Cool Science-y Tidbits

[Gawdzilla Sama]

NOVA: Dawn of Humanity, 2015, TV-PG 1h53m
"A concealed chamber in South Africa houses hundreds of human remains that may help fill a gap and reveal the true origins of our species.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Speaking of human remains, Ian Tattersall (who knows a bit about these things) estimates than only one out a billion bones is ever fossilized.  Seven billion humans with 206 bones each is a little less than a trillion and a half bones.  If Tattersall's estimate is even close to being right, we could expect that all humans currently alive would be fossilized into seven complete skeletons.  And this is the best case scenario.


So the South Africa find is a real trove.

Boru

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I love it when science turns out to be wrong in a really great way.

[The Grand Nudger]

Speaking of, spontaneous generation was a theory on the origin of certain forms of life that was codified by aristotle and taken to be fact until the 19th century.  Louis Pasteurs desire to verify a man named Francisco Redi's experiments and hypothesis (that maggots, in fact, came from fly eggs too small to see)... and to answer Redi's critics (who contended the absence of oxygen in those experiments accounted for the lack of spontaneous generation) designed a task specific flask that would allow oxygen but trap microorganisms...and this work lead directly to his interest and confidence in the pasteurization process.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

They were so much smarter than me...

[The Grand Nudger]

Dodder, a parasitic vine familiar to gardeners due to it's demonstrable preference for tomato in the early (motile) stages of it's life, has been found to be used, in turn, by those plants as a neighborhood watch hotline.  Cuscuta chemically telegraphs the onset of an herbivore attack, boosting toxin production in unattacked plants. 

https://www.pnas.org/content/114/32/E6703.full

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Here's a fun one.  The steam engine was not invented by Thomas Savory in 1698.....but somewhere around 50ad by Hero of Alexandria.

[Fireball]

Dodder, a parasitic vine familiar to gardeners due to it's demonstrable preference for tomato in the early (motile) stages of it's life, has been found to be used, in turn, by those plants as a neighborhood watch hotline.  Cuscuta chemically telegraphs the onset of an herbivore attack, boosting toxin production in unattacked plants. 

https://www.pnas.org/content/114/32/E6703.full

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Here's a fun one.  The steam engine was not invented by Thomas Savory in 1698.....but somewhere around 50ad by Hero of Alexandria.

Yabut, Hero's turbine just sat there and spun, not being connected to the shaft of a naval ship making war on someone else!

[Gawdzilla Sama]

We can re-invent things that have been lost.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Too right.  Walter Hunt is credited with the invention of the safety pin and was issued a patent for it in 1849.  Yet this



Was being widely used throughout the Roman word as early as 200 BCE.

Boru

[LastPoet]

We can re-invent things that have been lost.

How many things have been lost due to being against the gods.

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"Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window."

Whoever said that was WRONG. Everyone has one in the pocket and trust it. The machines will win