Darwin's Dilemma

Mostly demonstrable anecdotes regarding evolution, the fossil record, and things from religious crackpots that irritate me

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Video Clip SS249652 (Soap Bubble Film Colors)

The movement in the thin film of this soap bubble is due to the interaction between gravity and buoyancy in the liquid. 

The colors are produced by the interference of light waves reflected from the upper and lower surfaces of the film. As the thickness of the film is of a similar magnitude to the wavelength of visible light (dozens to hundreds of nanometers), the interference patterns appear as bands of color, related to the thickness of the film.

View More Fluid Dynamics Videos 

Thicker walls cause interference at longer (redder) wavelengths, so appear bluer and greener. As the film thins through evaporation or other processes, the reflected light cancels out yellow then green then blue light, appearing blue, magenta and golden yellow, before becoming too thin to support itself, and popping.

Research into film behavior can lead to increased understanding of other events involving fluid dynamics, for instance the movements of cloud bands in the atmosphere of Jupiter.

© David Parker / Science Source

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Survival: the first 3.8 billion years

Lisa Feldman Barrett ponders Joseph LeDoux’s study on how conscious brains evolved.

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Challenges in evidencing the earliest traces of life

Abiotic processes can mimic or alter the biogenic traces of early life but advances in micro- and nanoscale analyses provide evidence that—with geological contextualization—improves our ability to address this issue.

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A flock of lawn flamingos can pick a T-rex clean in under 90 seconds

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nature is brutal

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Fight or flight, take your choice.

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I’d say part heteromorph ammonite too.

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Black-hole meal, banana-killer and hottest July ever

The week in science: 16–22 August 2019.

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Trump makes changes to Endangered Species Act — critics say changes will drive more creatures to extinction

Conservation groups claim the changes ignore the impacts from climate change.

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Education: How to win at evolution

Stuart West and helpers compare the cut and thrust of three games that explore life's greatest competition.

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Good leaders don’t try to be the smartest person in the room.

It's said there are two rules that should be accepted working under a boss. The rule no.

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How much Medicare Part B (medical insurance) costs, including Income Related Monthly Adjustment Amount (IRMAA) and late enrollment penalty.

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Yeast cells handle stress by reprogramming their metabolism

Taking up lysine enables yeast cells to handle oxidative stress.

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Time to face decisions

Civil liberty groups are raising the alarm over the ubiquitous use of automated facial recognition. As a society, we need to decide on the acceptable use of this technology and how to build in safeguards to protect human rights.

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How Georgia Will Use ‘Moral Turpitude’ to Strip Black People of Their Votes in 2020

The laws date to Reconstruction and are vague enough that officials can decide ‘moral turpitude’ means whatever they want it mean. Guess who bears the brunt of that down South?

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See also:

Georgia's strictest possible reading of the law to stop felons from voting

The vague measure dates back to the Civil War and bars anyone from casting a ballot who has been convicted of a "felony involving moral turp

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Developing a brain atlas through deep learning

High-throughput brain image registration methods that are independent of any pre-processing steps, and are robust under mild image transformations, could accelerate the study of region-specific changes in brain development. A deep learning-based method is therefore developed for automated registration through segmenting brain regions of interest with minimal human supervision.

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AI empowers conservation biology

Faced with mountains of image and audio data, researchers are turning to artificial intelligence to answer pressing ecological questions.

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Hacking conservation: how a tech start-up aims to save biodiversity

Standard efforts have failed to slow the pace of extinctions, so Conservation X Labs is trying a fresh approach.

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Plant extinction 'bad news for all species'

Almost 600 plant species have been lost from the wild in the last 250 years, according to a study.