You know NOTHING about rat whiskers! You have eyes & hands to explore, but rats have an army of sensors on their face. Whiskers are a rat's superpower. Here's how rats sense what you can't:
Sensors at the tips Each whisker is like an antenna, picking up curves, pressure, and air changes. Rats sense a sly cat plotting an ambush before it pounces.
Hydraulic mechanics? You bet. At the base of each whisker is a blood sinus. When a whisker moves, the fluid pressure instantly triggers brain activity. Genius, right?
Brain barrels In the rat's brain cortex, there are "barrels," neural areas dedicated to each whisker.
Why is this cool? Rats detect stimuli, assess textures, and identify objects without touching them. A quick whisker wave gives them all the info. Superfast: rats process signals in milliseconds. While you're thinking, "What's that?", they already know if it's edible.
Bonus: if scientists tickle the right "barrel" with electricity, they feel like their whisker touched something real. It's like telepathy for sensors.
You know NOTHING about rat whiskers! You have eyes & hands to explore, but rats have an army of sensors on their face. Whiskers are a rat's superpower. Here's how rats sense what you can't:
Sensors at the tips Each whisker is like an antenna, picking up curves, pressure, and air changes. Rats sense a sly cat plotting an ambush before it pounces.
Hydraulic mechanics? You bet. At the base of each whisker is a blood sinus. When a whisker moves, the fluid pressure instantly triggers brain activity. Genius, right?
Brain barrels In the rat's brain cortex, there are "barrels," neural areas dedicated to each whisker.
Why is this cool? Rats detect stimuli, assess textures, and identify objects without touching them. A quick whisker wave gives them all the info. Superfast: rats process signals in milliseconds. While you're thinking, "What's that?", they already know if it's edible.
Bonus: if scientists tickle the right "barrel" with electricity, they feel like their whisker touched something real. It's like telepathy for sensors.
Given the pro-privacy stance of the platform, it’s taken as a given that it’ll be used for a number of reasons, not all of them good. And Telegram has been attached to a fair few scandals related to terrorism, sexual exploitation and crime. Back in 2015, Vox described Telegram as “ISIS’ app of choice,” saying that the platform’s real use is the ability to use channels to distribute material to large groups at once. Telegram has acted to remove public channels affiliated with terrorism, but Pavel Durov reiterated that he had no business snooping on private conversations. This ability to mix the public and the private, as well as the ability to use bots to engage with users has proved to be problematic. In early 2021, a database selling phone numbers pulled from Facebook was selling numbers for $20 per lookup. Similarly, security researchers found a network of deepfake bots on the platform that were generating images of people submitted by users to create non-consensual imagery, some of which involved children. Telegram has become more interventionist over time, and has steadily increased its efforts to shut down these accounts. But this has also meant that the company has also engaged with lawmakers more generally, although it maintains that it doesn’t do so willingly. For instance, in September 2021, Telegram reportedly blocked a chat bot in support of (Putin critic) Alexei Navalny during Russia’s most recent parliamentary elections. Pavel Durov was quoted at the time saying that the company was obliged to follow a “legitimate” law of the land. He added that as Apple and Google both follow the law, to violate it would give both platforms a reason to boot the messenger from its stores. Messages are not fully encrypted by default. That means the company could, in theory, access the content of the messages, or be forced to hand over the data at the request of a government. For Oleksandra Tsekhanovska, head of the Hybrid Warfare Analytical Group at the Kyiv-based Ukraine Crisis Media Center, the effects are both near- and far-reaching.
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