lvxferre

This is not some sort of fancy new development, but it's such a classical experiment that it's always worth sharing IMO. Plus it's fun.

When you initially mix both solutions, nothing seems to happen. But once you wait a wee bit, the colour suddenly changes, from transparent to a dark blue.

There are a bunch of variations of this reaction, but they all boil down to the same things:

• iodide - at the start of the reaction, it'll flip back and forth between iodide (I⁻) and triiodide ([I₃]⁻)
• starch - it forms a complex with triiodide, with the dark blue colour you see in the video. But only with triiodide; iodide is left alone. So it's effectively an indicator for the triiodide here.
• some reducing agent - NileRed used vitamin C (aka ascorbic acid; C₆H₈O₆), but it could be something like thiosulphate (S₂O₃²⁻) instead. The job of the reducing agent is to oxidise the triiodide back to iodide.
• some oxidiser - here it's the hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂) but it could be something like chlorate (ClO₃⁻) instead. Its main job is to oxidise the iodide to triiodide. You need more than enough oxidiser to be able to fully oxidise the reducing agent, plus a leftover.

"Wait a minute, why are there a reducing agent and an oxidiser, doing opposite things? They should cancel each other out!" - well, yes! However this does not happen instantaneously. And eventually the reducing agent will run dry (as long as there's enough oxidiser), the triiodide will pile up, react with the starch and you'll get the blue colour.

Here are simplified versions of the main reactions:

1. 3I⁻ + H₂O₂ → [I₃]⁻ + 2OH⁻
2. [I₃]⁻ + C₆H₈O₆ + 2H₂O → 3I⁻ + C₆H₆O₆ + 2H₃O⁺

(C₆H₆O₆ = dehydroascorbic acid) Eventually #2 stops happening because all vitamin C was consumed, so the triiodide piles up, reacts with the starch, and suddenly blue:

EDIT: @mindbleach@sh.itjust.works shared something that might help to circumvent this shit:

Contained in these parentheses is a zero-width joiner: (​)

Basically, add those to whatever you feel that might be filtered out, then remove the parentheses. The content inside the parentheses is invisible, but it screws with regex rules.

Changes highlighted in italics:

0. Instance rules apply.
1. [New] Be reasonable, constructive, and conductive to discussion.
2. [Updated] Stay on-topic, specially for more divisive subjects. Avoid unnecessarily mentioning topics and individuals prone to derail the discussion.
3. [Updated] Post sources whenever reasonable to do so. And when sharing links to paywalled content, provide either a short summary of the content or a freely accessible archive link.
4. Avoid crack theories and pseudoscientific claims.
5. Have fun!

What I'm looking for is constructive criticism for those rules. In special for the updated rule #3.

Thank you!

EDIT: feedback seems overwhelmingly positive, so I'm implementing the changes now. Feel free to use this thread for any sort of metadiscussion you want. Thank you all for the feedback!

Apparently humpback whale songs show a few features in common with human language; such as being culturally transmitted through social interactions between whales.

"The authors found that whale song showed the same key statistical properties present in all known human languages" - my guess is that the author talks about Zipf's Law, that applies to both phoneme frequency and word frequency in human languages.

[Dr. Garland] "Whale song is not a language; it lacks semantic meaning. It may be more reminiscent of human music, which also has this statistical structure, but lacks the expressive meaning found in language." - so while it is not language yet it's considerably closer to language than we'd expect, specially from non-primates.

Based on

• owenfromcanada's comment - the "pros" of Lemmy (memes, beans, etc.)
• ByteOnBikes' comment - about not making Lemmy advertisement too slick, like corporations would.

SVG source for anyone willing to give it a try. Made with Inkscape. The emojis were added as images because Inkscape.

It's a 10m papyrus scroll from Herculaneum, one of the cities buried by Vesuvius' volcanic ash in 79 CE. It's fully carbonised but they're using a synchrotron to create a 3D model of the scroll without damaging it. Then they're using AI (pattern recognition AI, perhaps?) to detect signs of ink, so they can reconstruct the text itself.

The project lead Stephen Parson claims that they're confident that they "will be able to read pretty much the whole scroll in its entirety". And so far it seems to be a work of philosophy.

The title is a bit clickbaity but the article is interesting. Quick summary:

A new ancient population was recognised, based on genetic data. This population has been called the Caucasus-Lower Volga population, or "CLV". They were from 4500~3500BCE, tech-wise from the Copper Age, and lived in the steppes between the North Caucasus and the Lower Volga. .

About 80% of the Yamnaya population comes from those people; and at least 10% of the ancestry of Bronze Age central Anatolians, where Hittite was spoken, also comes from the CLV population. The hypothesis being raised is that the CLV population was composed of Early Proto-Indo-European speakers (the text calls it "Indo-Anatolian").

I'm sharing this pic because it might be useful, to advertise Lemmy in Reddit meme communities and the likes. It isn't supposed to be a full info dump, just to spread the word that Lemmy exists and give people some room to ask questions about it.

The copypasta is from @Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com. The meme is from @JokkaJukka@lemmy.world.

Here's the source SVG file in case anyone wants to edit it.

EDIT - @Libb@jlai.lu had a great take on this idea, I need to share it here:

cross-posted from: https://quokk.au/post/1499265

What a Christmas present!

Italo-Celtic is a hypothetical branch of the Indo-European languages. If that branch is real, it means that the Italic and Celtic languages are closer to each other than to other Indo-European languages.

This hypothesis has been raised multiple times in the past, due to a few shared morphological features between Italic and Celtic languages; for example, the *-ism̥mo- superlative. But that's on its own weak evidence, so this genomic data makes wonders to reinforce this hypothesis.

And also to bury the competing (IMO rather silly) Italo-Germanic one.

Graeco-Armenian is similar to the above, but between the Hellenic languages and Armenian. There were lots of competing hypotheses "tying" both branches to other "random" Indo-European branches; for example I've seen Indo-Greek, Italo-Greek, Armeno-Germanic, Armeno-Albanian...

In case anyone wonders about the star: