#science!

[kedreeva]

In more good news, the Sir David's long-beaked echidna, made an appearance on an expedition team's trail cams! This species hasn't been documented in over 60 years, and was thought to be extinct. This is also the first time a live specimen has been photographed/recorded, as the species was only identified in 1961 by a single dead specimen.

[achromic-red-dreams-doze-angrily]

So apparently on December 11th NASA tested using lasers to send information from space to Earth and this was the video they used:

The first video to be sent from space to Earth via laser is of an orange tabby cat chasing a laser pointer. His name? Taters.

More information:

[hmskms]

Citation

And this isn't related, but it's a fun article about bats, anyway

Saw this on FB and was amused.

[qwantzfeed]

as a kid this was my favourite fantasy, way better than winning the lottery because the odds against it happening were SO much higher.  if it happened people would be like "damn, that person really beat the odds incredibly well.  not in a good way but still: objectively impressive."

[otherpeoplescreativity]

Alt text description included:

Inspired by Hell's House of Horrors ( @hellenhighwater ), I have acquired this item of furniture from my local thrift store. My artistic and mechanical skills are at minimal die codes regardless of the gaming system. I need to replace some handles and the baseboard inside the hanging garment side.

I am now taking good and bad advice for additional things I could do to weird it up!

Difficulty: no electronics.

Edit to clarify: I did not pay anywhere near that $180 price. That was probably someone's really lofty ambitions back before a potential buyer first noticed how many repairs needed to be made.

[datasoong47]

Sound on!

[m0ose-idiot]

Did you see @bawdiestrhymester doing God's work and quantifying the Captain's bounces?

Hurrah for a fellow data scientist, we hope they don't mind that we couldn't help but graph the important findings 👻❤️

[sephirthoughts]

Vincent’s lingering obsession with Lucrecia is excellent drama, but their story is not a doomed romance.

This is an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think Lucrecia deserves nearly as much pity and excusing of her actions as she gets. This is not character-hate post, it's an analysis of a character I think gets short shrift as a Mother-Mary in a bell jar, and deserves better.

Lucrecia is morally grey. Charcoal grey. I love complex, morally grey characters, particularly when they're women, since usually women are relegated to roles that infantilize and objectify them, particularly in video games, which have historically been a very backward, androcentric medium. I strongly dislike brainless victims, subject to the whims of the male characters, without much agency, and Lucrecia was not such a character.

Lucrecia was an adult with agency and brains. She was a grown ass adult. She was a brilliant scientist. She made decisions with her eyes open, and even sacrificed her unborn child to her work. She is a very interesting character. The fact that she didn't idolize motherhood as the end-all of female existence, and that her obsession with her work was stronger than her desire to be a 'good mother' makes her far more interesting than otherwise. The fact that she regretted it later and wanted him back doesn’t magically make her a good person, or change the choices she made. It demonstrates guilt and remorse, which are part of character development. The bottom line is that she committed atrocities in the name of science, then felt guilty about it later, once she realized how devastating the consequences were to her personally. To say she didn’t know what she was doing or Hojo manipulated or controlled her is to infantilize and disrespect her character. She’s not some sacrificial angel who was a victim of circumstances; she was a willing participant in her own downfall.

Lucrecia is a tragic character, but she's not a romantic lead. Except in Vincent's head. After all was said and done, she had one of those too-late changes of heart that make tragedy so emotionally impactful. She had a human reaction to Vincent's death and felt terribly guilty for her role in all of it, as she should. That doesn't mean she loved him, it means she wasn't a monster. She lost her son, and gradually, Hojo's callous inhumanity and her inability to escape the net she wove with her own hands closed in on her. Did she deserve to never hold her baby son and never see him even once? No. But she caused it, with her own actions. That's tragedy. She was miserable, bereft, and riddled with guilt, so she made a last-ditch effort to make something right...by doing more insane science shit that turned Vincent into a monster. Seeing that she'd only made everything worse, she tried to kill herself, but was unable to, and thus ran off to become a crystal statue in a cave (this is a trope that I dislike, but that's the story, so that's what we've got).

Vincent is a bad judge of the circumstances. Vincent persists in seeing her as a lost love, and someone from whom he was unjustly separated by circumstances. The fact that he is so blinded by his feelings for her that he places her on this pedestal and can't blame her for what she did is excellent characterization, and I love it, but it's because he’s wrong. He loved her. She didn’t love him (I think she was in love with his father, but that's just icing on the tragedy cake, at this point). His lingering attachment, not to the real Lucrecia, but to the idealized version of her he has in his mind, is a very sad reality that adds so much delicious pain to his character. In the end, he is unable to blame her, because he loved his image of her (and Hojo is a way easier target for anger, because he's literally the worst), which speaks far more to his personal bias in the situation than to her actual role in it. She’s not moustache-twirlingly evil like Hojo but she’s not Vincent's star cross'd soul mate tragically torn away by cruel fate. Lucrecia was her own person.

In summation. Their story is not a doomed romance, it's a complicated, messy, ugly tangle of thorns, and one of the best written tragedies in a game that literally bleeds tragedy from every orifice. It's got one-sided love, obsession, mad science, betrayal, jealousy, fetal experimentation, murder, corpse reanimation, and a guy who can't die, and is left to deal with the consequences of everyone else's actions by himself forever. No one is innocent and no one comes out unscathed…strike that. Vincent is innocent and Hojo comes out unscathed. But still. Lucrecia is not a holy mother, she's not a brainless victim, and she's not Vincent's lost love. She's a person he loved, and who didn't reciprocate. Most importantly, she's a person. A whole-ass, complex, morally grey, fully developed person, who made terrible choices, then made even worse choices, and in the end, couldn't escape the fate she wove for herself.

And then wound up encased in crystal so she could be a pretty statue forever cause the game devs just couldn't help themselves I guess.

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

Quotes:

"If you've ever had the chance to try a raw cocoa bean, you will realize that the aroma pretty much doesn't have anything to do with the conventional milk chocolate," Krug says.

That's because chocolate's aroma forms during the fermentation and roasting of the cocoa bean. Krug and her colleagues tried fermenting and roasting more than a hundred other ingredients, including apricot pits*, olive kernels, jackfruit seeds and potato peels, until they finally settled on oats and sunflower seeds.

*Apricot Pits?! I thought they had cyanide in them...

The goal for ChoViva isn't to replace chocolate entirely, says Max Marquart, who runs the business side of Planet A Foods. Instead, he hopes to replace chocolate in applications where it's merely an ingredient in a larger product. He cites candies like M&M's and Snickers bars or even cereal or ice cream with chocolate chunks.

@athelind (and anyone else allergic to chocolate): I hope this becomes a viable and widespread alternative for you.

[grampasoup]

Chicken Science Swednesday: Chicken as a liquid

Many people are unaware that some chickens, when exposed to direct sunlight, become puddles:

There is no reason to be alarmed, as this process is 100% reversible. Indeed, most chickens will return to their solid form within a few minutes of melting, without any external assistance.

Don't worry if you were unaware of this. Even chickens who are not currently puddles are often confused by these encounters:

[prize-pig-collection]

Any creature on earth would eat as much as it could, as often as it could. The pursuit of food, to sustain and grow your body, is one of the most basic instincts there is.

The only thing limiting most animals is:

Need to stay physically able to access more food, and escape predators (i.e. not get too big)

Lack of unlimited food supply

Luckily for you, modern humans have solved these problems. Stay inside on the couch or in bed, and you’ll be safe from any danger. Fire up your food delivery app of choice and whatever you could possibly want to eat can be at your door in minutes.

If anything, you deserve to be an immobile blob that’s constantly eating. If not, you’re rejecting the advantages that millions of years of evolution and civilization have blessed you with. And that just wouldn’t be right 😢

[jokingluna]

[kedreeva]

Crown shyness, also known as "canopy disengagement" is a phenomenon in some forests where the upper canopy of branches from different trees seem to avoid one another. Scientists aren't sure why this happens (and why it only happens sometimes/with only some species).

The two major contending theories are that physical damage (such as when wind blows and branches brush one another) at the tips of fresh growth make it difficult to grow to close the gap, and/or that certain species of trees are sensitive to shade, and will not grow close to the other tree to prevent new growth from being shaded. For the first, trees previously exhibiting crown shyness will close the gaps if damage from wind is artificially prevented. For the second, some species seem to exhibit crown shyness with regards to their same species, but will close the gap with other species.

[achromic-red-dreams-doze-angrily]

contender for funniest quote of all time

[fictionadventurer]

Every so often (ever since I read that book about Catholic scientists) I think about the guy who discovered the cause of Down's Syndrome and get very sad.

Jérôme Lejeune did his research because he loved children with Down's Syndrome! He wanted to help them! Discovering the genetic cause was a huge breakthrough, and helping to develop the prenatal test was intended to give parents a chance to prepare for caring for a child with Down's Syndrome.

And then his test was used to kill children with Down's Syndrome.

He got the highest honor in genetics because of it, and he used his acceptance speech to tell the world's assembled scientists that their use of his test was evil. Which made everyone mad and destroyed his chances of winning a Nobel. But he stood for life. He stood for the disabled. He stood for the children. Even at the cost of his career. Because his work intended to save the children he loved was being used to destroy them and how do you deal with that? It just breaks my heart every time I think about it.