Possibly untrue science news

Honestly this feels like it might be more of a PR and fundraising pitch than a major development in mammoth de-extinction, but I would be curious to see mouse-sized mammoths if they figured out how to do that…

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But there were also some intriguing findings, although the effect sizes were quite small. There was a slight association between how participants perceived the duck versus rabbit and optimism and emotional stability, for example. Whether a participant first saw the older or the younger woman did seem to correlate with age. And subjects who saw the seal first scored higher on intuition and spontaneity measures.

Schrödinger’s bun.

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Gasp! We might have house elephants, and house hippos? Sign me up!

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Interesting research, but there’s a huge difference in being able to predict a slight seasonal or cyclical variation in earthquake activity and being able to predict any given specific earthquake. My wife (a geophysicist who specializes in this kind of thing) has convinced me that will never be possible.

Teeny tiny earthquakes are happening constantly, and they’re initiated at very small points on a fault miles underground. Even if you could magically accurately predict each one of those that would still be totally useless information without knowing which of them was going to cascade into a larger rupture, and there are a ton of factors and a whole lot of randomness that contribute to that.

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https://gofund.me/d507f778

TLDR: The National STEM Festival is running a gofundme, “because three major sponsors just pulled their funding for this festival because of the current political climate regarding science”. Kari Byron (of Mythbusters) is running the gofundme itself.

(At the video’s suggestion, I’ve been looking at the sponsor page to see who’s recently removed. So far I’ve only spotted https://does.dc.gov/ as no longer on the list)

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Dr. W. Stanley Jevons just called me on the astral miasmic link and wondered if they had seen his 1905 treatise on sunspots… :thinking:

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There’s a Sandwich Bag of Plastic in Your Brain

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/theres-sandwich-bag-plastic-your-brain-2025a100059r?ecd=WNL_trdalrt_pos1_250305_etid7274228&uac=365926BR&impID=7274228

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You know, there was a vague memory of “wasn’t there a now discarded theory about earthquakes and sunspots and possibly aether a hundred years or so ago” stirring at the back of my mind when I read this? But then I realised that I couldn’t be asked to go and look for it.

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Hey - at least my brain will stay fresh!

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Is that why I’m so sleepy all the time?

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Panopticon intensifies.

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The new study compared megalodon fossils with more than 150 living and extinct shark species. It found the megalodon may have had a longer, more slender body resembling that of the modern lemon shark, rather than the great white. It could have ranged between around 54 feet long and 80 feet long, the study suggests.

Which is even longer than previously thought. (For those who just wanted to know the reason already.)

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Longer, but less massive. Great whites are chonkers!

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