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🔗 Medicine 🔗 Medicine/Pulmonology 🔗 Plants 🔗 Horticulture and Gardening 🔗 Medicine/Society and Medicine

Botanical sexism is a term coined by horticulturist Tom Ogren to describe the planting of male plants instead of female plants of certain dioecious species including: willows, poplars, aspens, ashes, silver maples, pistache, mulberry, pepper tree and other woody plants such as junipers, yew pines, fern pines, wax myrtles, alpine currants, plum yews, and yews According to Ogren, pollen allergies have been amplified due to the planting in urban areas of male clones which increases the amount of pollen in the air. Male plants are commonly used in urban areas because plants with female flowers produce fruits and flowers that litter the landscape. The planting of more female plants would decrease the overall amount of pollen since they do not produce pollen and remove pollen from the air for pollination. The theory has existed since at least the 2000s. Biological sexism is used in the Ogren Plant Allergy Scale (OPALS), which has been adopted by the United States Department of Agriculture. Botanical sexism has found some scientific acceptance as a reason for increased allergies and asthma; however, other scientists have also been critical of it, stating that it only applies to certain trees and is not as widespread as Ogren alleges.

🔗 Physics

When using the term 'the speed of light' it is sometimes necessary to make the distinction between its one-way speed and its two-way speed. The "one-way" speed of light, from a source to a detector, cannot be measured independently of a convention as to how to synchronize the clocks at the source and the detector. What can however be experimentally measured is the round-trip speed (or "two-way" speed of light) from the source to a mirror (or other method of reflection) and back again to detector. Albert Einstein chose a synchronization convention (see Einstein synchronization) that made the one-way speed equal to the two-way speed. The constancy of the one-way speed in any given inertial frame is the basis of his special theory of relativity, although all experimentally verifiable predictions of this theory do not depend on that convention.

Experiments that attempt to directly probe the one-way speed of light independent of synchronization have been proposed, but none have succeeded in doing so. Those experiments directly establish that synchronization with slow clock-transport is equivalent to Einstein synchronization, which is an important feature of special relativity. However, those experiments cannot directly establish the isotropy of the one-way speed of light since it has been shown that slow clock-transport, the laws of motion, and the way inertial reference frames are defined already involve the assumption of isotropic one-way speeds and thus, are equally conventional. In general, it was shown that these experiments are consistent with anisotropic one-way light speed as long as the two-way light speed is isotropic.

The 'speed of light' in this article refers to the speed of all electromagnetic radiation in vacuum.

🔗 Fishes

The sturddlefish is a hybrid of the American paddlefish (Polyodon spathula) and the Russian sturgeon (Acipenser gueldenstaedtii), accidentally created by researchers in 2019 and announced in 2020. Obtaining living hybrids through breeding individuals from different families is unusual, especially given that the two species' last common ancestor lived 184 million years ago. The hybrids were created accidentally during attempts to induce gynogenesis, a type of parthenogenic reproduction where a sperm cell must be present to trigger embryogenesis but does not genetically contribute to the offspring. Hundreds of hybrid fish were created, of which about two-thirds survived over one month, and about 100 survived for one year. As of July 2020, all living hybrid fish are living in captivity at the research lab in Hungary. There are no further plans to create new sturddlefish.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Medicine/Neurology 🔗 Epilepsy

Musicogenic seizure, also known as music-induced seizure, is a rare type of seizure, with an estimated prevalence of 1 in 10,000,000 individuals, that arises from disorganized or abnormal brain electrical activity when a person hears or is exposed to a specific type of sound or musical stimuli. There are challenges when diagnosing a music-induced seizure due to the broad scope of triggers, and time delay between a stimulus and seizure. In addition, the causes of musicogenic seizures are not well-established as solely limited cases and research have been discovered and conducted respectively. Nevertheless, the current understanding of the mechanism behind musicogenic seizure is that music triggers the part of the brain that is responsible for evoking an emotion associated with that music. Dysfunction in this system leads to an abnormal release of dopamine, eventually inducing seizure.

Currently, there are diverse intervention strategies that patients can choose from depending on their situations. They can have surgery to remove the region of the brain that generates a seizure. Behavioral therapy is also available; patients are trained to gain emotional control to reduce the frequency of seizure. Medications like carbamazepine and phenytoin (medication for general seizure) also suggest effectiveness to mitigate music-induced seizures.

🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Songs 🔗 Electronic music

"The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet" (also known as "Like the Wind", "Blind the Wind", "Check It In, Check It Out" or "Take It In, Take It Out" after lines in fan-interpreted lyrics; acronymed as TMMSOTI or TMS) is the nickname given to an unidentified song recording, most likely composed in the 1980s.

The song was reportedly recorded from a Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) broadcast sometime in the mid-1980s, likely during or after 1984. Since 2019, this song has been the subject of a viral Internet phenomenon, with many users of sites such as Reddit and Discord involved in a collaborative effort to search for the origins of the song. Through the search, other unknown songs were discovered. Users have coined the term "Lostwave" to describe songs of this nature.

🔗 Computing

A lace card is a punched card with all holes punched (also called a whoopee card, ventilator card, flyswatter card, or IBM doily). They were mainly used as practical jokes to cause disruption in card readers. Card readers tended to jam when a lace card was inserted, as the resulting card had too little structural strength to avoid buckling inside the mechanism. Card punches could also jam trying to produce cards with all holes punched, owing to power-supply problems. When a lace card was fed through the reader, a card knife or card saw (a flat tool used with punched card readers and card punches) was needed to clear the jam.

Disc and disk are both variants of the English word for objects of a generally thin and cylindrical geometry. The differences in spelling correspond both with regional differences and with different senses of the word. For example, in the case of flat, rotational data storage media the convention is that the spelling disk is used for magnetic storage (e.g., hard disks) while disc is used for optical storage (e.g., compact discs, better known as CDs). When there is no clear convention, the spelling disk is more popular in American English, while the spelling disc is more popular in British English.

🔗 Psychology 🔗 Cognitive science

Pandemonium architecture is a theory in cognitive science that describes how visual images are processed by the brain. It has applications in artificial intelligence and pattern recognition. The theory was developed by the artificial intelligence pioneer Oliver Selfridge in 1959. It describes the process of object recognition as a hierarchical system of detection and association by a metaphorical set of "demons" sending signals to each other. This model is now recognized as the basis of visual perception in cognitive science.

Pandemonium architecture arose in response to the inability of template matching theories to offer a biologically plausible explanation of the image constancy phenomenon. Contemporary researchers praise this architecture for its elegancy and creativity; that the idea of having multiple independent systems (e.g., feature detectors) working in parallel to address the image constancy phenomena of pattern recognition is powerful yet simple. The basic idea of the pandemonium architecture is that a pattern is first perceived in its parts before the "whole".

Pandemonium architecture was one of the first computational models in pattern recognition. Although not perfect, the pandemonium architecture influenced the development of modern connectionist, artificial intelligence, and word recognition models.

🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Cats

Longcat (2002 – 20 September 2020) was a Japanese domestic cat that became the subject of an Internet meme due to her length. Longcat, whose real name was "Shiroi", was born in 2002. An image depicting her being held with "outstretched paws" became popular on Japanese imageboard Futaba Channel, where it was nicknamed "Nobiko" ("Stretch" in Japanese) some time around 2005 or 2006. She was reportedly 65 centimetres (26 in) "from head to toe".

Subsequently, the meme spread to English-language websites, primarily 4chan's /b/, where it was edited into various images, and even had a song written about it. A backstory was invented for the cat, involving a world-ending battle called "Catnarok" with a nemesis named "Tacgnol" (resembling Longcat with the colors inverted).

The virtual community and message board Subeta, which made available a number of pixel art virtual accessories for user avatars, briefly introduced a "Longcat scarf" in 2007; this prompted "a legion of internet users to attack Subeta", primarily in the form of a DDoS campaign involving "all of the chans", until the Longcat item was removed later in the month. A Pokémon design released in 2019, the "Gigantamax Meowth", was compared by some commentators to Longcat.

In a 2019 interview, Longcat's owner said that the cat was "originally rescued after being discovered on the street in 2002", and at the time was thin with gray hair; as she grew older, she became white and fluffy. The cat was deaf. In 2019, Longcat's owner said that, at the age of 17, the cat no longer "climbed to high places" but was "relaxing and living her life".

In September 2020, after a period of ill health, Longcat was taken to the hospital, and died at the age of 18.

🔗 Animal anatomy 🔗 Marine life 🔗 Limnology and Oceanography

Spicules are structural elements found in most sponges. The meshing of many spicules serves as the sponge's skeleton and thus it provides structural support and potentially defense against predators.

Sponge spicules are made of calcium carbonate or silica. Large spicules visible to the naked eye are referred to as megascleres, while smaller, microscopic ones are termed microscleres. The composition, size, and shape of spicules are major characters in sponge systematics and taxonomy.