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Happy Thought for 21 June

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Have a Happy Thought:   We have passed the solstice – halfway through the solar year – at 8:51am on Friday 21 st June, New Zealand time – that is, a few hours ago. In most years, the solstice hits on the calendar date of June 22 nd in New Zealand. But this year, it’s a bit earlier.   A couple of definitions/explanations first: The solstice occurs when the Earth’s poles are most directly pointed toward (or away) from the sun. Because it’s the North Pole that’s pointed toward the sun right now, it’s summer solstice in the northern hemisphere. And winter solstice in the southern hemisphere, because we’re pointed away from the sun. The solstice is when you get the longest night and shortest day of the year (winter)… or vice versa (summer). Equinox (think: equal) is midway in between the winter and summer solstices. So they happen in the midst of spring and autumn, and tend to have equal amounts of day and night.   So back
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Happy Thought for 14 June 2024

Have a Happy Thought:     We’re learning that sperm whales might have a whole language. Not just a few words, but a complex, intricate communication.   This is one of the really cool things that machine learning (one of the aspects of what is being branded “AI”) has been used for. Scientists took a whole bunch of recordings of sperm whale songs, and broke them up into distinct “codas”.   They then took these 9000+ codas, and fed them through some machine learning algorithms to see how the whales were using them. Turns out, each coda might be roughly equivalent to a phenome (the audio equivalent of a letter), or maybe a word. They’re combined in different orders ( pat vs tap ), lengths ( tap vs tapdancing ), and even potentially adding ornamental noises ( ahem ). And the codas are used in all sorts of changing ways, so each whale is using all sorts of codas, in different ways - not just singing a repetitive “song”.   In other words (heh): it sounds a lot like a languag
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Happy Thought for 7 June 2024

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Have a Happy Thought:   3-D movies are once again* in theatres , and tech companies are, despite Facebook’s Metaverse fiasco and Google’s Glass , working toward ever-more immersive technologies.   *huh, according to Wikipedia pages, 3D hasn’t been out of the theatres since the 1950s, or by some definitions even as far back as the early 1900s , before talkies** even became a thing! **for those that don’t know, “talkies” is what people called the early movies that actually had soundtracks , including dialogue – before that, there may have just been music, often played by live orchestras! Once you learn this, it’s hard not to think very differently about the fact that we still use the word “movie”… like seriously, we haven’t yet gotten over the fact that the pictures, they move!     Back to talking about 3-D. The idea that people might want to experience something in 3-D that they weren’t physically there for? Well, at a minimum it’s been around for well over 100 years. (If
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Happy Thought for 31 May 2024

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Have a Happy Thought:   (Keeping it short and sweet this week) The sun is always shining, and there are blue skies at least somewhere on Earth, even if not exactly where you are.   Oh, and the sun is also often doing things like this:    A Solar Filament Erupts Image Credit: NASA 's  GSFC ,  SDO AIA Team     Make sure to check out the Astronomy Picture of the Day for this and many more spectacular views of our universe.   And have a sunny weekend!
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Happy Thought for 24 May 2024

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Have a Happy Thought:   Space telescopes are amazing. And we live in a time where there are multiple space telescopes, bringing us incredible views of the universe.  I’ve shared images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope before ( https://cymittw.blogspot.com/2023/06/happy-thought-for-23-june-2023.html ) and now it’s time to share some pictures from ESA’s Euclid Telescope.   Feel free to just scroll through pretty pictures, or read the captions and click the links for all of the science!   The Horsehead Nebula Euclid shows us a spectacularly panoramic and detailed view of the Horsehead Nebula, also known as Barnard 33 and part of the constellation Orion. In Euclid’s new observation of this stellar nursery, scientists hope to find many dim and previously unseen Jupiter-mass planets in their celestial infancy, as well as young brown dwarfs and baby stars. CREDIT ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi. CC BY-SA 3.
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Happy Thought for 17 May 2024

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Have a Happy Thought:   Most of us have heard (and are secretly tickled by) the fact that the ancestors of whales walked on land , then decided to “go back” into the oceans to swim and live their best lives.   What I hadn’t heard until recently was that apparently the ancestors of turtles made a similar decision. A few times.   It starts with the long-ago ancestors of all four-legged creatures on Earth, which lived mostly in the water. Then the turtles split off, and their ancestors adapted to living on land. Then some of the turtles started living in the water again, leading to most of the sea- and pond-turtles we know today. But then some of those decided to come back onto land, re-joining their distant cousins that we now call tortoises.          So yes: all tortoises are turtles, but not all turtles are tortoises.   Which means that the ancestors of box turtles have gone through ocean -> land -> water -> land. Who knows what they’ll decide next?
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Happy Thought for 10 May 2024

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Have a Happy Thought: Some flowers change colour to tell pollinators whether they’re open for business. Take lupins for example. Image: Wild Russell Lupins (Lupinus polyphyllus) in central Otago. Photo by author, 2010.     These beautiful plants have a whole bunch of flowers on a single stalk. As a flower is pollinated, a part (or sometimes all) of each flower turns a different colour – which indicates to pollinators like bees and moths whether or not to bother with that flower, or even that stalk. A foraging pollinator of a species in the Lupinus genus. At the top of the inflorescence are rewarding flowers at anthesis where the spot on the banner petal is yellow. Towards the bottom of the inflorescence there are older purple flowers that are typically avoided by pollinators presumably because they contain less pollen and nectar. Photographer Terry Lucas CC-BY-3.0   With some types of lupin, the entire flower changes colour, others it’s just a lower petal or a centr
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Happy Thought for 3 May 2024

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Have a Happy Thought: We’ve talked before about taking short breaks out in The Nature for mental and physical health . But sometimes you just can’t get outside. Maybe it’s raining torrentially Or maybe you live or work in the middle of a concrete jungle, which just is not as relaxing as a rainforest jungle.   In these cases, you can at least give yourself the audio experience of being out in The Nature By tuning in to Forest.fm   This is now one of my fave websites. You are now one click away from seeing the picture of a forest (or sometimes just a beautiful landscape) somewhere in the world, with a couple of minutes of audio recorded there.     tree.fm   Click to listen to a random forest and you may be transported to Ghana, or France, or Ecuador, or ...   (The audio will just keep looping as long as you leave it on. So I’ve been in Denali National Park the whole time I’ve been researching and writing this.)   And in most of these forests, you will hear bird
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