General science thread

Rat tickling

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78PfGQbL-g0

Study in Water Resources Research.

Quote:

The study is about the biblical miracle of loaves and fishes, in which Jesus apparently fed 5000 people using five loaves and two fish. The authors propose a naturalistic explanation: a seiche or standing wave that sometimes causes deep water to rise. The idea is that waves blowing over a lake sometimes create a standing wave on the surface. In Lake Kinneret, the Sea of Galilee from the Bible, this deep water is low in oxygen - so if it rises to the surface, it can cause fish to asphyxiate en masse.


The authors document two such events in Lake Kinneret in 2012.
They also note that they seem to be quite rare: there hasn't been one since 2012. That means most people may not have been aware of the possibility, especially if they had travelled to listen to a charismatic speaker and lacked local knowledge

Quote: rxwine

Study in Water Resources Research.

I really dislike this business of needing "naturalistic explanation" for Bible miracles and I find it usually leads to something preposterous

Quote: odiousgambit

I really dislike this business of needing "naturalistic explanation" for Bible miracles and I find it usually leads to something preposterous

I'm still waiting for the naturalistic explanation for Jack and the Beanstalk.

I've always wanted to look in an observatory telescope. I know from backyard telescopes, it's different than even a high-resolution photo.

Quote:

The European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) — the world's largest visible- and infrared-light telescope — is currently under development on the Cerro Armazones mountain in Chile's Atacama Desert. The mighty telescope is expected to see its "first light" by 2028, with the goal of observing terrestrial exoplanets and their atmospheres, as well as measuring the expansion of the universe.

I suppose, you can still put your eyeball up next to the lens, but don't know for sure if that's the way this works.

Quote: rxwine

I've always wanted to look in an observatory telescope. I know from backyard telescopes, it's different than even a high-resolution photo.



I suppose, you can still put your eyeball up next to the lens, but don't know for sure if that's the way this works.

I believe most of the new telescopes are now video and probably don't have an optical eye piece.

Birds don’t start flying the way I thought. They do an “explosive” jump. This substitutes for a runway. At least when they’re on the ground. Or when they’re startled. Not sure if small birds like sparrows ever really glide from a perch, but it’s hard to see.

I was just watching a Nova style show and they said something hard for me to comprehend. "There are more stars in the sky than there are grains of sand on Earth".

I've been complaining about fake stuff I'm seeing now on Facebook*, videos and such imposed on me that I don't ask for. A lot of it purports to be scientific. I wonder if it's the predicted phenomenon arriving already, that it would now be harder and harder to know what is real and what is fake

In all seriousness, I don't know for sure this picture of an extinct Siberian rhinoceros, Elasmotherium, is fake. It purports to show a model created by an artist in Prague. What I suspect is that it is a real model and what is fake is people added in the wrong scale to make it larger than it really is. It is also likely that the horn has been made larger than what is actually on the model. This guy, Al-Ghaili , has made me suspicious with other things he is showing, a consistent pattern. This is disturbing me in more ways than one.

As predicted in the new phenomenon, I'm not *sure* about it being fake. Perhaps this is just artistic interpretation gone awry, or perhaps some experts think it is accurate? The horns of this rhino have evidently not been preserved in the fossil record, not being real bone after all, and at least some paleontologists think they were small horns. The first image is from the Wikipedia page and the second is from Al-Ghaili's facebook post

Note that the extinct rhino [the gray one] is larger than a modern one, but is shown here with a small horn and reasonable scale overall



Note the preposterousness of the horn size and [arguably] overall scale of the facebook image



https://www.facebook.com/ScienceNaturePage/photos/the-siberian-unicorn-these-creatures-were-twice-as-large-as-rhinos-and-lived-alo/1116144409966427/?_rdr

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasmotherium

* I check out facebook for pictures and such posted by relatives.

I'm Still Standing, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah [it's an old guy chant for me]

I'd ask what is the survival of the fittest use for a horn that size. It appears to be so heavy that the rhino would have a hard time lifting its head.