Southern giant petrels(Macronectes giganteus)can be cannibalist, according to new findings. These petrels are common predators in austral islands around Antarctic Peninsula, scavending and preding on a wide ranges of preys, with highly opportunistic feeding habits, meaning these birds can eat whatever they can. On different dates, in monitored colonies at Nelson Island, two males were sighted feeding on the young of other pairs. The island is also inhabited by penguins, providing enough food to southern giant petrels, suggesting these males would not be opportunistic cannibals. Researchers confirm that cannibalism is part of the behavior repertoire of male southern giant petrels, but have no clues about what push this behaviour.
Photo: A male Southern Giant Petrel feeds on a chick after removing it from its nest.
TheRapa Nui Fairy Basslet(Pseudanthias hangapiko)is the latest new species forRapa Nui, commonly know as Easter Island, one of the world’s most isolated inhabited islands.
Showing a clearly dimorphism, with males being slightly bigger and redish than females, these fishes are tiny, with around 3 to 4.5 cm in length. These fishes were collected at 80 m depth on Hanga Piko, a mesophotic coral ecosystem near the coast of Rapa Nui, hence its name, for the location where it were collected.
- A Rapa Nui Fairy Basslet aggregation on a rocky mesophotic coral ecosystem at Rapa Nui (Easter Island) at 80 m depth.
This fish is one of four new species that were documented from a pair of technical dives at a single location in Rapa Nui, as result of a international research collaboration, emphasizing the high number of undescribed species likely still unknown in these deep ecosystems. It is also, the first record of the genus in Rapa Nui, which hosts the second-highest level of endemism in both shallow and deep-water fishes.
Foto: Male (upper) and female (lower) Photos by LA Rocha.
Coelacanths(pronounced SEAL-uh-kanth) are primitive-looking fishes, survivors from the dinosaur-era to modern date. As far we know, only two coelacanths species are know, found in coastal waters of South African and Indonesia.
Researchersbelieved coelacanths has a maximum lifespan of 20 years, placing the coelacanth among the fastest growing marine fish. But these findings are at odds with the coelacanth’s other known biological features including slow metabolism, ovoviviparity, and low fecundity, typical of fish with slow life histories and slow growth.
Now, new methods for ageing coleacanths using scale ring growth reveals these prehistoric fish may live a centenarian life, but also, its life history is among the slowest of marine fishes, with 5-years gestation, and reaching sexual maturity at 50 years, the study found.
As long-lived species with slow life histories are extremely vulnerable to natural and anthropogenic perturbations, researchers aims that coelacanths may be more threatened than previously considered.
Photo description: An african coelacanth free-swimming in what appears to be a submarine cave. It’s mottled pattern is made visible by the help of external lighting from submarine divers.
throwback to solving for closed loop time constants in process haha
once i move and get a bit more settled, i will be posting an undergrad recap! it’s bittersweet to be moving onto the next chapter after being stuck in the same chapter for so long and I want to share my experiences with you all… even though most of you have been here to witness it.
it won’t be very quantitative and talking about grades or anything, more so qualitative discussing my experiences and emotions.. with some tips!
So I’m reading Rosenfeld’s 1963 paper “On Quantization of Fields" (a 3-page paper that is otherwise without metaphor or analogy) at 1 AM (as I do) when its closing sentence sucker punches me through the screen, collapsing my wavefunction instantly.
I’m stoked! This is the first of several papers my group has planned, and begins to describe something we’ve been working on (in one form or another) since late 2017.
⚛What questions do you have about particle physics,QFT,orgravity?⚛
I’m in the mood to do some writing & illustrating, and would love some inspiration! (Signal boosts welcome!)
The response to this open call for questions has been FANTASTIC! I adore the questions submitted so far. Thank you all so much!! (and please do keep them coming!)
Attending another conference means I gave yet another presentation!
It went well overall, but I did have a strange experience leading up to the talk. Specifically, I spent most of my time prior to my talk feeling confident about it, only to become Extremely Nervous out of nowhere 15 minutes beforehand. Like, much more nervous than my usual nervousness, and for seemingly no good reason beyond my body deciding it wanted to freak out? The whole time my brain was like “It’s going to be fine. Seriously, even the worst case scenario isn’t that bad… so why are we freaking out right now??”
Thankfully, I managed to push through whatever that was (definitely something I should look into), gave the talk (I converted as much nervous energy into talk-giving energy as I could), got some good questions, and now I’m free to enjoy the rest of the conference!
If you’re interested in checking it out, the abstract and slides for my SUSY2019 presentation, titled
** Unitarity in Extra-Dimensional Gravity Models **
I’m the kind of person who can talk about topics I love for hours without tiring. Combine that with how readily I lose track of time, and I can easily stretch a 15 minute talk into a half hour… unless I’m careful.
Here’s several tips for staying on pace & not going over time when presenting (for class, at a conference, etc.) from someone who frequently does so despitea poor internal clock:
Practice your talk and time yourself. For bonus points, practice and time each section of your talk separately. Based on the results, edit your talk accordingly.
Have a plan: if you (because of nervous energy, interruptions, magic, whatever) find yourself several minutes behind schedule, what material are you going to cut? Practice this speedy version of your talk too!
Furthermore, memorize the main point of each slide in your presentation. That way if you need to fly through them, you can rapidly convey your primary narrative. In fact, I recommend writing each main point explicitly on each slide, which has the added benefit of making your slides easier to follow on their own.
During the talk, I like to keep a timer going on my phone that I can glance at while speaking; I’ve found this significantly helps me maintain a desired pace. If you go this route, it helps to know at what slide you should be on at specific times.
If worst comes to worst and you find yourself running over, jump to your talk’s thesis statement and thank your audience. Maintaining the overall time schedule is important!
Finally: running over time happens sometimes, and that’s okay! Keep your cool as best you can, and know your talk is still good & valuable.
If you’re interested, these are all tips I originally posted on my Twitter.
“First, I’d like to thank [university / conference / host] for having me, and thank you all for attending my talk. Today I’m presenting work I performed on [general topic] with my collaborators at [university/universities]. To begin, let’s talk about [slide 1 topic].”
Bad Feeling: Getting stuck on a Chicago runway for nearly two hours.
Worse Feeling: Landing in San Antonio and realizing 1. you’re 2.5 hours from your final destination and 2. the department didn’t account for this when booking your travel.
One frenzied bus ticket purchase and many hours later, and I’m finally in Corpus Christi! Now to get ~6 hours of sleep before a full day of PHYSICS.
I hope y'all are doing well! (and getting your own adrenaline through less stressful means, haha)
Additionally:If you’re making a slide-based presentation, consider giving your slides to a non-expert without context. If they can put together your main points and overall narrative from slides alone, then your slides are doing something right!
I wanted to ask what do you mean by non-expert? Like someone who’s never studied your topic intensely or are we going all the way to someone not in your field or somewhere in between?
Because for most presentations, I feel like someone outside the field entirely not really understanding it is expected. They won’t have the necessary basic vocab (sometimes I babble on about groups or partitions or literally whatever when I’m around non-math friends without expecting them to have any clue what I’m talking about and indeed they don’t). On the other hand, someone else in an adjacent topic or someone a bit younger does sound like a good choice. A couple weeks ago, @counter-example and I practiced conference presentations with each other a couple times which was extra helpful bc we tend to do pretty different math but we both have decent upper level undergrad math backgrounds.
That’s awesome, @sevenfactorial! I’m glad you found someone who provides you useful feedback!
Re: your opening question, I don’t think there’s a universally applicable answer. When I wrote “non-experts”, I had in mind pretty much anyone who hasn’t worked in the subfield of the presentation’s content, but you’re right that there’s likely some minimum overlap of knowledge necessary for useful feedback (a minimum which I imagine relates to the intended audience of the specific presentation; slides for a subfield-specific conference can be more technical than slides for the general public, for example). You’ve pointed out that choosing people in the same field but in a different subfield is a good strategy, and I agree.
I most recently got feedback on my physics slides from a friend who is pursuing a math Ph.D., and his comments were extremely useful despite himself being unfamiliar with a large majority of the physics & jargon. Asking a variety of people seems most useful to me (the more data, the merrier), but as for what single individual would provide the most valuable input? I’m not sure.
I also think it’s important to dial expectations to fit each feedback provider. For example, while my math friend doesn’t know a lot of the vocab that my audience would (so that a critique like “I don’t know what this word means” wouldn’t necessarily warrant action), he picked up that certain things were important from context and thus–even though the details escape him–he could identify the overall narrative. His lack of knowledge about my work is actually a boon: he can keep in mind the bigger picture without getting lost in the details that I might be distracted by. I figure that if he can follow my narrative without understanding the details, then I can be confident my organization will be crystal clear to my audience too. If he mentions that something seems important despitemy intentions, then I can think about reducing my inadvertent overemphasis of that thing.
So I’ll refine my earlier statement to be: I recommend acquiring feedback from multiple people at varying levels of familiarity with your content, while also being careful to gauge that feedback through both the perspective of each feedback provider as well as your eventual intended audience. (I was careful to use plural wording in the original tweet, but dropped it in my text addition on Tumblr, which I would change in retrospect.)
Additionally:If you’re making a slide-based presentation, consider giving your slides to a non-expert without context. If they can put together your main points and overall narrative from slides alone, then your slides are doing something right!
Annnnd just like that, I’m back from PHENO! Y’all, I had a fantastictime.
I got to talk shop with plenty of physicists (familiar and new), attend excellent presentations, and introduce myself to important people in the field.
Highlight of the Conference: On Tuesday, I presented my current research project. My talk was the second in a coordinated pair of presentations, the first being my advisor’s. His talk allowed me to focus on details and he did a great job of hyping me up along the way, which gave me STRENGTH and ENERGY. I then proceeded to CRUSH my presentation. The question session went well too (people had so many great questions that there wasn’t enough time to answer them all!), and after the talk I received lots of compliments regarding both the project and my delivery. So yeah, it went about as well as possible! Which is made all the better by the fact that several big shots (who’ve done related work) were in the audience too!!
If you’re interested in checking it out, the abstract and slides for my PHENO2019 presentation, titled
** Cancellations in Spin-2 KK Mode Scattering Amplitudes at High Energies **
** I’m finally in the right frame of mind to polish up this presentation **
I’m grateful to my past self: they pushed against the latest bout of depression + dissociation in order to get it 80% of the way there. And now that the fog is lifting, I can more clearly see an end product in the existing draft.
