This week, researchers hypothesized that human culture is distinguished from the cultures of other species like whales by a single opening—the ability to communicate and understand an infinite number of possibilities. An ancient single-celled organism provided evidence that embryonic development evolved before actual animals. And researchers reported that Earth experienced a period of massive and rapid melting after the last ice age. Additionally, we reported on the sociological implications of blowing delays, a method for calculating the mass and rotation of a black hole, and the evolution of species coloration.

Work faster, not better

I was playing Fallout 4 this week, and as I was passing a farm, a settler said to me, “If you work, you eat. It’s that simple.” I hear you loud and clear, post-apocalyptic non-player character with a tenuous relationship with collision surfaces. We may not live in a society where soda bottle caps are currency, but we do live in a capitalist society where we complete tasks in exchange for money, and many of those tasks are sensitive to time factor. What happens when you miss a deadline?

According to a study According to researchers at the University of Toronto, missing a deadline often causes others to view you as less competent, which impacts their perception of the quality of the work you turned in.

They surveyed thousands of people in the US and UK, including managers, human resources staff and people whose jobs involved evaluating others. During the field experiment, respondents were presented with examples of work and asked to evaluate them. Before their evaluations, the researchers told them whether the work was submitted early, on time or late.

Respondents who were told the work was turned in late rated the work as qualitatively worse than in the other two conditions. “Everyone saw the exact same art competition entry, school submission, or business proposal, but they couldn’t help but use their knowledge from the moment it was presented to guide their assessment of its quality,” explains Sam Maglio, professor of marketing in the department of management at the University of Toronto Scarborough and the Rotman School of Management.

For the record, I submitted this blog post a day before my deadline.

Perceived wavelengths

A new statistical analysis by researchers at the University of Arizona suggests that color vision evolved in animals about 500 million years ago, long before the evolution of colorful fruits and flowers, which began sprouting 200 to 350 million years ago. The researchers focused on what they call “standout colors” — essentially, the ones children are most likely to select from a pack of 16 Crayolas: red, orange, yellow, blue and purple.

Around 150 million years ago, probably to take advantage of the well-established prevalence of color vision, species began to evolve warning coloration. And 50 million years later, there was an evolutionary explosion of both admonition and sexual coloration. Although the reasons for this evolutionary explosion are still unclear, researchers have identified three animal vector warning signs: ray-finned fish, birds and lizards.

Additionally, warning coloration is much more widespread among species than sexual coloration, probably because colorful animals themselves do not need to have color vision to signal the danger they pose to other color-sensitive species. Sexual color signals, on the other hand, are confined to vertebrate and arthropod species that have well-developed color vision.

Simulated perceived wavelengths

Black holes essentially have three characteristics: mass, rotation and charge. It would therefore be difficult to distinguish them from each other in a police queue, even after solving all the obvious practical problems of introducing them to the police station. But calculating the mass and rotation of a black hole in space is difficult for several reasons.

A new study published in Letters from the astrophysical journal propose a method for observing light bent by the gravitational influence of a black hole. The researchers wanted to find light echoes in black holes, a theoretical phenomenon in which gravitational lens bends the path of a photon and allows light to follow multiple paths from a source to an observer on Earth. The effect is that light from the original source arrives at different times, resulting in an echo. Observing the echoes could provide measurements of the black hole’s mass and rotation.

The technique captures faint echo signatures that would otherwise be drowned out by stronger direct light. The researchers tested the method with computer simulationstaking thousands of shots of light traveling around a supermassive black hole and toward Earth, and could directly infer the echo delay period in the simulated data. The results suggest that astronomers could detect echoes in the future by using two telescopes, one in orbit and one on the ground, together performing very long baseline interferometry.

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