Steve Stewart-Williams
@SteveStuWill
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Psychology, evolution, science. Author of "The Ape That Understood the Universe" (2018) and "Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life" (2010). Backup: @SteveStuWill2
Joined April 2009
It's out! The paperback edition of my book, THE APE THAT UNDERSTOOD THE UNIVERSE, featuring a new foreword by @MichaelShermer. You can read the first chapter here: and here's a sample of reactions to the book. 👇
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No big deal; just a guy playing fetch with a beluga whale. 😮
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Holy crap, this is incredible: A dog playing Jenga. Turn-taking, fine motor control, apparent understanding of the aim of the game. I would not have guessed a dog could do this.
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Amazing time-lapse footage of a day in the life of a pair of pot plants. Plants are so much more active than we usually imagine! We don't notice, though, because they move in slow motion (or, from the plant's point of view, we move in crazy fast motion).
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No big deal; just a deer scoring a goal then celebrating. 😮
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This is impressive enough at normal speed – but in slow motion, it's 🤯
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Special effects before green screen and CGI
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Juvenile primate mauled by domesticated wolves. Horrific.
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Cats negotiating obstacle courses. It's impressive that they can place their front paws so precisely; what really amazes me, though, is that they can do it with their back paws, when the obstacles are no longer in sight.
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The true scale of the universe. Mind-blowing.
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One of the most powerful motion illusions I've seen: The cubes appear to be rotating in opposite directions – but they're not actually moving at all… 😮. Credit: @jagarikin
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Scientists have developed tattoos that change color in response to glucose, albumin, and pH levels. The new tech could let people with diabetes or kidney disease track and control their health without having to take frequent blood samples.
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This photo of the sun might not look too impressive. until you realize it was taken at night – not looking up but looking down, through the entire Earth, using neutrinos rather than light. Amazing!
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Incredible visualisation: Birds migrating across Europe, tracked by GPS.
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No big deal; just a guy playing fetch with a beluga whale. 😮
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The Dance of a Thousand Hands. Absolutely incredible.
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Baby chimps, rescued from poachers and separated for medical treatment, see each other again for the first time 😍.
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Monthly global temperature anomalies, 1880-2021. Source: NASA
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An all-time classic: Genetics explained with gummy bears…
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THREAD: My Top 12 Favourite Perceptual Illusions. 1. A great example of how expectations guide perception.
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One of the best animal videos of 2020: a termite trail running parallel to an ant trail, each protected by a column of soldiers. HT @Mehdi_Moussaid
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One of my all-time favourites. Stare at the red dot on the woman's nose for 30 seconds, then look at an empty wall while blinking quickly. Promise it's worth it.
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One of my all-time favourites. Stare at the red dot on the woman's nose for 30 seconds, then look at an empty wall while blinking quickly. Promise it's worth it.
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Silverback gorilla stands guard as his family crosses the road
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Children's answers to the question "What is politics?"
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Physics is weird. (More precisely, our intuitive physics doesn't quite align with reality.)
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This is just startling: Footage from another world, the planet Mars, taken by NASA's Curiosity rover.
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Each ball is moving back and forth on a straight line. Strangely satisfying to watch.
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According to biologists, the function of zebras' stripes is to ward off insects. Based on that idea, a team of scientists painted zebra stripes on cows. This reduced the number of biting flies on the cows by more than 50%. Applied evolutionary biology!
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Wow: A panoramic view of Mars, captured by NASA’s Curiosity. Very cool.
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The noble lion, dignified and strong, unchallenged king of the. careful, watch where you’re. aw shit
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Well this is something I never expected to see. 😮
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"Cats are capable of walking very precisely because, like all felines, they directly register; that is, they place each hind paw (almost) directly in the print of the corresponding fore paw."
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"If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration." –Nikola Tesla. Video:
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One of most incredible examples of animal camouflage I've seen: the dead leaf butterfly of Tropical Asia. When a bird or other predator gets too close, the dead leaf closes its wings, rendering itself virtually invisible to the would-be killer.
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My all-time favourite example of survivorship bias
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Wow! "Fifteen uncoupled simple pendulums of monotonically increasing lengths dance together to produce visual traveling waves, standing waves, beating, and random motion."
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Amazing that natural selection can engineer such intricately patterned instincts, and amazing that it can squeeze so much behavioural complexity into such a tiny brain.
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Cats negotiating obstacle courses. It's impressive that they can place their front paws so precisely; what really amazes me, though, is that they can do it with their back paws, when the obstacles are no longer in sight.
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This is impressive enough at normal speed – but in slow motion, it's 🤯
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Innocent child brutally attacked by domesticated wolves. Warning: Graphic footage.
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This stunning time-lapse footage from a camera keeping a fixed view of the night sky gives a visceral sense of the rotation of the Earth. Footage by Eric Brummel (@Brummo)
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The political compass according to people in each quadrant of the political compass…. Source unknown.
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Great example of the power of expectations to shape perception: The visual system is so determined to see faces as convex, rather than concave, that it’s virtually impossible not to see the illusion – even when you know what’s going on.
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Wow! Scientists have observed a single-cell alga evolve in real time into a multicellular organism. The transition took around a year and was caused by the introduction of a predator into the environment.
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There are no plants in this photo, only animals.
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Archerfish trying to shoot down an insect with a targeted jet of water. Amazing accuracy.
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When we think about the solar system, we tend to imagine a stationary sun surrounded by planets in circular orbits. Here's a more accurate way to view things.
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Elephants have their trunks; giraffes have their long necks – and human beings have their ability to do this. (MRI of a person talking. Amazing!)
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Augmented-reality glasses put a smile on everyone's face. 😂
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A famous study found that Black babies have higher survival rates if attended by Black doctors than White doctors. But a re-analysis of the data shows the effect disappears after accounting for the fact that low birth weight babies more often see White doctors. [Link below.]
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Incredible animation: A billion years of plate tectonics squeezed into 40 seconds.
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The amazing camouflage of the great grey owl. Over the course of its evolution, any gene that happened to make the owl a little less visible had a greater chance of being passed on. The gradual accumulation of such genes led to the near-perfect camouflage we see today.
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Probably the best video you'll see today of a dog and a turtle playing soccer. 😮.
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Psychologists have posited hundreds of cognitive biases over the years. A new paper argues that they all boil down to one of a handful of fundamental beliefs coupled with confirmation bias.
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This photo of the sun might not look too impressive. until you realize it was taken at night – not looking up but looking down, through the entire Earth, using neutrinos rather than light. Amazing!
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Two fish spitting sand at each other. Humans aren’t the only animals that can have issues with their neighbours…
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Probably the best video you'll see today of a guy getting into a boxing match with a kangaroo that put his dog in a headlock. 😮
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Hundreds of giant honeybees performing their collective threat display. Known as "shimmering," the display is similar to a wave in a sports stadium, and is designed to scare off wasps and other predators.
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Psychologists have posited hundreds of cognitive biases over the years. A fascinating new paper argues that they all boil down to one of a handful of fundamental beliefs coupled with confirmation bias.
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Amazing how much more dangerous motorbikes are than all the other options “A motorcyclist who traveled 15 miles every day for a year had an astonishing 1 in 860 chance of dying. A person who took a 500 mile flight every day for a year would have a fatality risk of 1 in 85,000.”
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MRI scan of a person moving their eyes back and forth. Amazing how much the optic nerves move around inside the skull!
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The happiest countries in the world tend to have the most heavy metal bands…
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Attractive female students no longer earned higher grades when classes moved online during COVID-19
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No big deal; just a bear putting things right. 😮
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