Month: January 2024

Here’s a new long-read about something interesting.

I’ve already made several posts while reading Ed Yong’s book An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. Today we’re talking about shrimp. They haven’t told me much during our occasional encounters.

A quick primer for those out of the loop. We see colors because the retina of our eye has special light-sensitive cells, namely “rods” and “cones”. “Rods” provide vision in low light conditions, such as at night, and have very high-sensitivity to light but not to color. There are 130 million of them. Cones are responsible for color sensation; there are 7 million, and their light sensitivity is 100 times less than that of rods. We have three types of cones: long (L), medium (M), and short (S). They correspond to yellow-red (570 nm), green-yellow (544 nm), and violet-blue (443 nm) colors respectively. The combination of activations of these cells is perceived by the brain as color. For instance, a combination of blue and red creates indigo, which isn’t in the rainbow. Excitation of all three yields white. Beyond the 400-700 nm range, we can’t see because our three types of cones are tuned to the three peaks (see above), and color sensitivity rapidly decreases to the left and right of them. Below 400 nm is ultraviolet, above 700 nm is infrared radiation.

There are people who see the world in black and white — monochromats. Among animals, all pinnipeds, such as seals and walruses, sharks, whales, octopuses are like this. Dogs don’t have long cones, meaning their color vision is incomplete, but saying they can’t see red is incorrect. They see it as grey only when there are absolutely no shades of yellow and blue in it, which is not the case in the real world. However, this makes red on their color wheel equivalent to green.

Moreover, all primates are dichromats. Only humans have evolved vision similar to the vision of birds. But birds are even more advanced – they are tetrachromats. They have cells sensitive to ultraviolet light. The ancestors of modern mammals had lenses that let through ultraviolet light and had a photoreceptor sensitive to soft ultraviolet light. However, in some primates, particularly in humans, the lens evolved to block photons shorter than 400 nm, rendering this receptor obsolete.

So, it turns out that there’s a woman currently living in the United Kingdom with a genetic disorder, making her a tetrachromat. She sees the world with an additional color dimension — ultraviolet. Interestingly, Claude Monet, presumably after cataract surgery, perceived ultraviolet. I specifically looked for his paintings from this period in Chicago, but didn’t find any. He was old and had poor vision overall. He painted lilies abundantly during that period, it seems. By the way, for tetrachromats, the concept of “white” is different — it requires full ultraviolet presence. Without it, white looks different to them.

Apparently, this is precisely a dimension, not just an “expanded rainbow”. That is, imagine a color wheel and mentally draw an axis perpendicular to it for the saturation of ultraviolet from “none” to “a lot”. In other words, if indigo is a mix of red and blue, there is another color which we’ll call rurple, that represents indigo with ultraviolet. And this color can have different saturations.

And now, the most interesting part. There’s a kind of shrimp — mantis shrimp. It has the fastest strike in nature — an acceleration of 10,000 Gs. When hunting, its limbs develop speed up to 80-100 kilometers an hour, which is 50 times faster than the blink of a human eye, and comparable to the impact force of a .22 caliber bullet fired from a gun. The force of the strike is about one and a half thousand newtons, enough to break the hard shells of mollusks. The speed of the strike causes the formation of cavitation bubbles. When these bubbles implode, they release a large amount of heat, temporarily raising the temperature to very high levels and further weakening the armor of its prey. It was found that their “claws” consist of the mineral hydroxyapatite, and the impact part consists of nanoparticles that absorb and disperse the energy of high-magnitude impacts. Nanometer-sized spherical particles are arranged in a “Christmas-tree” pattern into a continuous sequence, similar to fish scales, which allows the impact force to be evenly distributed over the surface.

So, about those shrimp eyes, they have the most unusual eyes in the world. There, they have 12 different types of cones from ultraviolet to infrared, with four just for UV. Interestingly, their brain uses these differently: they cannot distinguish colors closer than 12-25 nm, while humans with three types of cones can distinguish a difference of 4 nm. Likely, these shrimp have “digital” color vision – red shades aren’t very important to them, and there’s simply one receptor for red. And it operates in a crude yes-no fashion. But that’s just because their brains haven’t fully developed yet. When shrimp take over the world, they will fully utilize their hardware.

They have three pseudopupils. These organs are stacked one over the other. They also have tens of thousands of clusters of photoreceptor neurons. We, for example, have just one cluster. The cells form ommatidia, making the eyes of mantis shrimp similar in structure to the compound eyes of flies.

By the way, you know that we actually see only a small circle in front of us due to the structure of the eye. The entire “world” is completed by the brain and the system of micro-movements of the eye (socalled saccades), moving this circle left, right, up, and assembling the picture into a whole. In other words, we don’t see simultaneously to the left and right. Actually, milliseconds pass between “snapshots” (from tens to hundreds).

Beyond that, shrimp eyes move independently, and there are mechanisms to determine distance with one eye. But the most mind-blowing thing is their ability not just to see the polarization of color, which is already unique, but to perceive, for example, circular polarization. First, what is polarization? Light is an electromagnetic wave. If you move a rope tied to a doorknob up and down, the plane in which that rope moves is polarization. Ordinary sunlight is unpolarized, meaning its waves vibrate in all possible directions perpendicular to the direction of propagation. However, when sunlight is reflected from surfaces like water, glass, or wet roads, it can become partially polarized. This is what polaroid sunglasses filter out, helping the driver. That’s why they also darken, because only part of the light, polarized in a certain direction, passes through. So, shrimp have the ability to see polarization as a “separate color”. This is for planar polarization. There’s also circular polarization — this is when the direction of oscillation rotates in a circle. Ultimately, it looks like a spiral or spring, where the wave moves forward, but its oscillations rotate around this direction. Shrimp can separate this type of polarization too. Moreover, they have coloring that, for shrimp that understand circular polarization, offers a richer visual picture.

It’s some kind of obscure shrimp that might not have caught our attention, but essentially, it’s like an alien. If you really look at the ocean’s inhabitants, you can find anything at all. I think real aliens will be less surprising.

Ivan Vladimirov. “Peasants Returning After the Devastation of a Manor House in the Vicinity of Pskov.” 1919.

Facebook has started showing me ads for all sorts of products from the future. Take, for example, the MOLECULAR TRANSFORMATOR. Can you guess its purpose without googling? Or how about a gun labeled EQUALIZER? Or the PORTABLE TOILET FLUSHER (with a girl) for almost $6000? Or there’s this machine being shown to me for $62000. Makes me wonder, should I buy it for the living room?

More tales from the past.

1999. The year I graduated from university. My thesis was on testing programmable logic devices. I worked at a publishing house “Evening Ryazan” — the most popular and politically controversial newspaper in the city. I handled the layout for the newspaper “Absolutely Free” — which contained classified ads. I also had orders for book layout from private clients, which I worked on at home. I used Pagemaker, and printed “films” on a printer at home (more on this later). “At home” meant in the fifth dorm of RGRTU, where I lived with Roman Gorlo and Svyat Kulikov.

After university, I was invited to Moscow. The “Leia” real estate agency was opening a branch here: they decided to publish a newspaper with classified ads. I had worked for the Ryazan newspaper under “Leia” for a couple of years before, they remembered me, and thus, our editor, Islam Yanbekov, and I were assigned to Moscow. Denis Sobolev, with whom I shared an apartment in Maryino, joined us. Islam Kasimovich once had throat surgery, so instead of talking, he whistled through a hole, and only close colleagues could understand him, though with difficulty. But the guy was impressive. Despite being 22 years older, he was interesting to be around. We not only produced the newspaper but also sold advertising in it (seemingly, 50 dollars a piece) and distributed it (negotiated with Soyuzpechat and delivered to some unofficial points of distribution). I remember one time a stack of newspapers tore apart on an escalator in the metro, and we barely gathered them by the time we reached the bottom. Back then, I lived in Maryino and dined in original fashion: buying herring and black bread. Also, we were kicked out by our hosts in Maryino, for being messy.

By the way, in case someone doesn’t know how newspapers are made. I don’t think much has changed. Here’s how I do it: I layout a page, and print a master template. Specifically, we printed it on film, on a regular printer. If the page was A3, we used either an A3 printer or two A4 films (but that was quirky). The editor checked the films, and then they were sent to the press. There, these films were attached to another one, and underneath, a light-sensitive aluminum plate was placed. For each printing color (usually the colors CMYK – cyan, magenta, yellow, and black), a separate plate and a separate master film were required. There are more advanced technologies, where printing from a computer goes directly onto the plate (Direct-to-Plate, DTP). These plates are then dried, and mounted on a drum, or, in the case of color, drums. It spins, gets inked, and the areas on the plate that should show an image get inked, while the areas that shouldn’t don’t (hydrophilic/hydrophobic properties). At the input — huge rolls of paper. At the output – cut printed strips. There’s a separate section that folds them. And it seems, assembling a newspaper from these strips required people.

So, at that time, I bought my first mobile phone, a Philips Aeon. It wasn’t GSM yet, but AMPS. I remember getting a salary of 1200 rubles, and 600 went to communication costs each month. Often, we spent the night in the office at Krasnye Vorota because our accommodation (before Maryino) was a room in a communal apartment in the north of Moscow, where I shared a bed with three constantly drinking ex-convicts (who were calm). Honestly, I don’t remember spending more than one night there.

When we got hungry at night (in the office), we went hunting for food in a store. Money was tight, and at that time I fed on soft cottage cheese – a white “sausage,” bread, and tea, we also bought various “Doshiraks” instant noodles. During one of these “hunts”, Denis and I were stopped by the police on the street at night. They checked our tickets! Because to be in Moscow, one needed either a registration or train tickets. Denis, surprisingly, was all in order and they let him go, but I was found with an “unregistered mobile phone.” Yes, for those who didn’t know, at that time, it was necessary to register a phone after purchasing it, like a walkie-talkie. This was done at the State Communications Supervision Department according to the place of residence, and since mine was not nearby, I ignored it. Eventually, the police waited until I agreed to pay at least 100 rubles, I had to pay, then they let me go.

In October last year, the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis published a study indicating that a preference for vegetarianism could be inherited. Based on whole genome data from the UK Biobank, the study compared 5,324 strict vegetarians to 329,455 control subjects and found that at least one specific single nucleotide variation on chromosome 18 is associated with vegetarianism. Additionally, 201 other variants were identified that are presumably significant. Specifically, 11 genes were pinpointed, which are likely linked to the inclination towards vegetarian food. For details, google Genes with Possible Roles in Vegetarianism

So, blame it all on genetics 🙂

We’ve been sitting on the plane for 1.5 hours already. They’re fixing it. They said, whoever doesn’t want to test — get out. Gave us $15, can be spent after landing. Optimists!

24 years ago in Russia, payment cards already existed and I was working at a processing center. Quite an interesting experience. There’s virtually nothing on the topic when you google it, so it’s worth leaving it here for posterity.

This was around 1998-1999. Times were tough, as they say, although everything seemed to breeze by for me. An RGRTA student, dorm life, guitar, beer, parties. Somehow, I ended up working as an engineer at KB Stankobank, in the UnionCard processing center. The setup was this: there were about 50 retail points accepting UnionCard. Additionally, there were about 20 companies (factories), where such cards were used to pay salaries or part of them (“payroll project”). Otherwise, they’d receive nothing or get paid in factory products. And I did everything there—from touring the factories explaining from rostrums why and where they could buy food with this piece of plastic. I visited stores explaining to cashiers how to accept these cards and set up terminals. And in our office, servers stood along the wall, and every so often, something needed to be done on the consoles. The servers ran something under Novell Netware (By the way, the company’s name Novell was suggested by the founder’s wife, who mistakenly believed that “Novell” meant “new” in French).

So, the scheme was like this. A customer comes into a store with a card. The cashier calls the call center number. Well, not so much a call center as just dialing our office, where two girls worked. The cashier reports the card number and the amount. The girls confirm that there’s enough balance. The cashier sells the product, and the girls mark it as sold. There were also “slips” and an “imprinter.” Basically, an imprinter is a plastic contraption into which the card and a “carbon copy” slip were inserted, and with a swish-swish, the card number was printed under the carbon copy. The embossed card number is still seen on cards today, although probably no imprinters exist anywhere. The transaction is marked as pending, and then the bank waits for the slips from the stores. Once a slip arrives, the pending transaction becomes complete. At least 50,000 cards were issued.

Essentially, the store sells, say, conditional eggs and bread to a person, and the bank becomes indebted to the store for the eggs and bread. This is where a company called FPK Invest comes into play. Owning everything from a security firm to media assets, this company would supply stores with, say, flour to cover the debt. They traded this flour for machines. And those machines were provided by the very factories that would have liked to pay their workers with them, but since the machines were heavy, workers resisted. Indeed, happiness for everyone. This was called “mutual offset.”

Union Card, despite its foreign name, was a project of the Samara company “Processing Center Union Card.” At one time, many banks were part of the network, and ours was one of them. Later, they were bought by “National Credit Cards,” and then merged with China’s UnionPay. In short, it’s gone into the past. Hardly anything can be googled from the 1999 version anymore.

I regularly visit contemporary art museums in every city where they are present, and each time I see almost 100% of the exhibits made for aliens. I always thought it might wear off over time, that familiarity would do its job. Not a bit. There probably exists some gene, the carriers of which see beauty in it.

Meanwhile, on Instagram, say, contemporary.painting, every other post is cool. Why do museums show one thing while Instagram shows another? Only Instagram is free, but the museum costs 22 dollars.

I am currently reading an interesting book by Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. It is about the senses of animals, more precisely, about the organs of these senses and how animals perceive the world. For me, the book is full of intriguing facts and discoveries.

The author starts by noting that every animal has its own “sensory bubble,” Umwelt. This term was introduced by Jakob von Uexküll in 1909. Essentially, it’s exactly how they feel the world around them. We see colors, smell scents, and hear sounds differently than other animals, and this difference isn’t measured just by a simple more-or-less scale, but rather as a complex concept. For example, in 1974, Thomas Nagel released the article “What is it like to be a bat?”. Just imagine how the world around us would look if our sensory organs were replaced with radar, allowing us to see scents and hear the direction of the faintest sounds with precision to the degree.

In the chapter about olfaction, the author describes a dog’s nose. In fact, not only dogs—almost all animals see the world through their noses much more clearly than we do. It turns out that the air inhaled through the nose goes into a separate chamber. A wet nose captures molecules from the air with mucus, which then are sent to this chamber for analysis. When humans breathe, the air is inhaled and exhaled through the same “ventilation” channel. For dogs, for instance, it’s different. Their nostrils can function independently from one another. Inside the nasal cavity, special membranes separate the nasal passage into two distinct channels. The first channel is used for breathing, the second—for the operation of olfactory receptors. Furthermore, dogs exhale not just through their nostrils but through special slits located on the sides. Then the air turns and pushes a new air batch back into the nose. Ultimately, a dog analyzes a continuous stream of air, which it also actively pushes through such a configuration. That is, when a dog exhales, it simultaneously inhales as well. This can continue for up to a minute. Not quite like us.

The “sensors” in the nose are long neurons that look outward from the nose on one end and into a part of the brain called the olfactory bulb on the other. Ours are poorly developed, but in animals with keen olfactory senses, they are much larger, as is the number of these neurons in the epithelium and their diversity.

It turns out that some snakes manage to be undetectable even to animals for whom scent is everything. This applies to the rattlesnake, for example. Dogs, mongooses, and meerkats simply cannot sense it. However, if it sheds its skin, they can smell the skin. Apparently, snakes have somehow learned to trick the olfactory system of mammals.

It turns out that out of 15 odorants, humans outperform dogs in detecting five, including β-Ionone (scent of cedarwood) and amyl acetate (scent of bananas). Also, humans are better than dogs at distinguishing certain scents (meaning, both feel them, but humans don’t confuse them while dogs do).

Or for instance, Carvone – caraway, dill, mandarin, orange. It exists in two isomeric forms (mirror images, same atoms), and its enantiomers smell differently: S(+)-carvone defines the scent of caraway and dill seeds, while its mirror isomer, R(-)-carvone, smells of spearmint (acute mint). This proves that humans have chiral scent receptors. It gets even more complicated with mixtures. A mixture of A and B can smell entirely different than A or B individually.

Then these receptors in the nose, they are generated from genes. There’s the OR7D4 gene, which creates a receptor that reacts to androstenone – what sweaty socks and body odor after a run smell like. For most, this scent is unpleasant. But there are some who have a slightly different version of this gene, and for them, androstenone smells like vanilla. Of course, this is hereditary. And that’s just one example. You can imagine how many similar situations there are with other genes. It turns out that we literally “see” the world differently in terms of scents. What one describes as the smell of sweaty socks might seem to another as the smell of vanilla, and if he has never smelled vanilla, he too will call it the smell of sweaty socks, until he encounters vanilla.

It also turns out that the best sniffers are elephants. Apart from the fact that their trunks are structurally better, there are more receptors and a healthy olfactory bulb. Lucy Bates describes an experiment where she took a bit of soil with remnants of their urine from behind a herd of elephants and transferred it hundreds of meters ahead on the herd’s path. Depending on whether it belonged to them, other elephants, or the same herd, the reaction was different. If it belonged to others, they simply walked on and did not notice. But if it belonged to one of them, the elephants were astounded, unable to understand how it could possibly be. It’s like if in our world, you entered a door on the left and came out of a door on the right. They couldn’t understand how the scent could be ahead when they were coming from another direction. The experiment also describes how an elephant can understand that out of a group of scientists who arrived in cars, there’s one newcomer, and he is in the third car on the back seat. It needs to approach him and smell.

Moreover, much is described about the olfaction of birds. Previously it was thought that they had none. Moreover, it turns out the ocean consistently emits a certain scent – dimethyl sulfide, a gas from plankton. And various oceanic birds use this scent pattern – which is plus or minus the same – for navigation.

It turns out that snakes cannot taste or smell with their tongues, but with their quick movements of the forked tongue, they take air samples and send them to the vomeronasal organ (or Jacobson’s organ) for analysis. This organ, by the way, is also present in dogs. With my Yuki, it’s very noticeable when he uses it, and when it’s the nose. Snakes do the same, only unlike dogs, they don’t have another olfactory organ. And we don’t have a vomeronasal organ.