UCSC Inquiry magazine, October 14 2021
Flowers as symbols are loaded with meaning. So, what does a flower mean when seen through the lens of Robert Mapplethorpe, the controversial photographer best known for his depictions of radical sexuality? Read More >
LiveScience, January 10 2011.
In a dark corner of a storage cabinet, a pterosaur was waiting for Victoria Arbour. Well, at least its jawbone was. Arbour identified the piece of jawbone, which has been in the University of Alberta fossil collection for years, as a new species of the ancient flying reptile.
When she first pulled the bone fragment out of the cabinet, Arbour was stumped. “It could have been from a dinosaur, a fish or a marine reptile,” she said in a statement. The bone was discovered on Hornby Island, off the coast of Vancouver. Arbour studied the bone for months before identifying it as a pterosaur. Read More >
Discover, January 4 2011.
Babies: As we reported yesterday, they just keep getting bigger. And while they haven’t always been trending towards obese, human babies have always been larger, relative to their mothers, than the infants of most other species. This make birth difficult and could have even changed the social structure of early hominids, steering human evolution.
Human babies are about 6.1 percent of their mother’s weight at birth, while chimp babies are about 3.3 percent. A new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences takes a look at our extinct relatives to determine when this shift occurred, and suggests that it could even have encouraged our ancestors to come down from the trees and to form more complex social arrangements. Read More >
Discover, November 12 2010.
Fossilized dinosaur embryos, found still in their eggshells, have claimed the title of the oldest vertebrate embryos ever seen–they were fossilized in the early Jurassic Period, around 190 million years ago, researchers say. The embryos are from the species Massospondylus, a prosauropod, the family of dinosaurs which gave rise to iconic sauropods like the Brachiosaurus. Robert Reisz and his team found the embryos when analyzing a clutch of fossilized eggs collected in South America in 1976. The find was just published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
“This project opens an exciting window into the early history and evolution of dinosaurs,” said Professor Reisz. “Prosauropods are the first dinosaurs to diversify extensively, and they quickly became the most widely spread group, so their biology is particularly interesting as they represent in many ways the dawn of the age of dinosaurs.” Read More >
Discover, November 5 2010.
In anthropology departments, the debate has long simmered: Was it an improvement in manual dexterity or intelligence that allowed our human ancestors to begin making sophisticated stone tools? According to one group of scientists, figuring out the answer required only a pair of high-tech gloves and a trained craftsman who could make both simple stone knives and more complicated hand axes. The craftsman wore gloves studded with electronic sensors that tracked his his hand movements. Lead researcher Aldo Faisal of Imperial College London found that simple and complex tools required the same amount of dexterity to produce.
“From these results, dexterity can be ruled out, and we can infer it has something to do with the complexity of the task,” says Faisal. Axes are made in several stages, which requires switching between tasks, suggesting that a higher level of complexity is required in the brain. Read More >
Discover, October 25 2010.
A huge bounty of amber unearthed in India is giving researchers a peak at the wildlife that inhabited the area 50 million years ago, via the insects that are trapped inside it. The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that the Indian subcontinent was not as isolated as previously thought.
“We know India was isolated, but … the biological evidence in the amber deposit shows that there was some biotic connection,” says David Grimaldi, curator in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology at the [American Museum of Natural History]. Read More >
Discover, October 21 2010.
In a great convergence of old and new, Google and the Israel Antiquities Authority are teaming up to digitize the millennia-old Dead Sea Scrolls. The scrolls are the oldest known surviving biblical texts, created between 150 BC and 79 AD. They are written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek and include nearly every book of the Old Testament (except the Book of Esther), and several other religious texts.
The scrolls have been tightly guarded because of their delicate nature. Only two scholars are allowed to study the scrolls at a time, which are held in a room where temperature, light, and humidity are all carefully controlled. Public access to the writings will change how they are studied. Read More >
Discover, October 18 2010.
New bone evidence suggests that Tyrannosaurus rex was not only a scavenger but also a cannibal. While researchers frequently find evidence of bites on bone fossils, Nicholas Longrich was surprised to find big, predator-sized tooth marks on T. rex bones–because the T. rex was the only large carnivore in the area, and therefore the only dinosaur who could have left those marks.
“These animals were some of the largest terrestrial carnivores of all time, and the way they approached eating was fundamentally different from modern species,” Longrich added. “There’s a big mystery around what and how they ate, and this research helps to uncover one piece of the puzzle.” Read More >
Discover, October 13 2010.
Dried blood on a handkerchief, a $700,000 gourd and one dead king. A forensic murder mystery? Nope, just another genetics paper. I mean, it is gourd season, what did you expect? The dead king in question is Louis XVI (the last of the French kings), who was ceremoniously beheaded on January 21st, 1793. After the beheading, attendees rushed the stage and dipped their handkerchiefs in the royal blood.
Over two hundred years later, some of that blood may have been found–dried to the inside of a decorative gunpowder gourd. The story goes that one of the attendees rushed home and stuffed the bloody handkerchief into the gourd for safekeeping. In a study published in the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics, researchers analyzed some of the dried blood scraped from the inside of the gourd to find out if it really could be the king’s blood. Read More >
Santa Cruz Sentinel, March 25, 2010.
Music is a mainstay of any culture. Santa Cruz”s own Music of Bhutan Research Center has made it its mission to document the traditional folk music of Bhutan.
Ethnomusicologist Janet Herman and photographer Jane Hancock, both of the center, will present a multi-media lecture on Bhutanese culture and music Sunday at the Land of Medicine Buddha in Soquel. The presentation will include music clips, a short video and pictures from their excursions to Bhutan.
“Bhutanese traditional music is unique and beautiful,” Herman said. Read More >