Saturday Quote: Leaky Continental Plate, Talking Monkey, Einstein Ring

This week, researchers reported on nine rivers and lakes in the Americas that go against hydrological expectations. Geologists report that Earth’s first crust had chemical features similar to today’s continental crust. Engineers have advanced quantum technology by integrating materials tailored to two exotic laboratory-based labs into artificial structures and atoms.

Additionally, geologists report that the North American continent drips rock masses into the mantle. Research conducted in the Democratic Republic of the Congo strongly suggests that bonobos possess a compositional language. And James Webbspace Telescope took another pretty photo of the Einstein Ring.

Geologists report strong ratios

Geologists at the University of Texas at Austin report that the underside of the North American continent drips rock masses into the Earth’s mantle in the first discovery of what they call kratonic thinning. Thinification appears to be concentrated under the Midwest of the US and driven by subduction of the Faralon plate, the offshore tectonic plate below North America. Faralon has submerged below North America for the past 200 million years, interacting with the entire underlying craton of most of the US and Canada.

The researchers constructed a computer model of subduction dynamics and performed simulations that included and excluded Faralalon. Thinification only existed in simulations containing Falalalon. These are dynamics that occur over hundreds of millions of years, and the project contributes to the study of vast geological epochs.

“This kind of thing is important if you want to understand how planets have evolved for so long. It helps you understand how you break continents, how you break them, and how you recycle them to Earth,” says Thorsten Becker, a geologist at the University of Texas at Austin.

Monkey Semantics

Researchers at the Kokoropoli Community Reserve in the Democratic Republic of the Congo report that vocal communication between bonobos is widely dependent on composition. The ability to combine meaningful ideas into larger structures that allow meaning to be derived based on the content and structured method of individual units. Understood. How humans talk.

The first step in the project was to determine the meaning of the individual calls and their combinations. They began by assuming that bonobo calls have many types of meaning, such as giving orders, presenting future actions, representations of internal states, and referencing external events.

Using more than 300 context parameters, we enthusiastically describe individual utterances in the context of external events (such as the presence of other bonobos), and caller activity, EG, meals, rest, and performance. After the call, they coded the activities that occurred over the next two minutes. In this way, they decided that if a particular call started moving before Bonombo, the phone meant “I’m traveling.” The results were what they described as a complete dictionary of bonovocoll.

In the second step, we learned whether Cole’s combinations were constructive, that is, whether the combinations modulated more meanings. Using methods derived from linguistics, they ultimately identified four calls combinations whose meanings were derived from a single part. All call types were displayed on at least one of these combinations. This suggests that Bonobo Communication is compositional.

Bendylens from the Einstein era

Among many other achievements, the age of space-based telescopes confirmed Einstein’s prediction that gravity bends space-time and bends light. Einstein’s rings are gravitational lenses that bend light that run through light, and in best case, they cannot be enlarged and observed far away objects.

Recently, James Webb Space Telescope captured an oval galaxy, SMACS J0028.2-7537. The spiral galaxies are distorted, but the clusters and gas structures of individual stars are clearly visible.

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