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Might need more candles on Mercury. Photo by Richard Burlton on Unsplash
Calculate your age on other planets! Your Age On Other Worlds is an online calculator that will translate your Earth age into the corresponding age on the other planets (including Pluto! This is a Pluto safe site) based on their revolution period (i.e. how long it takes the planet to make one trip around the Sun.) The site also has many other planet and space science facts if you’re into that.
I’m only .21 Pluto years old, according to the site. Can that be right? Has Pluto not even made it around the Sun once since I was born? But I’m 222 Mercury years old. So it’s all relative. Enjoy!
Pluto forever!
Meanwhile, in Australia, the spider apocalypse. Or, as Australians call it, Thursday. ‘Spider apocalypse’ hits Australia covering countryside in eerie blankets of cobwebs after biblical mouse plague
The spooky veil covering shrubs, grass, and road signs, shows the spider's attempts to flee the floodwaters and seek refuge on higher ground.
The pictures, shared on Reddit, were posted alongside the caption: " If the floods weren't enough, I give you, spider apocalypse."
The southeastern state has been ravaged by heavy rain and strong winds, forcing thousands to evacuate.
Note that the spider apocalypse is merely a follow on to epic floods and a plague of tens of millions of rampaging mice. Because Australia. If you like eerie photos of the landscape covered in shrouds of spider webs, click to the article for many more. If you find spider webs disturbing, definitely don’t click!
Just a typical drive in the country, when the country is Australia. Credit: HDJWIAX/REDDIT
Some People Can See Through Camouflage, And It's Not as Hard as You Think. This was interesting. Researchers have developed techniques for training ordinary people, fairly quickly, to be able to see through camouflage — that is, rapidly pick out a camouflaged object in a picture or scene.
Not only are trained camouflage breakers able to detect that something is hidden in a scene, they're able to correctly assess what that something is, even if they haven't been told what they're looking for.
That can be very useful in a wide variety of military scenarios – knowing exactly what's present in a scene is a lot more informative than just knowing that something in a scene is different from normal.
"Here, we show that when subjects break camouflage, they can also localize the camouflaged target accurately, even though they had received no specific training in localizing the target," researchers explain in a new study.
I can usually find Waldo in about five seconds, so I’d be very interested to learn more about this. And I hope the military are all over it. I imagine AI sensors are rapidly rendering traditional camouflage obsolete anyway, but it is good to know the old-fashioned human eye and brain can still do the trick too.
Here are the science articles behind the story:
This is a great idea, as long as no one drinks it. Could We Store All of the World’s Data in a Coffee Mug Full of DNA?
Scientists are already demonstrating how writing image and text files in DNA could in principle revolutionize how we store and archive data, but while the technology is developing—there is still has a long way to go before it might become reality for everyday use—finding a practicable way of identifying and retrieving files from potentially massive archived stores is a key challenge.
So will we someday trade in our laptops and smartphones for some kind of genetically engineered data squirrel that just follows us around and gives us whatever information we need?
Okay, that might be too much of a leap.
On Earth right now, there are about 10 trillion gigabytes of digital data, and every day, humans produce emails, photos, tweets, and other digital files that add up to another 2.5 million gigabytes of data. Much of this data is stored in enormous facilities known as exabyte data centers (an exabyte is 1 billion gigabytes), which can be the size of several football fields and cost around $1 billion to build and maintain.
Many scientists believe that an alternative solution lies in the DNA molecule that contains our genetic information. After all, DNA has evolved to store massive quantities of information at very high density. A coffee mug full of DNA could theoretically store all of the world’s data, Bathe suggested.
The future is guaranteed to be stranger than we can possibly expect. (If we do get data squirrels, remember I called it here first!)
Dog mayor roundup! If there is one thing Thursday Things stands for, it is dog mayors. 9 Dogs That Ran for Public Office (And Some of Them Won!)
This article profiles nine loveable dog mayors, dog candidates, and one dog president, some of whom have been featured in these pages before — but that’s no reason not to feature them again! We need more dog mayors.
Mayor Max of Idyllwild, CA Source: Image via Instagram @MayorMax1
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