Two pretty cool sciency-stuff-thingys

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Lagrangian
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Wondering: Isn't is odd how so few people know what a Yautja is? I mean, have you seen the size of those omnibuses? With the amount of material out there, you think it would be more common knowledge.
 
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GeorgeK

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I don't do links. Are you talking about the Great White Shark? It seems to not senesce.
 
dgiharris

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Two points.

#1 The jellyfish story is perhaps the coolest thing i've ever read in my entire life.

#2, Stay away from Yautjas when they are in heat. Trust me on this one.

Mel...
 
Ruv Draba

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  1. The jellyfish's mouth is also its anus
  2. You don't live forever as a jellyfish -- it just feels like you do
 

Mac H.

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GeorgeK said:
I don't do links. Are you talking about the Great White Shark? It seems to not senesce.
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Why don't you do links?

Aren't you missing out on a great deal of knowledge?

Here's a link to Finch's book "Longevity, Senescence, and the Genome" for a very readable summary of aging characteristics of various animals, including sharks.

Basically - the belief that Great White Sharks don't senesce is a myth created to sell pills filled with magic anti-aging ingredients made from shark cartilage. (Along with the oft-repeated lie 'Sharks don't get cancer')

Right now, we haven't observed many Great White Sharks aging. Or Great White Sharks copulating. Or Great White Sharks giving birth.

In fact, the longest we've kept one in captivity for is a few months .. so it isn't surprising to find that we didn't have a lot of data on their aging or other habits...

For those interested in knowledge (even if it means clicking on a link), here's a National Geographic article about Great White Shark behaviour in the wild:

http://www.whitesharktrust.org/pages/mediaarticle/media25.html

Mac
 
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Plot Device

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Does the jelly fish retain its memories and its "selfness" when it repeatedly returns to a polyp again and again? I realize no one here can answer that question. But I ask because the question pretty much delinates my own outlook on true essence of something qualifying as immortality. A sort of a neo-reincarnation.
 
Shadow_Ferret

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The jellyfish thing is cool. How many of us are running of to write a story about it now?

they were able to cloak a tiny bump in a layer of gold, preventing its detection at nearly visible infrared frequencies
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Um. That's not invisibility, that's just hiding something. I could hide in a cloak of gold, too. You might not see me, but you'd see the cloak.
 
icerose

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Plot Device said:
Does the jelly fish retain its memories and its "selfness" when it repeatedly returns to a polyp again and again? I realize no one here can answer that question. But I ask because the question pretty much delinates my own outlook on true essence of something qualifying as immortality. A sort of a neo-reincarnation.
Click to expand...

Well a goldfish has a memory between 5-20 seconds. Take something out of their tank and 20 seconds later they won't even remember it was ever there.

Given that jellyfish are fairly simple organisms, I would venture to say their memory is probably similar.

ETA: Looks like they don't even have a brain, they do have neurons but basically run on instinct and reaction rather than any sort of learning or memory.
 
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Zoombie

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Shadow_Ferret said:
Um. That's not invisibility, that's just hiding something. I could hide in a cloak of gold, too. You might not see me, but you'd see the cloak.
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No, that's invisibility to people who see in infrared. If we can do it to one kind of E.M radiation, who's to say we can't do it to another?

Now, what I'm interested in is if we can use this to make some kind of super radiation shield for spacecraft.
 
Zoombie

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Just because we don't have a spaceship does not mean we can't have a fancy cool radiation bending material that makes gamma radiation flow around you like water.

Heck, that could be useful for radiation suits as well!
 
Bartholomew

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Zoombie said:
No, that's invisibility to people who see in infrared. If we can do it to one kind of E.M radiation, who's to say we can't do it to another?

Now, what I'm interested in is if we can use this to make some kind of super radiation shield for spacecraft.
Click to expand...

The news article talked about their research as if they were making cloaking devices, but I think the journalist was trying WAY too hard to get that injected into the article.

I suspect the researchers have considered the implications of being able to "cloak" an object in certain spectrums.
 
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