CONSTRUCTION IN PROGRESS

The Alola region - A Lesson in Island Ecology

ommanyte:

As a Zoologist, the Alola region has me very excited. It’s no coincidence that a region based on Hawaii, a remote archipelago, has evidence of adaptive radiation (Oricorio), has variants of mainland species (Alolan forms), and problems with invasive species (Yungoos and Rattata). All of these are inherently connected to the fact that Hawaii and Alola are islands. Before I talk about the above examples, I think I need to do a brief (lol) summary of what is probably my favourite subject, the magical world of Island Ecology.

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(via scientificpokedex)

koryos:

Have you ever thought to yourself, “Man, I wish there was an animal with ears one-third the length of its entire body.”

WELL CONGRATULATIONS, SPOTTED BATS EXIST

But maybe now you’re thinking, “that’s cool and all, but like, isn’t there an animal with like, ears that take up FOUR-FIFTHS of its body? Because that would really make my day…”

Again, CONGRATULATIONS.

That’s the brown long-eared bat, and it is good at hearing.

But you, eternally unsatisfied, mutter under your breath, “I mean cool but what if the animal also had a nose that was-”

STOP. LOOK AT WHAT I AM HOLDING IN MY HAND*.

That’s a sword-nosed bat and he JUST. DOESN’T CARE. ABOUT YOUR ARBITRARY BODY STANDARDS.

(*sadly that is not actually my hand in the photo)

Now, looking at these bats all together, your desire for increasingly unattainable body types satisfied, you may next find yourself pondering this:

“The bat is the only species of mammal with true powered flight, and also the only flying species, ever, to have external ears. How the heck are they able to fly without those ears (and sometimes noses!) presenting a significant problem? Wouldn’t they act like big, awkward parachutes strapped to the nose of a plane?”

Well friend, this is also what many scientists also thought, when examining the species of bats with exceptionally large ears. They figured that the increased drag caused by facial appendages was just a trade-off that the bats had to deal with in order to get better echolocation abilities to seek out their prey. The fact that most big-eared bats were slow-flying ambush predators rather than zippy little jet fighters seemed to confirm this.

However, no one actually tested the theory until 2015, when scientists from Bristol University ordered a bunch of bat heads from various bat labs (yes… actual heads from actual deceased bats), scanned them, 3D printed them, attached them to dummies, and put them in a wind tunnel.

Thaaaaaaat’s science!

To spare you a lot of physics talk, what they found was that big ears and big noseleaves aren’t causing significant drag for flying bats at all. Or rather, they ARE causing drag, but it’s offset by the fact that they also generate LIFT, which cancels out the drag and sometimes even improves the flying capabilities of the bat! Indeed, the lift generated by big ears may even help bats keep their heads up as they fly, which is important because they need to direct their echolocation beam as they move.

So big ears = no problem bucko. Again, bats prove themselves unique compared to every other flying animal.

Here’s the paper for you to peruse:

Vanderelst, D., Peremans, H., Razak, N. A., Verstraelen, E., & Dimitriadis, G. (2015). The aerodynamic cost of head morphology in bats: maybe not as bad as it seems. PloS one, 10(3), e0118545.

One final note on bats with big ears, because it’s cute. While they may pose no problem- and even be helpful- while flying, these big ears can get in the way while the bat is roosting, trying to fit into crevices, socialize, and such. But the bats have a creative solution for this, too. They just curl up their ears. Below are spotted bats and brown long-eared bats, the same two species depicted at the beginning of the post:

HAPPY BAT WEEK!

(via why-animals-do-the-thing)

What makes you an Art Thief

ofchatsandladies:

I’ve been talking to reposters for a while now, asking them to not repost art without permission and explaining why it’s a bad thing and one thing I noticed, it’s that most people are very shocked when people call them art thief.

So here I’m gonna show the 4 most common things I hear from people that post stuff without permission:

IF YOU REPOST ARTWORKS WITHOUT PERMISSION PLEASE READ THIS!

1. “I didn’t steal anything, I found that pic on We Heart It/ Pinterest/ Instagram/ Internet!”
   That’s the first thing everyone says when accused of stealing artworks. Just because you didn’t say “this is mine” doesn’t mean you are not an art thief. If you copied an artwork and reposted without permission you are basically saying you can do whatever you want with that work because you found it somewhere.
   
   CONCLUSION: If you repost artwork without the creator’s permission you are considered an art thief, doesn’t matter where you got the picture from.
   
   —–
   
   
2. “I didn’t know/ couldn’t find the original creator.”
   Excuses, excuses, excuses.
   

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(via jdlaclede)

Anonymous asked: In your opinion what are Superman's political beliefs?

davidmann95:

With most superheroes it’s pretty up in the air. Not just in terms of different interpretations - is Batman Miller’s hulking libertarian force of nature, or a bleeding heart in a tux? - but that the big companies obviously don’t want to anchor someone with the kind of public image of Spider-Man to a political alignment that could alienate part of the audience, leading to inane statements like Wonder Woman not being feminist, or Captain America necessarily being either apolitical or Republican.

Superman, even if it’s not always obvious, is an exception. Dude is liberal as all get-out, and with a few blips aside pretty much always has been, created as he was as a power fantasy for people living in the Great Depression.

Obviously, he’s for one thing always been at least nominally socially liberal (if not always in spirit - go ahead and ask Silver Age Lois Lane about that). All superheroes tend to be unless specified otherwise, for the simple purpose of avoiding a PR disaster - can you imagine him telling some kid to try and pray away the gay? Ain’t happening. And his stance on domestic policy is pretty consistent over the years too, if varying in intensity.

He’s pro-welfare, pro-civil liberties, and certainly pro-immigration. He’s historically not on the side of big business, to the point of his nemesis being the ultimate Ayn Rand arch-capitalist. He’s good with the government in principle by all appearances, he’d clearly just like for it to be a good deal more effective and beneficial to the people.  Even the post-Crisis Superman, set up by Miller (riffing more on his public image in DKR than his actual character up to that point) and Byrne as a true-blue Republican, tended towards the other side of the aisle when things got specific. When that Superman became president in a possible future - which led to this amazing panel of him defending himself against birther allegations, only marginally weirder than the actual current election:

…his stated policies included funding education, supporting green initiatives, furthering nuclear disarmament, and instituting major public works projects. He also specifically denounced recent Presidents (who at the time of publication in 1991 would’ve been Reagan and Bush, and given it was mentioned in-story there had been no real environmental efforts in two decades, it can be assumed that Roger Stern was implying that in the bleak future of Armageddon 2001 there were no Democratic Presidents in the ‘90s) as supporting a culture of “fuck you, got mine” under cover of patriotic rhetoric in order to enrich people at the top, and mentioned his support of FDR’s goals. Also he wore a snazzy suit with the s-shield on it, which is definitely a policy I can get behind. And of course the New 52 Superman made no bones about his political affiliation:

Pro-poor, anti-cop, anti-oligarchy. Morrison, the closest there is to the singular definitive modern Superman writer, even straight-up called him a socialist. He may waver away from his initial ideals under writers who just want to portray him as a generic exemplar of can’t-we-all-just-get-along niceness - mad at bankers, cop-punching Superman’s given away after a last gasp under Pak and Kuder to the ‘classic’ guy with nothing much to say about anything, a position both the comics and the creators have been trying to emphasize as the right and natural state of things - but the roots are too deep to be yanked out. Superman’s a leftie, plain and simple, and that’s good by me.

christophoronomicon:

glitchystardust:

antisanity:

carryonmysociallyawkwardson:

jamesbarns:

i hate when scientists are like ‘this planet cant have aliens on it because there’s no water! the atmosphere is wrong! theres not enough heat to sustain life!’ because dude theyre aliens, nobodys saying they need any of those things to exist

we’re so humanocentric it’s infuriating. just because we can’t live there doesn’t mean nothing can! like, never mind aliens, we do this with our own fucking planet! scientists used to think nothing could possibly live at the bottom of the oceans, because “all life needs sunlight to survive, of course!” yet what did we find when we invented submarines that could go deep enough? the barren wasteland the scientists were expecting? fuck no! the bottom of the sea is teeming with all sorts of weird and wonderful creatures even wackier than anything they ever came up with in star trek! when we discover aliens, we probably won’t even fucking realise it, because they’ll be so different from what we’re used to as ‘life’, we won’t even recognise them as living beings

things are  heating up in the alien fandom

Another thing that bothers me is when scientists stumble upon a huge black hole or something and say shit like “it’s impossible, it shouldn’t exist, it breaks the laws of physics”…Buddy, do you know who made the laws of physics? HUMANS. HUMANS WHO HAVE NEVER EVEN LEFT THE SOLAR SYSTEM. It isn’t “breaking” anything. Maybe instead of saying it’s impossible to exist, you should look at these old laws from a different perspective. Science is an ever-changing field that’s full of discovery, but sometimes scientists are SO STUBBORN! I understand not wanting to have to rethink years of research but COME ON.

The problem with this discussion is that it’s based on false premises, i.e. that scientists are conservative people who view physics laws as religion and anything contradicting them as heresy. That’s a popular view often shown in fiction and in the popular press, and tends to make non-scientists feel good about themselves (”I may not know as much as them, but at least I’m not as close-minded”). It’s also a very inaccurate and insulting view of scientists.

While one can never generalise things across an entire group of people, and there are indeed scientists out there who are somewhat ossified (and in the end of the 19th century, it’s true that the science field in general was rather calcified. The public has just failed to notice scientists have moved on from this point of view), the vast majority are extremely forward-thinking and would like nothing better than being proven wrong in some cases. Science advances as much through its failures as through its successes, and it’s in fact the very basis of the scientific method to be ready to expose oneself to being proven wrong (that’s the meaning of having falsifiable theories: a theory is scientific only if it contains the seeds of its own potential destruction). When a scientist sees something incompatible with their previous knowledge, they don’t exclaim “that’s impossible!” but “that’s curious…”. Cracks in current theories are usually where new knowledge is hidden, so scientists actually actively look for them.

What the general audience mistakes as conservatism is actually a combination of traits that are vital for scientists to be able to do actual scientific work:

• The threshold of proof is very high in science. Humans can easily be misled, our brains are specialists in fooling themselves, anecdote is not data, so don’t expect a scientist to take your tall tale at face value. To be worthy of scientific examination, a phenomenon must be repeatable, independent from the observer, and if possible noticeable in controlled conditions. While it’s true that some discoveries (like some animal species) have started as hearsay, a typical scientist will need more before they go on a wild goose chase for the Yeti;
• Our current scientific theories (with “theory” used in its scientific meaning, which is “a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that is acquired through the scientific method and repeatedly tested and confirmed through observation and experimentation”, i.e. quite the opposite of a hunch or hypothesis) are extremely successful and have large amounts of data backing them up. This is especially true of General Relativity, Quantum Field Theory, and the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. These theories have been repeatedly tested and found correct, sometimes down to 10 figures or more after the decimal, both through observation and experimentation. If you want to claim that one of these theories is wrong, the quality of the evidence you are going to have to give will have to match the quality of the evidence in favour of these theories. And if the only evidence against them is your misguided ideas about how the world should be, whether due to religious belief or plain ignorance, don’t expect scientists to have a lot of patience listening to you;
• While scientists value imagination, they are careful with trying to extrapolate too far from what is already known, and wild speculation is frowned upon, as it’s far too easy to fool oneself into expecting things that won’t happen. Scientific research is like walking in the dark: you make small steps and try to feel your way around. You don’t make long jumps and hope not to hit a wall or fall into a hole. Unless you have good reason, based on previous knowledge (like moving in an area you already know), to know that the direction you’re going is the right one.

So to take again the examples shown by the previous rebloggers, a scientist will never say: “this planet cant have aliens on it because there’s no water! the atmosphere is wrong! theres not enough heat to sustain life!“. At most, they will say: “This planet cannot support life as we know it (i.e. carbon-based water-dependent life)“, and that’s a perfectly correct statement. Could it support other types of life? Who knows? So far, we haven’t observed any other type of life, so it’s impossible to actually answer the question without a fair amount of speculation, and as I wrote, scientists prefer to leave speculation to others.

As for the “it’s impossible, it shouldn’t exist, it breaks the laws of physics“, it’s actually laughable that anyone could think a scientist would ever say that! Maybe in a bad Hollywood movie, but in real life? In real life, cosmologists and particle physicists are actually eager to observe stuff that cannot be explained by their current theories. General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory (and in particular the Standard Model) are extremely successful, but also desperately incomplete (and in the case of the Standard Model, rather inelegant), and actually completely incompatible with each other. Which is a shame, as some of the things we’d like to know depend on having a theory to bridge the two. That’s why scientists are eager to discover something that cannot appropriately be explained by these two theories. Such a crack, as I wrote above, would provide hints as to a better way to describe the universe.

So stop propagating this false image of the scientist as a kind of high priest that thinks they hold the truth in their hands and shout down any kind of alternative as heresy. That’s not how scientists are, that’s not how science works, and it reflects more on your own lack of understanding of science than on any imaginary scientist’s failings.

Thank you last poster

(Source: infinittywar, via mousathe14)