science

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polydnaviriformidae#Life_cycle

Parasitoid wasps serve as hosts for the virus, and Lepidoptera serve as hosts for these wasps. The female wasp injects one or more eggs into its host along with a quantity of virus. The virus and wasp are in a mutualistic symbiotic relationship: expression of viral genes prevents the wasp's host's immune system from killing the wasp's injected egg and causes other physiological alterations that ultimately cause the parasitized host to die. Transmission routes are parental.[2]

Hehehe

There's no simple way to simply copy and paste stuff. if you're interested - check the page.

(A) Detail of skin pattern of a giant pufferfish, which bears resemblance to B. (B) A computational simulation for a simple reaction-diffusion system.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to demonstrate that the organized formation of subretinal drusenoid deposits (SDDs) may be a Turing pattern. Methods: A Java-based computational model of an inferred reaction-diffusion system using paired partial differential equations was used to create topographic images. Reaction kinetics were varied to...

[continues]

In an investigation into mysterious illnesses in dairy cows in Texas, Kansas, and New Mexico, tests on unpasteurized milk and nasal swabs have revealed highly pathogenic avian flu in Kansas and Texas, according to a statement today from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS).

The cow's symptoms included decreased milk production, low appetite, and other symptoms. APHIS said the infections were primarily seen in older dairy cows. The new development comes less than a week after Minnesota veterinary officials detected H5N1 avian flu in baby goats at a farm where the virus had been detected in a backyard poultry flock.

The Texas Department of Agriculture said today that the disease has been working its way through the Texas panhandle, puzzling the agriculture industry. It said the cows had flulike symptoms, including fever and thick and discolored milk.

Sporadic outbreaks continue to be reported in US poultry flocks, along with numerous H5N1 detections in a variety of wild birds across many states. Along with the unidentified illnesses, the farms had also reported dead wild birds on the properties. The virus was found in milk samples from sick cows at two dairy farms in Kansas and Texas and in an oropharyngeal sample from another dairy in Texas.

"Based on findings from Texas, the detections appear to have been introduced by wild birds," APHIS said, adding that initial testing by the National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Ames, Iowa, have found no changes that would make the virus more transmissible in humans.

Hello and welcome! My name is Anton and in this video, we will talk about the once in a lifetime nova that's supposed to happen in 2024 and will be visible with a naked eye

Links:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.13668

https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.10011

https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.13858

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_Coronae_Borealis

T Coronae Borealis (T CrB), is a recurrent nova in the constellation Corona Borealis.[11] It was first discovered in outburst in 1866 by John Birmingham,[12] although it had been observed earlier as a 10th magnitude star.[13] It may have been observed in 1217 and in 1787 as well

On 20 April 2016, the Sky and Telescope website reported a sustained brightening since February 2015 from magnitude 10.5 to about 9.2. A similar event was reported in 1938, followed by another outburst in 1946.[22] By June 2018, the star had dimmed slightly but still remained at an unusually high level of activity. In March or April 2023, it dimmed to magnitude 12.3.[23] A similar dimming occurred in the year before the 1946 outburst, indicating that it will likely erupt between March and September 2024.[24]

In the video, he says that it should be bright enough to see in a city and that light pollution likely won't impact it.

Four light years may seem like an unfathomably long distance, but in comparison to the size of our galaxy, it's practically right next door. In fact, it's close enough that the Alpha Centauri system has nearly the same constellations as we do, just subtly warped due to the relatively small parallax factor.

The only caveat is that they're missing the brightest star in Centaurus, having traded it for an additional bright star in Cassiopeia on the opposite side of the sky. The Sun's stellar magnitude is 0.5 from that distance, that's about as bright as Betelgeuse in Orion.

I don't think we'll ever be so lucky that our closest star system just happens to contain a planet with alien life on it. That said, it's so surreal to think about even just the possibility of a life harboring planet orbiting Proxima Centauri. I'm imagining those creatures looking at the Sun in their night sky and wondering themselves about the existence of neighboring aliens.

(To clarify, Alpha Centauri is actually a triple star system close enough together to look like a single star to the naked eye. Alpha Centauri A and B are both sun-like stars with a roughly similar mass and brightness. Proxima Centauri is the nearest of the three, and it's a red dwarf with confirmed planets.)

In a new study released Wednesday, Kleinberger; Megan McMahon, an undergraduate studying behavioral neuroscience; and collaborators Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas at the University of Glasgow and Jennifer Cunha in Florida used a bare-bones, Balloon Pop-style tablet game to collect data on a group of 20 pet birds’ tactile interactions with their touchscreens.

Last year, the team showed a group of parrots how to video call one another, finding that the birds both overwhelmingly enjoyed the activity and could make the calls themselves, when given the option.

I never thought much about the insides of the gas giants but it's fascinating how the phase transitions are so discrete. I suppose that's to be expected given how phase transitions work. Water to steam is a binary, not a spectrum. But the planets themselves can be put on a spectrum of rocky to gaseous based on how much solid, liquid, and gas comprise them.

Gotta double check.

I'm a little perturbed by the meme phrasing in the title and how quickly I recognized it. But I guess they saw the opportunity and took it, even at the risk of looking unserious, in my view.

Some nice news for once :) I have devised a genius plan to end global warming, engineer a super coral that is photosynthetic and plant it everywhere. As it accumulates and deposits carbonate it will suck CO2 out of the ocean and therefore the atmosphere. We will end up living on gigantic coral structures because the sea level rose, but at least the corals will save us.

So as I understand it most covid rapid tests test for the nucleocapsid protein. But the nucleocapsid protein is generally enveloped by the viral envelope in covid, as I understand it. How then are antibodies able to bind to, and covid rapid tests able to detect, this nucleocapsid protein if it's enveloped by the viral envelope? Would it not be better to test for the spike protein or something else on the viral envelope itself?

I don't understand that much about virology etc. but I was reading about this and now I'm going down a rabbit hole and hoping someone can clear this up for me.

:shocked-pikachu: It turns out it was colonialism and unequal exchange all along.

There were article headlines and NPR shows about this like this 15 years ago.

National Geographic article from a few days ago

2009 Mother Jones article

Photo caption

Researchers at Hebrew University reconstructed the face of a Denisovan based on DNA alone. Almost no fossils of Denisovans have been found.

archive.today • On the Trail of the Denisovans - The New York Times

Neanderthals may have vanished 40,000 years ago, but they are no strangers to us today. Their stocky skeletons dazzle in museums around the world. Their imagined personas star in television ads. When Kevin Bacon noted on Instagram that his morning habits are like those of a Neanderthal, he did not stop to explain that our ancient cousins interbred with modern humans expanding out of Africa.

But there’s no such familiarity with the Denisovans, a group of humans that split from the Neanderthal line and survived for hundreds of thousands of years before going extinct. That’s largely because we have so few of their bones. In a new review paper, anthropologists tally all of the fossils that have been clearly identified as Denisovan since the first discovery in 2010. The entire list consists of half a broken jaw, a finger bone, a skull fragment, three loose teeth and four other chips of bone.