Bridlewoodstock and Bioluminescence · 4:38pm Jun 19th, 2023
The arrival of a new batch of pony episodes reminded me that I hadn’t written anything here for a while, so let’s see what random things I can find to blog about in Chapter 4. Beginning with Bridlewoodstock.
I liked the 40th anniversary Ruby Jubilee party feel to this episode, with all the nods to earlier generations and celebrations of things universal to ponies of all ages. Rainbow colours, catchy tunes, and crazy mane styles. Lift up your hooves up everypony. We’ll leave the epic alicorn battles for later in the season.
Now that the Dreamlands have made a comeback, will Minty do a rerun of her classic seasonal hit?
Linguistic aside: The name of the latest pony pop sensation gave a little challenge to the translators, as Ruby is Pipp’s name in the French and Italian version.
With that stage name taken, Ruby Jubilee is rebranded in France as Poppy Diamant. I like that too. This then means the gem stones that neutralise the Troggles (or Tracasseurs) become red diamonds.
While in Italian, she is Rosy Jubilee. That doesn’t work quite so well.
However, my primary interest is talking about irrelevant science, so let’s get on to that impressive biological phenomenon, the Lumi Bloom.
The raises a lot of questions about about the Bridlewood ecosystem. Flowering plants produce their blossom to attract pollinators. What are the bugs fulfilling this function? Or are the Troggles playing a role?
An even bigger question is how does wild rubies being ‘in season’ fit into the rock cycle? Where is Maud Pie when you need her? This might explain why so many ready cut and polished gemstones appear in caves or shallow underground sites around Equestria.
The competition to attract pollinators has pushed flowing plants to evolve an enormous range of visual and chemical stimuli, therefore luminous plants do not seem an unreasonable idea in principle. However, in our world, there are no natural luminescent plants. Bioluminescence is a thing for bacteria, algae, and animal life, allowing insects like fireflies and glow worms to attract mates. There are also auto-luminous fungi. The Lumi Bloom shows plants, mushrooms, bugs, and crystal outcrops all glowing together. Is there some stimulus that synchronises this?
While there are no natural luminous plants, it is not too hard for genetic engineers to insert an animal or fungi gene into a plant to create such a thing. Making things glow is a favourite research trick. By sticking a jelly fish gene in a particular place in a different species genome, and scanning the resulting lifeform with a fluorescence microscope to see which proteins light up, you have a way to map what each bit of genetical code does.
According to some reports, luminous house plants may be the next big trend. I’m no interior designer, but I would have thought that if you want a fancy glowing plant to decorate your apartment, then the sensible thing would be to buy a plastic ornament with LED lighting? Real plants are for a more natural look. But maybe there is a niche interest for such a horticultural curiosity.
The deep sea is the habitat that has produced the most impressive diversity of bioluminescent species from bacteria to fish. A kilometre beneath the surface, lifeforms live in perpetual darkness, illuminated only by the brief flashes they make themselves.
To finish with a particle physics connection, the ANTARES neutrino detector, in the Mediterranean, has provided a new way to study this. The experiment was built to detect cosmic neutrinos, through Cherenkov light—the flash generated when a charged particle produced by an interaction in the sea moves faster than the speed of light in water. The detector consists of long strings of light sensors anchored 2.5km deep, 40km off the French coast. After sixteen years monitoring neutrinos, ANTARES is now being replaced with the even larger KM3NeT detector.
For years, the flashes of light produced by deep-sea creatures have been frustrating background to the cosmic neutrino signal. However, the ANTARES data set has recently been analysed with the goal of learning more about them. Maybe particle physics will shed some light of this mysterious part of the biosphere.
I like the idea that Equestrian Gems are actually Stone Plants whose body structure is a Coral style hybrid with a crystaline gel/sol rigid matrix formed from alumina silicones, with metallic doping to give broadband electromagnetic interaction etc, and therefore able to act as supercaps as well as photovolatic, thermalvoltaic, radio convresion with piezoelectric behaviour amongst others. Water has a huge electric field strength ablity, as wll as a very high dielectric permitivity?
Then again, the Z Machine using water as insulator gets 12 megavolt per meter, which is 0.012 volt per nanomete, and the current best FET gate insulation is 0.8 volt per nanometer? almost 60 times higher? I think small pure mica sheet reaches ten times that of water?
Then again, it wouldnt suprise me, given how badly behaved water is, that when measured in nanometer scale and single layer tests that the dielectric constant isnt.
Mostly because of how easy it is to detect. That tells you that your gene therapy or whatever is working, so you can move on to whatever you were actually trying to study.
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Thing is, Everything glows. Its just that most emmited radiation takes equiment to pick up rather than the baseline non cateract modded eye, and some of those detectors and illuminators can get somewhat bulky and expensive.
SLAC.
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Right, bananas and all that.
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This is a quite specific application of glowing: https://theconversation.com/how-glow-in-the-dark-jellyfish-revolutionised-plant-biology-19118
I completely missed that this episode was MLP's Ruby Jubilee... mostly because I didn't realize that was the appropriate material for this anniversary.
In my experience, the undead rarely contribute to a healthy ecology. Though given how the Bridlewood appears to be a relatively docile stretch of the Everfree, I can't completely rule it out...
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Maybe the Troggles are needed to stop the number of wild rubies getting out of hoof, given that there aren't so many dragons, or other predators, as there were once.
I wanted to chime in, but you said everything. I slept on it and then it occurred to me that you forgot this interesting factoid:
Because high-energy cosmic rays are so penetrating, they can penetrate several kilometers of water. For this reason, the detectors look down so that they can detect neutrinos which have travelled through the Earth instead of up so that they do not have to figure out whether the flashes are from neutrinos or cosmic rays.