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Category: Natural Science
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Cetecean Needed
London’s Natural History Museum is re-modelling its entrance, moving out the dinosaur and moving in a blue whale.
My initial reaction to this wasn’t great. Seeing Dippy for the first time had such a profound effect on me as a child. It genuinely blew me away, and every time I go back it brings back the same feelings of wonder and awe.
But, I also thought it was a real skeleton. It wasn’t until years later I found out it was a plaster cast (in fact it wasn’t until years later I realised how few real dinosaur bones I had actually seen). The Blue Whale on the other hand is complete. 100% complete. And as the article says, a great story to represent the work the NHM does:
The museum has chosen the whale to lead what it calls its “three great narratives”.
These cover the origins and evolution of life, the diversity of life on Earth today, and the long-term sustainability of humans’ custodianship of the planet.
The cetacean has something to say on all them, particularly the last. Blue whales were hunted to the brink of extinction before a ban on their exploitation was put in place in the 1960s.
Indeed, it was NHM scientists who were instrumental in gathering the data in the earlier decades of the 20th Century that showed commercial practices were driving the animal to oblivion.
“And going forward we want to tell more of these stories about the societally relevant research that we do,” explained Sir Michael.
“So, for example, today our teams help the police with the forensic examination of crime scenes; we do projects that potentially could help feed nine billion people in 2050; and we also look at whether it’s possible to eradicate certain parasitic diseases in Africa.”
The Hall will definitely be a more fitting home for such a majestic specimen. In the hall of mammals you got to see just how truly huge Blue Whales are in comparison to everything else but equally there’s a lot in that space and it’s often crowded. As the first thing you see when you walk in I think would blow both 8-year-old me and 31-year-old me away.
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Iceberg
Photographer Alex Cornell caught an iceberg flip in Antarctica. This is prime supervillain lair material.
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Immaculately conceived turkey
BBC Science article on parthenogenesis (virgin birth).
I’ve long-known about Komodo (and other reptile) parthenogenesis but didn’t know it occurred in birds:
Perhaps the best understood ‘virgin’ vertebrate is the common domesticated turkey. In the 1800s, reports started appearing of virgin births among chickens. Then researchers started studying similar events among turkeys, finding that these large fowl could lay unfertilised eggs that produced live young.
The baby turkeys were always male, however, which was put down to a quirk of bird genetics in which male sex chromosomes are dominant. Soon a parthenogenetic strain of the domestic turkey was developed in which most males appeared normal and reproduced successfully.
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Olympus Mons
The Olympus Mons mountain on Mars is so tall and yet so gently sloped that, were you suited and supplied correctly, ascending it would allow you to walk most of the way to space. Mars has a big, puffy atmosphere, taller than ours, but there’s barely anything to it at that level. 30 Pascals of pressure, which is what we get in an industrial vacuum furnace here on Earth. You may as well be in space. Imagine that. Imagine a world where you could quite literally walk to space.
– How To See The Future, Warren Ellis
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Tree of the Year
An oak said to have sheltered Robin Hood and his merry men, and a yew which spans an area the size of the Royal Albert Hall, are two of the finalists in the “Tree of the Year” competition.
The BBC has a round up, some of these trees are pretty badass.
The Ickwell Oak
The Major Oak
The Anckerwyke Yew