The Official Treehouse Articles Thread

[cory]

And the industrial food/food science complex does it to the parents

 

[lxskllr]

From the Hidden Life Of Trees guy...

Plants Feel Pain and Might Even See

It’s time to retire the hierarchical classification of living things.

nautil.us

The most interesting part to me...

There’s a vine that grows in South America that adapts to the form of the tree or bush it is climbing on. Its leaves look just like the leaves on the host plant. You might think this is chemically controlled. In that case, the vine might be detecting scent compounds from the bush and changing the shape of its leaves in a way that was genetically predetermined. Three different leaf shapes had been observed. Then a researcher came up with the idea of creating an artificial plant with plastic leaves and relocating our botanical chameleon to its new home. What happened next was amazing. The vine imitated the artificial leaves, just as it had imitated the leaves in nature.

I might try to hunt down the original research some time, and see exactly how it was setup.

edit:
The vine(Boquila trifoliolata)...

 

[cory]

Wild article!

 

[lxskllr]

The Last Glimpses of California's Vanishing Hippie Utopias

Half a century ago, a legion of idealists dropped out of society and went back to the land. Here's a glimpse of their otherworldly residences—and the tail end of a grand social experiment.

www.gq.com

 

[cory]

Interesting!

 

[gf beranek]

Yeah, I remember that generation. Northwestern California was a haven for alternate life style. Land was cheap and most of the ilk were peaceful sorts. Earth people. That was before the cartels and crack labs moved in.

 

[cory]

The Rock That Ended the Dinosaurs Was Much More Than a Dino Killer (Published 2021)

In seeking the origin story of the Chicxulub impactor, scientists hope to also unlock secrets about the origin of life itself.

www.nytimes.com

 

[stig]

Sorry, not about to subscribe to that.

Might interest you to know that Møns klint where I've logged the last 2½ months is the place where they found the line of ash, that proved the theory of a dino killer impact.

 

[gf beranek]

In the meantime keep an every watchful eye out for the next big one. Lucky for us there's lot's of telescopes peering across the heavens today.

 

[stig]

That might actually bve the one thing that could get humanity to work together.
Knocking a meteor away from hitting Earth.

If, of course, we don't get too many Trump types, calling it a hoax.

 

[CurSedVoyce]

:insert eye roll at danish commie here"

 

[stig]

You forgot the pinko vegetarian part.

 

[lxskllr]

I found my people!

Latvia: Europe’s nation of introverts

Latvians are often self-deprecating about their culture’s tendency towards introversion, but could this personality trait be the key to their creative identity?

getpocket.com

Latvia just shot to the top of my 'places to retire to' list :^D

 

[cory]

 

[cory]

AI will not be taking over the world

AI Is No Match for the Quirks of Human Intelligence

We may sometimes behave like computers, but more often, we are creative, irrational, and not always too bright.

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

 

[ruel]

And foxes are no threat to a henhouse says Mr. Fox

 

[gf beranek]

That reminds me of an old fable...

 

[lxskllr]

Some failures of automotive startups over the years...

9 past mistakes offer lessons for today’s hot new automakers

More than 2,000 American automakers have come and gone in this chaotic industry.

arstechnica.com

What particularly struck me was there have been over 2k attempts at making cars. That's waaaay more than I'd have guessed.

 

[Steve Mack]

The footprints are believed to be between 21,000 and 23,000 years old, and show evidence of children and teenagers alongside a variety of extinct animals. The tracks are thought to be over 10,000 years older than previous evidence of humans in the Americas.

Fossil footprints are the oldest evidence of humans in the Americas

The oldest confirmed human footprints from the Americas have been found in New Mexico, pushing back the date of our ancestors' arrival on the continent by thousands of years.

www.nhm.ac.uk

 

[Steve Mack]

Big Breakthrough for “Massless” Energy Storage: Structural Battery That Performs 10x Better Than All Previous Versions

Researchers from Chalmers University of Technology have produced a structural battery that performs ten times better than all previous versions. It contains carbon fiber that serves simultaneously as an electrode, conductor, and load-bearing material. Their latest research breakthrough paves the way

scitechdaily.com

.

 

[Grnjp]

^neat. What happens when you get tboned? Ford Pinto time?

 

[stig]

Ford Pinto time???????

 

[CurSedVoyce]

Catches fire.

 

[stig]

Thanks!

 

[lxskllr]

Y'all probably don't want to read it, but this is an article on how engineering made New Orleans more of a disaster than it already was...

How Humans Sank New Orleans

Engineering put the Crescent City below sea level. Now, its future is at risk.

getpocket.com

Two quotes that stood out to me.

From 1718...

“Nothing more than two narrow strips of land, about a musket shot in width,” surrounded by “canebrake [and] impenetrable marsh.”

From 1850(speaking of the surrounding marsh)...

“This boiling fountain of death is one of the most dismal, low, and horrid places, on which the light of the sun ever shone. And yet there it lies under the influence of a tropical heat, belching up its poison and malaria ... the dregs of the seven vials of wrath ... covered with a yellow greenish scum.”

What part of that sounds like a good place to live?! "Hey, this is wet as shit, and smells like an alligator's ass. Home!". All the nice places in the country and around the world, what would possess someone to stop there? If you tried to sell me some of it, I'd tell you to go frig yourself, and I'd keep walking.