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A scientific fact/tidbit you recently learned that you thought was interesting

jadebox said:
Yes. Fat is lost mostly through carbon dioxide. So you breathe it out. That helps me understand one reason that losing weight is so difficult.
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Thunderfoot did a good vid about this a few years ago.
 
GlennB said:
Googling didn't help, so could you explain?

There's a lot more Ca and P in your body than K
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I've always heard this as CHON, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen. But I'm about as far from a biologist as anyone can be, so I'm not sure where potassium (K) fits in.
 
Wudang said:
Our eyes have 3 types of photoreceptors. Mantis shrimp have 12 including 1 infrared and 3 ultraviolet and see polarizes light. So they see many "colours" we can't conceptualise.
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No! Humans normally have four types of photoreceptors three colour receptors in cones, red, green, blue; and rods are non-colour specific (blue/green). Cones are predominantly around the centre of vision and provide detail, rods are dominant at the edge of vision and detect movement / changes in light and are low light sensitive, provide night vision. In particular light levels where all four photoreceptor contribute you may be able to see colours not normally visible.

Some women are tetra chromatic having an additional cone photoreceptor, this is related to the gene causing colour blindness in men. They can distinguish variations in colour not visible to normal humans.

Fun fact; humans retinas can detect near UV, the blue photoreceptors are sensitive to near UV, BUT the lens filters UV so no UV light gets to the retina to be seen. People who have had the lens removed can see into the UV spectrum.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140905-the-women-with-super-human-vision

Second fun fact; humans can detect polarised light, it is thought the vikings may have used this ability to navigate.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/ar...s, humans are,carotenoids in the macula lutea.

How to see polarised light.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982220318893
 
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The other thing with the shrimp is that the abundance of photoreceptors contrasts with basically no visual post-processing. We do a lot of post so when our red and blue receptors are both going off we perceive purple; apparantly the mantis shrimp does not do this and instead just has a dedicated receptor for each wavelength that is most important to it and that signal gets piped to its perception more or less directly.
 
This may be well-known to others, but I just learned that our sense of smell bypasses the thalamus:

Smell bypasses the thalamus, which Dalton calls the ‘consciousness detector.’

“(It goes) directly to the primary olfactory cortex, and that may be why we experience odors in a different way than we do other kinds of sensory stimuli,” Dalton said.

Because scent skips the thalamus, smells can enter our brains and attach to memories without us consciously registering or processing them. Research shows smell is the only sense that is active even while we sleep, or are in a coma.
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Source
 
ZirconBlue said:
This may be well-known to others, but I just learned that our sense of smell bypasses the thalamus:



Source
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"Research shows smell is the only sense that is active even while we sleep, or are in a coma."

How is it, then, that my alarm clock wakes me up?
 
GlennB said:
"Research shows smell is the only sense that is active even while we sleep, or are in a coma."

How is it, then, that my alarm clock wakes me up?
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The smell of bacon cooking in the morning wakes this mother ****** up more reliably than setting off an M-80 under my pillow.
 
GlennB said:
"Research shows smell is the only sense that is active even while we sleep, or are in a coma."

How is it, then, that my alarm clock wakes me up?
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I guess he meant that smell skips the reticular activation system which monitors senses and decides which ones to pass on while you are sleeping.

When I took psychology in college I was doing well on a test so when I came across the question "What does RAS stand for?" I answered with my name since those are my initials.

Whoever was grading the test had a sense of humor since my answer was marked as correct.
 
The Last of Us

There is a fungus, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, that turns a species of ants or certain other insects into zombies (sort of). Hypoxanthine, sphingosine, and guanidinobutyric acid (which is similar in structure to gamma-aminobutyric acid) are among the compounds that may be part of how the fungus controls the ant's brain. I have never seen The Last of Us, but this is the fungus that inspired it.
 
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Some of you are going to say, I knew that.

I've known about the double slit experiment forever. What I didn't know, or didn't remember I'd heard until I was watching a science lecture tonight was that if you put a detector by the second slit to record if the photons are going through both slits then the interference pattern disappears.

I am fascinated and confused how observations can cause waveforms to collapse.
 
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