Pookah posted:

Last year, I fell down a rabbit hole of reading about bumblebees (they are awesome btw, they have thumbsized ones in Brazil), and a line stuck with me forever - " bumblebee queens rule the hive with a combination of pheromones and violence'.

I thought they were cute before, now I think they are cute and badass.

Carthag Tuek posted:

bee fighting a botfly (i think)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyatiHg9ZxA

BrianBoitano posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQcKIN9vj3U

Dumb Sex-Parrot posted:

it looks like a horse-fly (klæg) being attacked by a yellowjacket (hveps). adult yellowjackets primarily live on sugary stuff such as fruit juice, tree sap, and your fizzy drinks, but their larvae need proteins to grow, and this is where the horse-fly comes into the picture: it is being turned into larvae food.
this is a good thing since horse flies are rear end in a top hat flies who suck blood from animals and humans, and they can have a rather painful bite.

good job yellowjacket.

yaffle posted:

In the north of England horse-flys are called clegs.

Inceltown posted:

Why yes if you click the pic you'll find out why it's badass

The Bloop posted:

That's drat cool, thanks for posting it

The Bloop posted:

That's drat cool, thanks for posting it

Lady Disdain posted:

"Good news, professor; I've managed to decode part of this khipu. Apparently," [looks at notes] "Chilche has a tiny knob."

BrianBoitano posted:

So black holes with accretion disks are already cool – no matter the orientation, the disk never obscures your view of the shadow of the event horizon. In fact, you always see the entire shadow, because gravity bends light from just outside the back side and sends it our way. Similar bending occurs on the light coming from the back of the accretion disk, so we see a really cool 360 view of black holes!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo

Well Nasa just worked out what it would look like if all that gravitational lensing occurred for binary supermassive black holes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQcKIN9vj3U

Xarbala posted:

This is a very detailed census

Inspector 34 posted:

"Knot! I meant he has a tiny knot!"

Otteration posted:

Black holes "should" last infinitely, cause they just eat stuff forever (excepting Hawking radiation).

Just stumbled across white holes though, which "should" last for an infinite short time, puking out all their (and their source black hole's mass with the same energy as said black holes suck mass in. Possibly the source of our own Big Bang.

How are white holes created from black holes? Yes (best laymen answer I've seen so far).

Apparently we're looking for a white hole right now, even though they may take forever to form, and may last a forever a small time (I like more and more that "infinity" just means we haven't figured out what ever it is is just yet).

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wWzEUDk-9m0

The Bloop posted:

Finally, evidence of pre-columbian furries

OwlFancier posted:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaguar_warrior

OwlFancier posted:

I'm just saying you go around wearing an animal suit and hitting people with a paddle that's a furry.

DontMockMySmock posted:

This post and that video are not very good characterizations of what a "white hole" is.

Long story short, a white hole is a mathematical quirk that pops out of the mathematics of the most basic and naïve formulation of a black hole, one that postulates a non-rotating, uncharged black hole in an otherwise empty universe for eternity. They're an extension of the black hole and they occur basically in another universe as a consequence of the existence of the universe with the black hole, and they're the opposite of a black hole - instead of all possible paths ending at the singularity, all possible paths start at the singularity. In other words, instead of light (or anything else) being unable to escape, it is unable to get in. You can (mathematically) construct a series of universes where infinitely long paths go from a white hole, through infinity to another universe, and into a black hole, and out a white hole in yet another universe, and so on. This is all obviously the sort of nonsense you get when you make a mathematical model that is too simple. I'm not sure where you got the "take forever to form" and "last forever a small time", since by definition they don't form - they always exist and last forever in their extremely simple mathematical model of a universe.

Once you remove the perfect symmetry of the empty universe, or the symmetry of the black hole existing for all time, there is no longer any reason to think there is a white hole counterpart to a normal black hole (of the sort you might get from a collapsing star, for example, or the supermassive ones at the centers of galaxies). However, there have been various ideas of how to re-jigger the white hole idea to try and explain the origins of the Big Bang. Interesting ideas, to be sure, but ultimately doomed to fail for now, because we do not have a complete theory of how the universe works on very, very, very, very, very small scales. There is little reason to think that such a thing as a "black hole singularity" (as in, an infinitely dense point of finite mass) is real, and not a consequence of a limited theory, and therefore, no good reason to suspect that matter might be vanishing into another universe to pop out of a white hole. Not that "the big bang is a white hole, and black holes create universes" is a bad theory, just one whose time is yet to come, and one which is neither mainstream nor well-supported. I'm not sure how they mathematically reconcile the instantaneous nature of the "Big Bang white hole" with the non-instantaneous nature black holes, but it's been a long time since grad school and my general relativity is rusty, so I'm not sure if I could tell you whether it's properly explained or just a load of horseshit.

DontMockMySmock posted:

DontMockMySmock posted:

Otteration posted:

Cool, thanks for the correction. I was going by a couple of recent pop sci sources, so either there is a lot of disinformation or a lot of disagreement on this hypothetical subject.

ekuNNN posted:

https://twitter.com/BBCNews/status/1385005207503921155

DontMockMySmock posted:

White holes, much like string theory, warp drives, wormholes, and other things we don't fully understand, are a thing that much pop sci communicates wrongly as a result of the popularizer's untempered enthusiasm for bizarre speculative ideas.

ekuNNN posted:

https://twitter.com/BBCNews/status/1385005207503921155

ekuNNN posted:

https://twitter.com/BBCNews/status/1385005207503921155

DontMockMySmock posted:

White holes, much like string theory, warp drives, wormholes, and other things we don't fully understand, are a thing that much pop sci communicates wrongly as a result of the popularizer's untempered enthusiasm for bizarre speculative ideas. It's not so much that there's disagreement on the facts, it's that there's disagreement on how to communicate them on a spectrum from exciting to realistic. So I'm here to give you the realist interpretation of the facts at hand.

Otteration posted:

If we don't fully understand a thing, how is it possible to communicate it wrongly?

Jabor posted:

Many many ways. The most obvious being taking one of the things you don't actually know and basing your entire presentation on it being unequivocally true, which is where a lot of these "I loving love science" descriptions tend to start.

Otteration posted:

Agree, and sorry. I should have used more qualifiers like "apparently", "according to", and "this guy says that...", etc. I did gently caress up there.

Jabor posted:

Many many ways. The most obvious being taking one of the things you don't actually know and basing your entire presentation on it being unequivocally true, which is where a lot of these "I loving love science" descriptions tend to start.