ISSN 1534-0236
Technology and ideology alike are exercises in applied imagination.
There have been two sightings--with photographs--of the
New Zealand storm
petrel this year. The species was last sighted in 1850. On 17 November 2003,
a professional bird photographer sighted a flock of 20 to 30 birds, which he at
first thought were a different species of petrel, near Auckland.
"Off New Zealand you expect to see two other species, the black-bellied and the white-faced storm petrel."But the bird we saw is really distinctive and different. The underparts are white with a black streak, and the feet project further back than the tail.
"There are differences in the detail of the plumage as well. And we were as close as 20 feet (six metres) to them.
"There are two skins dating from the time the bird vanished in the 19th century, and we now want those subjected to DNA testing.
"We're confident that will prove the New Zealand storm petrel is a genuinely distinct species, and our visual evidence to back that up is absolutely spot on."
The Yarkovsky effect causes sunlight to alter asteroid orbits
when absorbed photons are re-emitted as heat. Hypothesized for years, it has now been
experimentally measured
for the first time, by long-term radar observations of an asteroid called
Golevka.
As a bonus, the researchers calculated Golevka's mass
The distance Golevka was deflected by the Yarkovsky force also reveals the mass of the 350-metre-wide asteroid. This remote calculation of mass has not been done before for a solitary asteroid.The researchers will now move on to calculating the masses of other asteroids. "This is going to allow us to explore asteroids remotely by getting their mass, density and their surface properties," says Chesley, avoiding the difficult and expensive requirement of sending out spacecraft.
Most of the
missing
standing stones from Avebury have been found. They are buried in positions completing
the circle of the megalith, probably right next to their original locations. They appear
to have been underground since the 14th century; the people who buried them may have
seen Avebury as a threat to Christianity.
The National Trust plans to leave the stones underground, but make a computer reconstruction of what the site once looked like. They said something about the burial having "protected" the stones, but the exposed rocks are doing just fine in the Wiltshire countryside, and more actual megaliths would be a fine addition to the current mix of earthwork, stone, and the concrete pylons marking places where stones are known to have been removed in the 19th century. [via The Pagan Prattle]
Marsh periwinkles
farm fungus on
chewed-up marsh grass. They're the first species other than humans and insects
known to practice agriculture.
The 2.5-centimetre-long snail grazes on the grass Spartina but wastes away when fed bitter grass alone, find Brian Silliman of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and his colleague Steven Newell.The article suggests that similar activity may be common, but overlooked by humans.Rather than eating the grass, it seems that the snails are preparing its tissues for colonization by their preferred food - fungus. "The wound reduces the plant's defensive capabilities," says Newell, who is based at the University of Georgia Marine Institute on Sapelo Island. "The snails return to the wound and eat the fungus that has grown in it."
Bill Watterson is
living quietly
in Ohio, apparently doing nothing comics-related. This long article talks about
why, and about the current state of newspaper comics generally. [via D. C. Simpson]
I went over to
Spaceweather.com to see if an aurora is
likely in the next few days. Apparently not, but I found a good article on the
asteroid
Hermes, discovered and lost in 1937 and rediscovered this year. The write-up
explains why it was so easy to lose track of, and says we're safe for the next
century or so. Beyond that, Hermes' orbit is unpredictable, because it interacts
with too many planets: in 1954, Earth and Venus both perturbed it.
They also have maps of sunspots on the far side of the sun, helioseismography from the SOHO satellite. I'd read about the technique three years ago, then forgotten all about it.
I like living in a culture that not only has satellites like that, but puts all this cool information out there for me to look at any time it occurs to me. With John Coltrane's version of "My Favorite Things" playing behind me, courtesy of Vin Scelsa and WFUV-FM.
Jaguars
are being seen in southern Arizona. There doesn't seem to be a resident population,
but there have been three spottings in the last seven years, after an average of one
per decade through the 20th century.
The cats seem to be wandering north from Mexico, perhaps under pressure from a crowded habitat there, after abandoning the U.S. decades ago. [via Andy]
Someone got tired enough of their real work
to do the math: the
airspeed velocity of an unladen
swallow is 11 meters/second. Conveniently, when they then came across a study
of two actual swallows in a wind tunnel, the numbers matched.
Also: Ashur, Calah, Dur Sharrukin, Nineveh.
The highly reflective Venusian highlands are probably
covered in
lead and bismuth. The theory is that these metals evaporate at surface
conditions--90 atmospheres and 473°C--and then condense out at higher
elevations, which are slightly cooler.
The researchers estimate that the timescale for the coating of the Venusian highlands by metallic frost is somewhere between a few thousand and a few million years, demonstrating that it is an active process.They point out that at the highest elevations on Venus there is evidence that the metallic frost is absent - possible evidence of weathering, they say.
A new record for extremophile bacteria--living at a pH of 12.8--has
been set by
microbial
communities living in slag dumps in Chicago. Open questions include
how they got there--whether this is adaptation by local bacteria, or whether
related extremophiles were somehow imported. The researchers at the Illinois
Water Survey weren't expecting to find this: they were studying groundwater
contaminated by a iron slag dumping, and discovered these bacteria using the
hydrogen given off when the slag corrodes. [via Misia]
Cyprus's national
theatre plans to present the first production of
Aeschylus'
play about Achilles in more than 2000 years. Long thought lost, the work has been
reconstructed from text found on papyrus used to wrap Egyptian mummies, plus the Iliad
and references to Achilles in other classical plays. [via Andy]
Bad news:
there are probably no thick ice
layers in lunar craters. Arecibo bounced radar off both permanently-shadowed craters and
some that get sunlight regularly, and got the same echoes from both:
"We think that the rough, tilted walls of those craters were producing the strong reflections, not ice," [team leader Bruce] Campbell explains.When we settle there, we'll have to take our own water.The new data does not rule out ice altogether. The experiment would only detect ice sheets more than a metre thick. Any thinner deposits, or small ice crystals distributed in the lunar dust, would have remained undetected.
Avram pointed me at a story about an
iron-plated
snail. It has the usual snail shell, and magnetized iron scales protecting
the underside, which is soft in all other known snails. Like many of the strange
animals found in the last quarter century, these snails live in the hot ocean depths
near hydrothermal vents.
A biting
cartoon
for Armistice Day. [via Joseph Nicholas]
After a long week,
wouldn't you like
a nice cup of tea and a
sit down? They're pretty open-minded about the choice of teas, but have
all sorts of opinions on biscuits (what we call cookies here in North
America). I disagree with him about LU's Petit Ecolier, but he's absolutely
right about Oreos.
He must be
laughing in his grave: collectors and appraisers are fighting over
the authenticity
of many Andy Warhol prints. Because, of course, a "real" silk-screened
copy of a soup can is worth a lot more than a copy made by the wrong person.
The Guardian finally explains why
British trains are delayed
by leaves on the line--the problem started when the railroads abandoned steam.
Steam locomotives produce sparks, of course. To reduce fire danger, the railroads paid people to cut down any trees near the tracks, so there were no leaves on the line. And then it got worse with modern locomotives, which aren't heavy enough to work around the problems.
Copyright 2003 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.
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