The Science Thread

Wish this stuff would stop popping up. I don't have the knowledge to see crap.

http://www.colorado.edu/news/releases/2011/03/14/neanderthals-were-nifty-controlling-fire-according-cu-boulder-researcher

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-05-21/ancient-stone-tools-discovery-challenges-mainstream-history/6485566

I was reading about that just a little while ago. Big news there...

Other primates, sea otters, some birds and elephants use tools . There may be even older evidence out there somewhere, given that fire was invented by H.erectus almost a million yrs ago . So H.neanderthalis had a lot of previous experience with fire carrying and protection to draw on .

WHAT ARE THE WHITE REFLECTIVE SPOTS ?

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4594

I was skeptical at first, but it checks out.

Damn. Many hundreds, if not thousands, of hours I've spent shooting bows and was totally clueless about this until now:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-06-09/dinosaur-dig-unearths-bones-up-to-98-million-years-old/6502380

Great ideas, thanks for sharing here.

Artificial Neural Networks have spurred remarkable recent progress in image classification and speech recognition. But even though these are very useful tools based on well-known mathematical methods, we actually understand surprisingly little of why certain models work and others don’t. So let’s take a look at some simple techniques for peeking inside these networks...
http://googleresearch.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/inceptionism-going-deeper-into-neural.html

http://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/mystery-kennewick-man-identity-finally-solved-dna-native-american-003258

Excellent site

Yeah, I get it on my FB feed. I thought for sure they'd find out that Kennewick Man was some European explorer or something.

http://thelogicofscience.com/2015/05/27/5-simple-chemistry-facts-that-everyone-should-understand-before-talking-about-science/

An ancestor of the family of Jean Luc Picard, for sure.

I have to say, I find this video a bit annoying in some ways.

While I find it interesting to be reminded that the solar system has additional motions associated with it, I find it annoying that this video seems to imply some type of "cosmic" significance to the fact that some type of helix is formed by that motion.

Besides the fact that there is no significance, cosmic or otherwise, to any helical trails, the plane of the solar system is not perpendicular to the plane of the galaxy, so it would be more of a squashed helix anyway. Not to mention that there are a number of larger motions also associated with our solar system depending on which reference frame you watch it from. And I don't think there's any cosmic significance to that either.

Sorry to be picky, but I have a distaste for scientific woo woo.

I had to go back and watch it all the way to the end in order to figure out what you were talking about. Before that, I had only watched the first minute or two. Yeah, I could have done without that bit towards the end, too.

The Victoria Crater on the planet Mars