Monday Science Links

Another week of science!

• Darren at Tetrapod Zoology has pics of and thoughts about crocs feeding their babies: Obviously, members of these species do not practise feeding behaviour on a regular basis (otherwise it would have been commonly observed). So, do they do it only on very rare occasions? Or is it that this feeding is not deliberate at all, but merely opportunistic on the part of the babies? For now, it remains yet another of those neat and potentially significant bits of behaviour where more data and more observations are needed.


• Phil at Bad Astronomy talks about an astonishing picture: The European Southern Observatory just released a picture that I can only call astonishing: the deepest ground-based look into the universe ever undertaken. It’s part of the Chandra (X-Ray Observatory) Deep Field South, an effort to map out distant regions of the Universe across the entire spectrum with incredible resolution and depth. The image is mostly in the near ultraviolet, or UV. It’s a total of 55 hours of observations. Despite that, like many things, at first glance it doesn’t look like much. Sure, you see lots of stars in it, right? But the image I displayed here has been compressed; if you download the complete full-res image (warning, 32MB file!) you get a much clearer view of this field. Those dots you saw above? Those aren’t stars, they’re galaxies. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. I don’t know how many, exactly. A lot.


• Judith at Zenobia: Empress of the East talks about an exciting grave: Israeli archaeologist, Leore Grosman of Hebrew University of Jerusalem, [whose] team recently discovered in a small Israeli cave a woman’s skeleton pinned down in an unusual position by large stones and accompanied by a rare collection of grave offerings -- including 50 complete tortoise shells , the pelvis of a leopard, the wing tip of a golden eagle, the tail of a wild cow, two marten skulls (a member of the weasel family), the forearm of a wild boar, and a large human foot belonging to another person entirely. Of course, 'witch' is only the newspaper term applied to the woman (as in Tomb Raider Digs Up Witch). She's not a witch at all ... but a shaman. A Natufian (Middle Stone Age) shaman -- one of the earliest known from the archaeological record.


• Chris at Ediacaran offers an introduction to Ediacaran fauna (with pictures): The Ediacaran fauna (pronounced edi-ak-ran) is a Precambrian (Neoproterozoic) assemblage, which existed from about 600 million years ago to approx 545 million years ago. The fauna has now been found on all continents except Antarctica. However, the most important sites are: Namibia; Newfoundland & MacKenzie Mountains’ Canada, the White Sea Coast Russia; and the Flinders Ranges, South Australia. One of the best localities and the place where the significance of the fauna was first recognised is here in South Australia. The name Ediacara comes from the site where the fossils were first recognised as Precambrian. Fossils were found in Namibia about 25 years earlier, but due to a mistake over the age and the fact that the finds were published in foreign language journals (German) their significance was not realized at the time.


• The Planetologist tells us about ways to be alive, ways that didn't last: One of the most interesting things to me about the process of evolution is how weird things could have been. Biological evolution isn’t a ladder of progress, it’s a frantic Rube Goldberg race to try and make something useful from randomly-generated bits of gene code. Gaining a new mutation is like having someone from the city recycling center drop by your workshop/garage and throw you a random machine part. “Hey, here’s something from an old washing machine,” or “Think you can use this old carburetor?” You just get stuff, and your task is to use everything you have to try and build a car/food harvester/weapon system, and your life depends on it. You can’t go buy more parts from the store, you’re only allowed to use the random crap thrown your way, and everything you get takes up valuable garage space. It’s either use it or toss it out. What can you make? Some of the things you can make, given 4 billion years of garage tinkering, include all the life forms ever to have lived on Earth. But… what about all the life forms that didn’t live?

Enjoy!