Now in an extended edition from the space nerds at r/space. They add more ships and a tiny human for scale which is great. But they also organize the projects by country, unpleasantly reminding me of the nationalism these space programs are meant to inspire. But look! How cool!
Expedition 26 Commander Scott Kelly of NASA and Flight Engineers Cady Coleman of NASA and Paolo Nespoli of the European Space Agency offered Christmas and New Year’s greetings to all people on Earth from the orbital outpost on Dec. 21 as they flew 224 statute miles above. Kelly, Coleman and Nespoli are part of the six-person crew that includes Russian cosmonauts Dmitry Kondratyev, Alexander Kaleri and Oleg Skripochka.
Listen to these astronauts send some heartfelt and nerdy holiday greetings to all of us earthlings. Amazing.
Also, if you are ever curious: How many people are in space right now?
Should we clone a Neanderthal? No, really, should we? Recently, Archeology magazine considered the scientific, legal, and of course ethical challenges of doing just that. Researchers from Roche’s 454 Life Sciences and genetics firm Illumina are collecting bits of Neanderthal DNA to sequence the genome of a 30,000-year-old Neanderthal woman from Croatia. Once the genome is complete, making a clone is no easy task. But as the article explains, it’s within the realm of possibility. And what happens if there’s success? (via BoingBoing)
From Archeology:
Hawks believes the barriers to Neanderthal cloning will come down. “We are going to bring back the mammoth…the impetus against doing Neanderthal because it is too weird is going to go away.” He doesn’t think creating a Neanderthal clone is ethical science, but points out that there are always people who are willing to overlook the ethics. “In the end,” Hawks says, “we are going to have a cloned Neanderthal, I’m just sure of it.”
This same story was reported in Discover a year or more ago, and I know I’s talked my sister’s ear of on this subject, but this new article is much more interesting and comprehensive. What a strange and exciting world the decades will bring.
Prepare to have your mind blown.
Certain dinosaurs—physically disparate enough that we’ve always thought of them as different species—may actually be the same animal at different stages of its life cycle. Also: Those big, protective-looking bone formations surrounding some dinos’ heads and necks probably weren’t all that useful as a defense against predators.
Case in point, triceratops. Or, maybe we should be calling it torosaurus now, I’m not sure. See, according to research done by scientists at Montana’s Museum of the Rockies, the familiar triceratops is really just the juvenile form of the more-elaborately be-frilled and be-horned torosaurus.
A fully grown Torosaurus
This extreme shape-shifting was possible because the bone tissue in the frill and horns stayed immature, spongy and riddled with blood vessels, never fully hardening into solid bone as happens in most animals during early adulthood. The only modern animal known to do anything similar is the cassowary, descended from the dinosaurs, which develops a large spongy crest when its skull is about 80 per cent fully grown.Scannella and Horner examined 29 triceratops skulls and nine torosaurus skulls, mostly from the late-Cretaceous Hell Creek formation in Montana. The triceratops skulls were between 0.5 and 2 metres long. By counting growth lines in the bones, not unlike tree rings, they have shown clearly that the skulls come from animals of different ages, from juveniles to young adults. Torosaurus fossils are much rarer, 2 to 3 metres long and, crucially, only adult specimens have ever been found. The duo say there is a clear transition from triceratops into torosaurus as the animals grow older. For example, the oldest specimens of triceratops show a marked thinning of the bone where torosaurus has holes, suggesting they are in the process of becoming fenestrated.
There are other species this might apply to, as well. Some with even bigger shifts in appearance.
Full article here: New Scientest | Via Boingboing
These beautiful flowers are called Fairy Slippers. They are a native Montana orchid my mom pointed out on a beautiful birthday hike two Sundays ago. Montana has, get ready, thirty native orchid species. This list of all of them has some beautiful photos.
Many people are surprised to learn that orchids grow in Montana. They associate the plants with faraway, exotic places. While it’s true that most orchids live in the moist, hot tropics, they also show up in many other environments. They inhabit every continent except Antarctica and are found in nearly every type of terrain except true desert.
Orchid season in Montana begins in late April, when the first pinkish purple blooms of fairy slippers emerge in moist woodlands and mountain foothills. It ends when the spiraling flowers of ladies’ tresses begin to wither, usually in August.
