Ice time! Color magic! Wasp zombies! Worm tricks! Frog poison! Comet stories! Eye shapes! And the last spiders you’ll see before you die! It’s your Friday Science Watch, where we watch science—from a perch safely away from the field of battle!
“For the first time, researchers have directly calculated the rate at which water crystallizes into ice in a realistic computer model of water molecules.” Until now, scientists had no idea how long it took water to turn into ice. They were in the dark. And that’s a fact. And if you don’t like it—tough!
Why do you perceive the color yellow differently in summer than in winter? Probably because in winter it’s snow, which is white, not yellow. I’d love to hear what scientists have to say about how someone could make a mistake like that. Evolution?
Certain wasps are able to turn spiders into “zombies” by injecting poison into their brains, forcing them to build a web for the use of the wasps. It’s fair to say this isn’t “news” per se; wasps have probably been doing this for thousands or even millions of years. But one human gets around to writing a paper about it and all of a sudden it’s “news.” Is this sort of thing really “news?” I’d argue no. It’s something that’s been going on a long time. You have have a very anthropocentric viewpoint to consider this “news.” I’m a human and I like humans as much as anyone, but be fair about it.
How do earthworms digest toxic substances that plants produce specifically to ward off being eaten? Well, now we know the answer. I won’t bore you with the details but suffice it to say those worms are up to the task. If they weren’t, I never would have written this item, and the world would have been a different place, at least a little bit. Like when they talk about a butterfly flapping its wings, and later it makes a storm.
Listen to how a Brazilian scientist discovered that this frog is poisonous: he was out in the forest and all of a sudden one of the frogs “head-butted him, jabbing its spines into his hand.” And he got poisoned. Real funny I guess? The media would have you believe so. Maybe members of the media should be poisoned more regularly, to gain understanding of those they cover? Also—real good science work there, buddy (not)!
The “rubber duck comet” is a comet in space that is shaped somewhat like a rubber duck, with a smaller “head” fragment sticking out of a larger “body” fragment. So how did this rock come to be shaped this way? I’m already so fucking bored by this.
Researchers analyzed the pupils of 214 land animals and found that pupil shape is linked to an animal’s “ecological niche.” A sloth’s pupil is shaped like a tree, a cow’s pupil is shaped like hay, and so on.
A street in a Dallas suburb has been covered by a huge “communal spiderweb” holding thousands of spiders, and it’s only getting bigger. One can only hope that the spiders continue their diligent work until the web stretches through the suburbs and over the entire dreary hellscape of Dallas itself, swallowing officeworkers and oil moguls alike, until eventually covering up the totem of Texas itself, Cowboys stadium, sending star-bedecked fans fleeing in terror. Some will get away, but not Troy Aikman, whose bad knees will doom him to a slow, spidery death. Sorry Troy Aikman—them’s the breaks.
[Photo: Flickr]