Bronze-Age crime scene forensics: newly discovered artifacts only deepen the mystery of a 3,300-year-old battle. What archaeologists previously thought to be a local skirmish looks more and more like a regional conflict that drew combatants in from hundreds of kilometers away…but why? Much like the total weirdness of the Ediacaran fauna of 580 million years […]
Puzzling artifacts found at Europe’s oldest battlefield Read More »
Photograph: Scott Thrift. “We already have timepieces that show us how to be on time. These are timepieces that show us how to be in time.” – Scott Thrift Slow clocks are growing in popularity, perhaps as a tonic for or revolt against the historical trend of ever-faster timekeeping mechanisms. Given that bell tower clocks
The time-honored debate between catastrophists and gradualists (those who believe major Earth changes were due to sudden violent events or happened over long periods of time) has everything to do with the coarse grain of the geological record. When paleontologists only have a series of thousand-year flood deposits to study, it’s almost impossible to say
Scientists Have a Powerful New Tool to Investigate Triassic Dark Ages Read More »
As detailed in the exquisite documentary Proteus, the ocean floor was until very recently a repository for the dreams of humankind — the receptacle for our imagination. But when the H.M.S. Challenger expedition surveyed the world’s deep-sea life and brought it back for cataloging by now-legendary illustrator Ernst Haeckel (who coined the term “ecology”), the hidden
Case Study | The Refugee Buddy Project Hastings, Rother & Weladen (TRBP) is celebrating universal humanity by welcoming and supporting newly arriving refugees to their UK town and using Loomio to organize their rapidly growing group. When Rossana Leal fled Chile in the 1970s, her mum told her they were “headed for a land where
We’re all Humans Here Read More »
Big questions abound regarding the protracted childhood of Homo sapiens, but there’s a growing argument that it’s an adaptation to the increased complexity of our social environment and the need to learn longer and harder in order to handle the ever-raising bar of adulthood. (Just look to the explosion of requisite schooling over the last
Childhood as a solution to explore–exploit tensions Read More »
Archaeologist Stefani Crabtree writes about her work to reconstruct Indigenous food and use networks for the National Park Service: Traditional Ecological Knowledge gets embedded in the choices that people make when they consume, and how TEK can provide stability of an ecosystem. Among Martu, the use of fire for hunting and the knowledge of the
Traditional Ecological Knowledge Read More »
Jim Cooke / Gizmodo Gizmodo asks half a dozen natural historians to speculate on who is going to be doing what jobs on Earth after the people disappear. One of the streams that runs wide and deep through this series of fun thought experiments is how so many niches stay the same through catastrophic changes
Predicting the Animals of the Future Read More »
Michelle Swanson, an Oregon-based educator and educational consultant, has written a blog post on the Internet Archive on the increased importance of digital librarians during the pandemic: With public library buildings closed due to the global pandemic, teachers, students, and lovers of books everywhere have increasingly turned to online resources for access to information. But as
The Digital Librarian as Essential Worker Read More »
Samuel Velasco/Quanta Magazine Living in a world with multiple spatiotemporal scales, the very small and fast can often drive the future of the very large and slow: Microscopic genetic mutations change macroscopic anatomy. Undetectably small variations in local climate change global weather patterns (the infamous “butterfly effect”). And now, one more example comes from a
The Unexpected Influence of Cosmic Rays on DNA Read More »
