Today I learned...

[Tiberius]

Human Echolocation is powered by the visual region of the brain, and does not invoilve any activity in the audtitory region of the brain.

How do humans echolocate?

Multiple blind people have learned to do it by making clicking sounds and listening to it. Its a really interesting subject

[magmacube_tr]

That the Moderators of Tumblr have commited genocide to the NSFW blogs 165 to 152 Million years ago, Leedsichthys, the biggest bony fish ever lived, roamed the seas as a filter feeder. They were persumably 16 meters (50 feet) long.

[Prudentia]

https://qz.com/1314111/we-may-have-answ ... -universe/

And the study
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404.pdf

There is a good chance that we may never meet another civilization if they exist. At least according that paper.

[Tiberius]

https://qz.com/1314111/we-may-have-answ ... -universe/

And the study
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404.pdf

There is a good chance that we may never meet another civilization if they exist. At least according that paper.

It doesn't really say anything new though. My understanding of the paper was that it just argued that civilizations are very unlikely to arise since we can't see any and that the variables in the drake equation give a result, consistent with. what we see. Its basically the just the Great Filter substituted with the drake equation and the admission that life universe is big enough to overcome it occasionally, but with the caveat that its too unlikely to expect nearby.
I realise that what they did do that was new was adding uncertainties to the drake equation, but the drake equation is still fairly meaningless. The uncertainties are just too massive, even for astronomy(Fun fact: in my 2nd year astronomy courses, the markers only really care about the 10^x part of your answer. so long as you aren't off by a factor of ten you're close enough for full marks"sure you estimated the milky way to be five times bigger than it is, but I guess that's good enough for Astro. Meanwhile in Chemistry...).

[naturegirl1999]

Today I learned Amazon has a web browser called Silk

[magmacube_tr]

...That I learned how to corrupt a childrens show and steal the innocence and childhood of hundreds in the surface of Pluto, the snow is always fresh and soft as newly-fallen snow. But nobody is there to make a snowman with that metane snow.

[naturegirl1999]

Facetotecta is a genus of crustacean whose adult form has never been seen
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facetotecta

[Prudentia]

Alewives, Alosa pseudoharengus, contain a lot of Thiaminase. So when a predator consumes them, the thiaminase destroys the Thiamin, vitamin B1 and can cause deficiencies in Lake Trout in the Great Lakes where Alewives are invasive. The deficiencies are so drastic that alewives can cause massive die offs in Lake Trout.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiamine_deficiency

[naturegirl1999]

I learned that hard shelled ticks may have evolved rom obligate bird parasites
https://www.pnas.org/content/91/21/10034.short

[20 characters!]

Oooh very interesting stuff.