science

BIPM, responsible for standards, has decided not to include leap seconds moving time forward or backward during the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM). This was announced to relief by time keeping professionals everywhere, for fear of things breaking. In the notes BIPM says:

a negative leap second has not previously been applied, and it is considered to pose a high risk of causing anomalies and disruption to critical infrastructures that are largely unprepared, and the preparation would create, for the industries that rely on time synchronization, a need for financial investment, whose amount is estimated to be similar to their preparations for the millennium bug,

Scary Y2K. It was also note that the frequency of these leap seconds in the coming years would cause repeating problems. The leap second was introduced to algin UTC, which increments atomically, to solar time (UT1), which is based on the Earth's rotation of the sun.

During this conference, the time keepers of the Earth have decided to keep the maxium difference between UT1nd UTC to 1 hour which means UTC will stay the same for "several centuries".

The Leopardus tilcayo is the first entirely new species of cat to be discovered since the Pampas cat in 1923. Biologist Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz working in Bolivia was called to look at a the tiny cat which was discovered in the Yungas forest in 2017.

Together with Eduardo Eizirik, and Jonas Lescroart they were able to use genomic analysis to conclude that this was a new species. The articles goes further into how this coudl help uncover other branches in the cat family and help reclassify some lesser known or studies cats. This helps determine population sizes and direct conservation efforts.

Modern genomics lets scientists see deeper differences photographs and fieldnotes miss. In the new study, when the researchers compared complete genomes from 38 individuals across the Leopardus genus, the results showed that not only was L. tilcayo different from the other tiger cat species, but it had diverged from them around 1.4 million years ago—an evolutionary distance comparable to that between modern lions and extinct cave lions.

The study released last month is accessible on Current Biology for the fortunate few who have access.

I discovered this articles from Robb Knight's weeknotes.

Aurorasaurus is a crowd-sourced tracker of the northern and southern lights. Discovered via Prof. Sam Lawler on Mastodon.

An interactive visual of the Earth's bio and techno mass over time. Created by Ménard and Shtarkman, discovered via Xanthe Tynehorne's Garden.

A look what silica gel are, what that do and why we use them so much.

[A] single gram of silica gel could have an internal surface area of eight hundred square meters—the size of almost two basketball courts.

Discovered via Tom Scott's Newsletter.

Incredible interactive animations to demonsrate the moons path around the Earth with the Physics behind it. While on the site checkout out the other articles to be just as amazed.

Discovered via 82Mhz.

A 2-D approximation of how an iceberg would float in reality.

Created by JoshData and inspired by GlacialMeg on Twitter. This was discovered on Mastodon through Stef Walter.

These simple but well written articles remind me of the many children encyclopedic books I read through as a child. Its good to see a format like this on the internet thats accessible for all and something which can be, and is, kept up to date.

Discovered via Nicolas Magand