On a crisp fall day in November 2008, a wildlife biologist killed a deer in Eastern Virginia. He slit the carcass open from breast to tail and removed the animal’s internal organs. Hunting knives are very sharp. And, in the process of field dressing the deer, he nicked his knuckle. I imagine he didn’t think much of it at the time. But the cut did not heal. Two weeks later he had a painful bump where the wound had been. By mid-December, the bump had become an angry purple nodule. Not surprisingly, he sought medical attention. Continue reading
A few years ago, a colleague and I hired a cab to journey across the Sahara Desert, from a tiny oasis town to Luxor in the Nile Valley. Before we could head out, however, the driver insisted that we anoint ourselves with perfume he brought for the occasion–a ritual cleansing to protect us from evil spirits and the perils of our journey, the most likely of which was engine trouble. When we finally pulled into Luxor 12 hours later, the three of us were parched and coated head to toe in dust. As I rehydrated in a hotel bathtub, I felt like Lazarus rising from the dead.
Even today, in the age of the internal combustion engine, a Sahara crossing is not to be taken lightly. So it’s no wonder that archaeologists have long dismissed the possibility that our ancient ancestors–early modern humans–ventured successfully across the Sahara more than 100,000 years ago, as they journeyed out of their southern homeland. The Nile Valley seemed a much easier route.
But new research strongly suggests that the Sahara would have been a land of earthly delights for early Homo sapiens. Continue reading
We’re sorry, but Thomas Hayden, the New Person of LWON, will be unable to post today as promised. Instead we present for your delight and edification, Heather. Tom will be back as soon as possible and in the meantime, we send him our best wishes for recovery.
Credit: Jehan Georges Vibert
Please meet Thomas Hayden, a new Person of LWON. And let’s get this out of the way early: he is not and never has been married to any movie star whatever. He writes about ecology, energy, environment, and evolution and though he’s entirely a peaceable, friendly fellow, he writes a lot about war. And sex. You’re going to like him. His first post is Monday morning.
Photo credit: Mikhail Evstafiev
Every time I see a new scientific paper bearing the name of Dolores Piperno, I sit up and pay very close attention. Piperno is a force to contend with in the world of archaeology, a researcher whose work is so unconventional and yet so rigorous that she has won over a small legion of skeptics and naysayers and helped to found an entirely new field of research.
The battle of Piperno v. the old guard hinged on something seemingly arcane, but critical to the field of archaeology–the identification of plant microfossils. The old guard only accepted evidence from one kind of microfossil: pollen. But Piperno, now the Curator of New World History at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, learned to detect and differentiate between an impressive array of other ancient microfossils. Continue reading
As we near the end of 2010, everybody’s talking about the biggest science stories of the year. I’ve been thinking about these four:
May 20: Craig Venter’s team synthesizes a bacterial genome in the lab, sticks it into an empty bacterial cell, and watches it replicate. Venter calls it the “first synthetic cell“; many headlines prefer “synthetic life“. Controversy ensues.
July 23: NASA scientists take the new Mars rover, Curiosity, for a test drive. When it heads to the Red Planet, in late 2011, Curiosity will hold several instruments equipped to examine whether Mars has “environmental conditions favorable for preserving evidence of life, if it existed.” Continue reading
The title is a little joke about a math term, “convergent sequence.” No way on earth can I understand convergent sequences and I doubt if anybody can explain it to me. “Converging consequences” — now that makes a kind of horrible sense, like maybe an east coast snow storm. Anyway. I hope this will be a nice thought for the new year.
You can click it bigger, if you want to read the fine print.
Credit: http://abstrusegoose.com/1
The last Zooniverse project I spent time on was also their first, Galaxy Zoo 1. You looked at pictures of galaxies and decided whether they were shaped like spirals or ellipticals. I could do that, it was fun, and better yet, it was citizen science, 350,000 citizens doing real science with real scientific results, so I wrote about it a lot. A few days ago, the Zooniverse sent me a little message saying Woo! New project! Find a planet around another star! Test your eye and brain against a computer! I think: Bring it on. I log into the Zooniverse.
