• NoFuckingWaynado@lemmy.world
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    8 hours ago

    The real reason the Titanic sank is they sailed through a Spidercloud, and the captain freaked out and swerved into it.

  • GladiusB@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    How did they test this? How did the know that Chuck left Japan and ended up in Oregon?

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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    16 hours ago

    Hooray. This brought up one of the less pleasant memories from my childhood involving the natural world.

    My room was in the basement of the house. It was only a half-finished basement and my room took up most of the finished half. But because it was only half finished, spiders were not a stranger to my room.

    One day, I woke up and my face was weirdly itchy. I turned on the light and a billion little transparent baby spiders were hanging all over the room by little threads! I freaked the fuck out and ran upstairs and slept on the couch for two days. Thankfully, they were gone when I went back down.

  • Zachariah@lemmy.world
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    22 hours ago

    Spiders don’t have wings, but they can fly across entire oceans on long strands of silk. For more than a century, scientists thought it was the wind that carried them, sometimes as high as a jet stream — in a process known as “ballooning.” A new study shows that the Earth’s electric field can propel these flying spiders too.

    The study, published Thursday in the journal Current Biology, found that when spiders are in a chamber with no wind, but a small electric field, they are likely to prep for take-off, or even fly. Plus, the sensory hairs covering the spiders’ bodies move when the electric field is turned on — much like your own hair stands up due to static electricity. This “spidey sense” could be how the creatures know it’s time to fly.

    This makes spiders only the second known arthropod species, after bees, to sense and use electric fields. Because humans don’t feel Earth’s electric field, its role in biology is often overlooked, said Erica Morley, the study’s lead author.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      16 hours ago

      There is evidence that the human brain can detect magnetic fields on an unconscious level, although it’s far from settled science.

      https://www.science.org/content/article/humans-other-animals-may-sense-earth-s-magnetic-field

      I think it is entirely possible that we have vestigial magnetosensitivity from hundreds of millions of years ago. If that is so, however, it gives us the potential to redevelop it in the future.

      There’s also a way to fake it- people have made haptic “compasses,” wearable devices like belts which vibrate north at all times. I remember reading many years ago about the first scientists to develop the technology and the first person (one of the scientists) to try it out, and he said that he was able to know where north was for a long time afterward.

      I should say I was only talking about the first part when I meant faking it. We really don’t know if wearing the device made him temporarily (I think it was temporary) magnetosensitive or if he just got so used to where north was in his daily routines that it was just memory.

      • theneverfox@pawb.social
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        6 hours ago

        I think we use it, just not consciously. It’s not like knowing where north is helps much, but aligning your mental map of an area means a lot

        Have you ever come out of a forest or something not where you expected, then had a moment of disorientation before everything snaps into place and you realize exactly where you are?

        • fishos@lemmy.world
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          2 hours ago

          Agreed. I think when most people hear “able to sense magnetic fields”, they think it means you can always point to North. It’s more like being able to feel temperature or proprioception(your ability to sense where your body is). I think it’s another dataset that gets added to our mental calculations, we just can’t pinpoint that exact “sense” and use it actively.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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          2 hours ago

          I just got lost in a city while using Google Maps giving me walking directions. You are talking to the very wrong guy,

      • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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        8 hours ago

        That would explain my drunk human trick. You can get me drunk, blindfold me, and spin me in circles. I will then unerringly point to North. I always know where North is. Even when I’m rebooting after just waking up.

        • RedditRefugee69@lemmynsfw.com
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          1 hour ago

          By any chance do you have a native Australian background? Apparently they don’t have words for “left” and “right” but instead use cardinal directions, i. e. “My north hand.” They have extremely good spatial navigation skills that are thought to be a result.

    • niktemadur@lemmy.world
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      15 hours ago

      This makes spiders only the second known arthropod species, after bees, to sense and use electric fields.

      But birds use the magnetic field to navigate, correct?

      Because humans don’t feel Earth’s electric field, its role in biology is often overlooked.

      Speaking of the magnetic field, there is purportedly an Aboriginal group in Australia that uses a subjective form of orientation terminology baked into their language or syntax, that forces their speakers to maintain an intricate and complex awareness of their surroundings and place in them.
      Anyway… these people seem to be able to sense fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic field, for example - they can tell when a solar storm is hitting the atmosphere.

  • irish_link@lemmy.world
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    23 hours ago

    So what I am leaning from this headline is the zombie spiders in Ireland can fly across oceans and get to me.

    Great. Thanks Trump!

    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      8 hours ago

      Honestly, at this point, what an incredible end that would be. So much cooler than what’s likely coming.

    • Fredselfish@lemmy.world
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      20 hours ago

      Worse it means technically the spiders in Australia are necessarily trapped there. Also the fact that spiders can fly is nightmares fuel.

      • DudeDudenson
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        19 hours ago

        I don’t know if it’s better or worse that they don’t have wings to fly indoors like some cockroaches

  • jaredt@lemmy.ca
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    19 hours ago

    What the fuck do they think is happening? “Wow, sure has been a long time since I started hurdling through fucking space