafaba explained

When we refer to aquafaba... we’re talking about the liquid in a can of chickpeas... The starchy liquid is a great binder directly from the can, but what really makes it magical is that it whips and creates a foam. Aquafaba is therefore able to trap air, giving items structure at the same time it delivers a fluffy crumb and lift...

We fold this foam into blueberry muffins to lighten them, and we whip aquafaba with sugar and vanilla to make egg-free meringues... 

As it does with egg whites, adding a stabilizing ingredient improved the structure of whipped aquafaba. In sweet recipes, we usually used sugar. But there’s another ingredient we often whip into egg whites to add stability: cream of tartar. But why?

Cream of tartar is acidic—when added to egg whites, it prevents the egg proteins from bonding too tightly to each other and denatures them so they can create a foam that traps air bubbles and water more quickly and holds them in place for less weeping...

For ease, we like to freeze aquafaba in 1-tablespoon portions in ice cube trays. Once the bean liquid cubes are frozen solid, they can be transferred to a freezer bag for future use. Frozen-then-thawed aquafaba whips just as well as fresh aquafaba.

More information at America's Test Kitchen.

Foot-operated elevator buttons

Apparently developed not in response to coronavirus, but for workplaces where staff routinely have arms encumbered with carried items.

This is called "quarantine coffee"

Combine these ingredients, and then leave out the coffee.  Via.

Gecko shedding

Via.

Where people stayed home

Map from the New York Times.  Data from the week of March 23.  States and cities with known stay-at-home orders are crosshatched and outlined in black.

Also interesting is that data like this can be derived from cellphone data of 15 million people. 

The location data, from Cuebiq, a data intelligence firm, measures the range that people travel each day. It cannot predict where outbreaks will spread, and it does not track how many interactions people had while they were traveling. Not all travel is problematic: A person driving for a few miles to pick up groceries would not be violating stay-at-home orders. And people in cities can infect others without traveling far.