Clarity In Futurity: My Obsession with Our Future

My Reading Year.

Eclipse Rings l Eclipse Tree l NASA APOD

Researchers have argued that pointy eggs are common to cliff-nesting birds because they roll in a circle and are less likely to tumble off an edge. Or that asymmetric eggs pack together more easily and would allow females with large clutches to incubate their broods efficiently. Or that spherical eggs are stronger and less prone to breaking, or use the least amount of shell for a given volume, which would be useful for birds that can’t get enough calcium in their diet.

“There are a lot of hypotheses, but no conclusive explanation or theory,” says Stoddard, who’s an evolutionary biologist based at Princeton University. “It was a good puzzle.”

To solve it, Stoddard teamed up with L. Mahadevan, a biophysicist at Harvard University who has studied “how leaves ripple, how tendrils coil, and how the brain folds, among other things.” He realized that all eggs could be described according to two simple characteristics—how asymmetric they are, and how elliptical they are. Measure these traits, and you can plot every bird egg on a simple graph. They did that for the eggs of 1,400 bird species, whose measurements Stoddard extracted from almost 50,000 photos. It was the resulting graph that revealed the left-field nature of chicken eggs.

Want to work fewer days from the office? You could be doing the planet a favor.

Fully remote workers could produce less than half the climate-warming emissions of people who spend their days in offices, according to a new study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

10 steps you can take to lower your carbon footprint

In an analysis of various work scenarios, people’s behaviors and sources of emissions, researchers found that switching from working onsite to working from home full-time may reduce a person’s carbon footprint by more than 50 percent. Hybrid schedules where people work remotely for two to four days a week could also cut emissions by 11 to 29 percent, according to the study.

A pair of humpback whales synchronized the release of bubbles to corral and consume sand eels.

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

Sutton Lynch rises most days before the sun, arriving at Atlantic Beach in Amagansett, N.Y., for the early-morning calm. It’s the same beach he’s been going to since he was a child, and where he worked as a lifeguard for years as a teenager. Now 23, he spends his mornings surveying the horizon. When he spots activity on the water’s surface, he sends out his drone.

Mr. Lynch has earned a devoted following on Instagram for his remarkable footage of marine life off the coast of the East End of Long Island. Alongside images and videos of humpbacks, hammerheads, dolphins, bluefish and many other species, he writes captions that range from childhood memories and research on the effects of fishing policy to explanations of animal behavior. Across the board, his work exudes a reverence for the ocean and the creatures that call it home.

Mr. Lynch’s followers often express surprise that this abundance of species exists just out of sight. The truth is, the resurgence is fairly new. And so the photographer is documenting a dramatic turning point in the East End’s environmental and cultural history — a renewal of sea life after decades of depletion.

A large school of striped bass. (The video was taken during the northward spring migration.)

A vast school of menhaden, caught in a feeding frenzy of bluefish, dolphins, sharks and whales.

A hammerhead shark — accompanied by a pilot fish — gliding through the water off the coast of Amagansett, N.Y.

In Sapiens, Professor Yuval Noah Harari explains the reason. It was an evolutionary bargain. The human brain takes up 25% of the body’s energy. Compare that with 8% in other apes, and lesser in other animals.

Unlike today, the primitive Homo Sapiens did not have easy access to high-calorie food. And maintaining such a big brain took a lot of resources and energy. Our ancestors paid for the evolution of a larger brain in two ways — their muscles atrophied and their intestines got shorter.

It was a very heavy toll for the body to spend energy on digesting food, it was a lot more convenient if the food was somehow already broken down or cooked, reducing the amount of energy spent by the body that went into digesting the food.

And the cooked food saved the body vital energy to evolve the larger brain of Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals.

As such, it became difficult to digest more complex food like cellulose.

Look at our friend Mr Gorilla here, munching on raw bamboo while none of us can eat sugarcane.

That’s why we cook because we simply can not digest most food in the raw form.

And that’s because we have big brains :)