Posts tagged with "Live Science"

Above, a killer whale is about to capsize this boat. (Photo source: 'Top 5 Whale vs Boat Videos'/YouTube)

Experts say killer whales are teaching each other to attack boats

May 29, 2023

Orcas … They are nothing, if not organized. A sharp uptick in killer whale attacks on boats sailing off Europe’s Iberian Peninsula has led scientists to believe that orcas are actually teaching each other how to sink sailing vessels, Live Science reports.

Per Live Science, reports of increasingly aggressive encounters with orcas started back in 2020. But it wasn’t until this month that any of these increasingly hostile orcas had actually sunken any ocean-faring vessels.

And, while researchers can’t say for certain why the killer whales are suddenly sinking sailboats, according to a report by Futurism, they do have a compelling leading theory: revenge.

In short, as Alfredo López Fernandez, a biologist at the University of Aveiro in Portugal and representative of the Grupo de Trabajo Orca Atlántica (Atlantic Orca Working Group), recently told Live Science, the prevailing theory is that one female orca nicknamed White Gladis—was traumatized by a sailboat. This “critical moment of agony,” as researchers are calling it, caused a behavioral change in White Gladis, who began to attack similar vessels.

“That traumatized orca,” López Fernandez says, “is the one that started this behavior of physical contact with the boat.”

As the theory goes, other adult orcas picked up on this behavior—becoming more aggressive with boats themselves. And now, the kids of those adults have seemingly picked up the behavior, too. At this point, according to López Fernandez, sinking sailboats is really just good ol’ family fun.

“We do not interpret that the orcas are teaching the young,” the researcher says, “although the behavior has spread to the young vertically, simply by imitation, and later horizontally among them, because they consider it something important in their lives.”

Testimony from sailors certainly seem to support this theory.

“There were two smaller and one larger orca,” skipper Werner Schaufelberger, whose boat was sunk by orcas on May 4 in the Strait of Gibraltar, told the German outlet, Yacht. “The little ones shook the rudder at the back while the big one repeatedly backed up and rammed the ship with full force from the side.”

“The two little orcas observed the bigger one’s technique,” Schaufelberger added, “with a slight run-up, they too slammed into the boat.”

The orcas reportedly are attacking a relatively small number of vessels passing through the area. But, if the situation escalates, it could be dangerous for sailors and orcas. Here’s hoping that chaotic legend White Gladis chooses peace soon.

Research contact: @futurism

Photo source: jesseblogspot.com

Do all hipsters look alike?

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April 4, 2019

They say that everybody has a doppelgänger—an unrelated individual whom they so closely resemble that he or she could be that person’s twin. But now a Brandeis University mathematician, Jonathan Touboul, has taken that theory one step further, hypothesizing that all hipsters—those disaffected and unconventional young adults who see themselves as outliers—look so much alike that they cannot be differentiated at first glance.

And in fact, a stereotypical hipster already has unwillingly proven him correct.

According to a report by Live Science, this particular “can of worms” was opened about one month ago, when an irate reader threatened to sue the MIT Technology Review after he saw an article called “The hipster effect: Why anti-conformists always end up looking the same.”

The man (a hipster, himself) claimed that the photo above the story— which depicted a bearded man in his twenties or thirties wearing a dark wool beanie and a flannel shirt— had been hijacked from his social media profile, used without his permission, and was tantamount to slander.

It turned out, however, that the reader was mistaken. The man in the photo wasn’t him at all, it turned out, but rather a model dressed as a hipster. The two men just happened to look exactly alike.

The whole legal kerfuffle inadvertently confirmed Touboul’s theory, as well as the original basis of his study, published February 21 to the preprint journal ar X iv.org,

Touboul questioned what he called “the hipster paradox.” If hipsters define their behavior as opposing mainstream culture, he wondered, why do so many of them end up looking, dressing and thinking alike?

Touboul wrote an equation to try to find out, Live Science reports. In his study, he decided to model the emergence of a trend — say, growing a beard — as it spread through a society made of two distinct groups: “mainstreams,” whose decisions tend to follow the majority, and “hipsters,” whose decisions tend to oppose the majority.

To better simulate the way that trends spread through an actual culture, individuals in Touboul’s model learned about the trend little by little over time as the information trickled down through various sources — the way a trend might spread first to “influencers,” then to blogs, mass media and word of mouth, reaching various audiences along the way.

When a trend first emerged in the model, Touboul wrote, individuals in the hipster set acted randomly—periodically switching from adopting or rejecting a trend as new individuals learned about it. Inevitably, though, as more and more mainstream conformists adopted the trend, the hipsters became synchronized in their behavior, suddenly deciding to oppose the majority en masse.

In the beard-growing example, the cycle might look like this:

“If a majority of individuals shave their beard, then most hipsters will want to grow a beard,” Touboul wrote. “And if this trend propagates to a majority of the population, it will lead to new, synchronized switch to shaving.”

“Despite (and actually, in response to) their constant efforts, at all times, anti-conformists fail being disaligned with the majority,” Touboul concluded. “They actually create the trends they will soon try to escape.”

Research contact: jtouboul@brandeis.edu

Photo source: Look4ward UK