Continuing Education

Things I learned.

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Upon discovery that the Boquila trifoliolata is capable of flexible leaf mimicry, the question of the mechanism behind this ability has been

The mimic vine somehow has eyes in its leaves, since it has been shown to change its leaf shape to mimic the leaves of a plastic plant placed nearby.

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Revolution in medicine: A molecule produced by gut bacteria causes atherosclerosis, responsible for millions of deaths

The discovery, made thanks to an experiment involving hundreds of bank employees in Spain, opens the door to new treatments beyond reducing

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Square Theory

The story starts in Crosscord, the crossword Discord server. Over 5,000 users strong, the server has emerged as a central hub for the online

I’d thought about this sometimes in a vague way, but never crystallized the theory the way it’s done here. Nice to have all the work done and just read it and enjoy. I’ll be watching for more squares in the wild from here on out.

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Scientists Break Down Discoveries That Should Have Blown People's Minds More

Doesn't anybody care?!?!

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Thread by @jkeesh on Thread Reader App

@jkeesh: In 1945, six women pulled off a computing miracle. They programmed the world’s first computer—with no manuals, no training. Then, a

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Batteries for electrical vehicles. The first EVs of the modern era use scaled-up batteries designed for consumer electronics. But new types of batteries are about to bring a great leap in improvement – safer and faster charging thanks to the past decade of advances and development.

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The Indian cheesecake secrets found in a 1904 book

The 120-year-old recipes are a far cry from the cheesecakes we are familiar with today.

Cream cheese only came to be an ingredient in cheesecake in the 1920s to 1930s. In fact, cheesecake didn’t always have cheese in it.

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It's in the bag: Mobile containers in human evolution and child development

It's in the bag: mobile containers in human evolution and child development - Volume 2

“So ingrained are [mobile containers] to our present lifeways that their importance in human evolution has been somewhat overlooked. […] Why are mobile containers used universally by humans, and what cognitive processes precipitated their invention?’

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The elements, in haiku

An interactive review of the periodic table -- composed of 119 haiku

Silicon

Locked in rock and sand,/ age upon age awaiting/ the digital dawn.

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Share these poems and add your own on Twitter with hashtag #ChemHaiku.          

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“Be the Data” is a physical and immersive approach to visual analytics designed for teaching abstract statistical analysis concepts to students. In particular, it addresses the problem of exploring alternative projections of high-dimensional data points using interactive dimension reduction techniques

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The clever folds that kept letters secret

Hundreds of years ago, people developed ingenious methods to secure their letters from prying eyes – and they did it with only paper, adhesive and folds.

The lost art of letterlocking – physical encryptation that reveals tampering

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My sister is nonverbal but she knows the words to every song. Now we’ve made an album together | Ian Brennan

Through my sister Jane, who has Down’s syndrome, I learned how to listen not just with my ears but my entire being

By Ian Brennan

Never have I witnessed more unselfconscious bodily expression than decades spent at Friday rec-center DJ nights with [my sister] and her community’s peers. The electricity and abandon overflow, the given soundtrack merely secondary – any tune will do. The group expressiveness puts drug-fuelled ravers in Ibiza or disco-era Studio 54 to shame.

For the past decade I have travelled the world – from Malawi to South Sudan, Romania to Cambodia – with my wife, the photographer and film-maker Marilena Umuhoza Delli, making field recordings and producing albums that provide a platform for original music from under-represented regions and languages. We often work with persecuted or ostracized populations, including those with albinism in Tanzania, elderly women accused of witchcraft in Ghana, and Tuareg rockers Tinariwen (an LP we recorded in the Algerian desert won a Grammy for best world music album).

Not long afterwards [after the album was recorded] my father began to fade and I organised Jane a ride over to see him one last time. The reunion took place just hours before he passed. Immediately after Jane’s visit, the nurse said my father grew solemn and, after a few contemplative moments, began to transition from this life. There is a certain poetry in a daughter – who was sent home to die as an infant (at the doctor’s direction) – being the one who 55 years later helped her father make peace with his own death.

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Slowly does it: chord changes in John Cale's 639-year-long organ piece

Fans gather in a German church to hear the first new sound in John Cale’s composition, Organ/ASLSP, for six years

Hundreds of fans have attended a special kind of musical happening at a church in Germany: a chord change in an organ piece that is supposed to last for an entirety of 639 years.The performance of the Organ/ASLSP (As Slow As Possible) composition began in September 2001 at the St Burchardi church in the eastern town of Halberstadt and is supposed to end in 2640 — if all goes well.

The next chord change is planned for 5 February 2022, the German news agency DPA reported.

When the piece officially started on 5 September 2001, it began without any sound. It was only on 5 February 2003, the day of the first chord change, that the first organ pipe chords could actually be heard inside the church.

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One Queen to Rule Them All: Margrethe II of Denmark

In honor of A World Apart: Anna Ancher and the Skagen Art Colony, we’re researching other delightful, innovative, and interesting Danish women in the arts. Click here to learn more about NMWA’s cur…

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People Share Mindblowing Pairs Of Animals That Look Similar But Are Genetically Incompatible

For a really long time, biologists tried to unwrap the evolutionary history of various animals to figure out how they are related to one another. They have taken a seemingly logical course -- to classify animals according to their morphological characteristics and fossil records. Thus, many similarly looking animals were presumed to have come from the same ancestors.

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The Evolution of Reality

What evolution has given us is the ability to attend to what is meaningful to us.

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The 26-foot-long “unicorn of the sea” is a lesson in the wonders of collaboration

At least you, unlike pyrosomes, don't have to share a gooey wardrobe with your coworkers.

#pyrosomes Amazing structures that look look a giant sea worm, but are actually a colony of tiny cooperating zooids