
Herd of Fuzzy Green 'Glacier Mice' Baffles Scientists - Xplor
https://www.npr.org/2020/05/22/858800112/herd-like-movement-of-fuzzy-green-glacier-mice-baffles-scientists
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bryanrasmussen
[https://thespacewriter.com/wp/2019/11/16/scientists-are-
not-...](https://thespacewriter.com/wp/2019/11/16/scientists-are-not-baffled/)

Start: "Every week, I see headlines in the mainstream media (as well as the
“social” and online media outlets) that say something like “NASA Scientists
Baffled at….” or “Scientists Bewildered by…”. It’s annoying and tells me that
the writer and/or the headline writer is a) lazy and b) doesn’t have a clue
about science or scientists. "

~~~
klyrs
Or, c) they interviewed a scientist doing the research and literally reported
the fact:

> "We still don't know," he says. "I'm still kind of baffled."'

Scientists are baffled. It's what gets us out of bed. If we knew everything,
we'd be called oracles or something. If we stuck to the comforts of the known,
applicable facts, we'd be called engineers.

Humans are curious beings. We enjoy the trivia at the forefront of science,
even if we won't read the boring details of the precise scientific answer.
Mulling the questions that scientists are investigating is a delight. And
yeah, sometimes it's a lazy editor who exploits that curiosity, editorializing
without verification, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.

~~~
fsckboy
> if we stuck to the comforts of the known, applicable facts, we'd be called
> engineers.

seriously? you are showing off your knowledge of science by displaying an
ignorance of engineering... engineers don't live in emotional comfort, and the
best experimental scientists are engineers or they'd never create novel
equipment to test ideas.

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pmiller2
Sounds similar to the so-called "sailing stones": rocks in the desert that
move seemingly on their own. The explanation for their movement is essentially
wind, aided by thin sheets of ice that melt a bit on sunny days:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_stones#Explanation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_stones#Explanation)

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
There is a simpler explanation for that phenomenon:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Beneath_the_Ground](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Beneath_the_Ground)!

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wolfgang42
It seems like scientists are _always_ baffled. (What’s that old quote about
“the most important phrase in science is ‘hmm, that’s funny...’”?)

Being baffled is pretty much a scientist’s job.

~~~
partyboat1586
Sometimes I wish I was a scientist rather than a programmer. The kind of
baffled I get as a programmer is usually as a result of recent human creations
rather than the more numinous natural ones.

~~~
chris_st
"If debugging is the art of taking errors out of programs, then programming is
the art of putting them in." \-- someone far smarter (and funnier) than me.

~~~
DFHippie
Programming has two stages that alternate: bugging and debugging.

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TomasEkeli
I really like how that site solved the problem of visitors that don't accept
tracking. I got a challenge asking me to accept cookies, out get the just-text
version.

No images, no scripts, no cookies, no styling. Just the text. What a great
thing!

~~~
thepangolino
The question I keep asking myself is why tracking and cookies can't be handled
at the browser level?

~~~
the_other
One facet of this: the dominant browser manufacturer is the dominant tracking
body.

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mattigames
I would go with the experimental approach: cover a few glacier mice from the
sun and see if they change behavior relative to the others, cover a few from
the wind and see if they change behavior, paint a few with heat resistant
paint, and so on.

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Aardwolf
This is probably obvious and not it since they roll and it's not just on
antarctica, but did they check that it isn't the entire ice plate under them
that's moving?

~~~
xaedes
I asked myself the same question. Unfortunately this isn't addressed in the
article. But I think that the glacier researchers probably though about it.

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pcrh
>Bartholomaus

Nice aptronym!

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kweinber
If these are green Tribbles, don’t be fooled by their fuzzy cuteness, they are
very dangerous:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribble](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribble)

~~~
Kye
This is what they use to make that green drink.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQAG0JEb718](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQAG0JEb718)

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RichardHeart
This could be related to this phenomena:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_stones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_stones)

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AstralStorm
Why the hyperbole? Science has known multiple plant movement mechanisms. They
will follow sunlight, mineral content and even their equivalent of pheromones.

Looks freaky though. :)

~~~
weare138
What interesting about these 'glacier mice' is the moss forms into a ball that
somehow roll around which is why the moss on the bottom of the ball doesn't
die. So far they can't figure out what makes them roll.

> _The researchers considered several possible explanations. The first, and
> most obvious one, is that they just rolled downhill. But measurements showed
> that the moss balls weren 't going down a slope.

"We next thought maybe the wind is sort of blowing them in consistent
directions," says Bartholomaus, "and so we measured the dominant direction of
the wind."

That didn't explain it either, nor did the pattern of the sunlight.

"We still don't know," he says. "I'm still kind of baffled."

"It's always kind of exciting, though, when things don't comply with your
hypothesis, with the way you think things work," says Gilbert.

The work has charmed other glacier scientists who dote on the adorable moss
balls.

"I think that probably the explanation is somewhere in the physics of the
energy and the heat around the surface of the glacier, but we haven't quite
got there yet," says Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist at the Danish
Meteorological Institute._

~~~
catalogia
Their center of mass shifts as they grow.

Besides growth, their center of mass may also shift when one side becomes
damper or dryer faster than the rest, due to sunlight, wind, or the wet
ground.

~~~
dmckeon
The curved upper/exposed surface could act as an airfoil, allowing gusts of
wind to lift the moss-mouse, and move it a bit, and/or rotate it around it’s
vertical axis.

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jonnypotty
Hey, so called 'scientists' a collection of mice is called a mischief, not a
herd. This is obviously not true, glaciers are made of ice, not cheese.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _a collection of mice is called a mischief_

I always found this aspect of English, uniquely naming sets of animals, to be
simultaneously adorable and thoroughly useless and anachronistic.

Is there a defence of this flock of birds, mischief of mice, whateverthefuck
of whosits system? (Does it have a name?) Do all linguistic systems do it?

~~~
throwaway_pdp09
I suspect these collective nouns as they are called were invented, or
expanded, by the victorians, it's the kind of thing they did (if they were
sufficiently wealthy).

A parliament of owls, a murder of crows etc. I can imagine it was a way of
excluding people without education.

My speculation anyway. Whole things just seems silly to me.

~~~
dmckeon
I believe they may have grown out of “terms of venery” or words specific to
hunting - an activity often divided into class-specific groupings.

~~~
throwaway_pdp09
I do believe you hit the nail on the head. For others who are unaware of the
term
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_noun#Terms_of_vener...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_noun#Terms_of_venery)
\- thanks

