Secular Café Archive

[quote=""lpetrich""]That experiment and its results have been much-discussed. I've found: Robert Treat Paine (1933–2016) | Nature 14 Experimental Ecology Revisiting Paine's 1966 Sea Star Removal Experiment, the Most-Cited Empirical Article in the American Naturalist. - PubMed - N...

This is awesome!

Peez

[quote=""lpetrich""]I found some stuff on "oedipal mating" and "oedipal reproduction": Oedipal Mating as a Factor in Sex Allocation in Haplodiploids on JSTOR Survival and Reproductive Strategies in Two-Spotted Spider Mites: Demographic Analysis of Arrhenotokou...

[quote=""lpetrich""]Stephen Jay Gould wrote "Quick Lives and Quirky Changes", collected in "Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes", about an odd lifestyle that gives a clue to the origin of haplodiploidy. Histiostoma murchiei mites parasitize earthworm egg cocoons, an...

Yes, this reminds me of a quote: ...Which brings me to the Hubble Space Telescope's newest images. If it's wonder that you're looking for, and mystery, don't just scan the photographs. Stop and think about them. Try to imagine the scale. The Earth is just a speck of dust on one distant whirling tent...

[quote=""lpetrich""] Note that, strictly speaking, typical flowering plants are not hermaphrodites. The familiar life history stage of a typical flowering plant is a sporophyte , it produces spores rather than gametes. These spores may grow into the gamete-producing stage, the ga...

lpetrich: Some organisms are simultaneous hermaphrodites, having both sexes of reproductive organs. That's very common in flowering plants, gastropods, and earthworms... Mosses and liverworts have different sexes only in their haploid phases... Very cool topic, I love explaining to students how man...

[quote=""Jobar""]Re metals, I was wondering if a living organism could even theoretically 'grow' its own photovoltaic cell, and thus outperform all other photosynthesizing life. I understand that most (all?) of the iron ore bodies on Earth are the result of microorganisms concent...

There must be a woprld out there somewhere, on which shirts like this would be good camouflage:

lpetrich: Origin and evolution of the genetic code: The universal enigma[/url] by Eugene V. Koonin, Artem S. Novozhilov. The genetic code is the translation table for nucleotides to amino acids, thus translating RNA sequences into protein sequences. Nice summary. It is worth emphasizing that the sa...

Copernicus My thinking was in terms of population sizes. That is, there were more large animals in past epocs than there are presently, when the Earth is cooler and less able to supply as much energy to sustain large populations. That is conceivable, but there does not seem to be evidence that it h...

lpetrich: It is not clear why theropods could grow so large. That's much larger than most Cenozoic land predators. Present-day lions, tigers, and grizzly bears have shoulder heights of around a meter or a little more. So they'd look like puddycats and nice doggies compared to T. rex and similar-siz...

MattShizzle: I seem to remember reading the average dinosaur wasn't very big at all. I suspect that this is the case, though I cannot provide any actual estimates (such estimates would depend on relative numbers of individuals which would be hard to guess at, unless we were taking an average by spe...

Whether or not dinosaurs should be considered "reptiles" is a matter of semantics: how do we define a reptile? Certainly the evidence indicates that crocodiles are more closely related to dinosaurs than to lizards and snakes, so if dinosaurs are not considered reptiles then reptiles are po...

Copernicus Maybe that is true about, say, the blue whale, but that is about individual animals. In the OP, I mentioned "average size". In that case, you would have to take into account all of the animals that we have discovered in the fossil record and the size of their populations. My th...

Copernicus My impression is that the average size of animals has declined over time... I lot of people seem to have this impression, but I don't believe that this is the case. We tend to focus on dinosaurs, some of which were certainly bigger than any land animal alive today, but we tend to ignore ...

[quote=""Sey""]I'm skeptical. A sperm whale's mouth doesn't seem suited to grasping and eating individual fish, especially smaller ones.[/quote]To say nothing of biting them off from the head. Their dentition does not seem well-suited to this: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/35/1a...

Interesting to note that they found higher average woo use in those with "higher socioeconomic status" and "Intermountain West or Pacific location".

Peez

[quote=""Rie""]That's quite a silly comment as we don't even know when we started. Maybe it does go in circles? Maybe there is something in synchronicity etc.[/quote]I am not even sure who that is responding to, it does not make a lot of sense to me.

Peez

The protein’s greatest selling point is in its ingredients.

Sunlight. And carbon dioxide.

No, just no.

Peez

[quote=""lpetrich""] The mutation that helped ancient humans survive frostbite probably gave us arthritis - ScienceAlert noting In northern humans, evolution favored shorter bones — but with a painful trade-off | News Center | Stanford Medicine When the researchers analyzed the s...

[quote=""Jobar""]Well, I wouldn't care to bet big bucks that the EM drive is all that it seems to be. However, I do place considerable trust in the skepticism and technical savvy of NASA scientists who have been testing the thing, and say that it apparently *does* work, producing...

Simply put, the EmDrive is a conundrum. Reactionless drives are named as such because they lack the “reaction” defined in Newton’s third law: “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” But this goes against our current fundamental understanding of physics: An action (propulsion of ...