Monday Science Links

This week's science:

• At archy, John tells us about the first great mammoth: Finally, at the end of the fifth summer, 1803, the bluff had eroded and thawed enough for the mammoth to break free and tumble down onto the beach. The following March--still the debt of winter, but a time of little activity, waiting for the spring hunting and fishing season--Shumachov and two companions left their village and returned to the Bykovski Peninsula to collect the ivory treasure. The tusks were nine feet long and two hundred pounds each. That summer, Roman Boltunov, a merchant from Yakutsk sailed down the Lena and, when passing through Shumachov's village, bought the tusks. The price was fifty rubles worth of trade goods--roughly $975 today. For a people who lived almost completely outside of the money economy, this would have been a great boon to his village. When he heard that the ivory came from a complete mammoth, Boltunov was curious enough to go to the spot and make a drawing of how the animal must have looked in life. Shumachov had watched the mammoth slowly reveal itself and waited to collect the ivory for five years. Having done that he had no further use for the carcass; he left it to wild predators and fed some of it to his dogs. There is no evidence that Shumachov's people ate, or even tried to eat, any of the mammoth. In the one hundred ten years since Evert Ysbrants Ides first reported the discovery of a mammoth carcass, only four more had been reported and none of them had been recovered or made available for European scientists to examine. Dozens more were probably discovered during that time, but never reported. Shumachov's mammoth would have shared the fate of all the others except for one of those fortunate coincidences of history that placed the right man in the right place at the right time. That man was Mikhail Adams, a naturalist from St. Petersburg (not from Scotland, as is sometimes reported).


• At Literal Minded, Neal taught basic syntax to fifth graders. So it was that last Tuesday, I stood in front of Doug’s language arts class, asking how many had ever lost points on a worksheet or test because they hadn’t written an answer as a complete sentence. Just about all of them had. Only a few dropped their hands when I asked if they’d ever wondered what the big deal was, as long as the teacher had understood their answer. Then I moved to a different topic, and reminded them about learning about parts of speech in previous years. My question: Who had ever wondered what they were supposed to do with this knowledge now that they’d learned the eight or ten or however many parts of speech. They all had. My aim, I announced, was to take these two topics, parts of speech on the one hand, and sentences on the other, and fill in the missing material that connected the two. We’d start with a sentence they’d probably heard before…


• At White Coat Underground, PalMD tells us about using smallpox to stop rabies: Most of the few human rabies cases in the U.S. are transmitted by bats, although raccoons are more often diagnosed with the disease. Because rabies is fairly easy to transmit and nearly always fatal to humans, we are very aggressive about prevention. Rabid wild animals can have unusually aggressive behavior and can transmit rabies to humans and to their pets. With human populations mixing more and more freely with wild animal populations, the risk of rabies exposures increases. We're obviously not about to hold down every wild raccoon and vaccinate them, but humans, being rather clever animals, have found a way to vaccinate animals in high-risk areas.


• At Bad Astronomy Phil celebrates the return of Hubble: Ever since the Hubble upgrade a few months ago I’ve been waiting to see the results of it getting back to routine science observations… especially for the new Wide Field Camera 3, which promised to return gorgeous imagery. Well, the wait’s over. The first image is out, and it’s a nice one: star formation in the spiral arm nurseries of the nearby galaxy M83.


• At Starts With A Bang Ethan looks at what we knew in 1929 and what's changed: It's hard to believe that until 1929, we were pretty sure that the Universe consisted entirely of our galaxy, and everything else was inside of us. Hard to believe that you can look at something like this and not think it was another galaxy like our own, isn't it? Yet when you look in the visible light -- which is all they knew how to do back then -- this is what the pinwheel galaxy (above) looks like through a modern advanced amateur telescope.

Enjoy!