explanation

Artist’s impression of an individual 525-million-year-old Cardiodictyon catenulum on the shallow coastal sea floor, emerging from the shelter of a small stromatolite built by photosynthetic bacteria. Credit: Nicholas Strausfeld/University of ArizonaAccording to a new study, fossils of a tiny sea creature with a delicately preserved nervous system solve a century-old debate over how the brain evolved in arthropods, the most species-rich group in the animal kingdom.Fossils of a tiny sea creature that died more than half a…

A similar scenario played out in the 1990s, when a Tennessee naturalist named Lynn Faust read the confident published assertion of a scientist named Jon Copeland that there were no synchronous fireflies in North America. Faust knew then that what she had been watching for decades in the nearby woods was something remarkable.Faust invited Copeland and Moiseff, his collaborator, to see a species in the Great Smoky Mountains called Photinus carolinus. Clouds of the male fireflies fill forests and clearings, floating at about…

Ticketmaster has taken down its explanation for why buying a ticket to Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour was an absolute disaster. The explanation, titled “The Taylor Swift Onsale Explained,” was live in two places on Ticketmaster’s website on Thursday and is now gone from both. But because the internet never forgets, you can still read it thanks to Google’s cache, and in case that fails, we’ve embedded it at the bottom of this article.In its post, Ticketmaster said that despite spending out 1.5 million invites to Verified…

Image via Lucasfilm R2-D2 has seen it all. The loveable droid made his chronological first appearance in Star Wars in The Phantom Menace as part of the crew on Padme’s Royal Starship, going on to be Anakin Skywalker’s astromech droid, Luke’s buddy in the original trilogy, and finally a key part of the story of the sequels. R2’s rebellious behavior is often chalked up to him never having his memory wiped, granting him a distinct personality many other droids lack. But, as many fans have pointed out over the…

Perplexed Star Wars fans are trying to work out the rationale behind some of the glaring inconsistencies in the plot of the sequel trilogy films. Redditor Morlaak took to the r/StarWars subreddit to express their frustration in a post that begged the question, “Is it ever explained how The First Order, stranded in a barely inhabited and underdeveloped region of space managed to build superweapons several times more powerful than the Death Stars AND a fleet large enough not to be crushed by the New Republic…

Understanding SQL joins with Venn Diagrams and practical examplesPhoto by Kelly Sikkema on UnsplashConsidering that a single table can be seen as a set, Venn diagrams are a great way to visualise how SQL joins work. Even though there are probably many different ways to describe joins, I strongly believe that Venn Diagrams help the reader understand in a clear and consistent way which records will be included in the resulting set of rows that is returned when a particular type of join is performed between two tables.In…

Image via Lucasfilm There’s a certain, age-old joke that continues to be one of the most evergreen jests amongst generations of geekdom, along the lines of “A Stormtrooper and a redshirt got into a gunfight; the Stormtrooper missed, but the redshirt died anyway.” This, of course, is in reference to Star Trek‘s crimson-clad personnel, whose attire famously signified that they were probably going to die, thus spawning the “redshirt” character archetype in pop culture, but more importantly to the Stormtroopers’…

A recent study offers a new theory for consciousness.According to a new theory, choices are formed unconsciously and become conscious around half a second later.Consciousness is your awareness of yourself and your surroundings. This awareness is unique to you and subjective.A new theory of consciousness has been developed by a researcher at Boston University’s Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, describing why it evolved, what it is useful for, which disorders influence it, and why it is so difficult to diet and…

Explanation of 3 types of sorting algorithms and their implementation in PythonImage by 200 Degrees from PixabayIn the previous article, I walked through recursion and we will build on this foundation with sorting algorithms in this article. Sorting algorithms are used to rearrange elements in an array so that each element is more than or equal to its predecessor. There are many different types of sorting algorithms and I will walk through the three most common ones that are worth familiarizing yourself with: selection…

A straight-forward explanation of how to build an end-to-end causal inference model in PythonPhoto by 愚木混株 cdd20 on UnsplashBackgroundI first became interested in causality when I finished a commercial machine learning classification project and the first thing the customers asked after the presentation was …“Why does that happen and what are the underlying causes?”My first attempt revolved around artificially modifying the input data for the classification model but that did not work very well.Next I trawled Google,…