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

[Steve]

I don't know the theory behind it but this popped up on my FB feed, and it's an illusion I've never seen before.
Move your phone or laptop around a bit and the ball seems to move. It's not a video, an app, or a gif, just a static picture.
It has something to do with the surrounding QR Code-looking thing because if you block that out the motion doesn't happen.

View attachment 67678

Not seeing it. Nothing appears to move if I move my screen.

 

[Pixel42]

Not seeing it. Nothing appears to move if I move my screen.

Does for me if I jiggle the screen.

 

[jadebox]

Does for me if I jiggle the screen.

It also has a 3D effect for me. The ball appears behind the grey and white blocks.

I see a similar illusion when bright orange text is used on a blue background (chromostereopsis).

 

[arthwollipot]

Yeah I think it's an artifact caused by a "cooldown" in the triggering of certain cone cells in the retina. There's an inertia which seems to delay the movement just enough to cause the jiggle.

Could be wrong, not an expert, don't @ me.

 

[Helen]

Oroas and dolphins could be hunting together.

Orcas team up with dolphins to hunt salmon, study finds

Northern resident killer whales appear to use dolphins as ‘scouts’, in a surprising cooperative hunting strategy

www.theguardian.com

 

[arthwollipot]

This is a fairly long (26:30) watch that explores how order appears amidst chaos, using a quite frankly startling amount of simulations and visualisations of the double pendulum experiment. I found it really interesting. Maybe you will too.

 

[Wudang]

For those seeing gasping reports on social media today about a tardigrade surviving what is claimed to be quantum entanglement : the criticism

https://phys.org/news/2021-12-peers-dispute-tardigrades-entangled-qubits.html

 

[Puppycow]

If anything, this is the real news:

One thing that most did agree on was that the researchers had found a new level of robustness for tardigrades—some of those in the experiments had survived extremely inhospitable conditions near absolute zero and pressures as low as 0.000006 millibars for up to 17 days, and then revived and resumed their regular existence after conditions were returned to normal.

If they can survive temperatures near absolute zero and extremely low pressures (like in outer space maybe?), then they are certainly very robust.

 

[Darat]

If anything, this is the real news:

If they can survive temperatures near absolute zero and extremely low pressures (like in outer space maybe?), then they are certainly very robust.

They are the only living organisms (that we know about) that could look around the universe and decide it was created just for them. Whereas the rest of us can only live or survive in an immensely tiny pocket of conditions in the universe.