Monday Science Links

This week's sciency goodness:

• Ethan at Starts With A Bang asks why is uranium the heaviest element?: But -- here's a great question for you -- why? Why is Uranium the heaviest element on Earth? Well, there are two reasons: one is obvious, and one is very subtle. The obvious reason is that the elements shown above in light grey, 43-Tc, 61-Pm, and everything above and including 93-Np are unstable. They get created in stars and supernovae, just like all the other elements, but they radioactively decay into the other, stable elements (1-42, 44-60, and 62-92).


• Kim at All My Faults Are Stress Related blogs on the Italian earthquake and whether it was predicted:As you can see from the USGS map and moment tensor (and from Highly Allochthonous, who posted a great explanation while I was on kid duty), the earthquake occurred on a normal fault associated with the collision of Africa and Europe... At this point, if you've taken an intro geology class, you're probably shaking your head, wondering if I've made a mistake reading those moment tensor beachball diagrams, or interpreting the tectonic setting. (And if you're a plate tectonic skeptic. you're probably jumping up and down, convinced that you've proved, once and for all, that subduction doesn't exist.) For everyone else, let me take a step back and explain.


• Judith at Zenobia: Empress of the East writes about a queen who disappeared from history: Say to the king, my lord, my god, my Sun: Message of the Lady of the Lionesses [Belit-nesheti], your handmaid. May the king, my lord, know that war has been waged in the land, and gone is the land of the king, my lord, by desertion to the Apiru. Thus the desperate queen of a small city in Palestine writes to Pharaoh Akhenaten, who was the supreme ruler of the region at the time. For, around 1350 BCE, there was unrest in Canaan. Canaanite vassal kings conveyed their fears via letters written on clay tablets to the pharaoh in Egypt, requesting military help.


• Matthew at Why Evolution Is True posts on stegosaurs: Stegosaurs were large herbivorous dinosaurs that flourished in the Jurassic (roughly 170-145 MY ago). Only one taxon - Wuerhosaurus - made it through the end-Jurassic mass extinction. These were the dinos with the great big plates on their back, and vicious spikes at the end of their tail. And no, they never fought with T. rex, which was around much later... The most striking thing about Stegosaurs, however, were the plates, or osteoderms. What exactly were they for?


• Cat Urbigkit at Querencia passes on photos of a bola spider and her nest: My friend Janell Cannon, a wonderful children's book author and illustrator, sent me an email detailing her recent encounter of a bola spider in the apple tree on her property near Carlsbad, California. It was fantastic, so I asked, and received her permission to share. Janell loves to study animals, and was the friend who accompanied me to Mongolia last fall. She has several great books in print about such things as snakes, bats, hyenas, and other such desirable species. Enjoy her bola spider (Mastophora cornigera) encounter! "The mama bola spider has three egg packets. She suspends the globe-shaped packets (one on upper right) in a stiff web network between branches, and she is hidden in the dry leaf that she secured to the underside of the branch. Never mind that the entire tree is devoid of foliage. Nobody will EVER be able to see her! (wink-wink)"

Enjoy!