Recommended Links of the Week #367

This week's roundup brings living examples of species evolution, foreigners who like ugly Chinese girls, the life of Nikola Tesla in a comic, and the fastest spaceship in history. More? Of course there's more! The four fathers of modern computing, the man who lives without 90% of his brain, and Gualicho, the new Argentine dino.

Recommended Links of the Week (No. 367) — Girls links

Could you feel worse about being apart from your phone than your family?: "And one day the phone broke. Some of the best tragedies that will be written in the future will begin with those seven words. And who would have thought, a little over thirty years ago, when Motorola launched the first mobile phone, that DynaTAC 8000X weighing 793 grams. Today they are part of our daily lives. So much so that separating from our smartphone can cause anxiety, stress, and emotional instability that would have been inexplicable half a century ago. Is it something normal or is this dependency getting out of hand?" I don't use a smartphone, and my relationship with my family is... cordial, so it doesn't apply to me.

Idiots with laser sabers against fireworks

Living examples of species evolution: "Sometimes evolution can act very quickly. In fact, it always does –but sometimes it can be seen more clearly than God making men out of clay–. An extraordinary case is that of the 'metro dogs', stray dogs in Moscow with extreme intelligence that adapted to live on trains and learned to distinguish stops to go wherever is most convenient at each moment. But the environment is hostile, and only 3% of those born survive to reproduce, so a very strong natural selection imposes genes on these dogs that determine their behaviors. They no longer resemble either domestic or wild dogs. They are very sociable with humans but do not show affection. In other ways, they behave almost like any passenger, even rushing to take a free seat." Even so, there are some humans who don't seem very evolved, huh.

Why do foreigners like ugly Chinese girls?: "In China, going out with or marrying a native can be an experience full of contradictions. On one hand, it's true that pale faces enjoy a kind of racist halo effect by which we are attributed all sorts of economic, cultural, and sexual superpowers. However, that added value is paid quite dearly; first, with the bad blood it generates among heterosexual men, and second, with the supposed risk of ending up with a woman who doesn't fit the aesthetic expectations of Chinese society. And so, whether it sounds strange to us or not, the truth is that men from the West have a reputation for pairing up with women who precisely don't meet the local beauty ideal." What cute ugly Chinese girls they are!

The atomic clocks that circled the world to demonstrate relativity theory: "It was 7:30 AM on October 4, 1971, when physicist Joseph Hafele and astronomer Richard Keating get on a commercial airplane intending to travel around the world accompanied by unusual luggage: two cesium atomic clocks. The idea: to carry out a first experimental evidence to verify Einstein's theory of relativity and time dilation." Experimental science!

A two-thousand-year-old comic in full color: "Today it is believed that most sculptures from the classical period, both round sculptures (statues, to make ourselves understood) and reliefs, were polychromatic, that is, they were covered with paint. And why wouldn't they be? Isn't it logical to think that if the mission of sculptures was to reflect reality, they should reflect not only form but also color? Apparently, the polychromy of statues gradually disappeared due to various factors such as chemical degradation or erosion. Thus, the works so admired by Renaissance artists did not reflect their original appearance, which did not prevent them from being a source of inspiration for new sculptures that, now yes, left the natural color of stone exposed." I like them better in white.

The life of Nikola Tesla in comic: "Night of July 9-10, 1856, Nikola Tesla is born in Smiljan, present-day Croatia. From his earliest childhood, little Nikola will demonstrate great inventiveness. His mother, although illiterate, was capable of reciting extensive poems from memory and had great mechanical skill, being able to improve household appliances. 1859-60. At only six years old, Nikola helped firefighters diagnose a problem with a water pump, discovering that a fold in the hose impeded its proper functioning." Damn you, Edison!

Ghostbusters a cappella

What has been the fastest spaceship in history?: "The calculation of spacecraft speeds is often a source of misunderstanding for the public for two main reasons: reference systems and orbit properties. As a certain Galileo realized a few years ago, speeds depend on the chosen reference system, and in the case of a space probe, three reference systems are usually used. The first is the heliocentric, which measures vectors relative to the Sun. The second is the planetocentric, that is, it measures speeds relative to the destination planet, in this case Jupiter. Finally, we have the geocentric system, which apparently is the most useless of the three for an interplanetary probe until we realize that it is the simplest to calculate using the spacecraft's telemetry and, in fact, it is the one to take into account for communications." I was going to say the Enterprise, but then I saw it was serious.

The four fathers of modern computing - ENIAC, EDVAC, ABC, and LINC: "The human being has a kind of obsession with knowing what or who was the first to achieve something. We study who was the first person to circumnavigate the globe, who was the first to make a transatlantic flight by plane, or who was the first person to make a phone call. We are also interested in knowing what was the first tool or object that appeared with a defined purpose: what was the first mass-produced car, what was the first television sold, or what was the first computer. In the case of the latter, there is a popular belief that ENIAC was the first computer, and that the others were inspired by its design and operation." Some prehistory.

The man who lives without 90% of his brain has dismantled our concept of consciousness: "In 2007, Lancet described the case of a 44-year-old French patient who had gone to the hospital for a simple pain in his leg, later astonishing the doctors who studied his brain scans. And in contrast to all expectations, the images showed that a large part of his skull was invaded by a liquid that had deteriorated his entire brain, leaving intact only a thin region that was no more than 10% of the total." Absolutely incredible! We still don't understand anything about the brain.

Blacksmith vs. Minotaur - BattleBots

They presented 'Gualicho', the Patagonian dinosaur with extraordinary hands: "An unusual new theropod with two-fingered hands, from the Upper Cretaceous of Patagonia, found in 90-million-year-old rocks in Río Negro, was presented by paleontologist Sebastián Apesteguía through a replica exhibited at the Centro Cultural de la Ciencia in Palermo. 'Gualicho', named after the Tehuelche goddess of the wind Watsiltsüm, represented by a whirlwind of earth, was presented in conjunction with the publication of the scientific article in the specialized journal Plos One, whose lead author is Apesteguía." What a great name Gualicho!

From pronoia to awumbuk - 10 (rare) emotions you've probably experienced without knowing it: "Have you ever experienced that incredible sensation that everything is going so well that the stars seem to have aligned in your favor? Have you ever felt a sudden, irresistible impulse to destroy something? These emotions and sensations have a name, although not in our language, because they represent emotional states so complex that it is difficult to frame them within the words we know. However, Tiffany Watt Smith, a psychologist at the Centre for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary University, has researched 154 words in languages from around the world that are used to indicate very specific emotions and sensations that almost all of us have experienced at some time but didn't even know they had a name." I experience torschlusspanik every time I write this section. Ouch.

A new way to observe the microscopic life of corals: "Observing the life of corals at the microscopic level entails several difficulties. First, the sea is an unstable medium, with currents that prevent the device from staying still during observation; second, a certain distance must be maintained so as not to disturb the observed object itself; and third, the need for light sources. Although corals can be observed in the laboratory, seeing them in detail in their own environment is essential to understand how they respond to changes in water acidity and temperature or how they interact with other organisms. That's why the system presented by Andrew Mullen's team this week in Nature Communications has special value." Psychedelic!