Mosquito Coffee ... :)

An amazing portrait of the deadliest animal on planet earth, the mosquito, carriers of some of the deadliest diseases known to man & beast, has kept the secret of their success for finding prey for eons, until now. 

Geneticists have found a scent-sniffer protein molecule in mosquito antennae that — if somehow jammed — might leave a bloodsucker confused about whether we’re human enough to bite.

Insects evolved odor detection separately from vertebrates, and the six-legged version is “very complex,” DeGennaro says. Mosquitoes rely on three families of odor-sniffing proteins that have overlapping abilities to identify groups of airborne chemical compounds. Proteins called ionotropic receptors, which include IR8a, target acids among other compounds. As a mosquito hunts, the floating chemical cues get combined with other information such as atmospheric heat, moisture and the sight of something biteable. DeGennaro calls carbon dioxide “mosquito coffee,” revving the insects up to get to work seeking a meal. 

As an aside, yours truly, unlike his beloved wife, exudes a succulent scent, able to draw in expectant mother mosquitoes in ways that truly boggle the mind. :)

20 years ago ...

20 years ago, yours truly saw The Matrix with his son. Film has never been the same since.

Next, three men in sunglasses show up and scold the police for going in before they got there. “I think we can handle one little girl,” the officer says. “I sent in two units, they’re bringing her down now.” “No, Lieutenant,” the agent says. “Your men are already dead.” Interesting, but whatever. We then see the woman, whom we’ll later learn is named Trinity, as she’s about to be cuffed. Quickly she hits the cop with a few martial arts moves, jumps in the air, the shot freezes and the camera pans 180 degrees around her as she remains frozen in the air.

The Matrix Digital Rain ... Where does the code come from?

"The Wachowskis didn't feel like the design was old-fashioned and traditional enough. They wanted something that was more Japanese, more manga," Whiteley says. "They asked me if I'd like to have a go working at the code, mainly because my wife is Japanese and she could help me work out the characters and give me insight into which characters were good and which weren't."

So Whiteley went home and began browsing through the "stacks of Japanese cookbooks" owned by his wife, looking for inspiration. One recipe book in particular caught his eye and the recipes therein served as the basis for what would eventually become the film's iconic falling code.

One cannot make this up. Akin to tech Easter Eggs without a doubt. :)

Cool without question.

In a blink of an eye

In a blink of an eye, the dinos and significant others bought the farm back in the day.

The massive Chicxulub impact – the most cataclysmic event known to have befallen life on Earth – is widely held responsible for the end of the dinosaurs. This single event toppled the prehistoric lizards from the top of the food chain and allowed mammals to inherit the Earth.

Of course, not only dinosaurs were hit by this awesome event, a plethora of animals were wiped out. The fossil find by the KU palaeontologists shows a snapshot of this vibrant ecosystem.

“A tangled mass of freshwater fish, terrestrial vertebrates, trees, branches, logs, marine ammonites and other marine creatures was all packed into this layer by the inland-directed surge,” said DePalma.

“Timing of the incoming ejecta spherules matched the calculated arrival times of seismic waves from the impact, suggesting that the impact could very well have triggered the surge.”

This wasn’t a tsunami that arrived after the impact – but a seismic surge that pushed the waters into chaos.

“A tsunami would have taken at least 17 or more hours to reach the site from the crater, but seismic waves - and a subsequent surge - would have reached it in tens of minutes,” said DePalma.

Where & when the astroid struck earth.

The Chicxulub impact event was an ~100 million megaton blast that devastated the Gulf of Mexico region. 

The blast generated a core of superheated plasma in excess of 10,000 degrees.  Although that thermal pulse would have been relatively short-lived, a handful of minutes, it would have been lethal for nearby life. 

The Chicxulub Impact event produced a shock wave and air blast that radiated across the seas, over coastlines, and deep into the continental interior.  Winds far in excess of 1000 kilometers per hour were possible near the impact site, although they decreased with distance from the impact site.  The pressure pulse and winds would have scoured soils and shredded vegetation and any animals living in nearby ecosystems.  An initial estimate of the area damaged by an air blast was a radius 1500 kilometers.  There are several factors that can affect this estimate, so the uncertainty might be better reflected in a range of radii from ~900 to ~1800 km.  The travel times are quite short, so this effect would have occurred in advance of any falling debris ejected from the Chicxulub crater.  

Intense without question.

Epic Moves :)

Epic ninja moves, worthy of Bruce Lee at his best, is the method of defense employed by Kangaroo Rats vs Diamondback Rattlers.

The wily predator rears back and lunges at its prey — a lightning-fast attack that for a number of other living creatures would probably mean certain death. But in less than a second, the snake is on the ground with nothing but dust in its jaws and the kangaroo rat is bounding away to freedom.

The rat’s harrowing escape, however, isn’t just luck, according to a pair of papers published this week by a team of researchers from San Diego State University, University of California at Riverside and University of California at Davis. The desert-dwelling critters commonly found in western North America have a rather impressive arsenal of evasive maneuvers, including, much to the shock of scientists, the ability to deliver punishing midair “ninja-style” kicks in a fraction of a second, according to a Wednesday news release.

Epic moves indeed. :)

What's Real, What's Not ...

Finding out what's real news is hard enough, finding out real news generated by humans, even tougher until now if GLTR proves to be a viable solution to a problem becoming ever more serious as we speak.

To whit:

As a first example, we investigate a now famous generated text, the unicorn sample from an unreleased GPT-2 model developed by OpenAI. The first sentence is the prompt given to the model, and the rest of the text is entirely generated. The text looks very realistic and it is very hard to detect from reading it whether it was written by an algorithm or a human.

We can see that there is not a single purple word and only a few red words throughout the text. Most words are green or yellow, which is a strong indicator that this is a generated text.

See what I mean?

If nothing else ...

If nothing else, this video rocks.

SpaceX recently updated the Falcon 9 page of its website with a new video showcasing some of the rocket's recent launches and landings. On the video's YouTube page, there's an option for 4K video, and it is spectacular.

Block 5 rocket launch marks the end of the beginning for SpaceX
Some highlights of the video include close-ups of the Falcon 9 engines re-lighting to prepare for landing and deployment of the landing legs themselves.

We've seen a lot of these views before, but we've never seen them with this amount of clarity. Anyway, stop wasting your time reading this article and just watch the video.

Any questions?

The First Circle

This clip is not about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's, The First Circle but rather the first circle(s) seen by man, first the Sun, then the Moon and lastly by rain drops falling into water. Enjoy.

FUBAR inc.

A week ago, BRT stated that the actions of the MIC is bankrupting the country with endless wars and untold waste at unimaginable scale. Factor in ineptness and the inability to manage money at any  reasonable level whatsoever describes the defense department black hole where, beyond its event horizon, nobody ever sees just how much of a FUBAR the Pentagon truly is.

Simulation of gravitational lensing by a black hole,
which distorts the image of a galaxy in the background.

Now retired, Andy sometimes visits his neighborhood library, which uses RFID smart labels, or radio frequency identification, allowing it to know where all its books are at all times.

Meanwhile, the Air Force, which has a $156 billion annual budget, still doesn’t always use serial numbers. It has no idea how much of almost anything it has at any given time. Nuclear weapons are the exception, and it started electronically tagging those only after two extraordinary mistakes, in 2006 and 2007. In the first, the Air Force accidentally loaded six nuclear weapons in a B-52 and flew them across the country, unbeknownst to the crew. In the other, the services sent nuclear nose cones by mistake to Taiwan, which had asked for helicopter batteries.

“What kind of an organization,” Andy asks, “doesn’t keep track of $20 billion in inventory?”

It gets better.

Ahead of misappropriation, fraud, theft, overruns, contracting corruption and other abuses that are almost certainly still going on, the Pentagon’s first problem is its books. It’s the world’s largest producer of wrong numbers, an ingenious bureaucratic defense system that hides all the other rats’ nests underneath. Meet the Gordian knot of legend, brought to life in modern America.

AT THE TAIL end of last year, the Department of Defense finally completed an audit. At a cost of $400 million, some 1,200 auditors charged into the jungle of military finance, but returned in defeat. They were unable to pass the Pentagon or flunk it. They could only offer no opinion, explaining the military’s empire of hundreds of acronymic accounting silos was too illogical to penetrate.

Sounds like healthcare doesn't it?

Energy's gotta go somewhere, right? :)

Yours truly has always felt that the conjectured singularity in the center of a black hole was not possible given that energy can neither be created or destroyed, only transformed thanks to the 1st law of thermodynamics. With this in mind, scientists are starting to change their view of this notion to the possibility black holes are, in fact, worm holes, supporting the concept that everything is entangled, thus giving rise to reality, something truly astounding without question.

Loop quantum gravity is a difficult mathematical theory that has resisted the making of testable predictions inside black holes. However, Abhay Ashtekar and Javier Olmedo at Pennsylvania State University and Parampreet Singh at Louisiana State University have applied loop quantum gravity to the center of black holes. They claim that the result is not a singularity.

Their calculation predicts that space-time is curved very strongly near the center of the black hole. The result is that space-time continues into a region in the future that has the structure of a white hole. A white hole is like a black hole in reverse, meaning that unlike a black hole, which pulls matter in, a white hole shoots matter out.

Energy's gotta go somewhere, right? :)

It takes a little sweat ... :)

Something revolutionary is rare, something commonsensical and revolutionary at the same time is even rarer, especially when it comes to monitoring bodily processes noninvasingly, a notion whose time as come as seen by tech developed by the University of Cincinnati.

Making a revolutionary biosensor takes blood, sweat and tears.

And saliva, naturally.

University of Cincinnati professor Jason Heikenfeld examined the potential of these and other biofluids to test human health with tiny, portable sensors for the journal Nature Biotechnology.

Heikenfeld develops wearable technology in his Novel Device Lab in UC's College of Engineering and Applied Science. His lab last year created the world's first continuous-testing device that samples sweat as effectively as blood but in a noninvasive way and over many hours.

With luck, the era of painful finger pricks to draw blood will become a thing of the past. :)