Lethal Weapon, Cretaceous Style

By: | September 8, 2010

Without a doubt, this one of the most beautiful and sinister-looking fossils I have seen in recent years. It is the exquisitely preserved hindlimb of a brand new species of carnivorous dinosaur, Balaur bondoc, discovered in Romania and described eight days ago in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  This creature dates to the Late Cretaceous, a time when rising seas had swallowed much of Europe, leaving only a sprinkling of islands. Balaur stalked one of those islands.

What we’re looking at here is the business end of this beast: a foot perfectly evolved for disemboweling prey. The big toe, the uppermost in the photo, is equipped with a large sickle claw that could extend outward to slash the soft underbelly of its prey. And if this weren’t lethal enough, the toe next to it was similarly adapted, making Balaur, whose name derives from the ancient Romanian word for “dragon,” a double threat. Continue reading →

Great Science Classics

By: | September 7, 2010
Happy Children

I’m a keen reader of the New York Times Book Review, and thanks to the wonderful New York Public Library, I’m able to read bestsellers soon after they are published. However, I’ve often thought that old books – both the classics and the more obscure tomes that one finds tucked away in dusty old bookshops – deserve their own reviews. Some are beautifully written but often ignored. Others are just plain weird, but worth a look (and a laugh). So here goes with my first “really old book review”: Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872.

Continue reading →

Work Stoppage

By: | September 6, 2010

Even though Heather is Canadian, Josie and I have prevailed and Last Word on Nothing is having a holiday today, the American Labor Day during which labor is celebrated but nobody works.  We’ll be back on Tuesday and we hope that before then you won’t have gotten discouraged and quit.  Please, come back.

Actually Labor Day celebrates the Labor Movement, and this picture is one of the reasons why.

Photo caption:  “A little spinner in the Mollohan Mills, Newberry, S.C. She was tending her ‘sides’ like a veteran, but after I took the photo, the overseer came up and said in an apologetic tone that was pathetic, ‘She just happened in.’ Then a moment later he repeated the information. The mills appear to be full of youngsters that ‘just happened in,’ or ‘are helping sister.’ Dec. 3, 08. Witness Sara R. Hine. Location: Newberry, South Carolina”

Photo credit: Lewis W. Hine for the National Child Labor Committee

Bug/Blog/The Bunfight Continues

By: | September 3, 2010
Cinnamon Buns

Buns are flying across the airwaves of The Last Word on Nothing: currant buns, sticky buns, cinnamon buns, steamed buns, hot dog buns–all kinds of buns, but thankfully no buns of steel (yet). The bunfight began several weeks ago with an exchange between myself and my esteemed colleague, Ann Finkbeiner, on the benefits and burdens of bugs. Now I have discovered two fascinating ant stories to add to my armamentarium.

The ants in question don’t eat sticky buns, though some species, like the odorous house ant, are very fond of sugary sweets. No, the first type of ant is a leaf-cutting fungus farmer living in Trinidad and Tobago. Acromyrmex octospinosus grows and feeds on a fungus called Leucoagaricus gongylophorus,  “which it cultivates on a medium of masticated leaf tissue” (thanks, Wikipedia).

Scientists led by Matt Hutchings and his Ph.D. student Joerg Barke of the University of East Anglia in the U.K. have discovered that these ants use multiple antibiotics as weed killers to maintain their fungus gardens. Continue reading →

Science Metaphors (cont.): Sublime

By: | September 2, 2010

1089px-Dry_ice_in_cupSublime:  you don’t hear it much except as an adjective meaning really, really good, used the way “divine” or “glorious” “wonderful” are used, just another adjective, nothing to do with divinity or glory or wonder.   But really, sublime describes something that takes you beyond the ordinary — Glenn Gould plays Bach sublimely —  something transcendent, exalted.  It’s a lovely word, a word that inspires love. Continue reading →

The Latest from Expedition Titanic

By: | September 1, 2010

Hurricane Danielle and its 40-foot-tall waves drove Expedition Titanic back to port on Monday, but not before crew members recorded this haunting HD video of the RMS Titanic on August 29th.  Each time I watch this footage, I feel a sense of awe and emptiness. So much silent, eerie, lacy beauty, so much spooky preservation–all under the immense, inexorable pressure of the Atlantic Ocean.  How much more can the Titanic endure before it collapses?

The expedition’s principal investigator James Delgado, a nautical archaeologist of my acquaintance, yesterday described the ocean floor as the world’s largest museum. As a non-diver, I doubt that I will ever roam its wrecks myself. Thank you, James and your fellow crewmembers, for showing us the Titanic at its most frail and wondrous.

The great ship now looks almost human to me.

A Glorious Year for Crop Circles and Crop Rectangles

By: | August 31, 2010

Remember that billowing cloud of ash from Iceland that floated over Britain and other parts of northern Europe this past spring, shutting down airspace from London to Hamburg and filling airports with fuming travellers? It wasn’t all bad, I discovered yesterday. In fact if you were an archaeologist, particularly a British archaeologist, that plume of frozen magma had a real silver lining. It created, in concert with one of the driest springs in recent memory in England, almost perfect conditions for the discovery of cropmarks.

Until yesterday morning, I had never heard of cropmarks. But it turns out that I’ve been missing a lot. Cropmarks are very cool phenomena–a vast green geometry that signals the presence of buried archaeological sites. Think circles,  rectangles,  squares, and other patterns created by vegetation lying atop buried ruins, from Bronze-Age causeways to Iron-Age tombs. Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: Make a Wish

By: | August 30, 2010

I’m not exactly sure what this is a picture of — I’ve seen it somewhere, maybe a graphic picture of noise? some computer thing? — but given his title, Abstruse Goose clearly means us to think of it as stars.

#1.  It looks real.  #2.  Abstruse Goose, if you’re out there, can you tell us what that picture really is? please?

http://abstrusegoose.com/20