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The captcha is a 3rd part widget made by google that has a lot of logic behind it. One of the main purposes of it, is that a crawler can't click it. It has to be actually clicked for it to register, and the developer can see if the user has been authenticated when the submit button is clicked.

Because it's in an iFrame it makes it more difficult for bots (and web developers) to trigger the clicking of the div that contains the checkbox due to the same-origin policy present in all major browsers. This stops developers like me from having my submit button trigger the captcha. My option is to check to see if the captcha has been verified yet, but I can't trigger an automatic captcha. Which is a good thing, if I can do it, then so could a bot visiting my site.

Presumably, google could create a captcha that is just a button, and that could trigger a submit on the actual page. But that would get confusing for the user. Styling would be an issue. As well as the times when a more traditional captcha is required.

Look at the following captcha demo page.

Captcha demo

Now, look at it in incognito mode, and verify that you are human.

You'll notice a different type of interaction that really doesn't lend itself to a button click. This is also in addition to being accessible to people with visual disabilities. Which is beyond the scope of a button with a single click action.

This article explains it pretty well. It's like language, we are born with the ability and the amount of time we spend on tasks that use sense of direction directly influences how developed or underdeveloped our directional awareness becomes. There's a lot of cool ethnographic research about sense of direction. We use egocentric coordinates that depend on where we are...but many cultures describe where they are and how to get places using fixed geographic locations....that requires them to basically have a compass updating constantly in their brain. I wouldn't quote me on the exactness of these details because I read this quite a while ago in a cultural anthropology textbook, but some cultures have such a highly developed sense of direction that anyone can be taken out into the woods blindfolded at night and spun around a bunch of times and still know exactly what direction they were facing when the blindfold came off....really cool stuff. Hope that helps!

https://www.brainscape.com/blog/2015/06/humans-innate-sense-of-direction/

UPDATE: This is the article that was in my textbook and the part about language and space is almost toward the middle of the page...right below the graphic with all the mouths

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html

Betty Edwards, an experienced drawing teacher, suggests in her book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain that our inability to draw actually comes from our inability to see. When you draw Africa, for example, your mind has a clear-cut idea of what Africa is (most likely developed at a younger age, from the first few times you saw a world map). From that point on, any time you try to draw Africa, this preconceived image dominates your drawings. This is why it is difficult for you to draw things you see, even multiple times.

To test this theory (which I have done, many times), pick a painting that you like. You can also do it with the world map, if you would like. Try to copy it onto a new sheet of paper (don't trace, just put the sheet down next to the painting and copy). Because of your preconceived notions of what a human face, or a car, or anything else looks like, it will probably look nothing like the original (unless you are an artist).

Now, try it again, but this time turn the painting upside down when you copy it. By doing so, your brain no longer recognizes things as "a face", or "a car", but rather as a collection of lines. This means you copy exactly what you see, rather than what you think you see. The results are astounding!

The IBM Watson team put together a set of recipes that were composed by the technology known as the Watson Discovery Advisor. The technology was designed to identify semantic concepts in a corpus of documents, then find patterns across all the documents.

The system was loaded with corpora from three sources: 1) Recipes from Bon Appetit magazine, 2) Chemical definitions for cooking ingredients, and 3) linking it all together, a database of "hedonic psychophysics", a listing of how we experience different flavors from different ingredients.

The machine was then asked to develop new recipes based on knowledge from these three sources.

You can see some of the results here: Chef Watson.

And a cookbook was published: Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson at Amazon

check out the app CVSimulator. It shows how a colorblind person sees the world.

Android

Iphone

Great answer. As an addendum to your last paragraph, I'd like to add that a few different backdrop colors have been used over the years for the purposes of special effects in film. For example, Disney used to use a certain shade of yellow, as you can see in this shot from the set of Mary Poppins.

I'll just quote the article that I got that picture from:

> In what is sometimes called the “Yellow Screen,” renowned film innovator Petro Vlahos developed the sodium vapor process for technicolor film production. This process, which utilized a very specific light wavelength as a backdrop, would effectively “key” out certain colors through a very special camera, which Disney used heavily in the ’50s and ’60s.

check out the app CVSimulator. It shows how a colorblind person sees the world.

Android

Iphone

Are you asking about cannabis use leading to mental illness? The primary well-studied established link is between cannabis use and schizophrenia, and the research clearly suggests the link is only in persons otherwise predisposed to schizophrenia (meaning, they were already at risk of developing the illness, the cannabis use just "pushed them over the edge").

There is also research showing increased rates of depression and anxiety in some cannabis users, though like with schizophrenia, not everyone experiences those symptoms, and more research is needed to better understand the relationship and who is at risk of those symptoms.

EDIT: Sorry everyone, I have the lucky privilege of being on call today, and I have to go do a couple consults. So I'll be in and out the rest of the day. I'll try to check back and answer some questions when I have time.

When someone says "Your phone is more powerful than the computers NASA used to get to the moon" the right response is "Yeah, but your phone has you telling it what to do, and those computers had NASA."

Edit: Thanks for the gold. It brightened a kinda crappy day :D

Edit 2: More specifically, those computers had a contract with a team lead by Margaret Hamilton.

They don't take it to account the cost to society for roads, pollution / health, traffic congestion created by single occupant vehicles and more

https://www.npr.org/2013/03/28/175550949/imf-gas-prices-dont-reflect-true-costs

If you check Windy you'll see the African fires at like 0.1 W/m^2 and the Australian ones at 50 W/m^2.

So being 500x times hotter probably has something to do with the news attention...

Here, the amount of a 1% (w/v) caffeine/PBS solution absorbed transdermally was 2.6 ug/cm^2 per hour. This is a high concentration solution and was done with with a patch applied continuously and directly to a hairless mouse.

So, the amount you would absorb over an entire day would still be sub-milligram amounts, when a cup of coffee typically has about 100 milligrams.

TL;DR: Less than what's in a sip of coffee.

According to Robert Sapolsky in Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, most animals have a quick stress response that is over quickly. For most, this does no long-lasting harm. This is not true for more social and hierarchically organized species.

Check out this video where he describes the research on baboons that won him the MacArthur Genius Grant.

The tl;dw is that baboons are hierarchical and mean to one another. Lower-order baboons have rates of heart-disease comparable with modern humans, despite not eating like we do or watching Netflix all day. It's due to the constant stress of being on the low end of a social hierarchy. However, this is culturally learned and can be culturally unlearned. Serendipitously, he wound up studying a troop where all the aggressive males died at once. The only males left were social and nice, both to one another and to the troop's females. This changed the culture of troop. Not only that, but new males entering the troop were acculturated to the new norms of the troop. Their health improved once the culture of extreme hierarchy and cruelty stopped. It's a pretty life-affirming 10min lecture.

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129551459

A russian mamed Markov injured a tiger, took the tigers kill.

"The injured tiger hunted Markov down in a way that appears to be chillingly premeditated. The tiger staked out Markov's cabin, systematically destroyed anything that had Markov's scent on it, and then waited by the front door for Markov to come home."

"This wasn't an impulsive response," Vaillant says. "The tiger was able to hold this idea over a period of time." The animal waited for 12 to 48 hours before attacking.

When Markov finally appeared, the tiger killed him, dragged him into the bush and ate him. "The eating may have been secondary," Vaillant explains. "I think he killed him because he had a bone to pick."

Breast sagging, or ptosis, has not been significantly linked with sleeping on your stomach. A 2010 study concluded that "age, history of significant (>50 lbs) weight loss, higher body mass index, larger bra cup size, number of pregnancies, and smoking history were found to be significant risk factors for breast ptosis".

Additionally, bra-wearing has been deemed useful for exercise, but it has been reported that no medical evidence exists to confirm that regular bra-wearing prevents sagging.

You need to understand the reasons they wore them. The typical Venetian Plague Mask was a later contribution in the Early Modern Period (very late Middle Ages). Earlier Europeans had no clue about transmission issues, including these later "plague doctors" from several centuries later. The greatest theory of pathogen transmission (they never knew, used, nor understood that terminology) was expressed as sanguine vapours. There was a great notion that invisible blood particles passed from the human eyes, and it was the means of transmitting not only disease but also love and honesty. The long "beak" of the Plague Mask came about later in the centuries because the doctors could put scented items (handkerchefs) to blot out the stench of rotting dead corpses. This rotting reality of dead corpses changed the "sanguine vapours" eye theory towards "air vapours" in later centuries of the great plagues.

​

We still have no real clear idea which disease actually killed a third of the European population during the Black Death, and then one-fifth of the population over the next several centuries in the other flare-ups of the plagues. These people certainly had no idea about immunobiology. Quite a frightening time in Western civilisation.

​

-- PS - I am a Renaissance and Medieval scholar.

I used to work as an explosives chemist. Worked with a lot of ordnance guys over the years.

A collapsing circuit would be the main concern for someone who just randomly started cutting wires. Cut the main power source, and a solenoid (held open by electric current) closes, causing electricity to flow from a second power source into the detonator.

In reality, these are very rare; most of the bombing problem in the United States is from pipe bombs and other simple devices, and the vast majority of that is in Puerto Rico (based on BATF statistics- although these are dated, and possibly changed- I can't seem to find updates on the ATF website right now)- something like 3,000 pipe bombs and other small improvised devices every year.

The simple truth is that there aren't that many determined "mad bombers" that go around building devices with collapsing circuits and other wild devices that are the mainstay of movies. Moreover, when there are, it is rare that lives are placed in danger; the main reason these devices need to be preserved (as was the case with the one device found in Ted Kaczynski's cabin) is for the prosecution. What would have been lost if blown up in place? Nothing- except for a court case. Ditto with the recent Colorado whacko.

Normally today these devices are rendered safe with a combination of field-portable X-rays and a water disruptor, leaving behind plenty of evidence.

The other end of the spectrum consists of unexploded ordnance (UXO), which is the realm of the military. Many of these items have anti-tamper features, and must be handled correctly to render them safe- no "cut all the wires," just mechanical features.

There is a book called Survival of the Sickest I think would interest you.

The tl;dr is that in populations that are under constant pathogen challenge (think malaria in Africa, or tuberculosis in Europe) you do see changes in the genome to reflect it.

But the changes are not 'for the better'. What is selected for is surviving long enough to pass on your genes. So what we wind up with is sickle-cell anemia, which kills its homozygous carriers, and can cripple its survivors and shorten their lifespans, but also conveys resistance to malaria. Or, in the case of tuberculosis, the cystic fibrosis gene does the same- kill its homozygous carriers, allow its heterozygous ones to live long enough to have children and avoid tb.

In both cases, the populations are more suited for living in their conditions than an outsider would likely be. But (unfortunately for us), 'more suited' does not imply 'more robust'.

Our brains are able to use face alone to determine the sex of another person. There are also more obvious cues like body shape, tone of voice so on.

Here is a link on a study about facial gender recognition

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/8460447_Sex_differences_in_face_gender_recognition_in_humans

As a vision scientist, I love this question! You are asking about the difference between sensation (the photons that stimulate your retina) and perception (what you experience, also called phenomenology). This fantastic PDF chapter from MIT clarifies the problem. In a nutshell, the things we can ask about color are these: (1) are colors "real"? (2) Do we all see the same things?

The debate about whether language influences perception is an excellent one. Recent evidence actually suggests that language categories for color do not influence color perception, but can influence, say, color memory. Roberson, Hanley, & Pack (2009) tested whether speakers of English or Korean perceived color boundaries differently. They don't. Perception itself is the same regardless of language. What changes between the two languages are the descriptions or categorizations of these colors.

No. A concussion is caused by trauma to the cranium that causes the brain to contact the inside of the skull with enough force to cause an injury. Since insects lack endoskeletons and dedicated brain cases, any trauma that may be sufficient to cause a concussion will simply kill the insect outright.

Most satellites are in prograde orbits, meaning that they orbit in the same direction that the earth rotates. This is because retrograde orbits, which orbit opposite the direction of the earth's rotation, require more fuel to launch. Think of it like this. If you're in a car going 5 mph and you want to get a projectile going 100 mph you can either throw it forward at 95 mph, or backwards at 105 mph. Obviously forward it easier. That 5 mph car is like the earth's rotation, and the 100 mph projectile (forward or backward, doesn't matter), is like orbital speed.

So unless you have specific launch requirements or orbits in mind, it's simply cheaper and more efficient to launch satellites into prograde orbits.

There are a handful of satellites on retrograde orbits. Israeli satellites, for example, are launched westward so that launch debris would land in the Mediterranean rather than neighboring countries. This comes at the expense of a maximum payload that's 30% less than it would if it launched eastward- that weight is needed for fuel. Additionally, earth-observing satellites may be launched to be slightly retrograde so that they are on a sun-synchronous orbit. This enables them to have constant illumination from the sun when observing the earth.

The short answer is we are not sure.

The long answer is that while Homo Sapiens Sapiens is first seen in the record around 200,000 years ago, there is a concept called Behavioral Modernity that arose ~50kya. (https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmXoypizjW3WknFiJnKLwHCnL72vedxjQkDDP1mXWo6uco/wiki/Behavioral_modernity.html)

Basically there was an apparently rapid rise in art and certain other complex behaviors that may have been associated with a genetic capacity for language as we know it, or it may have just been an entirely cultural change that humans would have been capable of prior if the idea had occurred to them.

> I was interested about this too so I looked it up and was surprised at how lacking the research was.

Consider checking out Invisible Women, a great book discussing this topic in depth.

It also happens to mention that Viagra may be effective at treating period cramps.

The answer lies in the difference in bonding between metals (iron and gold) and ceramics (coal and rocks).

"In ceramics, however, dislocations are not common (though they are not nonexistent), and they are difficult to move to a new position. The reasons for this lie in the nature of the bonds holding the crystal structure together. In ionically bonded ceramics some planes—such as the so-called (111) plane shown slicing diagonally through the rock salt structure in Figure 3, top—contain only one kind of ion and are therefore unbalanced in their distribution of charges. Attempting to insert such a half plane into a ceramic would not favour a stable bond unless a half plane of the oppositely charged ion was also inserted. Even in the case of planes that were charge-balanced—for instance, the (100) plane created by a vertical slice down the middle of the rock salt crystal structure, as shown in Figure 3, bottom—slip induced along the middle would bring identically charged ions into proximity. The identical charges would repel each other, and dislocation motion would be impeded. Instead, the material would tend to fracture in the manner commonly associated with brittleness."

http://www.britannica.com/topic/composition-and-properties-103137

Most of the animals on Earth, and all of the vertebrates, are unable to make blue or green pigments. Animals without fur compensate for this by using refraction effects to separate out the blue light, such as micro-barbs on feathers or micro-scales on reptiles or tiny ridges on the skin of amphibians.

But mammals are covered in fur and lack scales or feather, so this method isn't available to us. Fur is a lot like feathers, but a hair doesn't bifurcate; it doesn't have the little barbs that can scatter blue light like bird feathers do. Mammalian fur can be made the right thickness to scatter blue light, as in some breeds of dogs or cats, but it's still not a very intense blue, and even then it doesn't serve as well as insulation or as padding, so there's a trade-off involved, and among wild animals, it generally hasn't been worth it.

Some mammals, like sloths, allow symbiotic green algae to grow in and on their fur to create a green color, but sloths are pretty weird.

https://www.quora.com/Why-is-green-camouflage-so-rare-among-mammals

Unicorns have a single horn. Goats have two horns. There are other problems. If you listen to Pliny the unicorn was

> a creature with a horse's body, deer's head, elephant's feet, lion's tail, and one black horn two cubits long projecting from its forehead

You're not going to get that from selective breeding.

But, just concentrating on the horn. Some things are not possible with selective breeding -some people think it's not possible to create a pink budgie for example- and some things are possible.

I don't think it's easy to remove a horn, and to move the remaining horn to the centre, and then to grow it straight and long.

Don't forget that many selective breeding programmes have caused considerable genetic flaws in the target population. I guess this is easier to to see in "pedigree" dogs, which often have diseases and deformities linked to breeding.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=unicorn

CAUTION: The following newspaper article contains an image (at the top of the page) that many people will find distressing. It's a hairless cat being held up by its skin.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/petshealth/4990966/Inbred-pedigree-cats-suffering-from-life-threatening-diseases-and-deformities.html

tl;dr No - you'll end up with ugly ill goats with a weird horn thing.

The logic actually goes the other way. The presence of marine fossils in the Himalayas is the biggest indicator that the Indian subcontinent was an island and when it struck Asia, coastal areas were raised to become the mighty Himalayas. The other indicators are the presence of limestone in the mountains and the fact that the Himalayas are still rising as the subcontinent continues to ply into Asia.

We were taught this in school, more than 20 years ago.

Trustable source: https://weather.com/en-IN/india/news/news/2018-06-29-fish-fossil-himalayas

I'm sure there are much better sources around - this was a quick search.

It has to do with how the brain develops. If human babies were born at the equivalently developed time of other animals (particularly apes), it would be approximately 2-3 months later and they would have significantly larger heads. Obviously, this poses a problem for birthing. So human babies are born so helpless because a more developed human brain would be unable to pass through the female pelvic opening. During the first few months/years of a human's development, we develop cognitive skills significantly faster than any other species, but do not necessarily develop motor skills as fast.

Here is an article on it that compares humans to other primates in terms of increased encephalization.

~~Humans have ~10,000 taste buds, for comparison. [source]~~

Bumping NietzscheIsMyCopilot's comment which is better sourced:

> And as for your numbers, according to encyclopedia, humans only have between 2,000 and 8,000 taste buds.

Well, I found an answer by a geologist that suggests that most of the sand in the Sahara is transient and no more than ~150m deep, and with dunes up to 320m high. However, since large swaths of the Sahara are bare rock and not sand, your answer will vary from 0m to <500m (at the tops of the highest dunes) until you strike ancient sandstone or other rock.

Although I can't speak directly to what causes suicidal thoughts in humans as this takes a great deal of psychological and medical perspective that I lack, I can speak to the presence of suicidal behavior in animals on a very basic level.

The pea aphid (Acyrthosiphon pisum), when parasitized by Braconid wasps, (Aphidius ervi) exhibit a cost sensitive suicidal behavior depending on both their reproductive contribution to their population and the probability of their spreading the disease to kin. Essentially what this means is that parasitized adults will become "suicidal" the cost of their life is exceeded by the risk to their immediate gene pool.

It is noteworthy, however, that the "suicidal behavior" is not the same as it would be for humans who are intent on killing themselves or larger animals that exhibit suicidal-like characteristics (there are numerous anecdotal accounts of Philippine Tarsiers committing suicide by bashing their heads against hard surfaces when in captivity or exposed to extreme stress). For the pea aphids, this suicidal behavior amounts to choosing more dangerous routes when escaping from their predators.

It becomes immediately apparent when reading more about accounts (confirmed and unconfirmed) of suicide in the wild that there is a large gradient with no clear division between what does and what does not constitute "suicide". I would expect that in each species, the reasons behind suicidal behavior are unique products of the evolution of their life history.

Two abstracts on the pea aphid and its parasite:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347205806761

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v328/n6133/abs/328797b0.html

Pure water is not a good conductor of electricity, but salts in the water can make good conductors.

The lightning follows the path of least resistance, and does not enter the water immediately. Instead, it creates arc channels in a disk-shape on the surface of the water before entering the water. The voltage then drops off rapidly as the voltage spreads out in a half-sphere. Fish (and people) have a higher resistance than the salt water and so will experience less voltage than the water directly around them. An interesting paper that touches on the topic.

A strike might not have dropped down to background levels (and still be detectable) as far as 1 km.

The issue here is specific to golf balls and vacuum. The shape of a sphere creates a vacuum directly behind it which pulls backwards (drag) on the ball. The dimples induce turbulence which fills this void quickly thus reducing but not eliminating that drag. In the case of a bullet a "boat tail" is added to the end of the bullet which allows the streamlines to converge behind the bullet. If you look at high velocity performance rounds you will see this principle applied universally. Dimples would actually cause the rounds to tumble.

Source: Mechanical Engineer

Edit: In the case of submarines and boats some of the same principles apply but you have the added complication of the propeller/s being at the back. Ideally the input stream for a propeller is as laminar as possible. The shape is designed to allow the vessel to slip through the water instead of plowing through it like a golf ball through air. Also in water turbulence and cavitation make noise which can get you killed in a naval scenario. Cavitation is different but related. I can expand if you want.

Edit 2: Here's a good quick overview of what reducing turbulence in fluid flow looks like. These suits broke so many records at the Beijing Olympics that they are no longer allowed.

The trouble is, you can't extract energy from something hot alone - it violates the laws of Thermodynamics. To extract energy, you need to build a Heat Engine that moves heat energy from something hot to something cool. That's what it would do at the surface - work between the hot fluid and the cool local environment.

You could put a turbine at the bottom of the hole, but then you'd need to move low-temperature working fluid from the surface to the turbine for it to have something to work against. Considering that, plus the difficulty of building a turbine and generator that can work under those conditions, maintaining it at the bottom of the hole, and getting the electricity to the surface, it's a no-go.

maybe my post is best suited for this question! You need (on average, for any species) 4169 individuals but the conservative estimates for mammals are around 7000 and there's only direct evidence for 12000 or so.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320707002534

since these are individuals, divide by 2 for # couples

It's the original Universe Sandbox which launched on Steam in 2011.

The sequel, Universe Sandbox ², is still in active development (although it's handling of the collisions of human scale objects (like dice, marbles, and bowling balls) isn't as good as the original even though everything else is far improved). We just brought on a new developer last month to work on solving this exact problem.

If you buy the sequel and want the original too, email us your email receipt and mention this post and we'll send you a Steam code for the original...

I am the creator & director of Universe Sandbox ².

This is an interesting read on how a corpse fairs in different weather conditions. I would say that a severed limb would likely start decaying, and based on the article could even mummify. I don't think it would sunburn in the traditional sense due to desiccation of the tissues

Not a direct answer to your question, but here is an article from 1980 about the proposal by Robert Pound (very prominent Harvard physicists, just died in 2010) to use microwaves for residential heating. I realize this doesn't answer the question of how much heating you would feel near a standard kitchen microwave oven, but it is worth knowing about if you're interested in this question.

OK - first take a look at this: https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1zp_HHPnwQIk0iopDHy5OBzCutwJI9tA7FJLuuFhVPfU/edit?hl=en_US

Anything at altitude is subject to gravity, which will draw it back towards the planet's centre of mass. First, let's look at object A. The green arrows indicate the gravitational vector. The only way to keep this satellite in a stable orbit, is for it to be moving sideways fast enough that the 'fall' due to gravity maintains it at the orbit altitude.

Object B is in a higher orbit, and you'll see that it has a smaller gravity vector. Similarly, to maintain its orbit it needs less orbital velocity.

Hence, low earth orbit objects need a high orbital velocity (the ISS orbits about 16 times a day, at 27,700 km/h), while high orbits have a lower orbital velocity (geostationary satellites travel only one orbit a day, at about 11,000 km/h).

Back to the original question - while you would be stepping off your building and dropping, you would be imparted with enough velocity to maintain a geostationary orbit. Bare in mind - this only works at geostationary altitude. If you stepped off higher up you would be placed in an orbit for which you were travelling too fast, and hence you would prograde away, while if you stepped off at lower altitude you would be travelling to slowly and would follow a retrograde orbit to eventually burn up in the atmosphere.

You should also be aware of this. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/vasovagal-syncope/symptoms-causes/syc-20350527

Vasovagal Syncope is more common than I ever thought and I noticed the muffled sounds often too. After lots of testing they found that I pass out on a "tilt table test". Basically, if I stand too quickly I'm prone to the drop in blood pressure (which causes muffled sounds and fainting occasionally).

I really like Project Euler for learning new programming languages. It just gives you lots of little problems to solve. They start out very easy and gradually get harder and harder.

http://projecteuler.net/

No, we don't have a pattern of insect size increasing as oxygen levels increase.

The giant "dragonflies" look like dragonflies, but they are members of the order Meganisoptera, which is different from modern dragonflies.

Meganisopterans lived in the Carboniferous and Permian. They show up around the time that oxygen levels peak and are still present in the fossil record as the rock record indicates oxygen levels are dropping. There are large specimens dated to the Late Permian, which some sources of data indicate had the lowest atmospheric oxygen levels of the last 500 million years.

So right now the evidence indicates that they were supported just fine in atmospheres similar to or lower in oxygen than ours.

Also, where meganisopterans occur alongside members of the same order as modern dragonflies, the dragonflies are not gigantic. Meganisopterans go extinct at the end of the Permian in a huge mass extinction, after which dragonflies increase in size (but don't become gigantic) even though oxygen levels are low. And dragonflies don't get huge when oxygen levels increase again in the Jurassic. To be able to say there's a pattern you'd have to track insect size changing as atmospheric oxygen levels changed, and that's not the case.

The case for dark matter being real is actually very strong.

I know nobody who has made the case for dark matter being real better than Ethan Siegel. Give it a read.

(PS: I think this is a fair question, and I think it is unfair to downvote objections instead of replying)

Everything in the demo - music, textures, models are generated from equations and or algorithms. The small number of assets will be used repeatedly. All the strawberries will be the same strawberry rendered repeatedly in different places and with different rotations. All the leaves will be the same leaf.

Eg. Storing every polyogon on a high resolution sphere takes a lot of space but you can generate it with a few lines of code which compiles to a hundred bytes or so Procedural Sphere Generation

Textures are often perlin or Brownian noise which again can be completely generated from a hundred bytes or so of compiled code.

[EDIT] : Technically this is a form of compression, the form you are thinking of doesn't use prior knowledge to improve the compression. These techniques use prior knowledge of the data to reduce the size of data required to regenerate the desired data. But even without priors (and a low enough information data set) you can get some crazy big compression ratios. 42kB file extracts to 45pB

As has been pointed out here, a reflex doesn’t involve the brain. Stimulus sends a signal to the spinal cord which sends back a signal for the proper response. No thinking needed, it is very fast. In order for a boxer to dodge a punch, he has to know the punch is coming. That information comes from the eyes and must be processed by the brain.

There is something else that looks and feels a lot like reflex that can be developed through repetition, practice, training, etc. People here are calling it muscle memory, but that’s a misleading term as it implies the memory resides in the muscles. It happens when a response or activity becomes so familiar that it is stored in a part of the unconscious brain. Many of the daily tasks we do are executed in this way: tying your shoes, driving home from work, typing on your keyboard. You’re barely aware of doing them and you would be hard pressed to explain exactly how you do them.

It would be impossible to hit a fastball if you had to think about it; it would be in the catcher’s mitt before you formulated any thought or initiated any action. But practice trying to hit a ball 1000 times, or 10,000 times, and then you’re ready to bypass, not the brain, but the conscious thought process. And, if you’re good, you will be able to hit that fastball one time out of every three or four. But it’s not a reflex, the information needed to do it is still in your brain, but in a part of your brain that works much faster that conscious thought.

Sources: Thinking, Fast and Slow: Daniel Kahneman, The Stuff of Thought: Language As a Window Into Human Nature: Steven Pinker.

It's a fact

Don't forget the energy costs of manufacture and transportation. It takes 17.3 terawatts of energy to manufacture and transport toilet paper per year. That's a huge carbon footprint.

If you're concerned about the ecological impact of TP, I highly recommend a bidet attachment for your toilet like this:

https://www.amazon.com/Luxe-Bidet-Neo-120-Non-Electric/dp/B00A0RHSJO/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1541959341&amp;sr=8-3&amp;keywords=bidet+attachment+for+toilet&amp;dpID=419LXSZM6YL&amp;preST=_SX300_QL70_&amp;dpSrc=srch

You will use significantly less toilet paper, maybe even eschewing it entirely.

According to this TED talk, you'll need at least 4 areca palms, 6-8 mother-in-law tongues, and 1 (maybe more? he didn't specify) money plant per person.

Awesome! I also wanted to be a paleontologist since I was in kindergarten, and I am so thankful to my parents who helped me to follow my dreams! We were (and still are) members at our local museum, The Field Museum in Chicago, so I got to go on members night behind the scenes tours and meet real scientists. We also did all sorts of paleontology activities around Chicago and also while on vacation. I definitely would not have become a paleontologist without my parents support.

Tell your daughter that being a paleontologist is an amazing career and that she should follow her dreams! Take as many science classes as she can. Biology and geology are critical, but chemistry, physics, math and statistics are also very important. Art and drawing in particular are also important because they help you to be keener observers of the world around you. Spend lots of time outdoors, thinking about how the natural world works today. Maybe have her make her own field notebook, where she can record her observations and sketches and then more detailed notes as she learns about what she is seeing? A good birthday present might be "Cruising the Fossil Freeway" by Kirk Johnson and Ray Troll (https://www.amazon.com/Cruisin-Fossil-Freeway-Scientist-Ultimate/dp/1555914519).

There's an app called Sleep as Android that tracks your sleep and adjusts your alarm clock within a choosen timeframe based on your phase of sleep. Never really worked for myself but other people seem to love it.

That's really interesting about the D and L glucose structures. If I'm reading this abstract correctly, the L glucose can be synthesized cheaply using a specific technique.

Well, babies are cute...

>Konrad Lorenz proposed the concept of baby schema (Kindchenschema), a set of facial and body features, that make a creature appear "cute" and activate ("release") in others the motivation to care for it.

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuteness

We know humans and animals (Lorenz used birds) have these tendencies. I don't think it is clear yet if the same response happens between different species. The fact we find puppies and kittens cute would suggest to me it does.

A lot of answers saying “this is why we don’t use metal cubes”. Basically none saying “they exist and people do use them”:

https://www.amazon.com/Franmara-Stainless-Steel-Cubes-Deluxe/dp/B0083RBXOY

Yes they don’t stay as cold as long as other commenters have noted but also as OP says, they’re re-usable. It’s an option and people use them. ����‍♂️

Although this is not my area of expertise, I feel that I need to weigh in because the top voted comments are incorrect.

Your body does not go into a ketogenic state. And even if it did, this would not cause the hunger pains that you are feeling.

Assuming the average human eats their last meal of the day around 1-4 hours before sleep, and then sleeps for about 7 hours, they are, essentially, fasting for half of the day. In order to keep your blood-glucose levels at a pretty constant state, your body does all of the following (this is called energy homeostasis):

• decreases the use of glucose by impairing the glucose tolerance (insulin not produced in response to glucose presence) and by removing any present insulin

• releases leptin, which triggers satiety

• suppresses appetite

I would hazard a guess that, on days when you wake up hungry, the day before you ate a late meal, and your body has not yet had a chance to deal with the "consequences" of that meal. Once you wake up, and your body goes back to normal, this may cause a dip in your blood-glucose levels, causing your hunger pains.

Edit: best source I could find quickly (sorry, requires licensing, but abstract is available)

This will take some participation - but if anyone wants to put it to the test I have set up a survey monkey asking for your birthday. I will simply collect the data into "rooms" of 23 submissions and test the results.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/N6XSBBD

Clarification Year is not taken into equation

*UPDATE - I made an error in my tables which caused the data to be flawed - please see new results

• Room 1 - No Matches
• Room 2 - 2 Matches (1/21 & 11/21)
• Room 3 - 2 Matches (8/20 & 1/01)
• Room 4 - No Matches
• Room 5 - 2 Matches (11/11 & 10/31)
• Room 6 - 1 Match (11/23)
• Room 7 - 2 Matches (2/25 & 8/25)
• Room 8 - No Matches
• Room 9 - 1 Match (5/15)
• Room 10 - 2 Matches (6/30 & 3/31)
• Room 11 - No Matches
• Room 12 - No Matches
• Room 13 - No matches
• Room 14 - 1 Match (8/27)

These results are inline with the statement and actually demonstrate a higher than 50% chance

1/speed of sound ~ 4.689 seconds/mile. So for every 4.7 seconds, sound travels 1 mile. Granted the actual rate is dependent on air pressure, humidity, temperature, I'd say roughly for every 9 seconds, sound travels 2 miles. So when you see the lightning, that's so fast we'll say it's instantaneously at you, and if you hear the thunder 9 seconds later, then the sound has traveled 2 miles to get to you.

So a lot of people are touching on the idea of where language is localized. Most of the time we have language localized in our left-hemispheres. The left side of our brain controls the right side of our body, and vice versa. It is commonly believed that this is why most people are right-handed.

This article says that:

>Functional hemispheric language lateralization has shown to be correlated with handedness: 95% of right-handers show left-sided functional hemispheric language lateralization, while 15% of left-handers show right-sided functional lateralization (Lurito and Dzemidzic, 2001 and Pujol et al., 1999).

Also a weird fact that left-handers tend to have shorter life expectancies for some reasons that are currently not well understood. Here is one study on that topic.

I read somewhere on pubmed that cholesterol metabolism in the skin may have an effect on mosquito interest in a person.

Here’s a webmd link, not exactly pubmed.

Looking at some of the formation models for the solar system are pretty instructive. I know AskScience hate speculative stuff, but what about papers that run speculative models? These suggest that small changes in the eccentricity of Jupiter would result in significant changes in the rate at which comets are fed into the inner solar system in the early history of the planet, and that a direct result of that is that changing Jupiter's eccentricity can turn Earth into a desert planet or a water world. How on the knife-edge were we, if this is true?

> really feel some emotional attachment to their owners or do they just stick around for food and shelter

Interesting question, but I think it is a false dichotomy. Arguably the reason that individual-specific attachment evolved (e.g. a duckling following the first animal or robot that it meets upon hatching) is because it is, on average, beneficial for finding food and shelter. Attachments can form without learned associations with food and shelter, they are automatic. Dogs' specific attachment to their human owners is a selected trait that is absent in wolves (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347205003155).

As to your second question, how can you prove an animal "really feels" an emotion? How can you prove your best friend really feels an emotion and isn't just a sociopath/brilliant actor putting on a show to manipulate you for the material benefits of your friendship? This conundrum is the foundation of the behaviorist turn in psychology, which still has not been well resolved by the upswing in neuroscience methods (e.g. monitoring activity of brain regions to infer feelings).

there is software like f.lux and redshift to adjust the colour temperature of your screen based on the time of day. Subjectively, I find it's somewhat effective at reducing eyestrain, not sure if it's effective at improving sleep or anything though.

In the book The Black Hole War, Stephen Hawking made a deliberately provocative comment in a small physics symposium that, if Professor Hawking was right, would shake the foundations of quantum physics to the ground. Leonard Susskind disagreed with Hawking's position, but was unable to demonstrate it mathematically.

It would take him ten years to do so, involving him with many other physicists and leading to several startling discoveries about the nature of black holes, time and space, leading to the holographic principle. Ten years of furious, brilliant research by multiple luminaries in the field, all touched off by a single, insightful question by Professor Hawking.

Susskind's book is quite accessible and well worth a read. Readers will get to see how physics is done, at least at the social and professional level. Plus, for a while and through Susskind, one gets to hang around a quiet social gathering of some of the most brilliant physicists the world has seen.

Well they are hundreds of light years across, and thousands of light years away- here are some of the latest images of the galactic dust. So no, you're not going to ever get a probe like that- even Voyager would take tens or hundreds of thousands of years to get to a good vantage point.

That said, we do have a good idea of what the galactic center is like part because of measurements in other wavelengths as I said, but also because we can peer into other galaxies that are similar to the Milky Way but are at a different orientation. For example, here are some observations of the center of my user-namesake the Andromeda Galaxy, which is a spiral galaxy very similar to ours (except prob a bit bigger).

While this may not answer your question, here's an interesting video about one man's attempt to build a toaster from scratch.

During the wake / sleep transition, the bidirectional communication between the hippocampus and cortex is thought to be disrupted, thereby inhibiting the consolidation of recent (right before sleep transition) memories.

This is still a topic of active research, but hopefully this helps.

Apparently, up to about 6 hours!

Biologists P.N. Srivastava and Morris Rockstein wanted to know how houseflies used chemical energy within their bodies during flight, and part of their experiments involved making flies fly until exhaustion. The times varied dramatically based on the flies' age however, as the youngest flies (1 day after molting) could stay aloft 5.5-6.3 hours, the oldest (8 days) only 38 min-2.1 hours. They then fed fed some flies, and injected others with sugar solutions in order to investigate their metabolism and see what got them buzzing.

I'd love to have been a fly on the wall when they thought of flying flies until fried. I'm going to bug out, but here's the source: The utilization of trehalose during flight by the housefly, Musca domestica.

Here are a couple studies I found. The first:

> A series of experiments has investigated the relationship between the playing of background music during the performance of repetitive work and efficiency in performing such a task. The results give strong support to the contention that economic benefits can accure from the use of music in industry. The studies show that music is effective in raising efficiency in this type of work even when in competition with the unfavourable conditions produced by machine noise.

And the second:

> An experiment was designed to look at the effects of 4 types of music, vs. No music, on the quantity and quality of production and the attitude of workers engaged in the routine task of assembling and packing skateboards. Ss were 26 assembly-line personnel ages 18-23. 4 types of music were played: dance, show, folk, and popular. These were contrasted with periods during which no music was played. Music conditions were balanced with respect to days of the week over a period of 5 wk. Results showed that, while employees had a highly favorable attitude toward music and thought they did more work with it, there was no change in measured productivity.

Here is an article written from a pilot's perspective of the beast. It's a very entertaining read.

The jet's top recorded speed according to the pilot was actually a short sprint at Mach 3.5, which is 2,660 mph or 4,280 kph. Unfortunately the titanium skin would creep at those temperatures so it could only fly that quickly for a very short period of time. When it was shot at with missiles (almost 4,000 times total), the pilot simply had to up the throttle to speed away from them.

Because it leaked so bad on the ground like you mentioned, after it took off it did a quick sprint so the body would heat up and expand, filling in the cracks that were designed in the titanium skin. Then the Blackbird would have to slow down to allow the fueler jet to refill it, letting the SR-71 continue on with its mission. The special fuel was heat resistant and doubled as a coolant for the craft, and the wing temperatures still reached 600^o C.

You could essentially say that it splits in half. There's absolutely no physical difference between an alpha particle and a (fully ionised) ^(4)He nucleus.

Let's assume we're in the centre-of-momentum frame: the initial ^(8)Be decays at rest. To conserve energy and momentum, the resultant pair of ^(4)He nuclei will have equal and opposite momentum and equal kinetic energy.

The kinetic energy will sum to the difference in mass between a ^(8)Be nucleus and two ^(4)He nuclei (multiplied by c^(2)). This is known as the Q-value of the decay.

~~The electrons almost certainly get shared between the two nuclei.~~ or not

For the most part, the only thing between galaxies is the warm-hot intergalactic medium. However, globular clusters are often found "outside" of galaxies in that they occupy the galactic halo primarily rather than the main body of the galaxy itself, at least in spiral galaxies.

AFAIK there was no paper that was retracted. However there was enough material written to publish a couple of papers, but George Levick judged that the scientific community was not ready for necrophiliac tuxedo snowmen.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jun/09/sex-depravity-penguins-scott-antarctic

PNG/JPG files can be generated automatically, on-demand (for example, using PHP - see http://php.net/manual/en/image.examples-png.php).

Contents (including text) can be easily set using variables available to PHP script during execution.

Your IP, browser info and OS are sent to the server during load request, so they are also available to developer. They can be used to generate any image file and served back as JPG/PNG file.

Once generated, JPG/PNG file obviously can't modify itself - it will remain static. So if you download it, it won't change. You will probably see changes when you refresh that page, because JPG will get regenerated.

Just to tag onto the original question...

Has there been any study to the effect of Chemotherapy on hair follicles? I've heard from a few different people that have gone through it that their hair grew back coarser and curlier. I'm finding confirmation on Mayo's website but they list the effect as temporary.

> It may take several weeks after treatment for your hair to recover and begin growing again. When your hair starts to grow back, it will probably be slightly different from the hair you lost. But the difference is usually temporary. Your new hair might have a different texture or color. It might be curlier than it was before, or it could be gray until the cells that control the pigment in your hair begin functioning again.

I find lots of studies on the hair loss portion of Chemo, but I'm not having a lot of success on finding studies on the returning hair after.

Actually, penecillin allergies are one of the most commonly misdiagnosed conditions in children. But in any case, the allergy when it really does exist is to the antibiotic molecule itself and not to co-purification products as many believe. So even if you really are allergic, you should be able to eat any Penecillium species as long as they are not producers of penecillin.

I just read about this in The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg (HIGHLY recommended)! Turns out they were also marketing it incorrectly. As r/mac_question said, it was almost pulled because it was only sold to eliminate bad odors. When they started marketing it as an air freshener, to be used after cleaning was done, sales skyrocketed.

No. You need (on average, for any species) 4169 individuals but the conservative estimates are around 7000 and there's only direct evidence for 12000 or so. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320707002534

you are actually asking several questions: in evolutionary bio we ask "what is the lowest number of individuals in a population that could allow the population to survive?" (this is studied through/asked about highly endangered animals) and this number is called the Minimum Viable Population and it varies by species, genetics, predation, etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_population

1. how diverse could we become? is irrelevant, since the species would die out BUT if you're interested: diversity depends on many things 2 big ones are: A- the initial genetic diversity, meaning the different alleles (different flavors of genes - like brown vs blue eyes) and B- mutation rates- roughly .003/generation (Drake et al 1998)

keywords: population bottleneck, mutation rates, inbreeding coefficient, minimum viable population, Toba catastrophe

Yes, but this proof has to be made in a stronger formal system. For example, the continuum hypothesis is undecidable in ZFC, and the axiom of choice is undecidable in ZF.

The reason I'm linking undecidable statements is because technically you could say that any negation of a theorem is unprovable (since it's false), but this assumes that the formal system you are operating in is consistent, a claim which is in itself undecidable in that system.

Here's a pretty good resource: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Neuroethology_of_Insect_Walking

Scholarpedia in general is pretty cool. It's a peer reviewed wiki for science.

If you are interested in implementing a distributed, neuro-inspired walking controller, I suggest looking at walknet.

We present this approach along with vaccine-by-vaccine talking point in our recent book (in case you would like to have access to a more detailed resource). Here's the link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07FNG3C2S/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_W4gCCb0K2Z6KW

Someone mentioned that the link isn't working (sorry, new to Reddit). Here's the name of the book: "The Clinician’s Vaccine Safety Resource Guide: Optimizing Prevention of Vaccine-Preventable Diseases Across the Lifespan"

It just depends on how you’re imagining it. Obviously the hypothetical is impossible anyways, so the question is what is in your head.

If it’s a foot of water stacked exactly in the same direction everywhere, then the mountains don’t matter. If it’s a foot of water aimed directly perpendicular to the ground, then the mountains matter a lot.

Think about one of these (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01FPHLFRE/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_awdb_t1_YyaAAbWPDNY3C). The same number of pins covers the same amount of space regardless of the elevation. But only if the pins are all going in the same direction. If the requirement was perpindicular coverage, obviously you’d need more pins to stick out to the side of your finger or hand.

Universe Sandbox actually has a very similar interactive system included. Load it and you will see a bowling ball with many smaller objects (baseballs, dice, etc.) in orbit. The orbital period looks to be in the range calculated by mutatron. Quite remarkable!

Morning wood is a way to describe waking up with a erection. This is a common occurrence that virtually every male has experienced. In order to understand the reason for morning wood, you must first learn a little about the sleep cycle. When a person first falls asleep they begin in stage 1 NREM (non-rapis eye movement) sleep. As they continue to sleep they fall into a deeper and deeper sleep, eventually arriving at stage 4 NREM. This is the stage where the most restful sleep occurs. After a certain amount of time in stage 4 NREM the person goes into REM sleep, which is a fairly shallow sleep. This is the part of sleep when you dream. In this stage of sleep your body gets temporarily paralyzed and runs a series of self checks. One of those is an erection, called nocturnal tumescence. If you wake up while in REM sleep, you will wake up with morning wood. The body cycles through the different stages approximately every 90 minutes through the night, but as you get more and more rested, you spend less time in the restful NREM sleep and more time in the dream filled (and erection filled) sleep. So the longer you sleep, the more likely you will wake up with morning wood.

Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_do_you_get_morning_wood#ixzz1dPbNlnqz

Bubbles get you drunker faster. The carbonation forces your pyloric valve open faster so the alcohol enters your blood stream more quickly.... so if you're used to drinking beer and you start drinking liquor it may take longer to feel the effects, thus getting you more hammered in the long run. Same deal with Champagne vs. Wine

Source: Slide 10

Edit: I learned how to edit AND how to add a link!

Briefly, one of the reasons is that the glycolytic capacity of the brain is low. Consequentially, ATP depletion and lactate production is dramatic in the brain.

This paper should answer your question quite comprehensively. If you can't access it, send me a PM and we'll get you the pdf.

I have my doubts about your source and those numbers. The "tongue map" is an incredibly antiquated concept that has already been debunked (source) And as for your numbers, according to encyclopedia, humans only have between 2,000 and 8,000 taste buds.

When you have a high fever, enzymatic action all over your body begins to slow or fail all-together (this is a reason why people die from hyperthermia; enzymes fail to function at high temperatures).

In the brain, this causes an unbalanced level of certain neurotransmitters and other psychoactive compounds due to the lack of enzyme function needed to break down or create them. When this occurs, hallucinations, 'stroke' (due to heat), and other odd feelings begin to surface. Eventually, if the fever continues to rise, delirium, loss of consciousness, coma, or death can occur.

Edit: Best I can do for a source is an abstract and to hope your prior knowledge is the same as mine. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0306362382900568

Also, this article explains it didn't contaminate the lake anyway. Apparently when the drill punched through the ice, pressurized water forced the antifreeze back out the drill hole before freezing into 100 foot ice plug

Actually to an extent a virtual machine could be able to tell how slow it's running and that its actually virtual machine. Software exists to be installed specifically onto virtual machines (VirtualBox Guest Additions for example) giving the virtual machine greater capability, performance, and reliability. Basically it's a program that taps the VM on the shoulder and says "FYI... You're a VM. You're running in a window right now IRL."

Visual signal transduction occurs through a relatively slow (but still really fast to you an me) biochemical cascade that takes tens of milliseconds just in the photoreceptor cells alone

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/G_protein-coupled_receptor.

http://webvision.med.utah.edu/book/part-v-phototransduction-in-rods-and-cones/phototransduction-in-rods-and-cones/

Melatonin plays an important role in our bodies as it helps to regulate the circadian rhythm.

According to this study the wavelengths most relative to melatonin production are 446-477 nm. These are blue wavelengths, and may or may not be produced by the lamps you have.

Melatonin does cause drowsiness and lower the body temperature so it helps to put us to sleep, but it doesn't seem to play a key role in keeping us asleep. It regulates the phase of the rhythm, meaning it helps to set when we fall asleep and wake.

Other chemicals like cortisol are suspected to play a stronger role in keeping us asleep, but they have more complex roles. They more play a role in sleep-staging, which is in itself poorly understood.

If you had a monitor with a resolution such that there were 34 pixels in total (17x2 would be an example of such a resolution), you'd have roughly the same number of different possible combinations as there are atoms in the visible universe (10^80)

Research suggests that "during sleep, swallowing is episodic, with long swallow-free periods" and is generally &quot;associated with movement arousal&quot; (which is most frequent during certain stages of sleep).

Some of this has a long long history - evolution works on existing body plans. So you have only one stomach because this was basically a bigger and more specialized part of the tube.

Some of the organs are sort of symmetrical but not separated (you can see that here with a guinea pig liver. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Comparative-Study-of-the-Liver-Anatomy-in-the-Rat%2C-Stan/01274da57b64cebf0882db15f8da1f22373e675b/figure/1)

The heart is also (in humans anyway) also like that - left and right sided but not separate.

The most accepted theory for this unfortunate effect is that broad spectrum antibiotics reduce levels of intestinal bacteria, which metabolize estrogen components of the contraceptive pill to allow the liposoluble part back into circulation in the body. When bacterial levels are reduced, there is a significant increase in estrogen excretion [1]. To put it bluntly, a microbial imbalance leads to a metabolic imbalance, which leads to a hormonal imbalance and babby formed [2].

Sources: [1] http://www.medicinaoral.com/pubmed/medoralv14_i3_p123.pdf [2] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0029784401015320

That's the karst landscape of Yangshuo.

Karst topography is a landscape shaped by the dissolution of a layer or layers of soluble bedrock, usually carbonate rock such as limestone or dolomite.

Have you heard of the Nicaraguan Sign Language? A number of deaf Nicaraguan students, unable to communicate with other hearing-abled people, began to develop a crude sign language when placed in a community together. The younger students further refined the pidgin into complex syntax structures. It's, near as we can tell, the most recent natural birth of a new language.

Also, I suggest reading The Language Instinct. Although some ideas in Pinker's book are debatable, he makes an extremely good case for the instinctual nature of language—that it is a biological cognitive adaptation of humans on the level of dam-building in beavers.

This seems to be what you're looking for although it does appear to be quite an involved process, not something you can do in ten minutes.

You might be able to make some sort of cardboard periscope-type arrangement, although it may not be as sturdy.

Oh, and putting on normal glasses upside down doesn't work.

It's styling that is specific to this subreddit. Those headings are made by the text you want inside, followed by a horizontal break (made by --- on it's own line).

Input:

Heading Text ---

Output:

Heading Text

For most of reddit, that input would produce:

Heading Text

For future reference, if you install RES, you can see the "source" of any comment showing you the actual input.

Sure, but this work is easier to do in primates, and it's been done. (Sorry for the paywall - [/r/scholar](/r/scholar) might help you out if you really want it.)

They apparently have a default mode network, meaning they might have some sort of introspective process, so it's somewhat reasonable to assume they have a similar inner monologue to ours.

It's just not really possible to definitively verify experiential events without real communication, something we are currently not capable of with primates - or dolphins.