“[O]ctopuses can alter the coloration of their skin, with darker colors typically being indicative of aggression. The authors found that octopuses with dark coloration threw debris more forcefully and were more likely to hit another octopus.”
“[O]ctopuses can alter the coloration of their skin, with darker colors typically being indicative of aggression. The authors found that octopuses with dark coloration threw debris more forcefully and were more likely to hit another octopus.”
“Translated, the inscription reads, ‘May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.’ … This purpose was confirmed when the authors searched for evidence of head lice on the comb under a microscope and found some remains on the second tooth, still in the nymph stage of development.”
(See also the discussion at Language Hat.)
“Over the next 1,500 years, during especially hot summers, the remains and artifacts were partially exposed, which explains the deterioration of the most exposed parts of the body and additional damage to the artifacts. Eventually, around 3,800 years ago, snow and ice finally sealed off the gully until the discovery of the mummified remains in 1991.”
(Ötzi was a recurring interest of my old @sben_links account on Twitter, the predecessor to this microblog. If I had completed my long walk in 2017, I would have passed through the next valley east from where he was found, and would have certainly stopped by his museum when the trail passed through Bolzano.)
“[A]dding soft tissue pads into the models substantially reduced the overall stress and strain on the pedal bones across all five species, similar to the cushioning pads of today’s elephants and rhinoceroses.”
“[Betelgeuse’s] trademark pulsation has also stopped—hopefully temporarily—perhaps because the interior convection cells ‘are sloshing around like an imbalanced washing machine tub’ as the photosphere begins the slow process of rebuilding itself.”
“That left the much rarer Type Ia supernova as the strongest candidate, events that generally occur once or twice each century in a given galaxy. These supernovas are the source of most of the iron in the universe, and such an event is the best match for the Hypatia stone’s unusual chemical makeup.”
“Sometimes the birds would lose a tool, leaving it out of reach inside the cage. In that case, they’d reach for another tool but wouldn’t use it to retrieve the food—instead, they’d retrieve the first tool, then use that to get the food. One individual went three layers deep into this sort of recursion.”
“The 21st-dynasty priests made extensive repairs to Amenhotep I’s mummy. For instance, they reattached the severed head with a resin-treated linen band, reattached limbs and fingers, tightened loose bandages, and placed two new amulets into the mummy.”
“[T]he Iron Age sample also had a high abundance of two species of fungi: Penicillium roqueforti — commonly used in the fermentation of cheese — and Saccharomyces cerevisiae, used for fermenting bread and alcoholic beverages like beer, mead, and wine.”
“Dupree and her colleagues suggested that as the star expanded in one of its usual cycles, a portion of the surface accelerated much more rapidly, thanks to a convection cell that had traveled from the interior of the star to its surface. Those two events combined pushed out sufficient material far enough from the star that it cooled down, forming stardust. That dust could account for the dimming.”
“This latest detection is a neutrino that began its journey in a faraway, as yet-unnamed-galaxy in the constellation Delphinus, born from the death throes of a shredded star.”
“The reverberation time lasted about 0.6 seconds inside [Stonehenge’s] circle for mid-frequency sounds—ideal for amplifying human speech, or the sounds of musical instruments like drums.”
“Cattle with the painted eyes on their rumps were significantly more likely to survive than those cattle that had crosses painted on their butts and those that weren’t painted at all.”