I hope they let the beetle go. It’ll be better for everyone if the little guy can propagate instead of filling out a slot in a glass display case.
SHINY
Submitted 5 months ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/1ca4a8b4-1d07-4ed3-a81a-bd8f79e36fb0.png
Comments
Someonelol@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
Melatonin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
They melted it. Got a gram of titanium.
anarchrist@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
Oh neat like in the Mummy! Oh wait…
stevedice@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
I demand a steel-type regional form of heracross.
embed_me@programming.dev 5 months ago
The shiny should be a gold scarab
Nastybutler@lemmy.world 5 months ago
WITNESS ME!
Meruten@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
You think this is why shiny pokemon are a thing? 🤔
therealjcdenton@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
Great you can now respec your character at Rennala
Yokozuna@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Ok, no one will ever believe me and that’s ok, but when I was a wee lad I took a trip up north to Tennessee (lol) and I swear on everything in this bush by a tree I saw two golden little beetles similar to that. A lot smaller but yea they were just… right there, it felt special but I really had no idea, still dont really. I thought someone had spray painted them or something, they were so shiny.
FoxyFerengi@lemm.ee 5 months ago
I wonder if they were tortoise beetles? They look gold until you spook them, then they turn a brownish orange. But they are super shiny. Could also have been a type of wood borer, some of the green ones look gold when the light hits right
Machinist@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Grew up in North Alabama. There were June bugs that were more golden when I was a kid. Some of them looked like they were made of gold, and weren’t green like they are now. We’d tie a string around a leg and fly them like little dive bombers. Which is pretty terrible, but didn’t know any better.
Melatonin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
Chrome is making a comeback
ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org 5 months ago
Only on vintage VWs
Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
chrome rims chrome bumpers and the trunk keep it thumpin on the SLAB
stupidcasey@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Can’t imagine why they are rare what with the mirror surface announcing their presence to birds.
xx3rawr@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
It actually works well as camo around small puddles of water on the rainforest floor
Dasus@lemmy.world 5 months ago
A bit like razzle dazzle!
red@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
its a full 1/8000 ods shiny
troyunrau@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
Nature is lit
unnamedau@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
oo shiny…
ving_thor@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Kill it for some twinkling titanite.
JoYo@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
is that the technoloptra? Elroy is looking for one of those.
Juliana@sopuli.xyz 5 months ago
Special …
SouthFresh@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Limbata: The forbidden beetle.
samus12345@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Like a treasure from a sunken pirate wreck
protist@mander.xyz 5 months ago
Nature is insane
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
In case anyone else was wondering how this could be effective camouflage. I wonder what happens if the predators are thirsty though.
skillissuer@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
it’s called dielectric mirror, this type of mirror can be made to be extremely effective over narrow range of wavelengths and it’s used in lasers for this reason. this is also the only way to manipulate extreme UV (13nm tin source, used in EUV semiconductor manufacturing)
similar effect is responsible for blue color of some butterflies and feathers that don’t contain blue pigment
masterofn001@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
Like, how does nature know to manipulate quantum states and electromagnetism to achieve this result. Trial and error / random mutation /survival etc just doesn’t explain why it happens.
That’s a staggering amount of non trivial science/math stacked layer by layer. On a beetle.
SkyezOpen@lemmy.world 5 months ago
You’re trying to assign agency to a natural process. It doesn’t work like that no matter how many times you ask why.
Lesrid@lemm.ee 5 months ago
The biggest element you are not accounting for is time. It takes an unfathomably long amount of time for the benefits of random mutation to shape a population.
SpongyAneurism@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz 5 months ago
There doesn’t need to be any knowledge involved. It happens, because it works. Neither the beetle nor evolution itself “know” anything about quantum physics. The beetle is just a beetle and evolution is not even an entity that has any agency, it’s just a process that’s happening and that leads to remarkable results over time.
This is just one more example for the old discussion how complexity can develop through evolution. The classic example is the eye of vertebrates. Read up on that, if you’re interested in that discussion.
AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
It doesn’t. Step by tiny step random mutations that grant a fraction of a percentage of survivability, multiplied across millions of generations.
Yes it does, assuming there’s a benefit to be had along the way. It doesn’t have to be as effective as it is today to confer some tiny amount of benefit. It just has to be better than those without the mutation.
protist@mander.xyz 5 months ago
Evolution can only build off what came before, and in this case, all the parts were already there, they just needed to be fine tuned. Beetles across the world manipulate wavelengths of light to iridesce using variable reflective layers of chitin
porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
There’s nothing “special” in the way you imagine about quantum phenomena. They are complicated to describe mathematically because we are limited to a fundamentally imperfect set of symbols, but they are not complicated to obtain the requirements for.
All chemical and light-interaction processes use quantum phenomena if you dig enough into how they work, and it’s especially clear on a smaller scale. If you just make something thin enough, it will start displaying quantum effects, but there is nothing that complicated about “thin”.
BradleyUffner@lemmy.world 5 months ago
It didn’t. It just does random shit in different offspring until they manage to survive and pass on the genes to the next generation and the next round of random shit, ad infinitum.
bunchberry@lemmy.world 5 months ago
It’s always funny seeing arguments like this as someone with a computer science education. A lot of people act like you can’t have anything complex unless some intelligent being deterministically writes a lot of if-else statements to implement it, which requires them to know and understand in detail what they are implementing at every step.
But what people don’t realize is that this is not how it works at all, there are many problems that are just impractical to actually “know” how to solve yet we solve them all the time, such as voice recognition. Nobody in human history has ever written a bunch of if-else statements to be able to accurately translate someone’s voice to text, because it’s too complicated of a problem, no one on earth knows how it works.
Yet, of course, your phone can do voice recognition just fine. That is because you can put together a generic class of algorithms which find solutions to problems on their own, without you even understanding the problem. These algorithms are known as metaheuristics. Metaheuristics fundamentally cannot be deterministic, they require random noise to work properly, because something that is deterministic will always greedily go in the direction of a more correct solution, and will never explore more incorrect solutions, whereby an even better solution may be beyond the horizon of many incorrect ones. Technically speaking, we would say they get stuck in a local minimum.
A simple example of a metaheuristic is that of annealing. If you want to strengthen a sword, you can heat up the metal really hot and let it slowly cool. While it’s really hot, the atoms in the sword will randomly explore different configurations, and as it cools, they will explore less and less, and the overall process leads them to finding rather optimal configurations that strengthen the crystaline structure of the metal.
This simple process can actually be applied generally to solve pretty much any problem. For example, if you are trying to figure out the optimal route to deliver packages, you can simulate this annealing process but rather than atoms searching for an optimal crystaline structure, you have different orders of stops on a graph searching for the shortest path. The “temperature” would be a variable that represents how much random exploration you are willing to accept, i.e. if you alter the configuration and it’s worse, how much worse does it have to be for you to not accept it. A higher temperature would accept worse solutions, at very low temperatures you would only accept solutions that improve upon the route.
I once implemented this algorithm to solve sudoku puzzles and it was very quick at doing so.
There are tons of metaheuristic algorithms, and much of them we learn from nature, like annealing, however, there’s also genetic algorithms. The random exploration is done through random mutations through each generation, but the deterministic and greedy aspect of it is the fact that only the most optimal generations are chosen to produce the next generation. This is also a generic algorithm that can be applied to solve any problem. You can see a person here who uses a genetic algorithm to teach a computer how to fly a plane during a simulation.
Modern AI is based on neural networks, which the greedy aspect of them is something called backpropagation, although this on its own is not a metaheuristic, but modern AI tech arguably qualifies because it does not actually work until you introduce random exploration like a method known as drop out whereby you randomly remove neurons during training to encourage the neural network to not overfit. Backpropagation+dropout forms a kind of metaheuristic with both a greedy and exploratory aspect to it, and can be used to solve any generic problem.
Indeed, that’s how we get phones to recognize speech and convert it to text. Nobody sat down and wrote a bunch of if-else statements to translate text into speech. Rather, we took a generic nature-inspired algorithm that can produce solutions for any problem, and just applied it to speech recognition, and kept increasing the amount of compute until it could solve the problem on its own. Once it solves it, the solution it spits out is kind of a black box. You can put in speech as an input, and it gives you text as an output, but nobody really even knows fully what is going on in between.
People often act like somehow computers could not solve problems unless humans could also solve them, but computers already have solved millions of problems which not only has no human ever solved but no human can even possibly understand the solution the computer spits out. All we know from studying nature is that there are clever ways to combine random exploration and deterministic greed to form processes which can solve any arbitrary problem given enough time and resources, so we just implement those processes into computers and then keep throwing more time and resources at it until it spits out an answer.
We already understand how nature can produce things without anyone “knowing” how it works, because we do that all the time already!
SurpriZe@lemm.ee 5 months ago
So what factors affect this then
werefreeatlast@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Easy, mature killed all the other Beatles of the same species which were not shiny. Then probably the shiny females only liked shiny males for mating. Finally the male penis got some weird curly twist and that eventually locked the mutation to just one species. I don’t known, just making stuff up.