One of the predecessor animals of humans lost the ability to make vitamin C in the Eocene, 40 to 60 million years ago. The world was a lot warmer then…
Category: Curious things
Why Molecular Biology Labs Are Almost Always Stocked With Salmon Sperm DNA
fun fact – DNA was originally isolated from salmon sperm. Swiss physician and biologist Friedrich Miescher accomplished the feat in 1869, dubbing his discovery “nuclein.” Salmon sperm was at the…
Washington is the UFO Capital of the U.S. Is it Our Weather?
A series of reports have come out recently demonstrating that Washington State is NUMBER ONE in the number of reports per person of UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects).
Grok 3 beta et al
Jonathan Cohler, David Legates, Franklin Soon, and Willie Soon, steer xAI’s Grok 3 beta to produce what they call. FIRST-EVER [AI produced] peer-reviewed climate science paper,
Texas is going big on desalination
Desalination today provides potable water to billions of people worldwide, with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, and other Middle Eastern countries leading the way. The world’s largest, Ras…
California Reported to Have Quasi-Cannibal Ground Squirrels
Avoid California, where even our squirrels are vicious killers. Our animal welfare agents wouldn’t dare to take them on
AI Knows It is Biased on Climate Change
Okay it is chatbots that know they are biased, not all of AI. But these days the headlines are all about “AI” and they really just mean these chatbots that…
AI could take your computer from search to research
If AI can do our basic research, that would be extremely useful. It would free us up to do other things, like thinking and more advanced research, or even relaxing…
Pretty Birds
The prettier the birds are the more we have killed them or imprisoned them. Some species have been lucky – they can be captive bred relatively easily, like canaries and…
Why Do We Now Think Politicians Can Control the Weather?
A troublesome incident for sure. A ‘perfect storm’ of events seems to have come together.
Eco-friendly brake cables eaten by foxes after switch to soy insulation
Eco-friendly brake cables are being eaten by foxes, after manufacturers switched from petroleum-based insulation to soy, forcing owners to wrap their cars in tarpaulins.
Specious Species: Coywolves & Coydogs
As most of us know, coyotes are fantastically adaptable – they can live almost anywhere they can find food – and ‘coyote food’ is nearly every- and any- thing small…
The AI Buzz
But, surprisingly, this technology is also very, very good at parsing, responding to, and writing “natural language” (e.g., English).
A Long Chat with Google’s Gemini
After all the news of Gemini’s biases this week I thought I’d give it a try, not of image generation which is currently disabled, but a conversation similar to my…
Interesting News Items
Over the last few days there have been a few interesting general news items touching on topics that I have covered here in the past: Wolves, Oroville Dam, Great Salt…
The 65th anniversary of “The Day the Music Died” and the weather played a major role…February 3rd, 1959
It was a little past 1 AM on February 3rd, 1959 when American musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson were killed in a plane crash…
Man-oh-Man: Manatees
Counting manatees is exceptionally difficult. They spend their time under murky sluggish waters, often have green moss on their backs the same color as the water itself and if congregating,…
A Curious Correlation -Sunspots vs. Major Hurricane Frequency
We see maximum cloudiness at solar maximum. Just the opposite of the Svensmark hypothesis