🕸️ Primitive Hypertext: “Alien” Wow! Signal, Conspiracy Theory Generator, Human Eggs “Woo Sperm," “Glacier Mating," Ice Cores with Stories, + Glycerol=Better Bubbles, Underwater Bubbles for Survival
🕸️ Primitive Hypertext: “Alien” Wow! Signal, Conspiracy Theory Generator, Human Eggs “Woo Sperm," “Glacier Mating," Ice Cores with Stories, + Glycerol=Better Bubbles, Underwater Bubbles for Survival
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.
Read more about the newsletter rhythm here.
☺️ Hello!
Table of Contents:
🏠 Back in Brooklyn!
🕸️ Primitive Hypertext (after Octavia Estelle Butler): The “Alien” Wow! Signal, AI-powered Conspiracy Theory Generator, and Eggs, Human Eggs “Woo Sperm” in a Post-Copulation Battle, Ancient Ritual of “Glacier Mating” in Pakistan’s Highlands, Ice Cores Hold Trapped Air with A Story, Glycerol Help Make the Perfect Bubble, Water Anoles, Alkali Flies, and Some Water Beetles Use Underwater Bubbles to Survive
🐇 🕳️ Another Rabbit Hole: Anti-Bubbles and Sonoluminescence
1. 🏠 Back in Brooklyn!
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 😬 😬
This Week! 20 January 2025
The Ohio State University Big Ear radio telescope detected the Wow! Signal in 1977, becoming one of the most noteworthy examples of alien intelligence. However, a non-peer-reviewed paper published on arXiv last year “hypothesize[d] that the Wow! Signal was caused by a sudden brightening of the hydrogen line in these clouds triggered by a strong transient radiation source, such as a magnetar flare or a soft gamma repeater (SGR).” When prompting Bitlife, an AI-powered conspiracy theory text generator with the word “eggs,” we are given “[s]ome conspiracy theorists believe that eggs, particularly chicken eggs, hold mystical properties that are linked to alien civilizations.” In 2017, Joe Nadeau, principal scientist at the Pacific Northwest hypothesized that sexual selection happens after copulation when the egg attempts to “woo sperm” instead of “passively” awaiting random fertilization. Other fertilization approaches are found amongst farmers in Pakistan's highlands of Baltistan who are racing against climate change by attempting to produce “glacier babies” using an ancient ritual of “glacier mating” of mixing chunks of white glaciers (presumed to be female) with black or brown glaciers (presumed to be male) in order to create a new water source for farming. At the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute, scientists store ice cores whose bubbles of Greenland air from more than two millennia can provide details on the progression of climate issues. Scientists have developed an optimized recipe for making giant bubbles which requires that the surface-active agent (a chemical compound that reduces the surface tension between two substances) must not be too high, the bubble solution must include long and flexible polymer chains, and glycerol provides stability and resistance to evaporation. Possibly to escape predators, water anoles, or semiaquatic lizards produce a bubble behind its nostrils that allows it to remain breathing underwater for 20 minutes. Alongside Lindsey Swierk’s water anoles research, other scientists have found that the alkali fly, (Ephydra hians) uses superhydrophobicity to create a bubble of air around its body (but not encasing the fly's eyes) while underwater in Mono Lake, California. And some water beetles form a temporary bubble to carry needed oxygen while underwater.
12 August 2024
🕸️ 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
A graphic of a rat with exaggerated genitalia was published in Frontiers. 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.
22 July 2024
🕸️ Primitive Hypertext: Microplastics in Semen, Floppy Disks Are Retired in Japan, Synchronized Fruit Dropping Across Europe, Bitcoin Noise Pollution Terrorizes Texas Town, and Greedy Cannibal Stars
A study of 40 healthy men found microplastics in all 40 semen samples, raising concerns about male fertility and the continued decline in sperm count. After Taro Kono, Japan’s digital minister declared and presumably won its “war on floppy disks,” the national abandonment of the seemingly anachronistic storage system, he has a new target: retiring the fax machine. Masting, or the synchronized production of seeds by plants, is finally seen at a continental scale, with European beeches dropping their fruits simultaneously across several nations. Noise pollution from a newly installed Bitcoin mining facility causes health issues for the residents of Granbury, Texas.
A 2022 study exposed Jupiter as a greedy little planet that “cannibalized baby planets” as it grew, or in a more dramatic summary: “Jupiter's innards are full of the remains of baby planets.” A 2024 study investigating stellar chemical compositions found that at least one in twelve stars shows evidence of planetary ingestion. Planetary ingestion, or “stellar ingestion” or “stellar murder,” is when a star eats a planet. NASA predicts that in about 5 billion years, our Sun will undergo an “end-of-life transition” by ingesting a few familiar planets: Mercury, Venus, and likely Earth. The soft halo of anthropomorphization follows the description of astrophysical phenomena everywhere, such as bestowing planets with the ability to establish healthy boundaries with their parent star — “planets should never feel too comfortable as they orbit their parent star.” Do some stars have dietary restrictions? A 2019 study seems to suggest that it may just be a matter of proximity: a planet migrates into the stellar envelope and eventually becomes a meal. Is there ever a point where ingestion exceeds stellar social norms, and a star is forced to take some stellar Ozempic or a more generic brand of GLP-1? Do some stars meal prep their planetary courses? If a star eats a planet that doesn’t taste as good as desired, does the star regurgitate the planet? Unsure! But, a quick inquiry into the cosmic dietary practices tied directly to stellar life cycles reveals that some black holes form from a dead star. One black hole shredded up, not swallowed up, a star that got too close, and according to a 2022 study, the black hole began “burping out” the energy from the shredded star two years later.
3. 🐇 🕳️ Another Rabbit Hole: Anti-Bubbles and Sonoluminescence
Thank you for reading,
Kameelah 👽
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How to cite this newsletter: Rasheed, K. (Year, Month Day). Newsletter Title. I Will (?) Figure This All Out Later. URL