Tuesday

Barrow, Alaska

Alaska has a population of 738,000 people, but its geographical size is around the same as 7 states in the USA that have a collective 142 million people within.

On top of Alaska there is a town called Barrow, the northernmost town in America.

Here, 4,200 people live life where the temperature is below freezing from Early October all the way to late May. Snow and freezing temperatures can and do even happy in June.

Around November 18th the sun sets, and it won’t come up until the end of January. The opposite happens during the summer, with an 80-day long day starting around May 11th.

The record hottest temperature in this town was a scorching 23.8 degrees C, and the coldest night plummeted to -48.8 degrees C.

If you want to visit, your only chance is by plane – It’s totally isolated. No roads. Surrounded by ice. And bears.

As a result, prices are extremely high. Disinfectant spray will cost you $18 and a bottle of detergent will set you back $40. A small pizza? $17.

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Wednesday

From @Hebro

The Doorway Effect

Because our minds perceive doors as a kind of ‘new beginning’, our brains sometimes save file & close whenever we go through one, which is why we often forget why we went into the room in the first place, and why we often re-remember when we go back into the first room.

This effect works in virtual environment as well as simply imagining walking through a door, too.

This is because our brain’s working memory is not infinite, so it compartmentalizes what it predicts will come next or will no longer be needed. So now you have two rooms and two separate compartments in your brain, making it harder to retrieve memories that are now fighting it out with each other.

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Thursday

Maternal dermatotrophy

During my research for my evolution series, I found this wonderful little natural quirk.

There is a worm-like, legless amphibian called a Caecilian who, when becoming a mother, thicken their skin so their babies can eat them. The babies have specialized scraping teeth to gnaw away at her back.

The skin gets enhanced by the mother with extra fat and protein, and though the mother does survive being eaten by her children, she does lose about 14% of body mass.

Not a worm
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Friday

Cats

Unlike dogs, domestic cats have changed very little since their wild status many thousands of years ago.

In the species of Felis Sylvestris there are five subspecies, only one of which was able to be tamed and become the lovable jerks we know today, the Felis Sylvestris Lybica, or the African Wild Cat.

Domestication of cats happened in two separate waves, starting in the Syrian desert thousands of years ago, where farming started to flourish. Obviously, the mice proved to be perfect mouse catchers. It wasn’t too long until they made the journey into Europe.

Some thousands of years later, cats were domesticated separately in Egypt, and proved even more common in Europe than in the middle east. Those mouse catching skills proved useful on ships, especially during the Viking age.
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Saturday

Pandas are carnivores

Despite their exclusive diet of bamboo, pandas are not genetically equipped for it, like all bears.

The truth is that pandas are not actually exclusive bamboo eaters, but almost. They are however found eating small rodents and other meat, eggs and honey.

Bamboo eating and the lack of interest in meat would have been modifications to the Panda’s genes due to migration drift around 4.2 million years ago, leaving one habitat and isolating itself where bamboo was the only workable food source.

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That being said, nobody actually knows why they chose to stick with this diet. It’s very low in nutritional value and so an adult panda needs to eat 80 pounds of it every day just to keep up. No wonder they’re so boring.

This also explains why their babies are some of the smallest of all mammals compared to parents, often smaller than a mouse and weighing merely 4 ounces @royalmacro. It’s easier to turn bamboo into milk than it is body mass, so the baby is born pathetically small for efficiency’s sake.

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Sunday Bonus

The lifecycle of Xenomorphs in the Alien movie franchise is so messed up and complicated that… well, I’m just gonna let this guy struggle and explain it to you.