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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:

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Nature is full of patterns: the most common ways to compose everything

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Xataka Science

by
Sergio Parra

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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.

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The largest spider in the world has a wingspan of up to 28 centimeters

was originally published in

Xataka Science

by
Sergio Parra

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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.

In Xataka Science

Pedagogical pseudoscience and inert ideas

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. .

In Xataka Science

Gender gap: only 9% of white boys from disadvantaged backgrounds reach university in the UK

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.

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Adultification: the bias of treating children in an increasingly adult way

was originally published in

Xataka Science

by
Sergio Parra

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Extinction is a normal part of Earth's history. Most organisms that have ever lived have become extinct. Sometimes large numbers of species become extinct in a short period of time. It's the call mass extinction.

After a mass extinction, many habitats are no longer inhabited by organisms because they have become extinct. With new habitats available, some species will adapt to new environments. The process by which many new species evolve in a short period of time to fill available niches is called adaptive radiation.

There is no causal relationship

But a new study led by scientists affiliated with the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI), at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, has used machine learning to examine the coexistence of fossil species and has found that radiations and extinctions are rarely connected and therefore therefore, mass extinctions probably rarely cause radiation on a comparable scale.

This study has compared the impacts of both extinction and radiation over the period for which fossils are available, the so-called Phanerozoic Eon. The Phanerozoic (from Greek meaning 'apparent life'), which represents the most recent ~550 million year period of the Earth's total ~4.5 billion year history, and is very important to paleontologists: before this period , most organisms that existed were microbes that did not easily form fossils, so the previous evolutionary record is difficult to observe.

In Xataka Science

We know more about the most catastrophic extinction in history

The new study suggests that creative destruction is not a good description of how species originated or went extinct during the Phanerozoic, and suggests that many of the most notable periods of evolutionary radiation occurred when life entered new evolutionary and ecological settings, such as during the explosion of animal diversity and the carboniferous expansion of forest biomes in the Cambrian. It is not known if this is true during the previous ~3 billion years dominated by microbes, since the scarcity of recorded information on such ancient diversity did not allow a similar analysis.

The team used a new machine learning application to examine the temporal coexistence of species in the Phanerozoic fossil record, examining more than a million entries in a huge curated public database that includes nearly 200,000 species.

In Xataka Science

The next mass extinction is estimated for 2100, according to mathematics

Using their objective methods, they found that the 'big five' mass extinction events previously identified by paleontologists were picked up by machine learning methods as one of the top 5% of significant disruptions in which extinction exceeded radiation or vice versa, as well as seven additional mass extinctions, two combined mass extinction-radiation events, and 15 mass radiations. Surprisingly, in contrast to previous narratives emphasizing the importance of post-extinction radiations, this work found that mass radiations and more comparable extinctions were rarely coupled in time, refuting the idea of a causal relationship between them.

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Artificial Intelligence Finds Surprising Patterns in Earth's Biological Mass Extinctions

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Xataka Science

by
Sergio Parra

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In 1913, Niels Bohr developed his famous atomic model. In this model, electrons rotate in circular orbits around the nucleus, occupying the lowest possible energy orbit, or the closest possible orbit to the nucleus.

However, the popular idea of an atom is, to a certain extent, a schematic distortion, a model of understanding for laymen... an approach that bears little or no resemblance to reality. Atoms are not as they are drawn in textbooks. In fact, atoms are far from all the same: They differ greatly from each other.

Densities and shapes

As explained Santiago Alvarez in the book Of women, men and molecules, the density of atoms can vary by two orders of magnitude from one element to another, more than the density of the Earth varies from the crust to the core:

If we calculate the densities of the electron cloud and the nucleus separately, in the case of helium we find values of 2×3 10¹⁷ and 3.52 x 10^-5 kg/m³, respectively. That is, the density of the nucleus is about 10^twenty-one times greater than that of its surrounding electrons. We do not have references in the everyday world to gauge the meaning of these densities. Not even the air in the stratosphere has a density as small as that of the electron cloud. We would have to go up to the thermosphere, about 100 km above the Earth's surface, to find a comparable density. In the case of the core, only a neutron star has such a high density, surpassed only by that of black holes.

Nor are atoms always spherical.. And even less is an atom within a molecule spherical. Even atoms of the same element can differ in a series of attributes:

• Number of neutrons (in different isotopes).
• Number of electrons (in multiple oxidation states).
• Degree of pairing of electrons (in various spin states).
• Variable molecular environment in coordination number and stereochemistry that also affects shape and size.

Thus, we could affirm that the invariant property between the atoms of the same element is its atomic number (number of protons in its nucleus), the property that defines a chemical element, despite the fact that the chemical reactivity and its ability to Bond formation resides in the valence electrons.

In this way, the writing of Margaret Lucas Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, in her book Poems and Fancies (1653):

• Pointed atoms make the Fire subtle, fast and dry,
• The Long ones fly like arrows in the air,
• The Round ones become water, moist,
• The Squares on Earth, with immovable Form;
• Square atoms make up hard Minerals,
• Soft vegetables appropriate round atoms.

However, we need models to understand reality, because reality is not understandable in its entirety:

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The density of different atoms can vary more than the density of the Earth's crust and nucleus

was originally published in

Xataka Science

by
Sergio Parra

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According to a new study, the mass of all our things (buildings, roads, cars, etc.) now exceeds the mass of all living things on the planet.

It is not surprising that this is the case if we take into account that the amount of new material added each week It is equal to the total mass of the almost 8 billion people on Earth (Humans constitute approximately 0.01% of the planet's biomass).

Prepared dough: exponential growth

In 1900, the mass of human materials was only 3% of the Earth's total biomass. Since then, materials have doubled approximately every 20 years..

The glut of concrete and asphalt began during the boom years between World War II and the 1973 oil crisis, when developed countries began building.

In Xataka Science

Power outages lead to more pregnancies, which in turn make the lives of young mothers worse

Meanwhile, total biomass has gradually decreased since 1900 due to deforestation and other reasons. The increase in human mass is driven by the use of geological resources: rocks, minerals and metals.

Human-created mass finally surpassed Earth's total living biomass this year. The timing of that transition depends on whether the biomass accounts for the water. If water is included, biomass will remain larger than human materials until about 2037.

Even so, the comparisons are very striking: Buildings and other infrastructure weigh more than the world's trees and bushes. And the mass of plastic is twice that of all animals.

The world can be divided into three kinds of matter depending on its purpose: dead matter, living matter and processed matter. Let's analyze how many billion tons there are of each type of matter in the world... and discover that There is more matter made from cows than from humans!:

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Each week, the mass of all our material objects added to the world is equal to the mass of all the world's inhabitants.

was originally published in

Xataka Science

by
Sergio Parra

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As is already the case with Twitter and its tendency to create sociological bubbles or informational echo chambers, YouTube's algorithms, according to a new study, also seems to be fueling the most radical ideas, the harshest positions, even conspiracy theories.

More of 330,000 videos on almost 350 YouTube channels were analyzed and classified manually according to a system designed by the Anti-Defamation League.

From least extreme to most extreme

By processing more than 72 million comments, the study showed that the three types of channels (Alt-lite, Intellectual Dark Web (IDW) and Alt-right) increasingly share the same user base; and? Users are constantly migrating from softer content to more extreme content.

In Xataka Science

We live in cultural bubbles and that doesn't explain many things

The study's authors hypothesized that alt-lite and the Intellectual Dark Web often serve as a gateway to more extreme ideologies. They proved it by tracking down the authors of 72 million comments on approximately two million videos between May and July of last year.

The results were that more than 26% of people who commented on alt-lite videos tended to move on to alt-right videos and subsequently comment there.

In Xataka Science

Do you use Twitter to inform yourself? Well, fake news is the one that is retweeted the most.

The alt-right They tend to sympathize with anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, anti-feminist, anti-communist, anti-capitalist, homophobic, racist, ethno-nationalist, traditionalist and neo-reactionary ideas. This type of ideology has experienced a boost from the development of social networks, the harsh opposition of the Republican Party during the presidency of Barack Obama and the impact of the Great Recession since 2008.

We still don't know much about YouTube radicalization: for one thing, we're not quite sure what exactly makes people switch from alternative material to far-right material. That's partly because YouTube restricts access to recommendation data.

In Xataka Science

Extreme political ideas evolve due to the need to connect with others

The tension between individual freedom and collectivism It has not been resolved since it arose at the dawn of the 18th century. There is no answer. And probably both positions must exist so that neither positions definitively wins. The same happens with ideologies, and also with ideas that now seem radical to us (many of today's moderate ideas were, to a greater or lesser extent, radical in the past).

The problem posed by the study is whether, perhaps, YouTube would be catalyzing a transformation beyond reflection, a kind of evolution from a moderate positioning to a more radicalized one. not so much for the ideas themselves, but for the reinforcement of peers through the internet. After all, extreme political ideas They evolve due to the need to connect with others, which would also explain part of the current COVID-19 denialist movement:

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YouTube's algorithm could be fueling extreme ideas and polarization

was originally published in

Xataka Science

by
Sergio Parra

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