OK Go … Is There Nothing You Can Not Do?
Sesame Street has teamed up with the band OK GO in this video introducing the basics of color theory. It’s all about the three primary colors.
This video might seem simplistic at first, but color theory is deeply rooted in physics and biology. The “colors” we see in light are nothing more than a certain window of wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. Red, blue and green are primary colors in human vision (“trichromacy”). This is because you possess three different kinds of cone cells, each corresponding (more or less) to one of these wavelength ranges.
More “complicated” colors are a result of your nervous system integrating these different wavelength combinations via a very complicated network of interconnected cells that the cones connect to. The same goes for what we view as “complementary” and so on. It’s all dependent on certain cells that you have in your head and how they interpret the world around you.
For more:
- Go play the OK Go color game
- A previous post about color vision, with links to mind-bending color illusions
(via Brain Pickings)
Spiders dodge cannibalism through remote copulation
That’s a whole new meaning to “absentee father”. Put yourself in a scenario. You get to have sex one time, and if you stick around too long you’ll get eaten. You want to make that one time count, and you’d also like to make sure that no one else got the opportunity to reproduce with your chosen lady.
Solution? If you’re an orb-web spider, it appears that breaking off your penis inside of the female and running away is just what Dr. Evolution ordered. It saves his legs, it prevents other males from copulating, and it allows him to fight to protect her. Even if she does want to eat him in the first place. How romantic.
Violent mating behaviors are actually rather common. Hermaphroditic flatworms engage in “penis fencing” to decide who will be the mother and who will be the father of their offspring. Honeybees’ genitals explode and break off inside the queen in a manner similar to the spider. Bedbugs simply impale the female with their penises and deposit sperm through the opening. And banana slugs have such large penises that if they freak out the female with one too large, they risk getting their organ chewed off.
(via Nature News)
Can’t remember what night this was…but it must have been a good one. Outside the Granada in Lawrence, KS, I believe.
