But I agree with you, better that scientists provide something for everyone. This is a good press release (it's not really journalism if it's coming from the university press office). The other very nice thing they did is link the original article in the first words of the release, although I would have made the hyperlink text "A new paper from University of St Andrews and Université de Neuchâtel" to make it clear that the paper is there. Hyperlinks are cheap and a lot of science is free to access, there's no excuse to leave that out.

This isn't a particularly bad case. I think both are often useful, and this headline isn't wrong, I just assumed the bubbles had some direct use and found the scientific title more clear there.

Maybe I'm overly fixated on the "to" in "to achieve": the whale doesn't care about the bubbles, they serve no important purpose in helping them sleep, it's just what happens when you vent air under water.

It's also kind of a nitpick, but the scientists refer to resting whales, but specifically state that they don't know if they are sleeping. I guess getting a proper EEG on a sperm whale is another scientific frontier.

Edit: An awesome scientific frontier: honestly if anyone deserves my tax money it's the grad student trying to figure out how to measure brain waves in a submerged oceanic whale.

Failed attempts at censorship are the best thing that could ever happen to Bitchat: free advertising for a vibcoded and questionably secure entry in a space with plenty of competitors. As others have commented it's basically impossible to shut down an open source app by blocking the source distributor, but press is priceless.

I played around with Briar [1] for a while: it worked well, and had an option to install peer-to-peer without going through any app store, was sad to see that the authors put it in maintenance mode. It also had a security audit.

[1]: https://briarproject.org/

    Buoyancy regulation through modulation of onboard gas volume by resting sperm whales

If you've done any scuba diving (or swimming) you're familiar with this method of buoyancy control. And most fish accomplish on actively transporting gas between an internal bladder and their blood.

The difference is that whales have no way to refill their lungs while submerged, which is why their dives start deep and slowly drift up: as long as they are drifting upward the volume in their lungs is expanding in response to decreasing pressure. So the bubbles are essentially a way of pumping the breaks, which is apparently something they can do in their sleep (if they are in fact sleeping).

Is anyone else slightly annoyed by the cutesy title? Of course I recognize that the meme economy runs on this stuff, so maybe it's just nerds like me.

[1]: https://dmscdn.vuelio.co.uk/publicitem/61eae467-9527-4922-b9...

Personally I see no contradiction in using a product despite wanting policies that prevent it: it just implies that you understand the tragedy of the commons.

Of course it's still 3 orders of magnitude slower than galaxy collisions, which themselves are colliding at roughly 1% of the speed of light.

I guess I could argue that putting a stop sign at a particular intersection in rural Kansas could concern me, even though I don't live in Kansas, but I think very few people would make that argument in good faith.

The respectable ones know they aren't doctors, but they've seen a lot more recoveries and cases where minimal intervention was required. As some people have said some surgeons like to cut people up.

But a lot of countries are somewhere on the "direct" vs "representative" spectrum. The US actually abnormally lacking in direct mechanisms, for example. See

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_by_country

- look up your local laws! usually you can photocopy money as long as it's shrunken / enlarged by a specific amount

- you can cover up everything but the EURion and see what it does to the rest of the copy

- you can cover up the EURion part of the bill and print out the rest

Again, particularly in the last point, be sure to look up local laws and set the printer scaling accordingly

    This account is temporarily suspended network-wide. The suspension period ends on Mar 18, 2292 at 16:28. 

[1]: https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/4864/ron-maimon

- https://ballotpedia.org/Oregon_Criminalize_Hunting,_Fishing,...

- https://www.yesonip28.org/

What's interesting to me is that game studios have less to loose here than other OEMs. With equipment like shoes, outdoor gear, or cars, having the physical product out in stores does a lot to sell it: you have to try on shoes, driving a car builds attachment, it's also nice to check the build quality of your tent or whatever.

With games, you generally just have to play it / read the reviews, and you can trial it directly at home in a lot of cases.

There are some precedents for this: hibernating bats lower their body temperature to that of a moldy environment, and are getting infected with a fungus which kills 90% of them in some cases [2]. Logic goes that raising the ambient temperature could be the same (with some evolution thrown in) as lowering our body temperature.

Is it credible? No idea, not that kind of scientist.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLNagvJHl3g

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-nose_syndrome

- The UN

- CERN

- The Red Cross

- The WHO

- The World Economic Forum

- ETH Zurich

There are probably a lot of others I'm missing.

I'd imagine international banks also benefit from recruiting foreign nationals to do business with their home countries, and not just because there's a shortage of domestic labor. The whole point of these organizations is to be the headquarters of a much larger international project.

I guess maybe there will be a lot of weird exceptions if this were to go though. Otherwise, good luck sourcing your diplomats from entirely Swiss people.

When people who maintain this separation travel for work, do they just bring both along? My laptop is often the heaviest thing in my bag, I'd hate to bring two.

[late edit: I meant work travel]

My understanding is that Civil Law (most of the world excluding UK, US, AU) is like a program: you feed it a situation, it outputs a decision, every once in a while you edit it.

Common Law (UK, US) isn't really a program, but you could stretch and say it's a state machine that has been running since the country started. Every interaction sets a new precedent and changes the state. But the programming analogy falls apart because no one in the right mind would design such a program.

LLMs might actually be the best example of such a program though: Common Law is basically one long chat with an LLM, hundreds of years long.

Before LLMs came along, a Common Law system seemed to have a finite time limit before it's co-opted by wealthy people with the resources to read the whole history. Now I think maybe can push it a bit further.

But it's still a terrible program.