Genetic studies hint that we may in fact have domesticated dogs not once, but twice. Overall, dogs are more closely related to ancient wolves from eastern Eurasia, but African and near east dogs...have up to half of their ancestry from a different wolf population.
It's possible this is from inbreeding, but it's also possible, even probable that dogs, with their natural social structure so close to ours, were in fact domesticated twice.
.from Windows 98. Or at least from software based off of it.
Don't look so shocked. The space shuttle used floppy disks.
Science fiction writers would do well to remember that spacecraft last a while and their software is likely to be, not state of the art, but slightly outdated. Especially robots.
It's now possible...due to a form of artificial photosynthesis. Plants are grown on a substrate of acetate that supports their physiology. It's generated through an electrocatalytic process.
They've so far managed to grow algae (at faster rates than natural photosynthesis), cowpeas, tomatoes, tobacco, rice, canola, and green peas.
This just made moon colonies much more feasible as you won't need to use grow lamps to keep plants alive through the 14 day night. It could also be used on Mars, on space colonies. On Ganymede, Expanse readers ;).
It also may make the science fiction trope of people on space colonies eating algae more likely...there's all kinds of ways to make it palatable. Algae could also be grown to scrub carbon dioxide as part of the life support system.
It could also be used to feed farmed fish to provide protein for our colonists. Of course, we would have to either modify the algae not to be toxic (many green algae have chemical defenses) or carefully choose strains.
And on Earth, this could be used to grow crops indoors or to increase yields.
(Of course, what's the over under on marijuana growing fine this way too? Ahem)
Our brains literally change when we engage in activities together. They synchronize.
And the more they synchronize, the better the group gets along and the better people are. For example, in a classroom, students who's brains sync up are more engaged and do better.
Which may be how brainstorming sessions allow us to come up with ideas we wouldn't on our own. We're literally wired, as social animals, to work together.
Tommorw comes a rare alignment. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn will be lining up. In that order, so closest to furthest.
You'll need to get up early if you want to see it, though. 45 minutes before sunrise, on the eastern horizon. And Mercury's small, so get your telescope.
(I have too much light pollution here even if it finally stops being cloudy).
On July 12, the first dataset will be released from the James Webb Space Telescope. NASA is putting together a test set that will highlight the telescope's capabilities; kind of a media kit for the telescope. The goal is to show researchers who might want to buy time on the telescope what it can do.
The first real science schedule hasn't been released (there may still be wrangling going on). But we absolutely have a space telescope and I can't wait to see what questions it asks.
There's actually a theory that the famous "Yeti" is a species of white bear.
And there's a group of polar bears that don't need sea ice. These two things might not be connected, but the Greenland population, who live at the mouth of a glacier and hunt from ice calved from it...are also quite happy to cross mountains to look for food. They're a small population, but...
Could something similar to polar bears have retreated to the Himalayas when the Ice Age ended? That's the theory. More likely, if they exist, they weren't polar bears but something more like the hybrids that exist when polars and grizzlies overlap range.
But the fact that polar bears can and do climb mountains makes one wonder...
The weird but lovely blue spiral over New Zealand? Not aliens. In fact, it was a cool effect that rocket launches sometimes generate if the sun hits the water and carbon dioxide from their exhaust *just* right.
Check it out here, it's actually quite awesome. And now if you see it you'll be looking to see which rocket it came from.
Not aliens. Sadly.
In a reminder to listen to local people, we've confirmed the location (although not exactly) of the so called Beeswax Shipwreck off the coast of Oregon.
The natives were selling the beeswax that washed ashore (honeybees had yet to be introduced to the U.S.) and when asked said it came from a shipwreck. (And was fair salvage).
We now know that the ship concerned was the Santo Cristo de Burgos and we have some of its hull timbers, but even with modern remote sensing gear we're having issues locating the wreck itself in difficult dive conditions.
But hey, maybe somebody's great great saw something and it got passed down...
Talk to people, ya know. It can give information!
The Chinese are now claiming that their big telescope has found possible aliens. FAST is a good telescope...the world's largest filled-aperture telescope, 500 meters in diameter.
But the researchers themselves indicate at the more likely scenario...the one which has unfolded every time we have "found alien signals" before: Terrestrial interference.
I believe last time it was a microwave...
The initial report has already mysteriously disappeared. If they did find something, it's narrow band radio signals, which we wouldn't be able to translate. We would know we were not alone...and about where they were X years ago, thanks to light speed.
But nothing more than that.
Although that would be enough to make people think.
It's most likely a microwave.
...and about something very important.
It appears plants have a metabolic channel that actually chooses whether to keep CO2 and use it or release it back into the atmosphere.
So, now maybe we can talk to the plants and ask them to store more CO2. I'm not entirely joking here; breeding or genetically modifying plants to store more CO2 for a bit could actually be a piece of the climate change puzzle. And it would be to the benefit of the plants too.
(By the way? They domesticated us)
...I was rich enough to spontaneously travel to the other side of the world. Because fortunate people in Africa are going to get to see Europa's shadow.
Yes.
Europa's.
Europa will be occulting a 10th magnitude star in the constellation Pisces early morning on June 19 (local time).
And if you do happen to be in southern Africa and willing to get up early, the Paris Observatory wants you to time the transit and send them their data, which will help ESA astronomers with their math. (europaocc2022.imccce(at)obspm.fr).
"A species is a discrete population that can't mate out..."
Yeah, right. Dogs, wolves and coyotes get it on cheerfully. I probably have somewhere between 1 and 4 percent Neanderthal DNA.
And polar bears and brown bears have continued to mate despite becoming quite different species with different lifestyles.
Interestingly, polar bears have a lot more brown bear DNA than the reverse. Maybe this means through some kind of gene dominance that brown bear/polar bear hybrids (I refuse to call them "pizzlies") end up looking more like polar bears.
Just like I don't look at all like a Neanderthal.
Incomplete species splitting is apparently a thing. And it might help the polar bears survive climate change...albeit possibly as a slightly different kind of bear.
Just like the extinct Neanderthals are right here.
...is awesome.
What's more closely related to an elephant shrew...the shrew or the elephant? It's the elephant.
The largest living land mammal and the smallest are now classed in the same branch of evolution, Afrotheria. And to think that we started calling them elephant shrews because they have itty bitty trunklets.
Convergent evolution just likes to lead us astray.
And will it lead to things actually looking similar if we ever make it to another Earthlike planet? Maybe Spock isn't so unrealistic after all...
Traditionally, there has been an assumption that horses, unlike dogs, aren't great with verbal/spoken language. They don't have a brain wired to understand it and are relatively non-vocal themselves.
A new study is making me question that. They studied what we call "baby talk" which is officially "Pet Directed Speech" and discover that it catches and holds the attention of horses as well as it does primates and dogs.
When you use PDS on your horse they actually hear you. When you don't? They ignore you. One test they used was having the experimenter point at some carrots. When they used PDS the horse was more likely to go get the carrots.
My theory is that we use this around horses regularly and they actually realize we are talking to them. When we use a normal tone of voice, they recognize that as "oh, the humans are waffling on again."
These studies help us communicate and work better with our horses, so they really do matter.
...another plotbunny. There's a planet 50 light years away, 55 Cancri e, that is on fire. Permanently on fire. It's larger than Earth, orbits a perfectly good star, and the day side is almost certainly oceans of lava. Probably tidally locked. Has a year that is a matter of days.
If it's tidally locked then one side will be a lava hell and the other cooler...but thanks to an atmosphere, not that cold.
If it does rotate, then each dawn would bring melting of the surface and rock vapor creating an atmosphere, and then rains of lava with the dusk.
I don't know how to use this in a story, but somebody needs to use it in a story.
The planet also names itself. Obviously it's Inferno. Or maybe Dante.
Until, well, right now, we thought Pando was the largest living organism on Earth. Pando is a clonal colony of quaking aspen and is 80,000 years old. Which also makes it the oldest living organism on Earth.
Turns out we're wrong. And if you are guessing "it's in the sea" you would be right!
The largest known living organism on Earth is now (and I'm stressing known, because, well) a clonal colony of sea grass off of Australia's west coast. the colony, which is a hybrid of two seagrass species, covers 77 square miles. That's three times the size of Manhattan.
Clonal colonies are wild. This is like one of those old science fiction novels where an entire planet is covered by one.
At a guess, the colony is 4,500 years old. The plant is a sterile hybrid.
In contrast, poor Pando only covers 43 hectares.
There is no nickname for the seagrass yet, but I am betting there will be one. I think it deserves a name, don't you?
