Monday Science Links

This week's science is all about the old:

• Mike the Mad Biologists points us at the oldest bug ever discovered: The exquisitely-detailed fossil has been identified as the imprint left 310 million years ago by a primitive mayfly that lighted briefly on a muddy outcropping in what was then a steamy Carboniferous Period flood plain.


• Scicurious at Neurotopia (v 2.0) also has something really old: If you're a history geek like myself (and I assume some of you reading this blog must me, and if you are, I salute you!), there's a few diseases that really pop into your mind when you think of big diseases in history. The Black Death, smallpox, the Influenza epidemic of 1918, polio, etc. And you can't forget tuberculosis. Formerly referred to as "consumption", tuberculosis (or TB) has been found in humans since antiquity. There are Egyptian mummies with evidence of TB. A form of TB which infected the lymphatic system used to be known as scrofula, "the king's evil", and in the middle ages, kings and queens would hold touchings where they would touch scrofula victims in order to heal them. There are tons of references to TB in literature and film. In the film Moulin Rouge, Nicole Kidman dies of consumption, and I always remember those books I used to read as a child that had ghosts in them of children who had died of TB in the Victorian era. And of course where would literature be if it weren't for the delicate consumptive Romantic poets. Even now TB is pretty common, everyone in my department has to get TB tests twice a year at least in order to conduct animal research.


• GrrlScientist at Living the Scientific Life, too, on something pretty old: new research on Tiktalik: Based on the based on the lack of transitional fossil forms, it has been widely assumed that the transition from an aquatic animal with fins and gills to a terrestrial animal with limbs and lungs was an abrupt event. However, meticulous studies of the internal structure of the cranium from the fishapod, T. roseae, reveal the necessary morphological changes that underlie terrestriality actually occurred in a stepwise process.
  


• Judith at Zenobia: Empress of the East talks about something not quite so old, Classical Athens - and a woman's place therein: An exhibition at the Onassis Cultural Center in New York will soon explore the many ways in which women’s religious worship contributed not just to their personal fulfilment but to the civic identity of the leading city of the Classical Greek world as well. Worshipping Women seeks to correct "the unremittingly bleak picture that the lives of Athenian women were highly restricted when it came to the public sphere and participation in the political process. The involvement of women in cults and festivals ... was as essential for the successful functioning of the polis as that of any member of society." I wish them luck. Of course, a woman's life wasn't 'unremittingly bleak' but it was certainly unremittingly patriarchal. The idea of women taking part in the public business of the polis would have seemed inherently comical to Athenian citizens (males only, of course). That's what's behind Aristophanes, in some of his surviving plays, where he chuckles, gurgles, and snorts at women pretending to take on the roles of men instead of staying at home.
  


• And finally, Martin at Aardvarchaeology talks about how we know old: Recently I organised a few days' excavation that didn't turn up the kind of stuff I was hoping for. Still, I brought some materials home that may serve to shed some light on what exactly it was we dug into. All those nondescript little pits, all those sooty hearths full of cracked stone -- when were they made and used?how Enter radiocarbon. This dating method works on anything organic, that is, anything with carbon in it. Running one sample costs about $500, so you have multiple reasons to be smart about which samples you send to the lab. I thought my thinking about this might interest you, Dear Reader. We dug 175 sunken features, but I don't have 175 samples. Most features yielded no datable material (in these situations, usually charcoal, other charred plant remains or bone). Of those that did, many also contained modern junk identifying them as recent refuse pits. I don't want to spend any money dating them.

Enjoy!