STEMsocial Distilled - A second Omicron edition...

.. as we are due for this. Here is @lemouth at the keyboard tonight, with a late version of the distilled because COVID decided to enter my house. I am still unsure that Omicron is the one in charge, as Delta and other Greek letters are not necessarily out of business yet... Anyways, for now, we are all fine and the only positive member of the family lies in an excited state with no symptoms.

As causation is not correlation we cannot conclude that this is responsible for the two following facts, although this is a very tempting thing to do.

• Our selection of the best STEMsocial post of the week is an admixture of returning authors and regular fellows;
• There is no single COVID post this week.

In any case, as usual, the selected posts are all worth a little detour, if not already done. So please buckle up and be ready for a short journey accross the best STEM posts that our curators have found this week.

As now done for a month, I have selected five posts amongst our most supported posts, and among those that have attracted the highest level of engagement. Note that we veto any single author to appear in more than one edition of the STEMsocial Distilled for three consecutive weeks.

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Our top choices

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Ornithology for beginners

Let's start this journey with a tribute to animal lovers, and more specifically to bird lovers. @oscurity, with his usual style of equipping his posts with a bunch of amazing pictures, enters the domain of ornithology (i.e. the branch of science dealing with the study of birds), and bird watching (i.e. a recreational activity dedicated to bird observation). In the case you would like to start such an activity, this post is really made for you, providing very good tips. Moreover, if you want to do that from your coach, this is also possible as it is sufficient to enjoy the pictures.

Med-Hive series: fasting -- Is fasting medically beneficial?

The next selected work consists of the last blog from one of our STEMsocial medical doctors, @jaydr. The post triggered several discussions with various members of the community. Whereas the cover image suggests a very nice cooking recipe, the content is in fact dedicated to a very different subject: fasting. In this post, the author discusses not only the medical aspects of fasting and its consequence for our health, but touches also a more spiritual frontier and how religion could play a role.

Oil Well Drilling Problems: Sticking of Pipe

The third selected post of this week is all about engineering. Yes, there is indeed an 'E' in STEM! @carlos84 brings to the scene a known problem that could often arise when drilling a well: the drill pipe may get stuck. In this case, we can either panic, or read the post to learn about the solutions that exist and which strategy should be followed. That is particularly facilitated through several homemade sketches nicely made by the author.

Look at these bubbles! Or How You Can Use A Neural Network To Detect Custom Objects In Pictures

There is no way to spend a week without discussing machine learning. This time, circle Hough transforms have the first role through a blog by @robotics101. For those who do not know him, he is an old STEMsocial author and contributor that just returned, and who made amazing STEMsocial enlightened badges for the second STEMsocial meetup in Italy. In his post, he describes a project he made in order to use neural networks to detect micro-bubbles. If you are interested, it is sufficient to follow the tutorial to quickly get the pink circles in the image above.

Could Motion Be The Main Ingredient For Our Existence ?

Finally, our last selected post is an interesting blog written by @clinton19. Physics is ruling our world, isn't it? His this blog, the author shows that the notion of rest does not exist in our universe, even if we may feel being at rest. It is indeed not because we feel something, that the something is actually true (otherwise Earth would be flat). If you feel your imagination needs a test, feel free to think about what a motionless universe would be, and share your findings that with the author who will probably be pleased.

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All rewards earned on the distilled posts are used to fund the STEMsocial project functioning and activities. The author of the distilled, who may be any STEMsocial member depending on the week, gets 30% of the rewards of the post they wrote. If you like what we do, please consider joining our community on HIVE and delegating to the @stemsocial account (85% of the curation rewards are returned), or trailing it.

Once again, thanks a lot to all STEMsocial authors of the week for their amazing contributions to our community. For those who do not know what we are or what we do, please take a look here, or pass by Discord or the Openhive Chat (that is currently under an unplanned maintenance; please be patient).

See you next time!