🕸️ Primitive Hypertext: AI-Generated Images of Rat Genitalia, Ants Perform Life-saving Amputations, Japanese Honeybees Swat Invading Ants, Mapping the Seafloor, and Measuring the Mind's Eye

🕸️ AI-Generated Images of Rat Genitalia, Ants Perform Life-saving Amputations, Japanese Honeybees Swat Invading Ants, Mapping the Seafloor, and Measuring the Mind's Eye

Bismillah. We begin everything with the name of Allah. We say Bismillah to initiate an act to acknowledge the intention and the ethics we carry with all that follows Bismillah.

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Table of Contents:

1. 🏜️ In the Desert!

2. 🕸️ Primitive Hypertext (after Octavia Estelle Butler): AI-Generated Images of Rat Genitalia, Ants Perform Life-saving Amputations, Japanese Honeybees Swat Invading Ants, Mapping the Seafloor, and Measuring the Mind's Eye

3. 🐇 🕳️ Another Rabbit Hole: Zoopharmacognosy, Mineral Lick, and Orangutan Applies Medicinal Plant

1. 🏜️ In the Desert!

I am in Joshua Tree! Look!

2. 🕸️ Primitive Hypertext (after Octavia Estelle Butler)

As a reminder, the Primitive Hypertext offerings are now modeled after Harper Magazine’s Findings, which focuses on “scientific progress—good, bad, or simply strange.” However, my version will include anything that piques my curiosity in a given week — which most likely will be science-adjacent...but not like always, but mostly 😬 😬

Check out the first one which explores Microplastics in Semen, Floppy Disks Are Retired in Japan, Synchronized Fruit Dropping Across Europe, Bitcoin Noise Pollution Terrorizes Texas Town, and Greedy Cannibal Stars.

This week:

A graphic of a rat with exaggerated genitalia was published in Frontiers. Still, it was later retracted because it was an AI-generated image, raising concerns about the increasing use, knowingly or unknowingly, of AI-generated images and texts in scientific journals. Researchers learned that Florida carpenter ants would amputate the injured legs of nestmates for survival. Using their ability to differentiate between different wound types, these ants can deploy different treatments, marking what scientists are calling the first “nonhuman animal performing an amputation on a fellow member of its species to save its life.” A new study revealed that a species of honeybees native to Japan use their wings to slap back Japanese pavement ants attempting to invade their hive. Researchers strap a camera and other tracking devices to endangered Australian sea lions to map the seafloor. Scientists learned that the sea lions visited six diverse benthic (seabed) habitats: macroalgae reef, macroalgae meadow, bare sand, sponge/sand, invertebrate reef, and invertebrate boulder habitats. Aphantasia, a new phenomenon only coined in 2015 but described by Francis Galton in 1880, refers to the inability to conjure mental images and may remind us that the naming of a phenomenon is not the same as the first recorded instance of observing the phenomenon. Many early aphantasia studies rely on self-reporting, leading researchers to ask: “How do you measure someone else’s inner reality?” and “Could reported differences in visual imagery be a language disconnect, given the ambiguity in how we describe our inner worlds?” thereby making aphantasia not an objective binary reality or even a well-defined spectrum, but something that challenges both systems of research methods and the failure of language. More recent research uses neuroimaging with ultra-high field 7T fMRIs to compare domain activation across subjects.

3. 🐇 🕳️ Another Rabbit Hole

Zoopharmacognosy

Mineral Lick

Thank you for reading,

Kameelah 👽

Finally, while I do not organize my finances around paid newsletter subscriptions, wouldn’t it be cool if this little newsletter could allow me to take quarterly self-imposed writing retreats? Consider getting a one-year membership at USD 70 :)

How to cite this newsletter: Rasheed, K. (Year, Month Day). Newsletter Title. I Will (?) Figure This All Out Later. URL