August 2024
This newsletter is a collection of things I have found in the last month that I enjoyed, found interesting, or simply wanted to share.
You can follow me more closely at my personal website or if you or someone you know is looking to buy or sell a home, you can point them to my real estate website.
Come on fly with me let’s fly, let’s fly
What happens during the first moments of butterfly scale formation
“We watched the wing develop over 10 days, and got thousands of measurements of how the surfaces of scales changed on a single butterfly,” McDougal says. “We could see that early on, the surface is quite flat. As the butterfly grows, the surface begins to pop up a little bit, and then at around 41 percent of development, we see this very regular pattern of completely popped up protoridges. This whole process happens over about five hours and lays the structural foundation for the subsequent expression of patterned ridges."
[…]
Scientists have noted that, as the cell membrane of a butterfly’s scale grows, it is effectively pinned in certain places by actin bundles — long filaments that run under the growing membrane and act as a scaffold to support the scale as it takes shape. Scientists have hypothesized that actin bundles constrain a growing membrane, similar to ropes around an inflating hot air balloon. As the butterfly’s wing scale grows, they proposed, it would bulge out between the underlying actin filaments, buckling in a way that forms a scale’s initial, parallel ridges.
Pee-Brain
To pee or not to pee? That is a question for the bladder — and the brain
As the bladder fills with urine, stretch-sensing cells in the detrusor, as well as in inner layers of the bladder wall, send signals of fullness up the spinal cord to a part of the brainstem called the periaqueductal gray. The signals then travel to a region called the insula, which acts as a kind of sensor: The fuller the bladder becomes, the more neurons in the insula fire off tiny electrical pulses called action potentials.
Next, a region of the brain that’s responsible for planning and making decisions — the prefrontal cortex — calculates whether it’s a socially acceptable moment to urinate. If the answer is yes, it sends a signal back to the periaqueductal gray, which in turn sends an all-clear signal to that part of the pons Barrington identified in cats — now aptly called Barrington’s nucleus. The signal goes back down to the bladder, and voila, urination occurs.
Links
- Champagne Bottle Sizes and Names
- Google’s Leap Smear
- How many days out is the temperature forecast accurate?
- Kermit sings ‘Gin and Juice’
- The Day Prince’s Guitar Wept the Loudest
- Physicists Have Created The World’s Most Fiendishly Difficult Maze
- The most religious, and religiously diverse, places in America
- Swear words and profanities from around the world.
- What beats rock?
- Banned gymnastic skills
- A Guide to Olympic Torches
- Incentives for Olympic medalists by country
- The Physics of Flight, explained simply
Sign Off
Do not hesitate to reply to this month’s email to share links, wisdom, or thoughts.
Thanks for reading. Have a great month,
Clay
How kind of you to make your way down here.
A bit about me: I can be interested in anything, for better or worse. I love photography, travel, golf, and baseball. My latest pursuit is learning the guitar. I write a rad newsletter that I publish monthly.