What's Eating You?

A Lecture On The Psychology of Animals Swallowed Alive

From 1925

[Darwin] states that big sharks swallow the porcupine. fish, and has frequently found it floating alive and distended in the stomach of a shark. On one occasion a porcupine fish swallowed by a shark had eaten its way out, not only through the coats of the stomach, but through the walls of tlhe body, and thus destroyed its captor.
Darwin asks, Who would ever have imaginied that a little soft fish could have destroyed the great and savage shark? The diodon iniflates itself with air and water, which it expels with some force when it deflates. The jets of water must cause some curious ticklings to a shark with a lively diodoni in its stomach!

Turning, Turning, Turning Through the Years

Physicists say cosmic rays affect the length of day

I’d like to add a warning to this (along the lines of the Journalism Warning Labels by Tom Scott): Article title implies much more certainty than the article; the article is more restrained than the title would indicate, and the paper (at least the abstract) even more so. Changing the angular momentum of the earth would affect the moment of inertia, but the correlation here is with the sunspot cycle — the connection to cosmic rays is more tenuous.

The abstract actually says

We conclude that variations in mean zonal winds are modulated by the solar activity cycle through variations in irradiance, solar wind or cosmic ray intensity.

I’ll have to consult my local experts on earth rotation and get their opinion on this.