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Fascinating scientific stuff

Conscious Bob said:
The Cave Bear became extinct around twenty seven thousand years ago and the Sabre Tooth Cat around eleven thousand years ago, we humans as in homo sapiens have been around for fifty thousand years which means we've outlasted those big critters and may even have contributed to wiping them out.
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All true. As I said, my pre-frontal says "Cool!" while my amygdala screams "Run!".
 
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Wait, what? You mean we are doomed? No kidding?

Just an excerpt, read it all for context:

Technology won't save you

For those who believe that there must be a technological fix to all this despair and destruction, the researchers found that the historical record provides "testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent.

"It may be reasonable to believe that modern civilization, armed with its greater technological capacity, scientific knowledge and energy resources, will be able to survive and endure whatever crises historical societies succumbed to," the authors wrote.

"But the brief overview of collapses demonstrates not only the ubiquity of the phenomenon, but also the extent to which advanced, complex and powerful societies are susceptible to collapse."

Not all is lost, however: Societies can moderate the two factors that contribute most to social meltdown: the exploitation of natural resources and the uneven distribution of wealth, the researchers said.

"Collapse can be avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the per-capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion," they wrote.

Yeah, that's going to happen.

Full story here.
 
For decades, the << Bio-duck >> sound has been recorded in the Southern Ocean, Scientists have been trying to decode the perplexing low-frequency sounds, which occur every winter in the ocean around Antarctica, since sonar began detecting them in the 1960s . Some scientists hypothesized that ‘bio-duck’ might be produced by ultra-high-tech military devices at the bottom of the ocean .
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However, more and more evidence mounted that bio-duck was actually produced by a deep-sea animal , Balaenoptera bonaerensis (( Antarctic minke whales )) - The team has solved the major mystery of bio-duck, but plenty are left for them and other scientists to uncover. For instance, no one knows the purpose of bio-duck calls or How the whales use them to communicate with each other or Why bio-duck is used only at the height of the southern summer and not at other times of the year .
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It's the ultimate vehicle for an emergency flood escape . It can assemble itself in about 100 seconds and keep thousands to millions of passengers safe and afloat for days, even weeks. Floating clusters of Fire ants (( Solenopsis invicta )) are a feat of Natural Engineering, and some researchers wanted to know just how these ants create such safe, long-lasting rafts out of themselves. The result means they can survive floods in their native habitats as well as migrate long distances .
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Rare white lobsters caught in Maine.

709149-albino_lobster-e1409934151503.jpg
 
That’s where a blue lobster caught two weeks ago off Pine Point in Scarborough was taken. Blue lobsters are estimated by the Lobster Institute to be one in 2 million.
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Yes, I remember this blue lobster... I read about the cause of its blue color, an excess of the crustochrin proteins .
 
beer good said:
I don't think we have a general thread for various findings, discoveries, ideas and theories that are just... fascinating. Not necessarily new, just stuff you look at and go "Wow, we share the planet/galaxy/universe with that? Awesome!"

For starters, did you know there's a giant waterfall of blood in Antarctica? Well, sort of. HP Lovecraft would have grinned from ear to ear if he knew about this. And the explanation for how it happens just makes it better.

800px-Blood_Falls_01_Medium_Res_photolibrary.usap.gov.jpg
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What is the photo? I'm intrigued
 
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