It’s not enough. Not even close.
Read More
'It just sends chills up and down my spine...'
Waves of wind-blown desert sand follow a sinuous course resembling the stripes of a zebra or marine fish. In the lattice-shaped shells of microscopic sea creatures we see the same angles and intersections as in the walls of bubbles in a foam. The forks of lightning reflect the branches of a river or a tree.
The natural world seems conceived by universal patterns, and some forms seem more common than others. That's what explains Philip Ball in his book The Self-made Tapestry.
Shapes and patterns
Nature commonly weaves its tapestry through self-organization, without using a master plan or blueprint, but through simple and local interactions between its components, whether grains of sand, diffusing molecules or living cells, which give rise to spontaneous patterns.
Many of these patterns are universal: spirals, spots and stripes, branches, honeycombs.
In some ways, Ball's book is an offshoot of a classic: About growth and the shape, of D'Arcy Thompson:
On Growth and Form, the greatest prose work of 20th-century science, highlights the role of physics and mechanics in determining the shape and structure of organisms. Thompson reveals himself as a great scientist sensitive to the fascination and beauty of the natural world with a style that has led the specialized press to describe his work as "as good literature as it is science." a discourse on science as if it were a question of humanity.
Adrian Bejan, professor of Mechanical Engineering at Duke University, has another book simulating: Shape and Structure, from Engineering to Nature.
In it he only addresses three natural forms: the aborescent networks (lungs, river basins, etc.), the circular section (of blood vessels) and the watermelon cut-shaped section of rivers.
Perhaps the most curious recent book on this subject is that of Jorge Wagensberg: The rebellion of the forms:
Around us, an enormous number of objects seem to share a very small number of shapes: although it did not have to be this way, nature exhibits rhythm and harmony. Furthermore, although it did not have to be that way, nature seems intelligible. This essay vibrates with the ambition to address the perplexity that these verifications can raise. Why are certain shapes (spheres, hexagons, spirals, helices, parabolas, cones, waves, catenaries, and fractals) especially common? Why precisely these and not others? How do they emerge? How do they persevere?
According to Wagensberg, each of these very frequent shapes usually appears to perform a main function: the sphere protects, the hexagon paves, the spiral packs, the helix grips, the tip penetrates, the wave displaces, the parabola emits and receives, the catenary Hold on and the fractals colonize.
An almost unknown author, in fact, tried to write a novel dedicated to each of these forms. You can learn more about him in the following video:
–
The news
Nature is full of patterns: the most common ways to compose everything
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.
The largest known spider is the giant goliath tarantula or birdhouse (Theraphosa blondi). It hunts by laying ambushes and its legs have a wingspan of up to 28 centimeters.
It can weigh more than 100 grams, with the maximum recorded weight being 155 grams corresponding to a female in captivity.
Theraphosa blondi
This spider lives mainly in the coastal jungles of Suriname, Guyana and French Guiana and, despite its name, they feed mainly on insects and frogs.
Its poison is far from deadly., as is popularly believed; Their chelicerae produce a deep wound and the pain can last for 48 hours at most, as well as nausea and sweating.
Although spiders are covered in elongated villi called trichobothria, they also have an exoskeleton. When they grow and outgrow their exoskeleton, they shed it in a process called "molting."
Some hunting peoples, such as the Yanomami, they use them as food. The Yanomamiös or Yanomamis are an indigenous American ethnic group divided into three large groups: Sanumá, Yanomam and Yanam.
–
The news
The largest spider in the world has a wingspan of up to 28 centimeters
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.
Children are born with behavioral patterns that come as standard, certain skills that are encoded in their genes. However, these latent skills, if not activated at an early age, remain permanently deactivated. In that sense, the child is born wild, and if adequate education and social context, the boy is trapped in an aberrant wild state.
In other words, the child is not an adult, and should be treated like a child. If we do the opposite, we may be incurring a adultification bias.
Adultification and its adult antithesis
A good book on the topic of adultification is The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need from Grownups, of Erika Christakis. She uses adultification as the inability to see the world from a child's perspective.
Paradoxically, we are also treating children as adults in some matters, as helpless in others, and, on top of that, demanding that women look more like children.
This study talks about this by examining the “adultification” of girls and the “youthfulness” of women in magazines, in which girls “dress up” to look like women and women “dress down” to look like girls. .
The analysis included a total of 540 advertising and editorial images from American women's, men's, and teen magazines. The results show that adultification prevails more than youth, that youth prevails equally in magazines for men and women, that girls who are adulted are more likely to dress provocatively and exhibit sexy facial expressions, and that advertising and editorial images are equally likely to appear adultified and youthful.
–
The news
Adultification: the bias of treating children in an increasingly adult way
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.
But you can learn to be.