Archive for the ‘Science’ Category

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Archaeological Botany


19 Feb

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Imagine this- you’re a botanist working at a major research university when one day you get a call from the archeology department. “Hi, we’ve found what we’re pretty certain was a garden over 2,500 years ago. Do you think you could tell us what kind of plants lived her?”

I think that call has to come first, because how are archeologists going to recognize that there’s pollen captured in plaster? As a pollen expert, how often do you get a chance to work on a project like this?

Do we need a new field of study for botany- archeological botany?

The Dinosaur Nursery


26 Jan

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As salmon return to their birth places to spawn, so dinosaurs returned to the same spots to lay their eggs. Well, maybe not exactly like that, but new evidence found at the oldest dinosaur nesting grounds ever discovered does show that multiple dinosaurs built their nests in the same area at roughly the same time, and that dinosaurs kept coming back to that area to build their nests.

The nesting ground, found in the Golden Gate Highlands National Park in South Africa, contains the oldest dinosaur nests ever found, older than previous nesting sites by 100 million years. That’s amazing.

Caught on Camera


21 Jan

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It’s happened again! Scientists have found a species believed to be extinct! This time, it’s the Miller’s Grizzled Langur, a monkey living in the jungles ofBorneo. These guys are so rare, and it has been so long since they’ve been seen, that the scientists who “found” them (via camera traps) did not even know what they were looking at. In fact, museum sketches were the best pictorial evidence they had to go on.

The old habitat of the monkeys had been destroyed, and they were honestly believed gone. Sometimes it’s good to be reminded of how resilient animals are.

Congratulations, It’s a Submarine


13 Jan

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The H.L. Hunley, the world’s first successful combat submarine, can now be seen completely unobstructed, at the Charleston conservatory in Charleston, SC.

Preservation is not yet completed. Conservators need to remove corrosion from the iron hull and then add chemicals so that the submarine can be shown in open air, but still, you can now view the whole thing.

While the Hunley was a major accomplishment for the Confederacy, it was also a source of tragedy, with three full crews dying inside her hull. Pictures of the final crew are on display next to the tank that holds the sub.

Behold the Sunflower


12 Jan

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I love this quote from MIT mechanical engineer Alexander Mitsos “”It is very scary that we did all the [numerical optimization] work and then we go back to nature,” he noted. “We could have started there.”

What is he talking about? Designing solar power arrays based on the sunflower. It sounds simple when you think about it. We call it the sunflower partly because it follows the sun. Is it any surprise that it’s optimized to catch the sun’s rays?

Regardless of the simplicity of the design, reducing the size of solar power arrays by 20% is huge. Go nature.

Old Dreams


11 Jan

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Way back when, I was a History major who wanted a masters in Museum Studies and my brother was an Archaeology major. I used to have these fantasies of us working at an important archeological site together and finding something amazing, something like the Hallaton Helmet.

Dating from Emperor Claudius’s invasion of Britian around two thousand years ago, the helmet took over 10 years to restore after it was first found (by a guy with a metal detector, along with a number of ancient coins). What a perfect combination of the work of archeologists and the specialists at the museum.

Not Dead, Just Moved Elsewhere


09 Jan

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It always saddens me when I hear that another species is endangered or extinct. Conversely, it makes me happy when we discover that a species is not actually extinct, as is the case with a specific species of tortoise from the Galapagos Islands.

Considering that the tortoises all probably look the same to the untrained, it’s not surprising scientists thought this species was gone when it disappeared from the island it lived on. It is a happy discovery to find the offspring of the species (mixed breed) on another island. Apparently, they just moved (or were moved by humans, anyway).

Dogs Know


06 Jan

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Dog owners know that our dogs understand not just the tone of our voices or our body language, they understand our facial expressions too. You can’t hide what you’re feeling from you dog. Science has now proven what we know.

Scientists say dogs have evolved to read humans. A dog trainer doesn’t agree. She thinks that that’s just the way dogs communicate.

Honestly, I have to agree with the scientists. Yes, dogs read body language of other dogs and humans, but dogs don’t have facial expressions the way humans do. We have bred an understanding of us in to them.

We’re Still Here


02 Jan

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To go along with Thursday’s post about the Denisovans (I didn’t give their name), we have proof that ancient modern humans bred with both the Neanderthals and the Denisovans. In fact, I think you could argue that modern humans might not exist if it hadn’t been for the interbreeding.

DNA tests using information from bone marrow registries show that more than half of our immune system related DNA comes from Neanderthals and Denisovans. Without that, some disease may have wiped us off the planet.

While we don’t know what happened to them, I think we can say, they saved us.

Not Human or Neanderthal


30 Dec

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How did I miss this story back in March? I was a History major and C was an Anthropology major so we actually talk about things like the extinction of the Neanderthals on a not infrequent basis. So how did I miss the report that there is genetic evidence of yet another pre-human ancestor? One that was neither modern human nor Neanderthal? Better yet, the evidence suggests this person lived in Siberia’sAltai Mountains at the same time as modern humans were moving there. Was there interbreeding? What happened to them? Was their fate tied to that of the Neanderthals?

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