Category: Science

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This is How Lava Lamps Are Protecting You from Hackers

Everyone worries about data encryption and cybersecurity. I’m certainly no stranger to the concept.

I think my credit card has now been skimmed 3 times in 2 years, but 2020 was 5 years long, so I may have lost count.

That’s where cybersecurity companies like San Francisco based Cloudflare come in, bringing a very unique perspective to data encryption.

As Atlas Obscura reports:

Cloudflare covers about 10 percent of international web traffic, including the websites for Uber, OKCupid, or FitBit.

I’m betting most readers have used at least 2 out of 3 of these sites at some point.

So it’s fascinating to learn that Cloudflare has a pretty unique method for generating random encryption code to protect those sites: a wall of lava lamps.

Posted by Cloudflare on Tuesday, September 27, 2016

Yes, you read that right.

The wall features over 100 lava lamps, spanning a variety of colors, and its random patterns deter hackers from accessing data.

It feels like the most hipster thing ever, but we all know the feeling of zoning out in front of a randomly swirling blob of light and color, right?

Well it turns out:

As the lava lamps bubble and swirl, a video camera on the ceiling monitors their unpredictable changes and connects the footage to a computer, which converts the randomness into a virtually unhackable code.

Posted by Cloudflare on Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Who knew that kind of magic was even possible?

Someone smarter than me, that’s who.

Cloudflare might have taken it to a whole new level, but they didn’t actually invent the “LavaRand” concept, which was patented for a few years by another company in the ’90s.

As Cloudflare explains on their blog:

In cryptography, the term random means unpredictable. That is, a process for generating random bits is secure if an attacker is unable to predict the next bit with greater than 50% accuracy (in other words, no better than random chance).

True randomness, they explain, only exists in the natural, physical world. Most encryption companies rely on pseudorandomness, or the generation of random data.

Pseudorandomness is generated through the use of a deterministic algorithm that takes as input some other random value called a seed and produces a larger amount of random output (these algorithms are called cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generators, or CSPRNGs)

The lava lamp system, it seems, may be a little bit of both, which is kind of mind boggling all on its own.

They’ve withstood the test of academic analysis, years of being used in production, attacks by resourced adversaries, and so on.

Be sure to check out this video from Tom Scott about the lamps:

And if you ever find yourself in the Bay Area, you can go see the futuristic cybersecurity in action for yourself.

Since any kind of external disturbance affects the lamps, increasing the randomness of their patterns, the company has no problem with visitors coming to gawk.

Simply enter the lobby of Cloudflare’s San Francisco headquarters and ask to see the lava lamp display.

I definitely want to check that out.

Did this story blow your mind as much as it did mine? Let us know in the comments!

The post This is How Lava Lamps Are Protecting You from Hackers appeared first on UberFacts.

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Scientists Say There Could Be 36 Alien Civilizations in the Milky Way

We’ve all wondered–could there be, not just life, but intelligent life, out there?

And while relative intelligence of life on Earth could be debatable, two scientists from the University of Nottingham have a new theory that suggests there is.

36 different potential civilizations, to be exact.

Image credit: NASA via Rawpixel

How can scientists possibly make a prediction about the number of undiscovered civilizations?

It’s a mathematical theory based on a fifty-year-old equation called the Drake equation.

As Popular Mechanics explains:

Drake’s seven key variables, which range from how many habitable planets exoplanets there are in the galaxy to the amount of time over which intelligent life takes shape, are almost impossible to pin down.

The formula acts more like a framework for the probability of finding life; previous estimates have ranged from zero to over a billion civilizations.

But Professor of Astrophysics Christopher Conselice, his colleague Tom Westby, and their team at the University of Nottingham used new technology and assumptions about our galaxy, the Milky Way, to formulate a new hypothesis.

They published their work last summer in The Astrophysical Journal.

Image credit: NASA via Rawpixel

As quoted in Phys.org, Conselice explains that they based their assumption on the length of time it took a civilization to develop on Earth:

“There should be at least a few dozen active civilizations in our Galaxy under the assumption that it takes 5 billion years for intelligent life to form on other planets, as on Earth.

The idea is looking at evolution, but on a cosmic scale. We call this calculation the Astrobiological Copernican Limit.”

The Copernican limit guides researchers to think on a pretty large scale–where intelligent life develops in either more or less than 5 billion years.

By intelligent life, scientists mean a civilization capable of communication.

On Earth, that development took more than 4.5 billion years, thus the 5 billion year threshold.

Image credit: NASA via Rawpixel

These calculations have been used for years, but the Nottingham team took it one step further, factoring in the specific composition of Earth’s sun.

As Westby explained:

“In the strong criteria, whereby a metal content equal to that of the Sun is needed (the Sun is relatively speaking quite metal rich), we calculate that there should be around 36 active civilizations in our Galaxy.”

When all of the data is combined and analyzed, they believe just 36 exoplanets possess all the right conditions to support the development of an alien civilization.

Of course that means 36 alien civilizations that are enough like us to be recognizable as communicative beings.

Who knows how many are out there that are so different that we might not even recognize them if we saw them.

The problem is, a theory needs to be proven, and the exoplanets are so far away that while we can see them with high powered telescopes and gather some sensory data on them, we don’t yet have the technology to visit them–even with probes.

Image credit: NASA via Rawpixel

If they’re so far away, why do we even care?

Well aside from the intrinsic human need to explore and discover, finding out how many other civilizations co-exist could actually tell us something about how long life on earth will last.

As Professor Conselice points out:

If we find that intelligent life is common then this would reveal that our civilization could exist for much longer than a few hundred years, alternatively if we find that there are no active civilizations in our Galaxy it is a bad sign for our own long-term existence.

By searching for extraterrestrial intelligent life—even if we find nothing—we are discovering our own future and fate

This is very exciting in the world of astronomy.

But according to Popular Mechanics and The Guardian, not every scientist is convinced.

Oliver Shorttle of the University of Cambridge told the news organization that more factors need to be considered—such as how exactly life formed on Earth—before taking the new findings as fact.

That’s science for you. There’s always more to consider.

Even so, it’s pretty cool to have such a specific number, don’t you think?

Do you believe there’s life out there? Let us know your theories in the comments!

The post Scientists Say There Could Be 36 Alien Civilizations in the Milky Way appeared first on UberFacts.

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Physicists Are Getting Closer to Understanding Why Glass Exists

Until someone pointed it out to me, I never really considered that the existence of glass is a weird thing. I mean, I enjoy science, and I read about science, but this particular quirk has escaped me for all of these years!

When liquid is cooled, it either crystallizes or hardens into glass. The former is a dramatic switch from the liquid phase, where molecules are disordered and free flowing, into the locked, regular, repeating pattern of the crystal phase (like how water freezes into ice).

Image Credit: iStock

Some liquids, like silica, begins as a molten liquid and when cooled, contracts and crowds closer together until they stop moving. The gradual transition doesn’t reorganize the molecules, and the gradual nature results in glass.

Scientists, though, don’t really understand why the cooling liquid hardens in some scenarios, or why the cold molecules don’t “squish” into new arrangements, confesses Camille Scalliet, a glass theorist at the University of Cambridge.

“Liquid and glass have the same structure, but behave differently.

Understanding that is the main question.”

They have had clues, like the one found by chemist Walter Kauzmann in 1948 when he noticed that the more slowly you cool a liquid, the longer it will cool before it transitions into a denser and more stable glass.

In that scenario, the molecules had longer to shuffle around and find tighter, low-energy arrangements before it fully hardened – and the lowest possible temperature it can stay at before full hardening is now known as the Kauzmann temperature.

Image Credit: iStock

There, the resulting glass has an entropy as low as that of a crystal, creating a paradox – how could glass possess the same order as a crystal?

It can’t, not normally, which implied something special happened at the Kauzmann temperature – something that created an ideal glass structure made of the densest possible packing of molecules.

Mark Ediger, a chemical physicist at the University of Wisconsin Madison, says that’s why “people thought there should be an ideal glass.”

Despite experiments through the years by scientists and glassmakers alike, no way has been found to form ideal glass by cooling a liquid. The cooling process would have to be perhaps infinitely slow, it was surmised, to keep the glass from hardening before it his the Kauzmann temperature.

Then, in 2007, Ediger developed a new method of glassmaking.

“We figured out there was another way to make glasses that are high density and close to the ideal-glass state by a completely different route.”

That route involved creating “ultra-stable glasses” that exist in a state somewhere between ordinary and ideal using a method called vapor deposition.

It required dropping molecules one by one onto a surface (kind of like playing Tetris), which allowed each one to settle into a snug space before dropping the next one. The glass that resulted was denser, more stable, and lower in entropy than any that had been created before, Ediger said.

“These materials have the properties that you would expect if you took a liquid and cooled it over the course of a million years.”

Several years after Ediger figured out how to make this ultra-stable glass, a group at Berkeley, and another in Madrid, set out to study whether it might depart from that universal heat capacity near absolute zero.

Image Credit: iStock

The two groups probed the low-temperature properties of the ultra-stable silicon and ultra-stable indomethacin and found that both had lower heat capacity than the typical near absolute zero – their configurations are especially snug.

Their theory is that there’s a “tunnel” or a “two-level system” that allows atoms to move between alternative configurations, passing through obstacles and occupying both levels at once. Since the ultra-stable glass has such a low heat capacity that results in fewer of these “tunnels,” then it would seem that ideal glass would have none at all, explained David Reichman, a theorist at Columbia University.

“It’s just perfectly, somehow, positioned where all the atoms are disordered – it doesn’t have a crystal structure – but there’s nothing moving at all.”

They believe, then, that when liquid becomes a glass it’s actually attempting to transition into “ideal” glass and a fundamental pull toward long-range order, but the increased viscosity prevents them from ever truly getting there.

Scientists were recently able to test these ideas through simulations, speeding up the process by a factor of 1 trillion and swapping particles to find the best possible fit.

Image Credit: iStock

They published their results in Physical Review Letters and reported that the more stable the simulated glass, the fewer two-level systems it has – just like they suspected.

There are still more experiments to do on substances like amber, which doesn’t fit this mold or these findings, but also exists outside of a laboratory setting.

For now, glass specialists and physicists all over the world are excited to be one step closer to understanding how class is made, how it exists, and how we can make it better.

The post Physicists Are Getting Closer to Understanding Why Glass Exists appeared first on UberFacts.

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Physicists Are Getting Closer to Understanding Why Glass Exists

Until someone pointed it out to me, I never really considered that the existence of glass is a weird thing. I mean, I enjoy science, and I read about science, but this particular quirk has escaped me for all of these years!

When liquid is cooled, it either crystallizes or hardens into glass. The former is a dramatic switch from the liquid phase, where molecules are disordered and free flowing, into the locked, regular, repeating pattern of the crystal phase (like how water freezes into ice).

Image Credit: iStock

Some liquids, like silica, begins as a molten liquid and when cooled, contracts and crowds closer together until they stop moving. The gradual transition doesn’t reorganize the molecules, and the gradual nature results in glass.

Scientists, though, don’t really understand why the cooling liquid hardens in some scenarios, or why the cold molecules don’t “squish” into new arrangements, confesses Camille Scalliet, a glass theorist at the University of Cambridge.

“Liquid and glass have the same structure, but behave differently.

Understanding that is the main question.”

They have had clues, like the one found by chemist Walter Kauzmann in 1948 when he noticed that the more slowly you cool a liquid, the longer it will cool before it transitions into a denser and more stable glass.

In that scenario, the molecules had longer to shuffle around and find tighter, low-energy arrangements before it fully hardened – and the lowest possible temperature it can stay at before full hardening is now known as the Kauzmann temperature.

Image Credit: iStock

There, the resulting glass has an entropy as low as that of a crystal, creating a paradox – how could glass possess the same order as a crystal?

It can’t, not normally, which implied something special happened at the Kauzmann temperature – something that created an ideal glass structure made of the densest possible packing of molecules.

Mark Ediger, a chemical physicist at the University of Wisconsin Madison, says that’s why “people thought there should be an ideal glass.”

Despite experiments through the years by scientists and glassmakers alike, no way has been found to form ideal glass by cooling a liquid. The cooling process would have to be perhaps infinitely slow, it was surmised, to keep the glass from hardening before it his the Kauzmann temperature.

Then, in 2007, Ediger developed a new method of glassmaking.

“We figured out there was another way to make glasses that are high density and close to the ideal-glass state by a completely different route.”

That route involved creating “ultra-stable glasses” that exist in a state somewhere between ordinary and ideal using a method called vapor deposition.

It required dropping molecules one by one onto a surface (kind of like playing Tetris), which allowed each one to settle into a snug space before dropping the next one. The glass that resulted was denser, more stable, and lower in entropy than any that had been created before, Ediger said.

“These materials have the properties that you would expect if you took a liquid and cooled it over the course of a million years.”

Several years after Ediger figured out how to make this ultra-stable glass, a group at Berkeley, and another in Madrid, set out to study whether it might depart from that universal heat capacity near absolute zero.

Image Credit: iStock

The two groups probed the low-temperature properties of the ultra-stable silicon and ultra-stable indomethacin and found that both had lower heat capacity than the typical near absolute zero – their configurations are especially snug.

Their theory is that there’s a “tunnel” or a “two-level system” that allows atoms to move between alternative configurations, passing through obstacles and occupying both levels at once. Since the ultra-stable glass has such a low heat capacity that results in fewer of these “tunnels,” then it would seem that ideal glass would have none at all, explained David Reichman, a theorist at Columbia University.

“It’s just perfectly, somehow, positioned where all the atoms are disordered – it doesn’t have a crystal structure – but there’s nothing moving at all.”

They believe, then, that when liquid becomes a glass it’s actually attempting to transition into “ideal” glass and a fundamental pull toward long-range order, but the increased viscosity prevents them from ever truly getting there.

Scientists were recently able to test these ideas through simulations, speeding up the process by a factor of 1 trillion and swapping particles to find the best possible fit.

Image Credit: iStock

They published their results in Physical Review Letters and reported that the more stable the simulated glass, the fewer two-level systems it has – just like they suspected.

There are still more experiments to do on substances like amber, which doesn’t fit this mold or these findings, but also exists outside of a laboratory setting.

For now, glass specialists and physicists all over the world are excited to be one step closer to understanding how class is made, how it exists, and how we can make it better.

The post Physicists Are Getting Closer to Understanding Why Glass Exists appeared first on UberFacts.

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Scientists Discover That Pigs Can Actually Play Video Games

There’s a new pig in town, so step aside Wilbur.

In the classic children’s book Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White introduces readers to a very smart little piglet.

As someone who loved the book in 3rd grade, I was only a little surprised to learn that pigs actually are genuinely very smart!

Image credit: Lucia Macedo via Unsplash

Earlier this year, pathobiologists from the Center for Animal Welfare Science at Purdue University in Indiana gave 4 pigs a test originally designed for primates.

They wanted to see if pigs could combine multiple complex tasks to earn a treat.

Image Credit: Frontiers in Psychology

As Rebecca Nordquist, the Assistant Professor of Veterinary Medicine at Utrecht University explains:

The animals need to understand the link between moving around a joystick and what’s happening on a computer screen, and then link what’s happening on the screen to getting a reward.

The four pigs tested were all able to do that to some extent, showing off their smarts.

Each time the pigs successfully completed their task, the researchers gave them a harder one, like progressive levels in Tetris or Mario.

Image Credit: Frontiers in Psychology

Now pigs, of course, do not have opposable thumbs. They were trained to move the joystick with their snouts.

Unsurprisingly, and probably for a variety of reasons, while the pigs were initially successful, they did not perform as well as their monkey predecessors.

Pigs have long been reputed as being very smart, but there are certain tasks that tend to challenge them.

Again, Professor Nordquist explains:

Mirror use, for instance, is not something all pigs can master, and while they can use simple geometric shapes to decide what response to give, recognising other pigs from photographs proves too difficult.

This was surprising since other farm animals like sheep and cattle are able to recognise their sheep and cattle friends on photographs.

Aside from the fact that it’s really bloody interesting, why do scientists care how smart pigs are?

For three reasons, the first being that it’s just really bloody interesting to get into the mind of a pig.

The second reason is a bit more practical. As farmers try out more ethical and socially responsible farming methods, they need to make sure that what they’re doing actually does benefit the animal.

For example: What good is letting pigs roam free if they can’t easily navigate the larger environment to find the food and water that they need?

And the third reason is to help us understand the pig’s “intrinsic value.”

Professor Nordquist describes this as:

Instead of monetary value as an agricultural product or value to a human as a companion, this is the value it has for being itself, just as a pig, with all of the piggy things it does, such as oinking, rooting for things like truffles, socialising, and natural intelligence.

Image credit: Benjamin Wedemeyer via Unsplash

It makes sense. Because the more we understand a thing, the more we love it.

And whether a pig’s intelligence makes people forgo the bacon or not, it could go a long way towards how the animals are treated.

Maybe that’s wrong–maybe they should all be treated as though they’re as smart or smarter than us, simply because they’re alive. But the reality is that humans assign intrinsic value, and so researchers want to make sure that value is weighted correctly.

Either way, it’s pretty remarkable that pigs can play video games. I would like to challenge one to a friendly round of Dr. Mario–truffles are on me if they win.

Did this absolutely blow your mind, or do you have one of those pets who you’re sure is smarter than most people? Share your thoughts in the comments.

The post Scientists Discover That Pigs Can Actually Play Video Games appeared first on UberFacts.

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5 Things You Must Consider Before Buying Laboratory Instruments

A laboratory is a place where testing and relevant research are done. It is also an important room for the production of drugs and chemicals. All lab managers are looking for quality and accurate results in their services. This can only happen when the instruments being used for testing and research are of good quality. Purchasing lab instruments can be challenging due to the changes seen in the current technology. Different types of instruments have been manufactured by hundreds of manufacturers, making it difficult to find the best easily. Note that not all the instruments obtained from the store will

The post 5 Things You Must Consider Before Buying Laboratory Instruments appeared first on Factual Facts.

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Cool Dinosaur Facts You Might Not Know

One of the great things about science is how we’re literally always discovering new things. Not only that, scientists get a little thrill at getting to revise and update previous work, so no one is ever going to pretend like a new discovery didn’t upend everything we believed yesterday.

Which means there are always new and cool dinosaur facts floating to the surface, and even if you’re not a kid anymore, there’s no reason not to love these 16 fun tidbits of information.

16. It’s tough to picture.

T-rex didn’t have exposed teeth. It had full lip cover. they can be absolutely sure about this because the tooth enamel wouldnt survive constant exposure.

Most artists assumed a T-rex jaw would look like a crocodile jaw, but never considered that the croc’s teeth are protected by the water

15. That seems like an easy thing to fix.

Here’s a fun movie trivia fact from a famous dinosaur movie:

Do you remember in Jurassic Park the mosquito stuck in the amber where they supposedly got the DNA from?

Well, that is an elephant mosquito, the only mosquito that doesn’t suck blood, so it couldn’t possibly contain any dinosaur DNA.

14. Bless his heart.

My son somehow thinks its a travesty that they don’t exist anymore and will sit up at night and be upset he can’t know all the answers to his dinosaur questions.

13. They’ve seen a lot of sh%t.

That Sharks where around before Dinosaurs and Trees.

12. Just for starters.

Iguanodon, the most abundant dinosaur of them all, lived on 5 continents.

T. rex had a bite force of 6 tons.

Stegosaurus would flush blood through its plates, most likely to intimidate predators or attract mates.

The leg bones of large sauropods like argentinosaurus or seismosaurus could be 20 feet tall and weigh as much as a ton.

11. They’re running out of names.

There’s a dinosaur that was discovered in Australia near a Qantas airport, so they named it Qantassaurus.

10. I would have liked to have seen that.

Some herbivores didn’t join the adult herd until juveniles and were big enough. Before that, some lived in the forest/jungle in baby herds. For safety.

9. Only the birds survived.

Dinosaurs are a diverse group of reptiles of the clade Dinosauria. They first appeared during the Triassic period, between 243 and 233.23 million years ago, although the exact origin and timing of the evolution of dinosaurs is the subject of active research.

They became the dominant terrestrial vertebrates after the Triassic–Jurassic extinction event 201.3 million years ago; their dominance continued through the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.

The fossil record demonstrates that birds are modern feathered dinosaurs, having evolved from earlier theropods during the Late Jurassic epoch. As such, birds were the only dinosaur lineage to survive the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event approximately 66 million years ago.

Dinosaurs can therefore be divided into avian dinosaurs, or birds; and non-avian dinosaurs, which are all dinosaurs other than birds.

8. And we probably never will.

We don’t actually know how they looked like when they were alive, we just think they look like what they’re perceived as.

Same with sounds. We just made up what we think they would have sounded like and everyone went with it.

7. It’s hard to imagine.

Tyrannosaurus Rex and Stegosaurus were evidently never on the planet together…separated by millions of years ¯_(ツ)_/¯ fake news museums will have you believe otherwise with their standard fight scenes…

6. Poor Newman.

Dilophosaurus (the one with the neck fans that pop out and rattles) doesn’t look like it does in Jurassic Park. They’re bigger (10ft tall), they don’t spit acid/venom, and don’t have neck umbrellas.

That’s actually part of the plot in the novel. The scientists were surprised by both of those things the the first ones were cloned, as neither thing showed up in the fossil record. (How much of this stuff was intentionally added by the InGen scientists for a “wow” factor is up for debate.) That section of the novel was always one of my favorites, as it always made me wonder what else we assume about fossils when so much of the original animal is missing.

Crichton knew there was no evidence of the hoods or venom when he wrote the book, and thought the idea of something so defining to the fictional species being something the fossil record couldn’t indicate was interesting.

5. Now it’s canon.

When the T-Rex attacks the kids in the Jeep, the glass was supposed to break. Instead, the entire pane fell on the kids as a thousand pound animatronic pushed it down on them. Their screams of terror in that scene are real.

4. Well I’m off to Google.

Ooh, my time to shine! My username is of an ancient now extinct animal, though not technically a dinosaur. Kubanochoerus used to be this humungous unicorn pig, like a half ton boar with a big old horn in the middle of its forehead.

Pretty bada$s of you ask me.

3. Just lick it.

When you are looking for dinosaur bones you can tell the difference between a fossil and a rock by touching your tongue to it. If it “sticks” a bit and kinda sucks back it is porous and probably bone.

2. It was a long wait.

I hope I’m regurgitating this fact correctly, but It took the triceratops longer to evolve to have horns than the amount of time they’ve been extinct.

1. A goofball dinosaur.

Therizinosaurus was a large, bipedal herbivore that occupied an ecological niche akin to that of the giant ground sloths of the Pleistocene: using its meter-long claws to pull down tree branches. It looked goofy as hell, like an eight-meter long turkey, especially since it was likely to have had at least some feathery integument.

The real kicker? It was a cousin of T. rex. Yes, that guy. One of the most terrifying carnivores ever to walk the earth had a vegetarian Edward Scissorhands for a cousin. And, yes, it likely used those scythe-like claws for defense, too.

These are all going straight into my brain and never leaving. It’s where they belong!

If you’ve got a favorite dino fact and it’s not on this list, share it with us in the comments.

The post Cool Dinosaur Facts You Might Not Know appeared first on UberFacts.

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People Share the Coolest Dinosaur Facts They Know

Kids who grow up obsessed with dinosaurs never lose their interest in it. If you need proof of this statement, just look at the popularity of the enduring (and still going) Jurassic Park franchise!

For some reason it’s not “cool” for adults to love talking about dinosaurs, but I say it’s about time to change all of that – and these 18 people know some amazing facts you’re not going to want to miss.

18. Waiting for discovery.

We have not even begun to scratch the surface of how many dinosaurs there actually were. We are finding new species as often as every 2 weeks (I imagine this is not true at the moment with corona going on right now).

I saw a movie at the Field Museum and I believe it said that we have only discovered 2% of all dinosaurs that have ever walked on earth. This was years ago so I imagine that number is different now but it’s crazy to think about just how long they were actually living on our planet. 165 millions years is a crazy number to wrap your brain around.

17. By the time you hear it, it’s too late to run.

Scientists have studied the nasal and throat structure of the tyrannosaurus rex and as it turns out it was completely incapable of vocalizing a roar like those seen in movies, rather they would have made deep growling noises similar to alligators.

16. I actually love how dorky this is.

The word “Dinosaur” means “terrible lizard”.

Since the coining of the name it has been determined that they are not lizards.

The name still fits though, because they make for terrible lizards.

15. That’s odd.

Raptors couldn’t walk around with its hands hanging palm down like most toys and movies show, their bone structure wouldn’t allow it. They had to keep their palms facing each other.

14. Wait, what?

Velociraptors are a lot smaller than depicted in movies.

An actual velociraptor was more like a turkey with attitude: around the size of a Thanksgiving roaster with feathers, teeth, and claws.

13. I always share this fact.

Cartoonist Gary Larson named a dinosaur part.

In one of his strips, a caveman scientist described the spikes on a stegosaurus tail as “the thagomizer, named after the late Thag Simmons”.

Real life paleontologists realized this part had no name… so they started calling it the thagomizer.

12. Not-so-feathered friends.

Many know dinosaurs likely had feathers also known as dino fuzz. However, now many scientists are discovering that the feathers on many dinosaurs have likely been overdone as a result of the feather craze. View the video below on the most up-to-date version of a T-rex. ?

11. I’m picturing a tiny tail but I’m sure that’s not right.

Recently spinosaurus was discovered to have a tadpole-like tail. It has been known for a while that it was mostly an aquatic animal, even Jurassic Park III showed that, but it was always depicted with the standard lizard-like dinosaur tail.

Recently new fossils have emerged that show that the creature had a tail like that of a tad pole, suggesting that it spend much more time in water than previously thought.

It was not, however, a water pursuit predator, as detailed by the paper “The ecology of Spinosaurus: Evaluating the ecology of Spinosaurus: Shoreline Generalist or aquatic pursuit specialist?” by Hone and Holtz (I’ve actually spoken with Hone).

It is in fact more evident that spinosaurus was incapable of pursuing animals underwater as do crocodiles, and more evidence based on their morphology points towards it being a wader, like a heron, sitting and waiting for fish to pass by and snapping at them. This “tappole” tail could therefore be attributed to sexual displays or something we don’t know of yet.

10. I KNEW it.

There is a Dinosaur named Yi Qi from the limestone deposits in China that has the exact same body plan as a Wyvern Dragon, complete with bat-like Wings and proves that flight evolved more than once in dinosaurs

9. It boggles the mind.

They were around for longer than they’ve been extinct.

Which means that there were dinosaur fossils when dinosaurs existed. Tyrannosaurus rex (late Cretaceous, 68 mya) lived closer in time to us than to Stegosaurus (late Jurassic, 150 mya)

8. Stupid wars.

There was an ultra rare skeleton of a dinosaur called spinosaurus that was the only one of its kind (not complete, but only evidence of it) and it got destroyed during ww2 when bombs fell on the museum in Germany.

Only recently another intact skeleton has been found in North Africa. Which was more complete and gave some clues about where it lived and how it got so big( it was bigger than a T. rex )

7. I would not like to see those.

There was a study done a few years ago where scientists grew chicken embryos that had dinosaur faces – a rounded snout and teeth instead of a beak. They did this by altering gene expression in the developing embryos, so the snouts came out looking more like an alligator’s than a traditional bird’s.

Also, birds actually existed at the same time as non-avian dinosaurs. Archaeopteryx was a Jurassic dinosaur, so the evolution of birds began long before velociraptors and T. Rex were walking the earth. Edit for clarification: they may not have been true birds as we know them today, but the avian dinosaurs branched off from non-avian dinosaurs well before the K-T extinxtion event that killed the non-avian dinosaurs, and continued their evolution into what we know as modern birds.

Finally, there’s a weird bird in the Amazon called the Hoatzin, and it’s notable because the chicks have 2 claws on their wings. These allow the chicks to climb trees until their wings are strong enough for actual flight; by adulthood the claws disappear. These birds are the last surviving members of a bird line that branched off from other avian species 64 million years ago, just after the non-avian dinosaurs were wiped out. They’re basically just really weird dinosaur birds that are very stinky and have gross tasting meat because they have a weird digestive tract.

6. It’s going to take a minute to process this.

Pterosaurs aren’t dinosaurs, Plesiosaurs aren’t dinosaurs, and Dimetrodon is not a dinosaur.

In fact, Dimetrodon is a synapsid and is more closely related to humans than to dinosaurs.

5. Plenty of religious sects don’t.

The Amish don’t believe in dinosaurs.

There are other christian cults that believe that the world was only created about 4000 years ago. They believe that there never were dinosaurs, just fossils created by god.

4. Where are the babies?

There’s a cool Ted Talk about why we’ve never found baby dinos.

3. Talk about good/bad timing.

There is a fossil called the “Fighting Dinosaurs” that shows a Velociraptor and Protoceratops locked in combat. The Velociraptor has its killing claw thrust in the neck of the Protoceratops, and the Protoceratops has the hand of the Velociraptor clutched in its mouth.

It’s thought that they died suddenly while in combat due to getting buried in a landslide of sand, caused by a rare torrential downpour. Real-life Velociraptors may be small, but they’re still metal as hell.

2. Scarier and scarier.

Dinosaurs such as T. Rex could produce infrasonic waves.

You’d basically feel in your spine.

1. Some tough monkeys.

T. Rex was actually really tough. Some skeletons have been found with major injuries that show evidence of years worth of healing.

A skeleton named Stan in particular had a hole in his skull, and he may have lived up to a decade after having his skull punctured if the bone healing is any indication.

Like Sue, one of the largest female T. Rex skeletons we have. One of her femurs is gigantic and misshapen due to an infection, she had a dead, hanging arm due to a torn bicep, had broken ribs on both sides of her chest, broken at 2 different times based on research how they healed, and had holes in her jaw due to germs. Her skeleton was difficult to put up because her tail bones were fused together due to arthritis.

These animals ran on pure hatred which undoubtedly fueled their survival drive. However, the severity of T. Rex injuries which they survived hints that they could’ve lived in pairs or small groups and they actually cared for each other ensuring their survival.

They were long considered to be solitary hunters that would rather feast on dead carcasses than hunt, but their injuries seem to point to the fact that they were active hunters. 15 years ago a family of 6 tyrannosaurids ranging from juvenile to adult was found in a mass grave suggesting they died together as a family.

I’m so happy all of these live in my head now.

If your favorite dino fact isn’t on this list, share it with us in the comments!

The post People Share the Coolest Dinosaur Facts They Know appeared first on UberFacts.

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The Crocodile Huntress Bindi Irwin Recreates a Special Photo-Op for Her Late Father

I love animals, and I was obsessed with The Crocodile Hunter back in the day.

While I was recovering from a difficult surgery, Steve Irwin’s “Danger, danger, danger,” was the fastest way to make me smile.

So of course I follow his daughter Bindi’s Instagram to keep up-to-date on what’s happening in the Irwin lives and at Australia Zoo.

Bindi and her family post a lot of great pictures to Instagram.

Whether they are pictures of the family helping animals, traveling, or just hanging out at home, they are always delightful and sure to please, like this group photo she posted recently:

It features her mom Terri, brother Robert, husband Chandler, and showcases Bindi’s baby bump.

Bindi and Robert are so much like their parents that it’s scary sometimes.

Steve definitely did an amazing job in the short time he had, to pass down his love of wildlife and his passion for conservation.

Like her parents, Bindi met her future husband during a tour of the family’s zoo.

After a years-long, intercontinental courtship, Chandler finally popped the question in 2019.

Now he’s part of the Australia Zoo family too, and honestly, I’m not sure there’s a more welcoming place on earth.

In many ways, Chandler is a lot like Steve-o.

That post, featuring an Australian Carpet Python, sure does remind me of a famous picture of Steve.
(And the UPS commercials where he used to pretend to get bitten.)

Unfortunately in the spring of 2020, Bindi and Chandler’s wedding plans had to be modified due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

But that didn’t stop them from enjoying the gorgeous day with family and close friends.

You can’t help but think that Steve would have been thrilled.

Especially later in the year when they made their very special announcement.

Once they found out she was pregnant, I bet Bindi couldn’t wait to recreate her family’s iconic photo.

Neither could her followers! The post has been favorited over 1 million times!

Just like Steve and Terri, it is obvious that Bindi and Chandler will be great parents.

And the world will be better off for the new Wildlife Warrior they are bringing into it.

The post The Crocodile Huntress Bindi Irwin Recreates a Special Photo-Op for Her Late Father appeared first on UberFacts.