Nullary Sources

Peter Howson for The Conversation:

AI companies increasingly want to move their operations into space. Elon Musk's SpaceX has applied to launch over a million AI data centre satellites and ultimately build them on the moon.

Jeff Bezos, Google, OpenAI and others have similar plans. The idea is to harness 24/7 solar energy and, in Bezos's vision at least, to move all polluting industries off-world, re-zoning Earth for humans and nature.

It's an intriguing plan. But once you factor in the whole life cycle, from water and rocket fuel used to launch these satellites into space, to keeping them cool and eventually disposing of old satellites, the environmental case becomes less clear.

Ronald Blum for the AP:

Major League Baseball is restricting iPad usage in dugouts to prevent the tablets from running artificial intelligence to help make strategy decisions, and former reliever Adam Ottavino said the New York Mets' use of technology helped prompt the move.

The tablets have access to video and league-provided data, and also included a custom tab where teams could access other programs. MLB made the custom tabs inaccessible to teams starting Wednesday night, when the second half of the season started.

"In many cases, the custom tab had expanded the use of the dugout iPads beyond their originally intended purpose to include recommendations regarding substitutions, pitch calling, and other in-game decisions traditionally made by players and coaches," MLB executive vice president of baseball operations Morgan Sword wrote in a June 11 memo to general managers, assistant GMs and video coordinators.

Laura Reiley with a news story from Cornell University:

The common rationale for drinking water at meals is that it physically stretches the stomach, triggering fullness so you don't eat too much.

But a new Cornell study found no support for that idea in practice.

Instead, for every additional 100 grams of water participants drank, they ate about 39 more grams of food – roughly 49 more calories. People who frequently switched back and forth between bites of food and sips of water ate even more: each additional switch was tied to about 4.4 more grams of food consumed.

Jack Guy for CNN:

Bronze Age remains once thought to belong to a revered male metalworker are in fact female, new DNA analysis has found, calling into question long-held beliefs about ancient British society.

The 4,000-year-old skeleton, which became known as the Upton Lovell Shaman, was found in a barrow, a special type of burial mound reserved for high-status individuals, researcher Tom Booth, senior research scientist at the Francis Crick Institute in London, told CNN on Thursday.

Gisele Galoustian in a news post from Florida Atlantic University:

In the rainforests of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), scientists have identified a previously unknown species of African monkey – one of the rarest discoveries in modern primatology.

Named Colobus congoensis and known locally as "Likweli," the monkey, which is mainly black with striking orange face patches is only the fifth new monkey species identified in Africa the last 75 years. Hidden within a remote region of the Congo Basin, the species remained undocumented despite decades of scientific exploration in Central Africa.

Sarah Kuta for Smithsonian Magazine:

The Maya were gifted mathematicians, famously using sophisticated calculations to chart the heavens and create various calendars. Yet, the individuals behind these complex numerical feats were unknown to modern researchers—until now.

Archaeologists for the first time deciphered the name of a Maya mathematician and astronomer from the Maya Classic Period: Sak Tahn Waax, which means "White-chested fox," they report in a new paper published in the journal Antiquity.

Sam Jarman for Phys.org:

For over a century, the accepted value for a firefly's brightness has mostly stood, tracing its origins to experiments carried out in 1912. Through rigorous new analysis published in the American Journal of Physics, David Silver of Remiza AI in New York has discovered that this value has likely been vastly overestimated. His results provide a stark reminder of what can happen when widely accepted older measurements are converted into modern standard units.

Pan Pylas for the AP:

Archaeologists revealed Thursday that they have discovered a structure near the prehistoric stone circle of Stonehenge in southern England that may have served as a "prototype" for the 5,000-year-old Neolithic monument.

A team from the British firm Wessex Archaeology said the structure would have consisted of two wooden poles 120 meters (394 feet) apart and aligned to point directly at the rising sun during the summer solstice and the setting sun at the winter solstice.

Researchers said the discovery predated Stonehenge by around 500 years.

Jennifer Sinco Kelleher for the AP:

Martha Lillard had just turned 5 when she was diagnosed with polio and depended on an iron lung to live. She died June 26 in Oklahoma, the last U.S. polio patient who used the machine, her sister said. She was 78.

"They told her she wasn't supposed to live past 20 years old," Lillard's younger sister, Cindy McVey, told The Associated Press on Friday. "She had the enthusiasm and the drive to continue living and make the best of her life."

McVey attributes her sister's death to the effects of long-haul COVID-19. A death certificate lists causes as chronic pulmonary failure and post-polio syndrome, McVey said.

Mindy Weisberger for CNN:

If you happen to be right-handed, you may be able to trace the origins of that trait to a wormlike animal that lived about 550 million years ago and had a tendency to bend to the right.

Spriggina floundersi appeared in oceans during the Ediacaran Period (635 million to 542 million years ago) at the dawn of the first forms of animal life.

Jack Guy for CNN:

A pilot jumped out of the door of a moving plane to his death, leaving the student he was teaching to fly to land the aircraft by herself.

…

The student said Bertazzo told her, "You know what you have to do, carry on," before taking off his headset and seatbelt, opening the door and jumping out of the plane, TN reported.

As part of our continuing coverage of bees, here's Andrew Barron for The Conversation:

In experiments performed at Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China, colleagues and I studied how bumblebees moved their glossa and other mouth parts when sampling different tastes.

To a single bumblebee we offered a tiny droplet of sugar water from a pipette. The bee vigorously extended her glossa to drink the droplet, but even after she finished drinking and the pipette was taken away she kept extending and retracting her glossa into thin air – almost as if smacking her lips.

By stark contrast, when we offered the bee a droplet of dilute salty water she sampled it with her glossa, then backed away shaking her head and wiping her glossa as if in disgust.

Have I really never posted any John Coltrane music here before? Seriously? Damn, what the fuck, me

Michelle Starr for Science Alert:

Paleontologists were stunned when they unearthed about 20 vertebrae from a single megalodon, including one that, at 23 centimeters (9 inches) across, was larger than any megalodon vertebra ever found, before or since.

…

In 1989, while being moved from one storage facility to another, the specimen was severely damaged and was thought lost.

It turned up again after vertebrate paleontologist and curator Bent Erik Kramer Lindow of the Natural History Museum of Denmark noticed a box of jumbled remnants and realized that he was looking at some of the missing fossils.

Transcript of a story that ran on PBS NewsHour last week:

If you have a furry friend, you might have noticed that veterinary care is becoming increasingly expensive. And as prices rise, attention is turning to a major shift in the industry, private equity firms and large corporations buying up veterinary practices across the country.