Week of October 11

src: Photoholgic @ Unsplash

Welcome to my weekly letter, where I share a few noteworthy articles and my own commentary. Without further ado…

Weekly Read

• Why Perseverance’s First Mars Drilling Attempt Came Up Empty (Wired) — TL;DR: it crumbled into powder so nothing could be retained. A few days later the attempt at another location succeeded so the bot now has a piece of Mars. (next up, how to launch a rocket, with the rock samples, from Mars back to Earth?)
• Can This Sun-Reflecting Fabric Help Fight Climate Change? (Wired) — a metafabric made of synthetic fibers and nanoparticles… this sounds like Tony Stark’s line in Avengers! I am so excited to be living in such a technologically advanced time 🙂 Bullet proof feature soon?
• So Hey Here’s a Tortoise Hunting and Eating a Baby Bird (Wired) — TL;DR if you don’t want to look at the video footage — some animals, such as tortoise, that we grow up believing only eats veggies and greens, actually occasionally eats meat and even hunts for these protein. Who knows, maybe the hare should be thankful that the tortoise won the race instead of eating it while it napped.
• Cuttlefish remember the what, when, and where of meals-even into old age (Ars Technica) — human’s hippocampus plays an important role of episodic memory, cuttlefish doesn’t have hippocampus yet it is found to have episodic memory also. And, hippocampus or not, both human and cuttlefish’s memory would deteriorate with age. So the moral of the story: There’s no escaping from the inevitable, and treat your pet or cuttlefish nicely. Because they remember.
• This Barnacle-Inspired Glue Seals Bleeding Organs in Seconds (Wired) — This is an amazing story, saving lives with a glue recipe inspired by Barnacles’ strategy. There’s so much our nature can teach us…

That’s it for this week! Have a nice weekend!

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Originally published at https://heta.link on October 15, 2021.