Weekly Round-up 2018.51
There Is a Spider That Feeds Its Young Delicious Milk, Because Nature Is Scary
Scientists typically define mammals as animals that have hair, produce live young, and produce milk. It’s a simple definition, but nature is very good at defying simple definitions. Platypuses, for instance, lay eggs. And plenty of non-mammals produce milk for their young. One group of researchers from China have discovered that even spiders produce milk, and it’s so nutritious that their offspring eat it for a surprisingly long time.
The Privileged Two
Mr Tubridy is too privileged himself to get into the style of interviewing that is needed to really interrogate Fine Gael’s privatisation goals; as the taoiseach is too privileged to even see the problem of homelessness in the first place, except as a kind of abstract “problem”, out there somewhere.
Westford resident gives town the middle finger
If you find yourself doing a double-take while driving down Route 128 between Westford and Fairfax — yes, that is a seven-foot-tall sculpture of a raised middle finger, carved from a 700-pound block of pine and perched atop a 16-foot pole on the property of Ted Pelkey.
Ted Pelkey, I salute you.
Meet the Money Burners
Harris doesn’t know why people burn money. He makes a point not to ask. “One of the rules I set myself was to never ask or tell anyone to burn their money” For Harris, it’s less about why he does it and more a question of, “Why not?”
I don’t get this at all, but I find the topic fascinating.
How a long-forgotten virus could help us solve the antibiotics crisis
Viruses have a bad reputation – but some of them could one day save your life, says biotech entrepreneur Alexander Belcredi. In this fascinating talk, he introduces us to phages, naturally-occurring viruses that hunt and kill harmful bacteria with deadly precision, and shows how these once-forgotten organisms could provide new hope against the growing threat of antibiotic-resistant superbugs.
The darkest building on Earth
The building’s exterior is covered with a substance called Vantablack VBx2, a derivative of nanomaterial Vantablack. Touted as the darkest man-made substance in the world, the original Vantablack is so black the human eye can’t quite decipher what it is seeing.
It is said to be the closest thing to a black hole we will ever experience.
That’s because Vantablack is not a color, it’s the almost complete absence of color.