Horned Crocodile-Faced Hell Heron

 No, it's not a cryptid.

It's a large predatory dinosaur unearthed on the Isle of Wight. 9 meters long, a horny and bumpy skull, teeth like a crocodile...and the hunting habits of a heron. That is, we think this thing stood by the water and waited for fish or other aquatic prey to show up. The crocodile-style teeth were well suited for grabbing large fish.

It's in the Spinosauridae family and I'm kinda glad I'll never meet one. Well, maybe. See one from a good distance, sure, and be glad I'm not a fish.

You've Heard of Carbon Removal...

 ...how about methane removal? It's a lot trickier because methane is so low, but apparently it could "save" us anything up to 1 degree Celsius in temperature increase.

(Methane capture at source is a lot easier, dairy farmers are already doing it).

It's something we need to be considering and investing in, at any rate.

Ah, Australia...

 Present Australia has some interesting critters, and so does past Australia.

In this case, an unusual eagle that liked koala for breakfast. They actually found an almost complete skeleton of the bird near Lake Pinpa. It wasn't like modern eagles - it had a short wingspan and hunted through trees like modern goshawks and Cooper's hawks.

As Australia dried out, the eagle vanished. Australia is now home to the wedge-tailed eagle, which is about the same size as a bald eagle. Except being Australia, we know which one would win in a fight. (Of course, that's an Australian site, so they're probably biased).

What did ancient Egyptians look like?

 A technique called "DNA phenotyping" is giving us the picture.

This article shows reconstructions of three men who lived (or at least died) in Abusir el-Meleq somewhere between 1380 B.C. and A.D. 425.

As you can see, the middle guy looks distinctly African, the right hand guy looks very Middle Eastern or eastern Mediterranean, and the one on the left looks like he had ancestry from both.

Which is about what I would suspect.

The argument about whether ancient Egyptians were Black or Middle Eastern is easy enough to settle: Both.

A major trade route and waves of migration (these men were not closely related to modern Egyptians) would have made Egypt a cosmopolitan country with people with all kinds of ancestry. Probably some people from further north too... One can imagine the streets of Alexandria filled with people from all over the known world...silk traders from Asia, spice traders from sub-Saharan Africa. Northern Europeans selling furs...

The full range of human diversity.

Friday Updates

 Not much news this week. Getting ready for Capclave (and hoping to see some of you there, although quite sympathetic for any who don't feel it's safe quite yet).

Working on the first round of edits on the second volume of the series that is why I haven't released anything lately. The first book is now back from betas, but I plan on writing book three before editing it. It's progressing, if slower than I was hoping. Writing all these aliens is fun, but tough.

What Does a Maya Pyramid Have to do with the Vikings?

 No, this isn't some kind of weird conspiracy theory.

In the early Medieval period, the climate in Europe cooled dramatically.

This resulted in crop failures in the north and led to the Saxon settlement of England and, almost certainly, to increased raiding by the normally peaceful Norsemen. (They went a-viking for a reason, people).

The cause of the climate change?

The eruption of the Ilopango caldera in what is now El Salvador, which was an area inhabited heavily by the Maya.

Who, of course, had to run like crazy. When they came back, they built a pyramid out of rock and ash spewed by the volcano, likely to appease whatever angry mountain spirit.

We're all pretty dang connected. Even when we don't know about each other.

Why Don't We Have Tails?

 Some people wish we did have tails. Anyone who goes to SF cons has seen the person wandering around with ears and a tail.

But like all apes, we only have the coccyx or tailbone, a small set of vertebrae that extend just beyond the pelvis. Our tail is completely vestigial and invisible.

And now we've found the genetic underpinning. It's a mutation in a gene called TBXT...and unlike many mutations that cause taillessness (Manx cats, for example, have a lot of back pain), it doesn't seem to cause any issues. You can use genetic engineering of this gene to breed tailless mice that do just fine.

Except that doesn't answer the question.

What we don't quite know is what evolutionary advantage not having a tail gave to our ancestors. Gibbons, after all, have truly splendid appendages. The common wisdom is that we don't bother to grow one because it's not useful, but that doesn't quite explain it. Very few mammals are naturally tailless.

At some point in the transition from monkey to ape, tails got in the way...but we still don't quite understand why.

The Walls of Jericho came Tumbling Down...

 ...welp. Turns out they actually did.

The cause was not, however, magical invocation of God via trumpets.

So, what happened? About 3,600 years ago, an asteroid similar in size to the one which struck Tunguska hit the city of Tall el-Hammam, 14 miles away from Jericho. That city was destroyed (the real Sodom, perhaps?).

The shockwave blew down Jericho's walls.

So, yeah. Jericho's walls really did get blown down. And in the typical manner of oral history written down many years later...

...while it's unlikely it happened during a siege because it would probably have killed most of the besieging army, did the Hebrews take advantage of this to take a city they'd been planning on capturing? And what else could it have appeared to them as but an act of God?

Primates, Grief, and Ritual

 So, some monkey and ape mothers will keep carrying their dead infant around for a while. This is really disturbing, but appears to be part of the grief process.

We also know that human mothers who are allowed to hold a stillborn baby process their grief better.

Other primates will return to the corpse for a while and talk to it (lemurs).

Is this the root origin of many of our rituals around death? It's easy to see how returning to a corpse and calling to it would evolve into, well...putting flowers on a grave.

(Sorry for the morbid topic, but it's kind of fascinating).

Friday Updates

 I have my VERY tentative schedule for Capclave (October 1-3). Yes, this is in person, but everyone will be vaccinated and masked.

Saturday 11am - Non-Traditional Protagonists. (I think I may be moderating this one, but it's not clear.

Saturday noon - Why Write Short Stories?

Saturday 4pm - Reading. I'm going to read my WSFA Small Press nominated story so everyone knows what the hype is about ;).

Saturday 8pm - Mass signing and award ceremony.

Sunday 10am - Writing Fantastic Creatures

Sunday 11am - A Century Of Robots.

Again, this is tentative. I will also be in the dealer room at the Rantings of a Wandering Mind booth with books...all the books.

Best School Project Ever

 I'm jealous of these kids. I got to do plenty of things as a kid...but not discover a new species!

A group of kids went fossil hunting in Kawhia Harbour, New Zealand, and found a giant penguin. Not some little thing, but a 1.4 meter tall penguin.

And it turned out to be a new species of giant penguin, equipped with longer legs than the other giant penguins. It's been named Kairuku waewaeroa, the second part coming from the Te reo Mâori for "long legs."

The kids donated the fossil to the Waikato Museum, but they used the 3D scans used in investigation to make them a replica.

New meaning to Club Penguin?

Here We Go Again...

 ...with people wanting to recreate the woolly mammoth. First, lets get something out of the way:

We can't bring back the mammoth.

What we can do is breed mammoth-elephant hybrids, which would be raised by elephants and thus act like elephants.

They do claim that releasing a few thousand mammoths in Siberia might help climate change (and there's some indication it might help the health of the tundra).

But also...

...elephants are endangered, so is it really ethical to have elephant moms bring hybrids into the world? Esp. as nobody can ask the elephants and they're pretty smart critters.

Bleeding for Mars

 Uh, so they've been experimenting with making concrete out of simulated Martian soil and they've discovered that the best compounds to turn it into really good concrete...

...are in blood, urine, sweat, and tears. In other words, the bodily fluids of astronauts might be used to provide the organic components necessary to make good concrete.

And yes, it does need that blood. Or rather, it needs a protein found in plasma called albumin.

You can't get blood from a stone, but you can apparently get stone from blood.

Assuming, of course, this doesn't result in health issues for the astronauts.

But yeah, blood, sweat and tears is usually a metaphor...

Our Oldest Viral Defense System...

 ...could be in our genes.

So, a lot of our "junk" DNA is fossil strands of virii. (Yes, a virus can rewrite your DNA, but the result is usually quarantined. There are a few exceptions where evolution has found the virus useful, which includes the mammalian placenta.

These are called EVE.

Bats and marsupials have more EVA than most mammals. And bats are well known for being highly resistant to viruses.

Marsupials, meanwhile, move on to the pouch stage of development without functioning immune systems.

Turns out these are not coincidences. It turns out that the reason we store all the viral DNA we can is so that we can use it to create antivirals.

Mammals don't do this as much because we have developed other immune system aspects, but there's still the possibility that this ancient defense system is still active and usable.

Does generational exposure to an ancient coronavirus explain why some people are "mysteriously" resistant to COVID-19?

This Takes Waste to Energy...

 ...one step further. Scientists have found a way to turn hydrogen sulfide into hydrogen fuel.

Hydrogen sulfide comes from a variety of sources, but one of the major ones is, uh...poop.

So, yes, in the future we might be extracting this gas from waste treatment plants and turning it into hydrogen for fuel cells. Manure piles would also be a good source.

(It also comes from paper production, mining, and a few other industrial sources).

James Webb Launch Date!

 I'll believe it when it actually happens, but NASA has chosen a launch window for the new telescope.

18th December.

Which, if it happens, happens to be the Saturday of the also delayed WorldCon.

Kind of feels like serendipity.

How Did the Tabby Get Its Stripes?

 They've found the gene that acts as a switch and determines whether your kitty is tabby or not. It's the Dickkopf 4 (Dkk4) gene.

In Abys and other ticked cats, it's mutated, which explains how ticking can be so reliably bred for.

The next step is to look at how this gene works in other felines, which might lead to...

...an actual explanation for How the Leopard Got His Spots.

Designing Farside

 As some people know I've been kind of obsessed with the idea of an observatory on the lunar farside.

So I like to bring it up every now and then. NASA has allocated funding for the design. A huge radio telescope in a crater, that will be built entirely by robots. It will allow us to detect signals with a wavelength greater than 10m, which may answer a lot of the questions we still have about the origins of the universe.

They are also talking about a visible light observatory.

Let's make this happen. We would learn soooooo much.

Swearing Aussie Ducks

 I couldn't make this up. Somebody hand reared an Australian musk duck, and apparently he can now call people bloody fools.

A duck.

So I did some poling around. The Musk Duck, Biziura lobata is only "distantly" related...possibly...to other stiff-tailed ducks. The males have a weird leather lobe under their bill. They're diving ducks.

And they differ from other ducks in a few ways too. They're not monogamous, but in fact are lek breeders (the males display, the females pick the best one, mate, then go off to raise the eggs alone). The males produce a strong musk when in rut. They don't even like other ducks. And they fly so little that for a while people thought they were flightless.

I'm starting to question whether these things are, in fact, ducks? They walk like them...but they don't quack like them. Well, unless they're mimicking them.

I mean, they sure don't act like ducks and while I have known many waterfowl (usually geese) who would call humans bloody fools if they could...this is the first evidence that any member of the Anserinae family can.

Have we done a DNA test on these fools?

Neanderthals and their Tools

 So, here's an interesting one. At Castel di Guido in Italy (close to Rome) we've found evidence of almost production-line like creation of tools...from elephant bones.

The theory is that they had a lot of elephants and no flint, so they were using the bones instead of flint. So instead of the typical primitive bone tools, they had sophisticated bone tools. (There was a water hole that attracted a lot of elephants).

Oh, and this was 400,000 years ago. Hi, Neanderthals. Nice tools you have there...can I borrow one?

New Device Repairs Tendons With the Power of...You

 So far, it's only been tested in rats, but a stimulator device implanted at the site of a tendon injury can apparently apply electrical therapy (which dramatically increases healing) with no power source other than the animal's own movements.

This could be a game changer for athletes with tendon injuries (including non-human athletes...tendon injuries are a common cause of significant downtime for horses and probably also for working dogs).

It's really kinda neat...and although it's an implant, it's relatively easy to put there and then you just do whatever physical therapy and exercises are recommended.

Why Would You...

 ...call any object in space "The Accident." Haven't you ever read a Peter F. Hamilton book?

The Accident is, in fact, an unusually old brown dwarf that's currently zipping past us about 58 light years away.

But...oh, they haven't watched any Doctor Who either.

Or they have and know what effect the name will have. Ahem. Geeks.