Category: Uncategorized
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How Will Digital Impact Archaeology?
Via HASTAC: How will digital humanities impact archaeology and ancient history? One major opportunity linking DH and archaeology is the ever-increasing access we have to archaeological landscapes. This new project in Wales is a great example,http://www.cofiadurcahcymru.org.uk/arch/archwilio_pages/english/app.html. You can use tablets or mobile devices to see the archaeology underfoot for thousands of sites across Wales. At…
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Habitable Earth-sized Planets
From The Atlantic: 22 percent—essentially one in five—of sun-like stars have potentially habitable Earth-size planets. (Not all of those planets, however, may be rocky or feature liquid water, a presumed prerequisite for life. And it’s worth noting, as well, that the margin of error for that stat is plus or minus 8 percent.) Caveats aside,…
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Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops Auction
A farmer is set to become an overnight millionaire after stumbling across the 70-million-year-old bones of two dinosaurs on his land. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2473280/Farmer-millionaire-2-DINOSAUR-skeletons-discovered-land.html#ixzz2jVB4Ltlv
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What’s Geology To Do With Coffee?
From Four Degrees: Definition of Andisol (USDA soil taxonomy) – ‘Andisols are soils formed in volcanic ash and defined as soils containing high proportions of glass and amorphous colloidal materials, including allophane, imogolite and ferrihydrite.’
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Paleolithic hand prints mostly done by women
FromScience Daily – Via ESCONI Yahoo Discussion Group: Plaster handprints from kindergarten, handprint turkeys, handprints outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood — are all part of modern life, but ancient people also left their handprints on rocks and cave walls. Now, a Penn State anthropologist can determine the sex of some of the people who…
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Mosquitoes Fossilized with Blood Meal
Via The Verge: according to new research, mosquitoes that feed on blood have been around for at least 46 million years. Researchers led from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History made the discovery by studying fossilized mosquitoes. Eventually, they came across one that appeared to still be filled with its final meal of blood —…
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What Came First: Fangs or Armor?
Via Scientific American Which came first: fangs or bony armor? For years, paleontologists have thought that the first bones to emerge were teeth, and that the protective armor coverings of early fish, made of similar material, followed. But now, a study reveals that the truth is the other way around….
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Pollen in Sediment Provides Clues About Late Bronze Age
Via NYTimes: Pollen Study Points to Culprit in Bronze Era MysteryAnalysis of pollen grains from sediment beneath the Sea of Galilee and the western shore of the Dead Sea indicate drought caused a Late Bronze Age collapse.
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Ice Sheets Scour Ocean Floor
From geology.com: “We knew of such scour marks from places like the Antarctic and Greenland. They arise when large ice sheets become grounded on the ocean floor and then scrape over the ground like a plane with dozens of blades as they flow. The remarkable feature of our new map is that it indicates very…
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Shape Shifting Metals
Via BBC: A new shape-changing metal crystal is reported in the journal Nature, by scientists at University of Minnesota. It is the prototype of a new family of smart materials that could be used in applications ranging from space vehicles to electronics to jet engines. Called a “martensite”, the crystal has two different arrangements of…
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Quarry Pool in Your Backyard?
From the ESCONI Yahoo Discussion Group: If you have the money (like these folks obviously do), then this is one thing you can do with an abandoned quarry – http://homes.yahoo.com/blogs/spaces/quarry-most-beautiful-backyard-pool-america-181744493.html There’s an embedded YouTube movie toward the bottom of the article that describes the construction. No mention of fossils though… Dave
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New Crater Lake National Park Map Available
Crater Lake National Park is the latest Oregon icon to get its own high-tech map from state geologists. The Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries (DOGAMI) released a new recreation map of Crater Lake this week, the third in its series of geologic guides and recreation maps of iconic Oregon places. The map, officially…
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10 Metre Long Fossil Found in Alberta Oil Dig Site
From the Yahoo ESCONI Yahoo Group: A large dinosaur fossil has been found by a pipeline crew near Spirit River, Alta… The 10-metre-long fossilized skeleton was found Tuesday when a backhoe operator working on the Tourmaline Oil Corp. pipeline installation moved some earth, inadvertently breaking off a piece of the fossil. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/massive-dinosaur-fossil-unearthed-by-alberta-pipeline-crew-1.1876996
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The Dynamic Earth: A Course for Educators!
Coursera is offering a course from the American Museum of Natural History: The Dynamic Earth: A Course for Educators by Edmond Mathez, Ph.D., Ro Kinzler, Ph.D. The course is still open, so check it out if you are interested in taking this free online course for earth science educators.
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New species of Cockroach – Early Cretaceous Yixian Formati
Via ScienceyThoughts: In a paper published in the journal ZooKeys on 23 July 2013, Chongda Wang and Dong Ren of the College of Life Sciences at Capital Normal University in Beijing describe a new species of Cockroach from the Jehol Biota of the Early Cretaceous Yixian Formation Liaoning Province, China.
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Major New Dinosaur Site
Via Live Science: Researchers may have just scratched the surface of a major new dinosaur site nearly inside the Arctic Circle. This past summer, they discovered thousands of fossilized dinosaur footprints, large and small, along the rocky banks of Alaska’s Yukon River.
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U of I supercomputers and climate change
Via WGN: The eyes of the world will be on Stockholm, September 27th, 2013, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change- I.P.C.C. releases it’s latest findings. Five years ago, that panel won a Nobel Prize for it’s climate work. And Atmospheric Science Professor Don Wuebbles from the University of Illinois, shared in that high honor. Chief…
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Why Were These Jade Shapes Made?
From National Geographic via Geology.com: Jade Mystery Remains September 7, 2013—Jade bi (discs), from China, that resemble modern-day CD’s or donuts, and date to the late Neolithic Period, Liangzhu culture (ca. 3300-2250 BC) remain a mystery. Click here to see video.
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Discovery of a 6.1-million-year-old Ape
From SciNews: An international team of scientists has announced the discovery of a 6.1-million-year-old relatively complete and largely undistorted juvenile cranium of the fossil ape Lufengpithecus lufengensis at the Miocene site Shuitangba in Yunnan Province, China.
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Database of 3D Fossils
From the Atlantic Magazine: A Database of 3D Fossils, Ready for You to Explore and Print Beyond their beauty, fossils are also physical objects, with heft and depth, contours and textures. These qualities are not easily conveyed across the Internet, which tends to resolve on screens, brightly colored and flat. This shortcoming is being addressed…
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Huge Canyon Discovered
Via One of the biggest canyons in the world has been found beneath the ice sheet that smothers most of Greenland. The canyon – which is 800km long and up to 800m deep – was carved out by a great river more than four million years ago, before the ice arrived. It was discovered by…
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Good News: New IL Law: Liability Protection for Private Landholders
Governor Quinn Signs Recreation Liability Bill At a press conference this morning, Governor Pat Quinn signed SB1042 into law as Public Act 98-0522. This new law will give private landowners that open their land to the public for recreation, conservation, and education liability protections. The Governor was joined by representatives from Openlands, The Nature Conservancy,…
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World’s Oldest Trees and Other Items
The world’s oldest tree lives in Utah – the Pando – 80,000 years old. This and more interesting information is beautifully presented: http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2013/07/7-graphics-of-earths-coolest-phenomena-from-rainbows-to-earth-wobble/
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Rock and Gem Magazine’s Lapidary of the Month
Gem and Mineral Coffee Table: “We visited the rock show on Friday and Saturday and purchased some slabs. Back in Caldwell, the fun began. I started with the butterfly in the middle, using two slabs of petrified wood. I cleaned up the edges on the 6-inch by 1½-inch 100 grit diamond wheel, glued them in…
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Rutile
Rock and Gem Magazine’s Rock of the Month: Rutile … Although it usually occurs in small amounts, rutile is widespread in plutonic igneous rocks (those formed by magma cooling deep within the earth) and metamorphic rocks that formed at high pressure and temperature. Rutile is often associated with quartz. When needlelike “Venus hair” crystals of…
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Game Tokens from 5,000 Years Ago
From BoingBoing: Ege University’s Haluk Sağlamtimur presented a remarkable find of 5,000-year-old gaming tokens found in a Bronze Age burial mound at Başur Höyük in Turkey. They take a variety of forms (“Some depict pigs, dogs and pyramids, others feature round and bullet shapes. We also found dice as well as three circular tokens made…
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Most Successful Mammal
From Science Daily: The 160 million-year-old fossil of an extinct rodent-like creature from China is helping to explain how multituberculates — the most evolutionarily successful and long-lived mammalian lineage in the fossil record — achieved their dominance.
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Neanderthal News
The Atlantic: New evidence suggests Neanderthals made sophisticated leather-working tools like ones we use today. It might mean that they were smarter than we thought….
