For those who love dinosaurs, Stegosaurs are a recognizable favorite. These plant-eating armored animals wore rows of raised plates on their backs and spiky tails to protect them from the carnivores, especially the Allosaurus, a theropod ancestor of modern day birds.
When threatened, the Stegosaur swung its tail to batter its attacker with the spikes.
This display at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science shows an Allosaur ready to bite a Stegosaur while two Stegosaur young run beneath her. Look closely in the background and you can see that the end of her tail — the spikes — are out of sight as they swing at the Alloasaur’s back.
When paleontologists were puzzled by a hole in this Allosaur vertebrae (at left) they figured out that a Stegosaur spike fits the hole (at right). Bone piercing bone in real time. Ouch!
Stegosaur tail spike pierced an Allosaur backbone (image from Wikimedia Commons)
The arrangement of the tail spikes had no name until “Kenneth Carpenter, then a paleontologist at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, used the term when describing a fossil at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Annual Meeting in 1993.” — quote from Wikipedia.
The name came from a Far Side cartoon in 1982 when Gary Larson invented it as a joke. “Now, this end is called the thagomizer … after the late Thag Simmons.”
A thagomizer is the distinctive arrangement of four spikes on the tails of stegosaurian dinosaurs. These spikes are believed to have been a defensive measure against predators.
Each light is one of two ends of a fungal gnat larvae (Orfelia fultoni). This photo by Alan Cressler, embedded from Flickr, shows what the larva looks like during the day.
Orfelia fultoni, Anna Ruby Falls Recreation Area, Chattahoochee National Forest, White County, Georgia:
This is the only bioluminescent fungus gnat larvae in North America. Both whitish ends of the larvae emit a blue light used to lure prey. Although they may be common in proper habits, apparently there are very few places in the southeast where they form extensive colonies. One place is Dismal Canyon in Alabama where they are locally called “dismalites”. I was invited by my friends who work for the Chattahoochee National Forest to view and photograph the extensive colony at Anna Ruby Falls Recreation Area. Locally the event is called “fox fire” and there are scheduled night hikes to witness the amazing colony. Other than the guided night hikes, after hours entry into the area is prohibited.
Fungus gnat larvae live within a slime tube and develop a network of sticky filaments that capture prey that are attracted by the blue glow. The sticky filaments can be seen in the photos.
In the photographs above, the lights don’t look connected but you can see how they move in this video in New Zealand. The bluish glow worms in New Zealand are not the same species but they have a similar appearance and behavior.
Back in Georgia the foxfire glows mid-May through June when the gnat’s larval form is alive. Night hikes are offered during those months but pre-registration is required and the hikes fill up fast. Don’t wait until May 2024 to check this website for Foxfire Night Hikes at Anna Ruby Falls: https://gofindoutdoors.org/events/foxfire-night-hikes-coming-soon/
(Originals and credits of the slideshow photos can be seen by clicking on each photo)
Nowadays it’s rare to write anything by hand unless it’s the size of a Post-It note. When we really want to say something we use keyboards and touch screens to generate digital text read on screens or, less often, on paper. Our writing equipment becomes obsolete so rapidly that our computers and cellphones are replaced within a decade. (Who among us is still using the same cellphone since 2013? Do we even remember what model it was?)
So consider this: Humans used the same writing tool, the same indelible ink, from the 5th to the 19th century. When applied to parchment, it is readable 1,700 years later. The ink is easy to make by hand from natural ingredients and is still used in calligraphy today. To make iron gall ink, the process starts with a wasp and an oak.
Eventually we used paper instead of parchment, even for important documents, and iron gall ink fell out of favor because the acid in iron sulfate makes the paper disintegrate. To solve that problem we invented paper-friendly inks and then computers.
Medieval manuscript creation used natural products from animals, plants and minerals. See the process from parchment to ink to binding in this 6-minute video from the Getty Museum.
By now you’ve probably heard that a lot of bird names are going to change in the U.S. and Canada.
The American Ornithological Society [AOS] has vowed to change the English names of all bird species currently named after people, along with any other bird names deemed offensive or exclusionary.
The AOS can do this because they have jurisdiction over all the bird names in the Americas. Every year they make 5-10 name changes, usually among scientific names due to new DNA research, and we birders cope. This project is larger and will take several years as they change the common English names of 70-80 birds.
My first reaction was typical. I don’t like change unless I instigate it so I thought: “This sounds like an overreaction to the name problem. All the field guides will be out of date(*ummm, they already are). It’ll be an ordeal to change the data when 4-letter bird banding codes, based on the English names, change as well. I don’t want to do this. Stop Change.”
But then I changed my mind because … I made a list of names that will change and began to invent new ones and the new names were better than the old ones. I could see the point. Here are two examples.
The Wilson’s warbler (Cardellina pusilla), pictured at top, has held the same English name for 185 years, though its scientific name has changed five times since it was first described in 1811 by Alexander Wilson. Its current 4-letter banding code is WIWA.
Suppose it’s new name becomes “black-capped warbler” as suggested by my friend Shawn Collins. It’s so much more descriptive! When someone asks, “What is that warbler with the black cap?” the answer is obvious. The new banding code would be BCWA.
The Cooper’s hawk (Accipiter cooperii), doubly named for ornithologist William Cooper, is most often noticed near backyard bird feeders because it eats birds for a living.
[The Cooper’s hawk] it is an inconspicuous species. However, since the 1970s, Cooper’s Hawks have commonly nested in suburban and urban landscapes, such that it is likely the most common backyard breeding raptor across North America.
Suppose its new name becomes “backyard hawk.” When someone says, “There’s a hawk in my backyard…” the answer is almost obvious (there are several possibilities). The new banding code would be BAHA.
AOS might not use these suggestions but I’m happy to have found names that are unique and available as well as the proposed banding codes.
So now I’m a bit excited by the prospect of fixing up the people-names.
Held all kinds of jobs: herder, journeyman, peddler, weaver and then…
Became a poet, sometimes satirical & incendiary enough to get arrested. One popular poem started a libel suit against him which he countered by blackmailing the libeler.
He was living in poverty so he decided to emigrate to America in 1794 at age 27.
In the U.S. he taught school for 5 years until he got into a scandal with a married woman.
And then he met naturalist William Bartram who encouraged his interest in birds and painting. Wilson traveled, sketched, painted and described birds. His illustrations and descriptions of 268 birds included 26 which had not been described before. The way he posed the birds inspired other bird illustrators including Audubon.
He died in poverty in 1813 at age 47.
When Alexander Wilson got hooked on birds he became a very good observer, illustrator and ornithologist in the final decade of his life (1802-ish to 1813). Wilson’s warbler was named for him 25 years after his death.
Humans are complicated.
(credits are in the captions except for the Stop Change sign formerly used by Pittsburgh Regional Transit to denote a BUS stop change. I used to have that sign hanging in my office.)
The Mercator projection that transforms our 3-dimensional Earth into 2-dimensions was invented in 1569 for use in navigation, which is why Google uses it. Unfortunately it totally distorts the size of land closer to the poles. It makes Greenland look big, maybe bigger than Africa. New Zealand is often cropped off this map.
The animation at top alternates between the Mercator projection and each country’s actual relative size. Hello, Northern Hemisphere, you aren’t as big as you think you are!
If we correct for size, as in the Gall-Peters projection, we mess up shapes and navigation.
Making a flat map of the Earth is like trying to cut an orange peel to make it lay flat on the table. Good luck!
p.s. Here’s a screenshot from the thetruesize.com mapping tool that Johnny Harris mentions at the end of the video. Its initial screen demonstrates that the contiguous U.S. + China + India can easily fit into Africa with room to spare. Try it at thetruesize.com
On 18 October while Jim McCollum was taking photos of the Hays bald eagles a raven showed up and began to harass the new male eagle, nicknamed “V.”
10/18 – The new fella went for a fly about and got jumped by a Raven. The Raven chased him all over the sky. This guy needs to work on his fighting skills.
A little tidbit I read recently. Crows will lite on eagles backs and peck at their necks. The eagles don’t fight back just soar higher and higher until for lack of oxygen the crow passes out and falls off the eagles back. I’m not sure about the validity but it’s a good story!
At what altitude does lack of oxygen affect birds?
Birds are the champions of high altitude and can breed and exercise (fly) at altitudes that kill humans. Some species are so well adapted to high altitude that they fly as high as a jet, over the Himalayas where humans die without supplemental oxygen. Even our North American songbirds fly high …
Migrating birds in the Caribbean(*) are mostly observed around 10,000 feet, although some are found half and some twice that high. Generally long-distance migrants seem to start out at about 5,000 feet and then progressively climb to around 20,000 feet.
Do you feel thirsty when you wake up in the morning?
It turns out that as we exhale we also breath out water vapor, so during the hours of sleep we lose water. According to sleep specialist Dr. Michael Breus, the healthy solution is to drink a full glass of water in the morning before you drink coffee because caffeine is a diuretic.
We could avoid this by getting up in the middle of the night to drink water, but perhaps our bodies are compensating in another way …
The region around the Gulf of Naples is very volcanic. There are vents at Solfatara in Pozzuoli where sulfurous steam emerges in an old crater. Pompeii and Vesuvius are across the Gulf.
Nonetheless it’s a lovely place to live by the Mediterranean. Towns, including Pozzuoli, Agnano and Bacoli, dot the crater edges and the flats between them. The area’s population is 500,000.
In September the magma under Campi Flegrei began shifting again and caused more than 1,100 earthquakes in a month, some as strong as 4.0 and 4.2 on the Richter scale. The Guardian reported on 3 October: “The Italian government is planning for a possible mass evacuation of tens of thousands of people who live around the Campi Flegrei supervolcano near Naples.”
Years ago I learned that birds can sense when an earthquake is coming and they take flight before it hits. I suspect that the birds at Campi Flegrei are flying more than usual lately.
Read more about birds and earthquakes in this vintage article from 2016.
How heavy is a puffy white cloud? It depends on how big it is.
According to USGS, an average 1 kilometer by 1 kilometer cumulus cloud weighs about 1.1 billion pounds.
Notice that this calculation uses the metric system for the cloud’s dimensions because it’s so much easier to calculate the weight of a cloud using those units.
When the metric system began in France in the 1790s, the units had Earth measurements as their basis. A kilogram was the mass of water in a 10cm x 10cm x 10cm container (a litre). The cloud answer, above, was calculated in metric and expressed in kilograms, then translated to U.S. customary pounds.
Did you know that we use two measuring systems in the U.S.? Everyday things are described in U.S. customary measures (inches, feet, pounds) but, as described in Wikipedia, science, medicine, electronics, the military, automobile production and repair, and international affairs all use the metric system. Also, most packaged consumer goods in the U.S. have to be labeled in both customary and metric units.
All birds are measured in grams and centimeters. I can tell this common yellowthroat is being banded in the U.S. because there are inches on that ruler. But his tail is about 4.5cm.
Why haven’t we completely adopted the metric system?
It comes down to three things: Time, Money and Congress. The change will cost time and money for U.S. industry, and designating an official measurement system requires an act of Congress. Whenever the subject comes up, lobbyists convince Congress to say “No.”
So for now we use two measuring systems.
p.s. Grams and pounds do not measure the same thing at all. Grams are a measure of mass (a fundamental property of matter). Pounds are a measure of force (the force of gravity on a mass).
If your mass is 68 kilograms, you are … 68 kg in Europe 150 pounds in the U.S., 25 pounds on the Moon and still 68 kg, 0 pounds in outer space and still 68 kg Your mass is 68 kg everywhere you go.
When Michael Rivera was in grad school at Carnegie Mellon he spent a lot of time at Arriviste Coffee Roasters in Shadyside. At the time, Arriviste paid a service to collect their coffee grounds but the service stopped during the pandemic and the spent grounds piled up.
Rivera was working on 3D printing technology and saw how to solve two problems at the same time: (1) Reuse coffee grounds instead of throwing them away and (2) Reduce plastic use in 3D printing.
The vast majority of 3D printing machines use thermoplastic to make new objects by melting it and reforming it with the print head.
Rivera is now a postdoctoral researcher at University of Colorado Boulder where he further fleshed out his idea of using spent coffee grounds instead of plastic.
Rivera and colleagues mix dried spent coffee grounds with two common food additives — cellulose gum and xanthan gum — and then mix in water.
“You’re pretty much shooting for the consistency of peanut butter,” Rivera said.
You can’t load that ooze directly into a 3D printer. First, Rivera does a little jury-rigging, modifying a printer with plastic tubes and a syringe filled with coffee paste. When dried, the coffee grounds material is about as tough as unreinforced concrete.
“You can make a lot of things with coffee grounds,” River said. “And when you don’t want it anymore, you can throw it back into a coffee grinder and use the grounds to print again.”
p.s. Does the reuse of coffee grounds sound familiar? I blogged about it a few weeks ago but forgot to mention it until Jennie Barker made the comments below.
(photos from Wikimedia Commons, Kate St. John, Arriviste Coffee Roasters Facebook banner, and embedded photo from Ars Technica; click on the captions to see the originals)
