albertcardona

albertcardona, 7 days ago to pizza

How processed food companies muffle those who author studies that put them to shame:

"One large food company, for example, asked if he would be interested in giving a half-hour talk to its senior team, for a fee of £20,000. He said he would, but he’d pay his own expenses and give the money to a food charity.
When the contract came through, he changed his mind. Within it was a clause binding him not to disparage the firm in public statements, “throughout the universe and in perpetuity”."

On pizza, I entirely second Chris van Tulleken's statement: “Pizza has become emblematic of junk food ... but proper homemade pizza is very healthy.” The hilarious bit is that making pizza at home is easy peasy: just make baguette dough (takes you 5 minutes to mix, a couple hours to raise https://albert.rierol.net/recipes.html#Fast%20baguettes%20for%20everyday%20bread ), then roll flat and top with whatever you like or happen to have at home.

https://www.theguardian.com/food/article/2024/may/19/academic-and-doctor-chris-van-tulleken-ultra-processed-products-are-food-that-lies-to-us

#pizza #nutrition

albertcardona, 7 days ago to random

Another unusual insect: Tenthredo baetica (ssp. dominiquei), with only 118 observations world wide, of which 29 for this particular subspecies. It's a wasp – sort of: a sawfly.

The rear limbs are rather large, and I wonder why. For carrying prey?

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/216752296

Wikipedia points out an interesting reversal: in the Tenthredo genus, the larvae eat plants while the adults prey on other insects. Whereas many typical wasps do the opposite: the adults sip nectar but hunt insects to feed their young. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenthredo One wonders then what is this adult doing on a flower, engaging in motion patterns characteristic of foraging on nectar and pollen.

#iNaturalist #Hymenoptera #Symphyta #sawflies #wasplove #entomology #insects

albertcardona, 8 days ago to random

Surprise observation this afternoon: Homotropus sp. An ichneumonid wasp, about 5-6 mm long.

There are only 8 observations world wide.

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/216551306

#iNaturalist #Hymenoptera #entomology #insects #wasplove

albertcardona, 11 days ago to random

Not a mosquito but a Cecidomyiinae, likely of the genus Lasioptera sp: a kind of gall midget or gall gnat.

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/81412856

From a lucky shot in focus back in 2021. Thanks to the #iNaturalist community for the ID. With Cecidomyiidae being a family likely more speciose than even beetles [1], the chances of identifying this animal are slim.

[1] Hebert et al. 2016 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2015.0333

#iNaturalist #Diptera #Cecidomyiidae #entomology #insects #flies #midges

albertcardona, 12 days ago to Java

In java, is there a simple, idiomatic, standard-library built-in way to iterate a Stream n elements at a time? E.g., in pairs, using a BiConsumer or similar two-argument Function?

#java #programming

albertcardona, 17 days ago (edited 17 days ago) to Neuroscience

"A petavoxel fragment of human cerebral cortex reconstructed at nanoscale resolution" by Shapson-Coe et al. 2024 (Lichtman lab).

The reconstruction at its current state is already useful and very interesting. Here is to hoping the authors will put in more time and resources to further polish it.

Paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk4858

Preprint (2021): https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.29.446289.abstract

Browsable data: https://h01-release.storage.googleapis.com/landing.html

Viren Jain's (Google) press release: https://research.google/blog/ten-years-of-neuroscience-at-google-yields-maps-of-human-brain/

#neuroscience #connectomics

albertcardona, 18 days ago to Trains

In Europe, flying is cheaper than taking the train.

It's an embarrassment, and a major problem: we have to stop flying for silly short distances. Realise that the overheads of flying (reaching the airport, awaiting 2 hours, the flight, the unloading, reaching the destination) largely cancel out any time gains of flying. And the carbon costs are utterly untenable. Not to speak of the modern, dire conditions of the whole flying "experience".

Another embarrassment is that train connections can't be guaranteed when across countries or companies. They aren't even coordinated. As if those who commission and set the schedules didn't travel by train themselves, at least not internationally. In considering how tiny most European countries are, it's frankly bizarre.

There are so many destinations one could travel by train to, yet in practice, it's not sensible. A disgrace.

The upside is that it can be fixed.

#trains #EuroRail

albertcardona, 19 days ago to Neuroscience

"Lu.i -- A low-cost electronic neuron for education and outreach" by Stradmann et al. 2024 https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.16664

#neuromorphic #neuroscience #education

albertcardona, 26 days ago to random

Mason bee, Osmia sp.

Seen this morning at #Pembroke1347, Cambridge, UK.

#iNaturalist #Hymenoptera #nativebees #entomology #insects

albertcardona, 29 days ago (edited 29 days ago) to uk

From Cambridge with love?

#UK #potholes

albertcardona, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to Neuroscience

The honeybee brain hosts over 600,000 neurons, at a density higher than that of mammalian brains:

"Our estimate of total brain cell number for the European honeybee (Apis mellifera;
≈ 6.13 × 10^5, s = 1.28 × 10^5; ...) was lower than the existing estimate from brain sections ≈ 8.5 × 10^5"

"the highest neuron densities have been found in the smallest respective species examined (smoky shrews in mammals; 2.08 × 10^5 neurons mg^−1 [14] and goldcrests in birds; 4.9 × 10^5 neurons mg^−1 [16]). The Hymenoptera in our sample have on average higher cell densities than vertebrates (5.94 × 10^5 cells mg^−1; n = 30 species)."

Ants, on the other hand ...

"ants stand out from bees and wasps as having particularly small brains by measures of mass and cell number."

From:
"Allometric analysis of brain cell number in Hymenoptera suggests ant brains diverge from general trends", by Godfrey et al. 2021.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2021.0199

#Hymenoptera #entomology #neuroscience #ants #honeybees

albertcardona, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to random

I had forgotten camera SD cards have limits. Just reached "Camera full" for the first time – it's a 128 GB SD card, with nearly 50,000 12 MP photos and some videos. 99% of invertebrates, largely insects: 6478 of 7155 observations at #iNaturalist https://www.inaturalist.org/lifelists/albertcardona?view=tree&details_view=observations , of which the last ~5000 were done with this camera.

albertcardona, 1 month ago to Neuroscience

"Noise limits of event cameras" AKA event-based silicon retinas. A talk by Tobi Delbruck in Cambridge, UK, in March 25, 2024.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YY31GaiOkNM

The screenshot below features Patrick Lichtsteiner and his work on mimicking retinal circuits in the design of the dynamic vision sensor (DVS), an event-based camera where the log difference of light intensity at time t and t-1 is emitted (the event), rather than a typical camera frame. This has extraordinary implications for visual processing, data transfer bandwidth and data storage.

#neuroscience #ComputerVision #cameras #neuromorphic #vision

albertcardona, 1 month ago to random

Rewilding the internet:

"Just like the crime-ridden, Corbusier-like towers Moses crammed people into when he demolished mixed-use neighborhoods and built highways through them, today’s top-down, concentrated internet is, for many, an unpleasant and harmful place. Its owners are hard to remove, and their interests do not align with ours."

"Apple and Google’s email clients manage nearly 90% of global email. Google and Cloudflare serve around 50% of global domain name system requests."

"For many people across the generations today, platforms like Facebook or TikTok are the internet. They’ve long dwelled in walled gardens they think are the world."

https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/

By Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon.
@mariafarrell @robin

albertcardona, 1 month ago to random

#SilentSunday #Tirol

albertcardona, 1 month ago to random

Ted Gioia and the new (old) business model: addiction.

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-state-of-the-culture-2024

albertcardona, 1 month ago to random

On wasps:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/07/in-defence-of-wasps-misunderstood-insect

By Paul Hetherington #BugLife
#wasplove

albertcardona, 1 month ago to Neuroscience

eNeuro is looking for an editor in chief.

https://www.sfn.org/publications/eneuro/eNeuro-Editor-in-Chief-Search

Made me ask: what is the job of an editor in chief, and what kind of qualifications should an applicant have? And what kind of job is it – full time job, or part time? Paid or not? A practising scientist or a dedicated specialist? The ad doesn't specify much beyond the obvious.

#SfN #neuroscience #academia

albertcardona, 1 month ago to Neuroscience

Junior Scientist Workshop on Theoretical Neuroscience at #HHMIJanelia

November 17 - 22, 2024

https://www.janelia.org/you-janelia/conferences/junior-scientist-workshop-on-theoretical-neuroscience-4

#neuroscience #CompNeuro

albertcardona, 1 month ago to fishing

"The world’s population increasingly relies on the ocean for food, energy production and global trade yet human activities at sea are not well quantified."

"We find that 72–76% of the world’s industrial fishing vessels are not publicly tracked, with much of that fishing taking place around South Asia, Southeast Asia and Africa."

"We also find that 21–30% of transport and energy vessel activity is missing from public tracking systems."

"Our map of ocean industrialization reveals changes in some of the most extensive and economically important human activities at sea."

Paolo et al. 2024 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06825-8

#fishing #oceans #EcosystemCollapse

albertcardona, 1 month ago to random

First unusual insect order of the season:

Common alderfly, Sialis lutaria, order Megaloptera
http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/204953010

#iNaturalist #Megaloptera #entomology #insects

albertcardona, 1 month ago to chemistry

Spot on for lanthanides and actinides.

https://xkcd.com/2913/
#chemistry #physics #XKCD

albertcardona, 1 month ago to uk

#SilentSunday #UK #AccidentalRothko

albertcardona, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to machinelearning

“Is this a … person?” Asks the incidental meta-meme.

One wonders, what manner of amusing and colorful hats or attire did the people in the training set wear.

Or weather the “eyes” on its wings not only fool predators but also machine learning classifiers.

Biology 1 - 0 Machine Learning.

#fail #MachineLearning #AIFail

albertcardona, 1 month ago to random

The web, unfiltered, is a pile of nonsense. Exhibit A, the Science magazine web page.

The content seems almost like an afterthought.