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      Birds of a feather flock together, but patterns change with the mission

      Jennifer Ouellette · news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 5 January, 2021 - 21:05 · 1 minute

    Large flock of jackdaws in silhouette flying in the evening sky over the trees.

    Enlarge / Large flock of jackdaws in silhouette flying in the evening sky over the trees. (credit: iStock / Getty Images Plus )

    There's rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we're once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2020, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: why flocks of jackdaws will change their flying patterns depending on whether they are returning to roost, or banding together to drive away predators.

    Flocks of wild jackdaws will change their flying patterns depending on whether they are returning to roost or banding together to drive away predators, according to research originally slated to be presented at the 2020 APS March Meeting, which was cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic. The work builds upon earlier findings published in a November 2019 paper in Nature Communications. This could one day lead to the development of autonomous robotic swarms capable of changing their interaction rules to perform different tasks in response to environmental cues.

    Co-author Nicholas Ouellette (no relation), a physicist-turned-environmental engineer at Stanford University, has long been fascinated by biological swarms after noting how flocks of starlings in flight formed unusual patterns that, to his physicist's eye, looked a lot like turbulence. He thought there must be underlying mechanisms behind the formation of those patterns—possibly even a set of universal laws that could apply to collective behavior across different species.

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      Archaeology is going digital to harness the power of Big Data

      Jennifer Ouellette · news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Saturday, 2 January, 2021 - 23:10 · 1 minute

    Archaeology is catching up with the digital humanities movement with the creation of large online databases, combining data collected from satellite-, airborne-, and UAV-mounted sensors with historical information.

    Enlarge / Archaeology is catching up with the digital humanities movement with the creation of large online databases, combining data collected from satellite-, airborne-, and UAV-mounted sensors with historical information. (credit: Brown University)

    There's rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we're once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2020, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: archaeologists are using drones and satellite imagery, among other tools, to build large online datasets with an eye toward harnessing the power of big data for their research.

    Archaeology is finally catching up with the so-called "digital humanities," as evidenced by a February special edition of the Journal of Field Archaeology, devoted entirely to discussing the myriad ways in which large-scale datasets and associated analytics are transforming the field. The papers included in the edition were originally presented during a special session at a 2019 meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The data sets might be a bit smaller than those normally associated with Big Data, but this new "digital data gaze" is nonetheless having a profound impact on archaeological research.

    As we've reported previously , more and more archives are being digitized within the humanities, and scholars have been applying various analytical tools to those rich datasets, such as Google N-gram, Bookworm, and WordNet. Close reading of selected sources—the traditional method of the scholars in the humanities—gives a deep but narrow view. Quantitative computational analysis can combine that close reading with a broader, more generalized bird's-eye approach that can reveal hidden patterns or trends that otherwise might have escaped notice. The nature of the data archives and digital tools are a bit different in archaeology, but the concept is the same: combine the traditional "pick and trowel" detailed field work on the ground with more of a sweeping, big-picture, birds-eye view, in hopes of gleaning hidden insights.

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      Dark Archives: Come for the floating goat balls, stay for the fascinating science

      Jennifer Ouellette · news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Monday, 28 December, 2020 - 00:04 · 1 minute

    These might look like your standard leather-bound texts, but they are actually bound in human skin—a practice known as "anthropodermic bibliopegy." All five are housed in the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia.

    Enlarge / These might look like your standard leather-bound texts, but they are actually bound in human skin—a practice known as "anthropodermic bibliopegy." All five are housed in the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia. (credit: Mütter Museum/College of Physicians of Philadelphia))

    There's rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we're once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2020, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: a look at medical librarian Megan Rosenbloom's book, Dark Archives , about tomes bound in human skin.

    When you think about medical librarians and rare book specialists, chances are you picture them poring over rare tomes in a dusty archives—and chances are, you wouldn't be wrong. But when Megan Rosenbloom set out to separate fact from fiction on the existence of rare books bound in human skin, her investigations took her to some uncommon places—like an artisanal tannery in upstate New York, where the floor resembled "Mountain Dew with chunks floating in it," and emptying drums of tanning effluvia might just unleash a few floating goat testicles among the mix.

    The technical term is " anthropodermic bibliopegy ," and Rosenbloom first became fascinated with this macabre practice in 2008, while she was still in library school and working for a medical publisher. While strolling through the vast collection of medical oddities at the famed Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia , she came upon a glass display case holding an intriguing collection of rare books uncharacteristically displayed with their covers closed. The captions informed her that they had been bound in human skin, along with a leather wallet.

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      Study: children’s belief in Santa Claus is more nuanced than you think

      Jennifer Ouellette · news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 25 December, 2020 - 13:00 · 1 minute

    Writing letters to Santa Claus and leaving out milk and cookies are two actions that reinforce children

    Enlarge / Writing letters to Santa Claus and leaving out milk and cookies are two actions that reinforce children's belief. (credit: Carol Yepes/Getty Images)

    There's rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we're once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2020, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: how children's belief in Santa Claus is part of a hierarchical pantheon of real and non-real figures.

    Do you believe in Santa Claus? If you're over the age of eight, you probably don't. We tend to think young children are simply more gullible due to their tender years. But their belief in Santa, the Tooth Fairy, or similar cultural figures isn't quite as simple as that, according to a June paper published in the journal PLOS ONE.

    Rather, such figures fall into an ambiguous category between "real" and "nonreal" for many children, indicating that their belief structures are much more nuanced than previously believed. Rituals like writing letters to Santa, or leaving out milk and cookies on Christmas eve, reinforce their belief in these ambiguous figures. The fact that the milk and cookies are gone on Christmas morning serves as a form of indirect evidence, and when children interact with a Santa figure at the mall, it further reinforces that belief.

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