https://www.oist.jp/news-center/news/202...ant-motion

PRESS RELEASE: Ants make up one of the most diverse groups of animals on the planet, with many species boasting unrivaled physical and social behavior, and an overall species richness that far exceeds that of mammals. Various types of ants can carry up to one hundred times their weight or forage hundreds of meters from their nest, the equivalent of a human carrying thousands of kilograms and walking hundreds of kilometers.

These feats have inspired researchers to study not only their anatomy that makes this possible, but how they make use of these capabilities to forage and explore. By recording how individual ants move around a laboratory environment, researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have come up with a physics-based model for how these ants navigate, now published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology.

Animal motion has been a topic of fascination for scientists for a long time, though physicists have only really gotten involved in the past few decades. OIST PhD student Jack Featherstone, part of the Nonlinear and Non-equilibrium Physics Unit, explains: “Life is one of the most interesting mysteries out there, rivaling the universal extremes of quantum mechanics or astrophysics in complexity. Physicists have now begun applying many of the quantitative tools developed to study the non-living world to explore why animals move and behave the way they do.”

Trekking out to the wilds — or rather, the parking lot — to gather specimens. The foundation of most animal behavior studies begins with observing living specimens and gathering quantitative data about how they behave. The OIST researchers were interested to study one type of ant, known as the long-legged or yellow crazy ant (A. gracilipes), due to its reputation as a particularly aggressive invasive species. As a result, these ants are increasingly colonizing urban habitats as they spread across the globe, making it all the more important to understand how they navigate and explore in artificial environments.

In a clear sign of their widespread presence in Okinawa, the researchers had little difficulty finding specimens. After gathering more than 100 ants from locations like parking lots, walkways, and sitting areas around campus, Featherstone and colleagues placed them alone in arenas in the laboratory to record how they explore the new environment. The researchers emphasize that understanding how these ants move when they are alone is very important, though sometimes overlooked.

“Ants are very famous for their collective interactions, mediated by pheromones or other sophisticated communication systems, but the individual motion of an ant is the building block that makes this collective behavior possible,” says Featherstone.

Following the experiments, the researchers trained a neural network to analyze video recordings of the ants. The network tracked the position of different parts of each ant’s body as it explored, generating spatial trajectories that the researchers could then quantitatively analyze.

How random physics can help us understand animal behavior. The researchers found that the key ingredient to better understand and model the ant behavioral data lay in stochastic, or random, modelling. Famously important to understanding diffusion and the motion of small particles, this approach assumes that the overall, non-random behavior of a system can be constructed from individual, random contributions.

“The behavior of any animal depends on a massive number of variables, from the states of individual neurons in their brains, to the weather around them, to what they had for breakfast. Trying to measure every factor that might be relevant here is impossible; instead, the stochastic approach allows us to explore macroscopic behavior without getting lost in the microscopic details,” says Featherstone.

Their proposed model, which includes a combination of several techniques often used in studying bacterial motion or diffusion processes, can reproduce many of the features of the experimental trajectory data. It also allows them to computationally or mathematically derive predictions about how the ants might behave in new environments, which they hope to use to study how these ants interact with other species, either as predators or as prey.

As one of the most rigorous descriptions of ant exploration behavior — including the ability to simulate ant-like motion — this study may help other researchers understand how locomotion fits into the rest of an ant’s life; external stimuli, in the form of food, water, predators, or obstacles will have the ants adjust their behavior from the baseline that this work provides. In the future, it could even be used to better understand and contain invasive ants. And even beyond ants, this modeling approach could be easily adapted to explore how navigation, foraging, and exploration vary throughout the rest of the animal kingdom.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-n...180989260/

EXCERPTS: All organisms alive today descend from the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) that likely dwelled in the early oceans. This mysterious ancestor, the new study suggests, was still reliant on its environment to conduct metabolism.

This mysterious ancestor, the new study suggests, was still reliant on its environment to conduct metabolism. Rather than fueling its energy-producing reactions on its own with enzymes, LUCA depended on small organic molecules and metals in the environment to conduct about half of the core metabolic reactions, the researchers found. Then, over time, some of these metals were replaced with more specific and efficient enzymes as the proteins evolved to do the same jobs.

[...] Archaea and bacteria are two of the three domains of life, and these microbes arose early in Earth’s history. The third domain, eukaryotes—the one that animals, plants and all organisms with nucleus-containing cells belong to—evolved later, from a hybrid of the first two groups.

For many years, scientists contemplated three possible scenarios for the origin of life: Either bacteria evolved from archaea, archaea evolved from bacteria, or both independently evolved from LUCA. The new study makes the argument that the last possibility is the most likely one.

[...] The team then found that bacteria and archaea shared some enzymes with LUCA—but each lineage also had some that were not present in the ancestor. Essentially, bacteria and archaea independently evolved different enzymes to replace the same metal-catalyzed reactions. “This shows the reaction is older than the enzymes that catalyze it,” says University of Ottawa chemist Joseph Moran, a co-author of the study.

These distinct solutions to the same metabolic problems are evidence to Martin that bacteria could not have been derived from archaea, or the reverse. “The simplest interpretation,” he says, “is that there were two independent transitions” from LUCA to free-living cells.

[...] Based on its metabolism, too, Martin argues that LUCA was a simpler ancestor—something not completely alive. “There can be no question that free-living cells are alive,” says Martin, referring to cells that are capable of growing, dividing and surviving on their own. “We can all agree on that.” But LUCA was still reliant on small organic molecules and metals in the Earth’s crust to carry out metabolism. When it comes to being classified as truly alive, “that’s not going to cut the mustard,” he says.

Martin has long argued that metals were the original catalysts for metabolic reactions, and that over time, those metals were replaced by enzymes. “There’s strong support for the idea that geochemistry would have led to life’s biochemistry,” says Donato Giovannelli, a microbiologist at the University of Naples Federico II in Italy who studies the origin of life... (MORE - missing details)

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1138645

EXCERPTS:: Dinosaurs are famous for being big, from the towering Tyrannosaurus rex to the colossal Apatosaurus. But a new study published today in the journal Evolution by scientists at the American Museum of Natural History and Princeton University suggests that one of the greatest mysteries of dinosaur evolution isn’t how some species became giants—it’s why even the smallest dinosaurs never became truly tiny.

Using mathematical models to investigate the evolution of body size across vertebrates, researchers found that while energetics and physiology can explain the sizes of mammals, birds, and turtles, they cannot explain why the smallest non-bird dinosaurs remained unusually large throughout their evolutionary history. Instead, the findings suggest that competition with small-bodied early mammals may have prevented dinosaurs from becoming mouse- or sparrow-sized animals that are so common among vertebrates today.

“Everyone loves a giant dinosaur,” said study co-author Roger Benson, the Macaulay Curator of Dinosaur Paleobiology at the Museum. “But we decided to look at the other end of the scale. The absence of tiny dinosaurs may be just as interesting as the existence of giant ones. We already knew that dinosaurs prevented mammals from evolving to large sizes before the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. Here we suggest that mammals in turn prevented dinosaurs from evolving to small sizes.”

While the largest dinosaurs weighed more than 80 tons, the smallest known non-bird dinosaurs weighed nearly one pound (approximately 450 grams)—about the size of a large rabbit. This is more than 200 times larger than the world’s smallest bird, the bee hummingbird, which weighs just 1.75 grams and the smallest mammal, the Etruscan shrew, which is about 1.8 grams. The smallest lizard, the dwarf gecko, is only 0.15 grams.

Roughly 75 percent of living mammal species and 90 percent of living bird species are smaller than the smallest non-bird dinosaurs.

“Small animals dominate modern ecosystems,” said Stephanie Lechki, the lead author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University. “If we want to understand how today’s biodiversity evolved, we need to understand why tiny dinosaurs appear to have been missing.”

[...] The findings suggest that physiology alone cannot explain dinosaur body sizes. Instead, ecological factors—including competition, predation, and the availability of different ecological niches—likely played a large role in limiting how small non-avian dinosaurs could become.

The study also offers new insight into one of the most dramatic transitions in vertebrate evolution: the emergence of birds. Although birds evolved from dinosaurs, modern birds are dramatically smaller than even the smallest known non-avian dinosaurs. Birds evolved body sizes far smaller than any other group of dinosaurs in just a short time after they first appeared in the Early Cretaceous.

The researchers found that this shift toward miniature body sizes also cannot be explained by physiology alone. Instead, they propose that the evolution of powered flight fundamentally changed the ecological opportunities available to early birds. By taking to the air, birds may have escaped the ecological constraints that prevented their dinosaur ancestors from evolving into much smaller animals.

“The ability to fly may have opened entirely new ways of life,” Lechki said. “Once birds entered those new ecological niches, they were free to evolve body sizes that had simply not been possible for other dinosaurs.” (MORE - missing details, no ads)

INTRO: Dave Rubin of “The Rubin Report” shares his interview with Larry Elder, in which Larry destroyed his weak arguments. Dave's most viral clip that changed his career and political views forever.

They also discuss why Elder rejects the idea that systemic racism is the biggest problem facing Black Americans. His heated challenge to Dave over racism, police shootings, and Black Lives Matter. Why he believes fatherlessness, the welfare state, and the breakdown of the family have had devastating consequences. Affirmative action, school choice, and why Black voters may disagree with the Democratic Party on more issues than the media admits. And much more.
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THE RUBIN REPORT
https://youtu.be/QEvl1P4mIaQ

VIDEO EXCERPT: My guest this week is a lawyer, a writer, and the host of the aptly named Larry Elder radio show. Larry, how's it going?

Going great, Dave. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Yeah, thanks for coming in. I've been trying to make this happen with you for a while.

I've been dodging you forever. Caught up with me.

I got you. I got you. [...] So there's a lot of stuff I want to talk about. And in the beginning of the show, I set up that I am a liberal. You're a conservative.

My condolences. [laughter] Maybe by the time this show is over, we can move you to the center a little bit.

And maybe by the time the show's over, that's not going to happen. But that's what it's all about. That's why I've wanted to have you on the show because I find there are some people in the public space that I disagree with, but that I'd like to sit down and talk about some of the ideas, and I consider you in that space.

[...] So I haven't talked that much about the right. I've had a couple people on the right. How would you define conservatism? What do you think that even means at this point in America in 2016? What is a conservative?

Well, I don't mind being called a conservative. I don't consider it to be a four-letter word, but I really call myself a libertarian. I believe in article 1, section 8 of the constitution, which gives the federal government a small number of things to do, Dave.

Mint money, put together an army, deal with the borders, and a handful of other things. That's it. Welfare, health care, abortion, same-sex marriage, doctor-assisted suicide -- all the social issues that the Supreme Court takes up -- in my view, they shouldn't take those up in the first place. That should be done on a state-by-state basis. That's what I think most conservatives believe as well.

So, I'm with you on a lot of that. I definitely have some libertarian beliefs myself.

I think most people are libertarian. They just don't know it. The founding fathers were libertarians. The founding fathers drafted a document that said our rights come from a power other than individuals. Government doesn't give us our rights. We give government our rights and power, and everything else should be left to the states and to individuals. That's how the constitution was started. That's how the country was started. And I think that's how most Americans really feel when they really think about it....

Dave's red pill moment ... https://youtu.be/QEvl1P4mIaQ

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1...15.1104977

In an interview, the creator of the TV show COPS, John Langley, admits that he goes out of his way to show more white suspects on the show...

-- EXCERPT --

LANGLEY: "Here's the reality of street crime. Approximately 60% to 70% is committed by people of color. Only 30-35% of the suspects are white people. In prisons, the numbers are pretty much the same. Around 35% of the inmates are white and the rest are black, hispanic, etc.

Now on COPS, we reverse that. We show 60% to 70% white suspects and only 30%, sometimes maybe as high as 40% of people of color. Why do we do that? Because I don't want to contribute to negative stereotyping. Everyone knows that street crime takes place in the ghettos. We all know that, or should know that. All of the white criminals are in corporate boardrooms and places like that because they're not disenfranchised, so they do different kinds of crime."

In an interview, John Langley, the creator and executive producer of the reality television police drama COPS, admitted that he purposely did not present race and violent crime accurately on his show, which centered around race and crime, because of the potential impact it would have on the audience. Langley essentially concedes television’s power to impact how the audience sees the world and therefore consciously decided to present a false reality where whites were seen committing violent crime disproportionate to real-world statistics and reality.

Langley’s admission is not surprising as research has long shown that the media can shape thought and culture, and provide a powerful tool for individuals to learn about their social world particularly on issues like race and violence. Since the advent of television, politicians and the public have voiced concern about its impact on political beliefs and social attitudes.

Biased or inaccurate messages may influence the audience and potentially reinforce stereotypes and therefore remain a vital area of inquiry for researchers. When the public is presented a narrow range of ideas in the media, and become accustomed to this narrow view, they begin to accept this portrayal as representative of society and the real world even if it is not an accurate representation. This becomes a greater concern as audiences select programming they find entertaining and conforming to their own perceptions/beliefs of the world, which reinforce these perceptions... (MORE - details)

Some pretty amazing clips here. Analyst does a good job at ruling out mundane explanations.

https://www.facebook.com/reel/27920019511015884

PAPER: https://journals.aps.org/pra/abstract/10.1103/kmmy-3dy3

SABINE HOSSENFELDER
https://youtu.be/SMXq68UeeXU

VIDEO INTRO: For a decade or so, I've complained that physicists seem content with quantum mechanics as it is. They don't try to fix its problems. Rather, they tell themselves and everyone dumb enough to believe it that we must accept the quantum weirdness. By now, they've glorified the strangeness of quantum mechanics so much, it's become basically impossible for them to move beyond it. If something makes no sense, don't fix it. Give it a mysterious name and start a pop cast.

And yet today, I have a team of physicists who've done exactly that. They've looked for the origin of quantum physics and found at least a possible one. That's intriguing because physicists said it's impossible. Let's have a look.

One of the biggest mysteries on the foundations of physics is one you might never have thought about, causality. We're so used to it, we never even think about it. Flip a switch and the light goes on. Cause and effect, simple enough, unless you have children, in which case the effect just happens and the cause denies involvement. But where does causal order come from? Why is the world so neat and orderly? The authors of the new paper say, "Actually, it isn't. Causality doesn't fundamentally exist any more than say a liquid does. A liquid is fundamentally made of particles. Yet the particles themselves aren't liquid. That just doesn't make any sense. The liquidness is an emergent behavior for a large collection of particles."

The authors of the new paper say causality is like that. It doesn't exist on the fundamental level. It's an emergent behavior that we observe for many quantum particles. The reason I find this interesting is not just that it could explain the origin of causality. It's also that causality is one of the reasons why it's so difficult to combine quantum physics with gravity. Physicists have been looking for such a combination, a theory of quantum gravity, for almost a century...

https://youtu.be/SMXq68UeeXU

This is apparently why the Indiana Fever coach is not much liked by the team's own fans. Nada from her after the incident. Putatively, she has political grudges against her own players.
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LINDA COHN
https://youtu.be/8odm_LxtChk

VIDEO EXCERPTS: The latest blatant example came against Minnesota when Sophie Cunningham, of course, was a guard for the Indiana Fever. She took a hard elbow to the face from forward Nia Coffey. I couldn't believe that her head was still attached.

So, you would have thought, "Oh, there's a foul called on the Minnesota player Coffey." Now, there was a foul called, but remarkably, it was called on Sophie Cunningham...

[...] And then they went to video review, and I thought I was watching the game. They went to video review, the officials, and I thought, "Oh, they'll straighten this out. It's obviously a misunderstanding." You know, they want to get the call right. That's why we have video. They stood over that video longer than any human should have.

And guess what? Did they reverse the call? Did they make it a non-call? Did they give Coffee the call, meaning that she was the guilty party? No. They stayed with their first decision. They said, "No, Sophie Cunningham deserved the foul." And Sophie's like looking up and like, "Are you kidding me?"

My issue was, unless I missed it, I didn't see Sophie Cunningham's head coach, Stephanie White, come to her aid, like all head coaches should when number one, their player gets elbowed in the face; and number two, when they do not get the call that they deserved, which would have helped the team. Now, Indiana ends up losing to Minnesota. I think it was by eight points, but this is ridiculous.

Were the officials trying to send a message to Sophie Cunningham? I know she's the most polarizing player in the league, but be better. How many times do we have to say this? They are the worst officiating I've ever seen in any professional sport. And they do not do anything to change my mind.

[...] What these coaches forget to to point out and the reason why Sophie Cunningham has to say this and why there are protests of support and protests against Sophie. ... They forget to mention that there are 23 states plus the District of Columbia that allow biological men to compete in women's sports and be in locker rooms. Transgender girls, who are also biological men, can do this in 23 states.

But when you listen to these WNBA coaches, and there were a couple that spoke out, you would think this doesn't happen. You would think this was a made-up narrative.

That's why 80% of the country believes in what Sophie Cunningham is saying and stating. And isn't she allowed to say it? I said that in the last show. When is that a crime against humanity? You have this free speech. You can speak up. You don't have to agree with it, and you can create and debate it. But you do not get to physically bully the person...

WNBA continues to be its own worst enemy ... https://youtu.be/8odm_LxtChk