Chinese Jurassic Park when?

Saw the title, was about to waste at least half an hour giving this my “quote most the article and lose my mind commentating on it” treatment, but it’s actually pretty reasonably written. Touché, Global News.

I would still have liked to see them go into more detail on what the term “sugar” means chemically, though. To ensure readers aren’t confusing it for straight table sugar, AKA sucrose. That’s always a pitfall when terms have both a common language or layperson meaning and a more rigorous scientific meaning.

OK, time to read another mainstream science article with a vague unscientific term like “strongest” in the title. Maybe it’s just the title that’s bad and the article will clear it up?

Now the snails have upped their tough-guy street cred

Oh jeez…

snails’ teeth are made of the strongest natural material out there

You want to define what strongest means in this context up front? You know, like scientists tend to do for their terms?

No?

Spider silk, often compared to kevlar, has wowed with its tough yet flexible powers.

Spider silk is not a superhero. It doesn’t have “powers.” You probably meant properties but that doesn’t sound as cool does it?

And “compared to” kevlar in what ways? You can compare tons of things but not all comparisons are helpful.

But when tested, the tooth material was, on average, about five times stronger than most spider silk, reports BBC News.

What tests did they do that it was five times stronger in? They gave it a math test and measured its emotional resolve?

“Most spider silk” which ones? Did the paper not say?

Jesus fucking Christ.

This makes it the strongest natural material on Earth.

Can you motivate this conclusion at least a little? Because from what I’ve read so far I don’t have enough information to believe you or call bullshit.

Tests in the lab revealed that it can withstand pressure that would turn carbon into diamond.

Gee whiz! Sure would have been nice to have some numbers and units with that because most people don’t know how much pressure it takes to turn carbon into diamond.

Also, you can’t turn carbon “into” diamond because diamond is a form of carbon. It’d be like me saying I turned a pidgeon into a bird. Did you mean graphite into diamond maybe?

Thats’s comparable to a single strand of spaghetti holding up about 3,300 one-pound bags of sugar

Yeah but how many one-pound bags of feathers could the spaghetti hold up?

Also, didn’t know the cross sectional area of spaghetti was so standardised it can replace actual measurements.

This is a comparison you’d read in the Pokédex or something.

Also you were talking about pressure a second ago but now you’re talking about tension? Those aren’t the same for a given material.

And there are also two rare, natural materials that can withstand more stress than diamond

Now you’re talking about stress???

wurtzite boron nitrate—has a diamond-like arrangement at the atomic level.

[…]

lonsdaleite—is all carbon but has a hexagonal structure. (Diamond’s cubic.)

So you think we’re stupid enough to need spaghetti as a unit but we’re supposed to just know what arrangement diamond has at the atomic level?

Why is this article so inconsistent with the background knowledge it assumes we have?

Hard and strong-yet-flexible materials offer attractive properties for engineers looking to build the next generation of materials

Ah yes, they need materials to build… materials.

I kind of get what they’re saying but it’s worded so awkwardly and doesn’t inspire confidence in the article.

the terminology in this story could cause confusion for some readers. There are many different scientific terms used to describe an object’s capacity to resist bending or breaking apart, each of which has subtle differences. In this article, we use the terms toughness and strength to refer to the object’s tensile strength—the capacity of an object to resist pulling apart. This differs from compressive strength, which describes the amount of squeezing an object could withstand. The above discussion of wurtzite boron nitrate refers to not to tensile strength but the hardness of the material, which is its capacity to resist scratching or cutting.

Love his they went to the effort of saying that but didn’t see fit to actually rework the article.

It’s science “journalists” like these that help perpetuate science denialism among the public by making science eem like just a bunch of morons screwing around and drawing whatever conclusion they feel like, instead of the rigorous, disciplined process it actually is.

Funny enough, that’s a leading theory of why attraction to and the desire to roll around in catnip by felines was selected for.

People who say driving is freedom have never lived within walking distance of the amenities they need. You think driving to Costco/Walmart is convenient? I’ve left the house 5 minutes before the grocery store closes. When I want to make a recipe, I don’t check the fridge for what I have until literally right before I need to start making it because forgetting something adds at most 15 minutes to the prep time. I’ve never had to haul ten grocery bags from my car because I never need to buy that much at one time and then watch half of it go bad in the fridge. I can go get snacks when I’m high as a kite on weed without worrying about killing someone on the road.

This would be the ideal end TBH. No warning, no dread, no pain, no suffering, just one instant you’re biology and the next instant you’re physics.

The statistical number-crunching showed that those who drank two to three cups of coffee a day were the least likely to develop mental health problems, compared to people who didn’t drink coffee at all or who drank more than three cups.

How much is a cup? Is it the cooking unit equivalent to 250ml or is it a colloquial “cup” that could be anything from the size of a thimble to the size of your head?

If you’re going to report on a study about “how much is optimal” can you at least be clear on the units?

Now make the fly VM run DOOM

Virgin electric BYD

Chad electric CRRC

My policy with alien life is “I’ll believe it when it’s proven beyond reasonable doubt.” All this is interesting but I don’t think most pepople are rushing to the conclusion that alien life exist just because of this.

“What’s my purpose?”

“You seal bowels shut”

“Oh my god”

Their legacy lasted all these billions of years only to be destroyed by nosy humans. I get the scientific benefit of discovering things like this and support the research efforts in general, but the very act of studying something ancient like this irrecoverably alters it, and that still makes an irrational part of me really sad.

If science journalists can stop dumbing down the titles to the point of being misleading that’d be great.

A study found that the sea anemone, a member of the Cnidarian phylum, uses bilaterian-like techniques to form its body.

This suggests that these techniques likely evolved before these two phyla separated evolutionarily some 600 to 700 million years ago, though it can’t be ruled out that these techniques evolved independently.

Ok, so say that in the title. A blueprint implies instructions for making a human, which is not what they found.

So it’s surprising that this species in the phylum Cnidarians (along with jellyfish, corals, and other sea creatures) contains an ancient blueprint for bilaterians, of which Homo sapiens are a card-carrying member.

Again, this is not a “blueprint.” Just say they use the same mechanism as us to accomplish a similar task, it’s surprising enough on its own without needing to reach for a comparison to a human construct.

How about “Cnidarians like sea anemones have been found to use the same molecular mechanisms as bilaterians like mammals”

Speak for your own instance.

Reject shingles embrace green roof

This assumes a very narrow definition of “simulation” based on our current computational theories and technology. Nothing about the simulated universe theory says the thing being used to simulate us has to be anything resembling a game engine or virtual machine like we have today, or even something that runs on anything we would recognize as a computer. In the same way a peasant from the middle ages would not even be able to fathom a virtual machine from today due to missing entire categories of context and background knowledge, us thinking we can extrapolate our technology and simulation techniques to beings that would be literal gods to us and their technology is extremely presumptuous and vastly overestimates what we know.

You deserve it by grossly understating what Nazis deserve. /s

Wonder how many more dumbass men will give their partners STIs when this hits the market. There are so many men who see male contraceptive as the key to being able to “raw dog” it, and that’s literally the only reason they care about its development.

“It’s okay babe, we’re both taking birth control, no need for a condom.”

The only reason we think this is so we can justify doing horrific things to animals. Most of these theories, at least in the West, originated from the Christian doctrine that humans are created in God’s image and animals are just mindless NPCs.

There are more than 15,000 cattle and hog feeding operations in the United States. These operations rear 70% of the country’s cattle and 98% of its hogs.

Is this the new sanitized corporate term for factory farm? I doubt they’re just feeding the animals and letting them go afterward.