Category: fun facts

fun facts

Humans can’t tell male and female eyes apart, but an AI model can.

February 6, 2023

“Predicting gender from fundus [the part of the eyeball opposite the pupil] photos, previously inconceivable to those who spent their careers looking at retinas, also withstood external validation on an independent dataset of patients with different baseline demographics.” ~ learn more

fun facts

Brown gold: the great American manure rush begins.

February 6, 2023

Dairy farms are now partnering with companies to turn their cow manure into “renewable natural gas (RNG)”. Possibly the most dystopian line in this article: “Taken to an extreme, some worry dairy farms could end up turning into feces farms […]

fun facts

Life in the metaverse.

February 6, 2023

This NYT reporter spent 24 non-consecutive hours in Facebook’s metaverse as research for this story. “My goal was to visit at every hour of the day and night, all 24 of them at least once, to learn the ebbs and […]

fun facts

A Lakh.

February 5, 2023

I hadn’t bothered to look up this term before now. In the Indian numbering system, a Lakh is a unit of 100,000. Ok, cool, but why am I sharing this? This part struck me as much more interesting: “In the […]

fun facts

How do things glow in the dark?

February 5, 2023

A new book arrived this week for Petra with glow in the dark stickers included. We guessed at how it might work (magic?) and then she suggested we look up a video to teach us. ~ learn more

fun facts

Wheel running in the wild.

January 24, 2023

A lot of experiments with mice measure their running on wheels in their cages. Some had worried that the running was a symptom of captivity rather than a natural behavior, invalidating many experiments. So, between 2009 and 2013 researchers placed […]