your science briefing for 01.17.2025
The ferocious, loud, and odd sex lives of dinosaurs, the bizarre industry of fake fossils, a mystery in the Earth's mantle, and more...
Everyone loves puppies, kittens, and dinosaurs. Hell, pretty much every kid who ever learns about dinosaurs goes through a serious dino kick, myself included. As we get older, we realize that dinosaurs are still objectively very cool, but start to have far less wholesome questions. Like, how did dinosaurs do the horizontal mambo. Was it even horizontal? Could we classify it as a mambo? Well, believe it or not, paleontologists do have some good ideas on how to answer those questions… (The Smithsonian)
And speaking of dinosaurs, sadly, there is a group of people which absolutely hates them since they pose a problem to dogmas they hold near and dear, and desperately want to preach as inerrant: creationists. So, creationists came up with an industry that sells fake fossils to the public, one which documentarian Dan Olson, of the mega-viral Line Goes Up expose of NFTs, decided to look into… (Folding Ideas)
Per-and-polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are used in thousands of very common household products like non-stick cookware and coatings. Originally created to make our daily lives cleaner, these chemicals turned out to be responsible for birth defects and cancers, and need to be eliminated as soon as possible. But the price tag to do that is hefty. In Europe alone, it would take €100 billion per year… (Le Monde)
There’s a complex, churning, superheated world under our feet. We now know that far from being solid, the Earth shifts as continents drift, subduct, dissolve, and collide on timescales of hundreds of millions of years. This is why when geologists studying the inner layers of the mantle saw enormous “bumps” in their scans, they assumed that it was leftover bits of ancient continents. But on second look, that idea had to go, as the blobs had no business being where they are… (Science Alert)
Does it seem like more and more people are complaining that their job applications go nowhere, even as more and more companies advertise the same exact openings day in, day out? Social media is abuzz about “ghost jobs” for which no one really seems to hire while coming up with theory after theory about why they might exist. A new study says that not only are ghost jobs real, but they may account for one in five of all open solicitations online. The real question is why… (Quartz)