Monday Science LInks

This week's Science:

• Martin at Aardvarchaeology tells us about an humble Iron Age grave with a big surprise inside: The dig was expected to be a humdrum affair, concerning a late-Last Millennium BC grave in which you might hope to find a little burnt bone and some iron fragments -- if very lucky. As it turned out, local wealthies had messed around with the site a thousand years after the original funeral and stuck a silver hoard into the monument.


• Darren at Tetrapod Zoology talks about the red panda and its relatives: In the previous article we looked at the discovery of the Red panda Ailurus fulgens, and also at some aspects of its biology and distribution. There's so much I didn't cover: Red panda physiology is bizarrely interesting, for example. In this article we're going to look at the Red panda's fossil relatives. As I implied in the last article, the Red panda's friends and relations once roamed far and wide.


• Jennifer at Mind the Gap discusses learning to use Excel: The ways and means of science are changing. It’s true: I can feel the tide tugging at me. I’m that waterlogged bit of dead tree mired in beach shingle; the last few passes of the surf have caused me to start sliding in. As the tide continues to turn, I will soon be flowing out into the grey deeps, liberated from gravity and on my way – whether I want to be or not.


• Another Jennifer, this one from The Infinite Sphere, blogs on pictographs in Utah, with pictures: One of my favorite things about Utah is the fantastic rock art. It's everywhere! The generally dry climate has helped to prevent too much erosion (here in the humid south it's really unusal to find rock art like this). On this trip, we visited several very nice rock art panels.


• Stefan and Bee talk about black holes at the LHC and what could happen (or not): Black holes sound like dangerous beasts, evoking voracious vacuum cleaners that suck in everything in their neighbourhood. If they are created at the LHC, that may mean the end of the world - or so one might think, with an intuition gained mainly from the exposure to special effects of science fiction movies. The reality is more prosaic.

Enjoy.