Just in time for xmas, here is a video that went quite viral. An engineer who had his packages stolen made a special package for the thief, that, among other things, shoots glitter and video that eventually makes it to youtube. The action starts at 5:45.
If you feel like you need a laugh, here is a brilliant video where the auralnauts dubbed some commercials.
You probably know someone using a fitness tracker. Recent models track daily heart rate and sleep. With just a few years of such models in the market, the companies collecting these data anonymously can provide insights that we simply did not have the data for just 5 years ago.
Here is such a summary from fitbit data.
Among the highlights are that 7 and a bit hours of sleep seem optimal for having a low standing heart rate, that Italians have a very low resting heart rate after controlling for daily activity while Indians have a very high, and life events (like surgeries or family gatherings) can be identified by looking at resting heart rate variation throughout the year.
Here is a well made video make by a farmer singing about weed resistance.
You may have heard of the idea of a genetic bottleneck. It is when genetic variation is lost by sampling a very small subset of a population. Just by chance, the frequencies of alleles on the subset of the population will be different to those in the whole population, and overall genetic variation is likely to be lost by population sampling.
This is why small population sizes are not good, and species on conservation lists are required to not drop to too small population sizes. The limited genetic variation remaining in a small population poses a risk because it makes the species susceptible to whatever relies on genetic variation for adaptation, such as environmental changes or diseases.
Here is a visualisation of a bottleneck.