Nullary Sources

Current events, kickin' rad tunes, moving pictures and visual art, '90s nostalgia, the struggle for a fair civilization, Andy Rooney, and whatever else our sick minds can dredge up from the depths of the internet. Your Hosts: Colin Barrett can be found in the grass just outside Pallet Town. CHz ('Ili Butterfield) is a jerk. Twitter: Follow @nullarysources

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Why AI's environmental footprint won't disappear into orbit

Peter Howson for The Conversation:

AI companies increasingly want to move their operations into space. Elon Musk's SpaceX has applied to launch over a million AI data centre satellites and ultimately build them on the moon.

Jeff Bezos, Google, OpenAI and others have similar plans. The idea is to harness 24/7 solar energy and, in Bezos's vision at least, to move all polluting industries off-world, re-zoning Earth for humans and nature.

It's an intriguing plan. But once you factor in the whole life cycle, from water and rocket fuel used to launch these satellites into space, to keeping them cool and eventually disposing of old satellites, the environmental case becomes less clear.

This is a pretty good quick primer on why putting data centers in space is a dumbass idea if you actually know anything about physics

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MLB restricts dugout iPad use to prevent AI help with strategy. Ottavino says Mets were involved

Ronald Blum for the AP:

Major League Baseball is restricting iPad usage in dugouts to prevent the tablets from running artificial intelligence to help make strategy decisions, and former reliever Adam Ottavino said the New York Mets' use of technology helped prompt the move.

The tablets have access to video and league-provided data, and also included a custom tab where teams could access other programs. MLB made the custom tabs inaccessible to teams starting Wednesday night, when the second half of the season started.

"In many cases, the custom tab had expanded the use of the dugout iPads beyond their originally intended purpose to include recommendations regarding substitutions, pitch calling, and other in-game decisions traditionally made by players and coaches," MLB executive vice president of baseball operations Morgan Sword wrote in a June 11 memo to general managers, assistant GMs and video coordinators.

Asking Grok how to get Shohei Ohtani out and following its expert advice to sub in Elon Musk as the pitcher

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Common diet tips about water intake and spicy foods could be dead wrong

Laura Reiley with a news story from Cornell University:

The common rationale for drinking water at meals is that it physically stretches the stomach, triggering fullness so you don't eat too much.

But a new Cornell study found no support for that idea in practice.

Instead, for every additional 100 grams of water participants drank, they ate about 39 more grams of food – roughly 49 more calories. People who frequently switched back and forth between bites of food and sips of water ate even more: each additional switch was tied to about 4.4 more grams of food consumed.

Honestly, that explanation does sound 100% like something some rando made up because they felt full after drinking a lot of water one day

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Bronze Age 'shaman,' previously assumed to be a male metalworker, was actually a woman

Jack Guy for CNN:

Bronze Age remains once thought to belong to a revered male metalworker are in fact female, new DNA analysis has found, calling into question long-held beliefs about ancient British society.

The 4,000-year-old skeleton, which became known as the Upton Lovell Shaman, was found in a barrow, a special type of burial mound reserved for high-status individuals, researcher Tom Booth, senior research scientist at the Francis Crick Institute in London, told CNN on Thursday.

Can't wait to find out about her roommate next

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New Species of African Monkey Discovered in the Congo Rainforest

Gisele Galoustian in a news post from Florida Atlantic University:

In the rainforests of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), scientists have identified a previously unknown species of African monkey – one of the rarest discoveries in modern primatology.

Named Colobus congoensis and known locally as "Likweli," the monkey, which is mainly black with striking orange face patches is only the fifth new monkey species identified in Africa the last 75 years. Hidden within a remote region of the Congo Basin, the species remained undocumented despite decades of scientific exploration in Central Africa.

Trying out some orange makeup

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Meet Sak Tahn Waax, a Maya Math Whiz Who Lived More Than 1,000 Years Ago and Left Behind a 'Really Elegant, Complex' Formula

Sarah Kuta for Smithsonian Magazine:

The Maya were gifted mathematicians, famously using sophisticated calculations to chart the heavens and create various calendars. Yet, the individuals behind these complex numerical feats were unknown to modern researchers—until now.

Archaeologists for the first time deciphered the name of a Maya mathematician and astronomer from the Maya Classic Period: Sak Tahn Waax, which means "White-chested fox," they report in a new paper published in the journal Antiquity.

Can't believe STEM folks had fursonas even way back then

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Here's 17 minutes of keyboardist and legendary synth programmer Eric Persing and winds player Pedro Eustache just jamming out. This edited performance was also released as the album EP-PE One with a few extra tracks edited by Persing. This vid also has both men demoing their instruments for quite a while afterward, which is fun.

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Firefly brightness holds a cautionary tale about accepting older measurements

Sam Jarman for Phys.org:

For over a century, the accepted value for a firefly's brightness has mostly stood, tracing its origins to experiments carried out in 1912. Through rigorous new analysis published in the American Journal of Physics, David Silver of Remiza AI in New York has discovered that this value has likely been vastly overestimated. His results provide a stark reminder of what can happen when widely accepted older measurements are converted into modern standard units.

Maybe fireflies were just juicing back then

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Archaeology team unearths 'prototype' of world-famous Stonehenge monument just a few miles away

Pan Pylas for the AP:

Archaeologists revealed Thursday that they have discovered a structure near the prehistoric stone circle of Stonehenge in southern England that may have served as a "prototype" for the 5,000-year-old Neolithic monument.

A team from the British firm Wessex Archaeology said the structure would have consisted of two wooden poles 120 meters (394 feet) apart and aligned to point directly at the rising sun during the summer solstice and the setting sun at the winter solstice.

Researchers said the discovery predated Stonehenge by around 500 years.

We have to start calling the famous one Stonehenge 2 now

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Martha Lillard, last US polio patient using iron lung, dies at 78 in Oklahoma

Jennifer Sinco Kelleher for the AP:

Martha Lillard had just turned 5 when she was diagnosed with polio and depended on an iron lung to live. She died June 26 in Oklahoma, the last U.S. polio patient who used the machine, her sister said. She was 78.

"They told her she wasn't supposed to live past 20 years old," Lillard's younger sister, Cindy McVey, told The Associated Press on Friday. "She had the enthusiasm and the drive to continue living and make the best of her life."

McVey attributes her sister's death to the effects of long-haul COVID-19. A death certificate lists causes as chronic pulmonary failure and post-polio syndrome, McVey said.

The article doesn't go into it, but the reason we don't use iron lungs now is a combo of polio eradication and the development of less bulky ventilators that work more like a CPAP in that they push air into you

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Fossils reveal the earliest animal with a head was also the oldest known 'righty'

Mindy Weisberger for CNN:

If you happen to be right-handed, you may be able to trace the origins of that trait to a wormlike animal that lived about 550 million years ago and had a tendency to bend to the right.

Spriggina floundersi appeared in oceans during the Ediacaran Period (635 million to 542 million years ago) at the dawn of the first forms of animal life.

Finally some good news about my evolutionary origins

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Flight school pilot jumps to his death midair, leaving student to land plane

Jack Guy for CNN:

A pilot jumped out of the door of a moving plane to his death, leaving the student he was teaching to fly to land the aircraft by herself.

…

The student said Bertazzo told her, "You know what you have to do, carry on," before taking off his headset and seatbelt, opening the door and jumping out of the plane, TN reported.

This would be astoundingly funny as a comedy sketch, but it's astoundingly unfunny to have happened to someone in real life (someone who, thankfully, safely landed the plane)

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Bees 'facial expressions' may be a sign of their inner lives

As part of our continuing coverage of bees, here's Andrew Barron for The Conversation:

In experiments performed at Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China, colleagues and I studied how bumblebees moved their glossa and other mouth parts when sampling different tastes.

To a single bumblebee we offered a tiny droplet of sugar water from a pipette. The bee vigorously extended her glossa to drink the droplet, but even after she finished drinking and the pipette was taken away she kept extending and retracting her glossa into thin air – almost as if smacking her lips.

By stark contrast, when we offered the bee a droplet of dilute salty water she sampled it with her glossa, then backed away shaking her head and wiping her glossa as if in disgust.

BEE FACIAL EXPRESSIONS

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Have I really never posted any John Coltrane music here before? Seriously? Damn, what the fuck, me

Well anyway, rather than posting something intelligible, here's "The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost" off of his 1966 album Meditations, when he was firmly in his free jazz era

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The Largest Megalodon Vertebra Ever Found Was Excavated in The 1970s. Then It Went Missing

Michelle Starr for Science Alert:

Paleontologists were stunned when they unearthed about 20 vertebrae from a single megalodon, including one that, at 23 centimeters (9 inches) across, was larger than any megalodon vertebra ever found, before or since.

…

In 1989, while being moved from one storage facility to another, the specimen was severely damaged and was thought lost.

It turned up again after vertebrate paleontologist and curator Bent Erik Kramer Lindow of the Natural History Museum of Denmark noticed a box of jumbled remnants and realized that he was looking at some of the missing fossils.

Completely normal and everyday occurrence to find a decades-missing shark spine in a box somewhere

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As veterinary costs climb, private equity ownership of clinics draws scrutiny

Transcript of a story that ran on PBS NewsHour last week:

If you have a furry friend, you might have noticed that veterinary care is becoming increasingly expensive. And as prices rise, attention is turning to a major shift in the industry, private equity firms and large corporations buying up veterinary practices across the country.

I've never been a pet owner so I didn't really know anything about this before, but multiple people I know were already aware of this so I guess this isn't a super new thing. Private equity vacuuming up vets feels... somewhat ill-advised to me in this post-Luigi world we live in

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Scientists find yeast in ancient Iceman's guts—and make bread

Daniel Lawler for the AFP:

Yeast has been growing in the guts of a frozen mummy called Oetzi the Iceman for thousands of years, scientists have discovered, telling AFP they used it to make a tasty sourdough bread.

More than 5,300 years ago—before the Egyptian pyramids were built—Oetzi was strolling through the Alps on the border of Austria and Italy when he was killed by an arrow in the back.

He remained frozen in the ice until two German hikers stumbled across his mummified remains in 1991 in the northern Italian region of South Tyrol.

Fucking finally, some non-coward scientists making corpse bread and definitely getting cursed in the process