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sciencehabit writes:
Few scientists have ever seen the rare tufted ground squirrel (Rheithrosciurus macrotis), which hides in the hilly forests of Borneo, but it is an odd beast. It’s twice the size of most tree squirrels, and it reputedly has a taste for blood. Now, motion-controlled cameras have revealed another curious fact. The 35-centimeter-long rodent has the bushiest tail of any mammal compared with its body size.
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sciencehabit writes:
Millions of tons. That’s how much plastic should be floating in the world’s oceans, given our ubiquitous use of the stuff. But a new study finds that 99% of this plastic is missing. One disturbing possibility: Fish are eating it. If that’s the case, “there is potential for this plastic to enter the global ocean food web,” says Carlos Duarte, an oceanographer at the University of Western Australia, Crawley. “And we are part of this food web.”
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sciencehabit writes:
Emperor penguin populations could plummet 19% by the end of the century, thanks—not surprisingly—to climate change, according to a new study. Emperor penguins breed and raise their chicks on Antarctica’s fringe of sea ice, and a constant amount of the frozen ocean water is vital to their survival. Too little sea ice, which harbors the penguin’s diet of squid, fish, and shrimplike critters called krill, means the penguins could go hungry. Too much ice and the birds have to travel farther to reach the ocean—a tough round trip for nonbreeding adults, but particularly for parents feeding their chicks. Climate change can have both direct and indirect impacts on sea ice extent in a given location, by not only warming temperatures and melting the ice, but also by altering wind patterns and wave heights that can push the ice around. The team determined that at least 75% of the emperor penguin colonies are vulnerable to changes in sea ice, they found, with 20% of the colonies heading for extinction by 2100.
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sciencehabit writes:
Incarceration in the United States is frequently described as an epidemic, with per capita rates nearly quadrupling in the past 30 years. Now a new study suggests that imprisonment may indeed spread like a disease, with those who have family members or close relations in prison more likely to end up behind bars themselves. The work may also help explain the large discrepancy in incarceration rates between blacks and whites.
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sciencehabit writes:
For the first time, scientists have taught computers to figure out the direction of time in videos, a result that could help researchers better understand our own perception of time. Regardless of any possible applications, “we just thought it was a great problem,” says one of the study's authors. Teaching computers to see the arrow of time combines computer science, physics, and human perception to get at the heart of the question, “How do we understand the visual world?”
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sciencehabit writes:
An elephant’s bladder is more than 3000 times the size of a cat’s, yet the two animals take the same amount of time to urinate. Videos shot of a range of different mammals reveal that, as long as the animals are larger than 3 kilograms, they take approximately 21 seconds to empty their bladders. As an animal’s body size increases, so does the length of its urethra. Because an elephant’s urethra is longer than a cat’s, for example, gravity creates more pressure in the elephant’s urethra, pushing the urine through faster. The rule doesn’t hold for small animals like rats and bats, which take only 0.1 to 2 seconds to urinate. Their urethras are so thin that gravity doesn’t affect the flow of urine. Instead, surface tension pulls the urine through the urethra until it emerges in droplets . The researchers hope that their findings will help engineers build larger systems of pipes and reservoirs that don’t take as long to drain.
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sciencehabit writes:
Scientists excavating an archaeological site in southern Spain have finally gotten the real poop on Neandertals, finding that the Caveman Diet for these quintessential carnivores included substantial helpings of vegetables. Using the oldest published samples of human fecal matter, archaeologists have found the first direct evidence that Neandertals in Europe cooked and ate plants about 50,000 years ago.
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sciencehabit writes:
Astronomers staring across the universe have spotted a startling scene: three supermassive black holes orbiting close to one another, two of them just a few hundred light-years apart. The trio, housed in a pair of colliding galaxies, may help scientists hunting for ripples in spacetime known as gravitational waves.
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sciencehabit writes:
A little quantum mechanics could provide an edge in the classic card game bridge, a team of physicists claims. Bridge is played by four people in teams of two, and the goal of the game is in part to deduce which cards your partner and your opponents hold. Players do this during bridge's pivotal bidding phase, by making terse bids such as "three hearts." The physicists wondered if the quantum world could help players convey more information without breaking bridge's stringent communication rules. This month in Physical Review X, the team presents a thought experiment that gives players a game-changing 2% advantage over their competition. The scheme does not break the current rules of bridge, but it would likely require a lab full of optical equipment.
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sciencehabit writes:
Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, born a thousand years ago in Central Asia, calculated Earth's circumference with astounding accuracy and invented specific gravity, the measure of a substance's density compared to that of water. He rejected creationism, accepted that time has neither a beginning nor an end, and—5 centuries before Copernicus—argued that the sun might be the center of the solar system. Now, an influential U.S. scholar has proposed adding another laurel to that list: inferring the existence of America.
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sciencehabit writes:
More than 6000 years ago, a small child in ancient Mesopotamia went wading in a nearby stream. He or she might have been bathing, playing, or merely cleaning up after answering nature’s call on the stream’s bank, a common practice in the days long before toilets. But the wader was out of luck; lurking in the water were the treacherous larvae of a parasite called Schistosoma. It is hard to say which symptoms the ancient Mesopotamian child suffered because no soft tissue remains on his or her skeleton today. The disease did leave a trace, however. The mature worms in the child’s pelvis laid eggs, and one of them stayed buried for thousands of years. Now, a team of researchers has unearthed the egg in a grave in the Tell Zeidan archaeological site in modern Syria. Before the Tell Zeidan discovery, the oldest confirmed case of schistosomiasis was a 5200-year-old mummy in Egypt. The egg at Tell Zeidan is the first confirmation that the infection existed in Mesopotamia as well.
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sciencehabit writes:
The D-Wave computer, marketed as a groundbreaking quantum machine that runs circles around conventional computers, solves problems no faster than an ordinary rival, a new test shows. Some researchers call the test of the controversial device, described online today in Science, the fairest comparison yet. But D-Wave argues that the computations used in the study were too easy to show what its novel chips can do.
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sciencehabit writes:
Do you like to spend your days basking on the beach or relaxing in a tanning bed? You may think you do it for cosmetic reasons—that natural glow does look good on you—but new research suggests you might have another motive. Mice frequently exposed to ultraviolet light show symptoms of drug use and addiction, suggesting that every time you seek out the sun’s rays, you may just be looking for a high. The research team speculates that the effect evolved as a way to encourage mammals to seek out the sun, which spurs the body’s production of vitamin D. But with tanners possibly becoming addicted to the high—spending too much time in salons and outside—the risk of cancer increases, and the proclivity can become deadly.
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sciencehabit writes:
Lying in wait at the water's edge, four legs on a leaf and four legs feeling the water for vibrations, the Dolomedes triton spider can catch a fish twice its size in an instant. Holding on tight, it injects its aquatic prey with a deadly dose of venom and drags it to dry land, where it spends hours pumping it full of digestive enzymes and slurping up the fish’s liquefied flesh. Fish-eating spiders sound like something out of a nightmare, but until recently, scientists were pretty sure only a few kinds of arachnids could do it. Now, a new survey shows that at least 26 species of spiders know how to fish—and they live on every continent except for Antarctica.
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sciencehabit writes:
There's such a thing as too much talent, at least when it comes to sports teams. Psychologists reached that conclusion by studying World Cup soccer games, where players from top professional clubs compete on national squads alongside others from lesser leagues. Analyzing rankings from the 2010 and 2014 World Cup qualification periods, the researchers found that a team benefits from more elite footballers until they make up about three-quarters of the squad. Go past that, and the team’s ranking starts to decline. Two American sports suggest why. In the National Basketball Association, having more top-scoring players helps only until they make up about 60% of the team, whereas Major League Baseball teams rack up more wins as their proportion of top players goes up. The difference? Because their roles overlap more, soccer and basketball players alike can end up fighting over the ball, competing with each other for the most points.