Did you know that today is the birthday of two very influential 19th century personas? Ok, Abraham Lincoln was born on this day in 1809. Who else – Charles Darwin was also born on this day in 1809. Yes, they share the same birth date. Here are the articles we found interesting this week. We try to keep these articles in categories related to existing sections of our Academy.
Anthropology
- 90,000-year-old human footprints found on a Moroccan beach are some of the oldest and best preserved in the world. 85 human footprints found in 2022.
- Lions making fewer zebra kills due to ‘chain reaction’ involving invasive ants. Big-headed ants to be precise.
- Are insects drawn to light? New research shows it’s confusion, not fatal attraction. They rely on light to know which way is up. Night sky is lighter than the surrounding landscape.
- Western monarch butterflies overwintering in Calif. dropped by 30% last year. 230,000 instead of 330,000 in 2022. Still well below the millions of these in the 1980s.
- Indian Tectonic Plate Is Peeling Apart, Splitting Tibet in Two as the Himalayan Mountains Continue To Grow. “The study presents evidence indicating that the Indian plate is indeed subducting, but concurrently, it is undergoing warping and tearing, leading to the upper half delaminating or peeling away. This revelation challenges previous assumptions about the behavior of continents and represents a groundbreaking insight in solid earth science.”
- Flying reptiles ‘lived in pre-historic’ Somerset hills (UK). Closely related to ancestors of both crocodilians and dinosaurs. They would have fit in the palm of a hand. Fossils are roughly 200 million years old.
Things that make us go hmmm…
- Bizarre Fossils Are Neither Plant Nor Animal, But a ‘Weird Fusion’ of Life. Were ancient Euglenid fossils identified as Pseudoschizaea shells? For those who don’t know – “Euglenids are a group of unicellular eukaryotes that gain energy through both photosynthesis, like a plant, and through consuming other beings, like an animal.” This seems like the sort of article one should review in celebrations of Darwin’s birthday today.
- Life on Earth may have first sparked in shallow “soda lakes.” “The emergence of life requires high phosphate concentrations, far exceeding those found in natural water bodies like rivers, lakes, or oceans.”
- ‘Obelisks’: Entirely New Class of Life Has Been Found in The Human Digestive System. They appear to be a new class of “virus-like” objects.
And… That concludes our review of interesting articles this week. Please let us know your thoughts by posting in the comments below. Again, we wish Abe and Charlie a very happy birthday.