Let's keep the SCIENCE!!!! coming in 2026

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Mendalla

Mendalla

Happy headbanging ape!!
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Here we go. The year ticks over but science stops for nothing. In fact, scientifically speaking, years based on the Earth's orbit around the Sun are a purely arbitrary choice of measure. We could have a purely lunar calendar (e.g. the ancient Chinese, Jewish, and Arabic calendars) tied tightly to the movements of the moon. While most nations/societies have now adopted the Western solar calendar for day to day use, those lunar calendars are still widely used to calculate religious and cultural festivals, which is why events like the Asian Lunar New Year, Passover, and Ramadan don't have fixed dates on the solar calendar. It even influences Christian festivals since Easter is tied to Passover.

Anyhow, enough rambling about calendars. Here's the first SciShow of the new year, exploring an interesting geographical and geological puzzle: Why doesn't the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico have any rivers? It's not the only place like that, either, as host Savannah Geary points out towards the end.

 
SciShow has a new mini-series going called Field Trips. You know, like when you were in school and got to go out of the building to see and do stuff? In this case, Jaida Elcock, one of their regular hosts, is traveling to meet working scientists in their labs. And the first two have certainly been interesting. Both work out of the Broad Institute in Boston, Massachusetts but in rather different fields.

First up, Dr. Feng Zhang, currently of MIT. He was one of the early researchers on CRISPR, the famed gene editing technology. Not part of the original group that won the Nobel, but did some critical follow-up research. And he's still doing work in that area, investigating another gene sequence that might be even better for some applications.


Then we have Dr. Beth Stevens of Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital, a neurology researcher who focuses on the role of the glia. The glia are cells in the brain that people used to think just provided the infrastructure with the neurons doing the real work. Now Dr. Stevens, building on the work by her doctoral supervisors and colleagues, is showing that glia do a lot more and may even be a factor in things like dementia and ALS.

 
And from paleontology channel ExtinctZoo, a look at the Triassic mass extinction. This is another of the 5 mass extinction events in the Earth's evolutionary history (we are probably causing the sixth) but tends to get less press than the Permian "Great Dying" and the Cretaceous asteroid. And, yet, it presents an interesting irony. We talk a lot about how the Cretaceous event killed off the non-avian dinosaurs and their flying cousins pterosaurs (which were, to be clear, neither dinosaurs nor birds but were the first vertebrates to evolve flight). However, both groups actually owed their dominance to this mass extinction, which took out a lot of competing lineages. Much like the Cretaceous event cleared them out of the way, allowing for the birds (offshoots of the theropod dinosaurs) and mammals to take over.

 
Quintessence; like the 5 portions of Nobel Presentations ... dash the first 4 and peace ensues ... vast silence?

Now if you get into physics, chemistry, medicine and literature you might go to Oxford as they say they do to examine reading material ... in the vernacular ... they go to Oxford to read! Some cannot ... they believe they have no need ...

It is a long challenge ... as it goes on and on ... what if it is entirely related? Dame ...

Is that Capital as a kind of Eire? We are directed that we cannot say because of unknown rationale ... pieces gone missing ... mist! Entertains the vast spread ...

Mores to look into ... round-about's ...

Does it in total; appear seminal? Can it transpose? Involves spin factors ...
 
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So many mistakes ... you'd wonder if we know anything at all, or are just an impulsive, irrational race ... thought is out there!
 
Interesting evolutionary story here from PBS Eons. Apparently, rye and oats actually started as weeds. They grew in Neolithic wheat and barley fields and evolved to resemble those plants since ones that didn't look like the crop were pulled by the farmers when they were weeding, leaving only the ones that did to reproduce. Eventually, the seeds got mixed with the crop seeds and people discovered that they, too, made a good staple grain and started specifically cultivating them. Which is how we got rye whiskey, pumpernickel bread, and oatmeal. However, there is also a cautionary tale, because a grass that is a nuisance weed in rice paddies in Asia developed in the same way. Sadly, the Soviet biologist who first figured a lot of this out fell afoul of Stalinism and died during one of Stalin's purges.

 
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Plants play a big part in biodiversity of drugs, vitamins and toxic effects ... balance is a major consideration for the "WOKE" to such science.

The historical significance of Hogwarts even reaching into literary depictions ...
 
I don't usually post 7 Days of Science here (but do watch it, it's an excellent science news channel) but this week's regular show is one of the more succinct versions of the story I want to talk about. It's the first story. For a long time, we have known that in the distant past, a weird lifeform called Prototaxites existed, basically a kind of living pillar that could grow to c. 8m high. And for a long time, people have classed it as a fungus though there has been debate. Now some new work on fossils of Prototaxites suggest that it was, in fact, not a fungus. Nor was it a plant. Nor was it an animal. In short, we have no f-ing idea what this thing was and it now appears that it may actually be a previously unknown, and apparently 100% extinct, branch of the tree of life.


And a write-up of the story from Sci News: Prototaxites May Be Completely Unknown Branch of Complex Life | Sci.News

There's also a link to the original paper in the description of the video.

And a cute Canadian note. If you look at the right (her right) shoulder of Emilia, the host, there's a set of L. M. Montgomery's books.
 
Maybe just a bone-here for contention as someone would render it down to boner so to stiff someone ... thus spines in some novels ...
 
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