This is not your regular Abbreviated Science Round-up. Don’t worry, that one is coming. But each week, there are a number of science, environment, energy, and technology stories that escape the pages of journals—or were never there in the first place—and appear in the mainstream press. Since I started Abbreviated Science Round-up with the specific purpose of bringing some attention to articles while they were fresh on the pages of peer-reviewed journals, I’ve always felt a bit off when it came to hitting the articles from Discover, or National Geographic, or the science pages from the BBC, NY Times, or elsewhere.
So here’s the obvious solution: Abbreviated Science Round-up is splitting in two. ASR will remain doing its job of covering articles that have just hit the pages of Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (yes, people do call it PNAS) and other reputable journals. But Popular Science Round-up will bring you a look at some articles that made it into the papers, television, and twitter feeds over the last week, even if they don’t come with an attached author’s CV and numbered charts.
And, entirely emblematic of what happens when science gets tossed into the popular press, story number one is something you’ve probably seen, and winced about, several times in the last few days.
Secret tomb turns out to contain a trio of mummies in blood red broth
When a massive granite sarcophagus turned up near the city of Alexandria in Egypt, speculation began immediately that it might be the long-sought tomb of Alexander the Great. Alexander, a Macedonian warlord who spent the bulk of his short life conquering every damn thing he could find, died in 323 BCE after a bought of racking pains and a severe fever. The nature of Alexander’s death has always been a bit suspect. There has long been a theory that he was poisoned, possibly by his own soldiers who—having traveled all the way to India—were just so damn tired of marching.
In his illness, Alexander was hauled back to the palace of of Nebuchadnezzar, in Babylon, Iraq. He apparently wanted to be buried back in Macedonia, where he had started before all that conquering, but his body was fought over, stolen, and buried in at least a couple of other places, before fans dug him up and brought his body brought back to his namesake city in Egypt somewhere around 274 BCE. And they built him a tomb on the outskirts of the city.
Alexander’s tomb was apparently quite real, because a visit to the place appears in a lot of ancient travelogues. Caesar dropped by. So did Cleopatra and, later, Augustus. But by 400 AD the location of the tomb seemed to be something of a mystery. Arabic scholars reported having a small building pointed out to them as late as the 15th century, but its description doesn’t seem to match the rather grand descriptions from earlier visitors. Since that time, more than 100 attempts have been made to locate the tomb without success.
So gigantic granite sarcophagus weighing 30 + tons … it seemed like an interesting find, even if it wasn’t exactly where there ancient texts predicted. But after a week in which people alternately cheered on the idea of opening the thing, and recited every scrap of mummy-related lore picked up from expert Egyptologists Boris Karloff and Rachel Weisz, archaeologists in Egypt peeled back the lid to find, as The Gaurdian recounts …
… three mummies and a red liquid he identified as sewage water, believed to have entered the sarcophagus through a crack on its right side, causing the decomposition of the mummies.
So far, the world has not been hit with a curse. Well … the world has not be hit with a new curse. But, people being intrinsically awful, it has been hit with a online petition to allow someone to turn the blood-red mixture of decades-old sewage and centuries-old mummy rot into an energy drink. And no, I am not linking that petition.
Come on, let’s look at something else ...
Baby snake found in amber
One of the papers found in Abbreviated Science Round-up recently pointed out that amber, not surprisingly, doesn’t give a very complete overview of what lives, or lived, in a forest. That’s because not everything manages to get itself caught in, and covered by, tree sap.
But a surprising number of things do, and in addition to insects and bird feathers, it appears that, somewhere around 98.8 million years ago, one of those things was a small snake. As Discover reports …
Preserved in a piece of amber about the size of a small potato, a tiny snake hatchling — less than two inches long — is unprecedented in the fossil record. At nearly 100 million years old, the baby snake’s remains provide researchers with significant new information about the animals’ development and global distribution. But wait, there’s more…
It’s not going to lead to Jurassic Park. Not even Tiny Cretaceous Snake Park. But it’s still very cool. Go, Go look at the pictures.
White clover is one of the most rapidly-evolving species of plants.
When we think of how the natural world is adapting to an Earth where 96 percent of animals are either us or the things we raise to feed us (That’s right, people — everything you ever saw in a David Attenborough special fits within 4 percent of what’s still out there in a world of humans, chickens, cows, and pigs) we usually think about bears learning to raid garbage cans, or deer encroaching on suburban gardens.
But plants play the adaptation game as well, and as the New York Times reports, common white clover is one of the best at carving new niches in a concrete world.
White clover makes for a good test species because it has already displayed the stamina to survive in climates from Norway to southern India, Dr. Johnson said. The plant also helps nourish soil with nitrogen and serves as an important source of nectar for bees and other pollinators.
The clover adapts to colder climates by losing its ability to make hydrogen cyanide or HCN, a toxin the plant produces to protect itself from predators, like snails, insects and voles, and in the country, cows, sheep and goats. The number of plants that produce hydrogen cyanide increases with every mile away from the city center, the study found, with small cities showing the same effect as big ones.
My bees feed primarily on clover in the spring, and I’m a great fan of clover honey. I suppose I will keep eating it, so long as the clover doesn’t evolve some mechanism to pass that cyanide along to me as .., sweet revenge.
Polar bears on the march to new territory.
Polar bears are one of the emblematic animals of climate change expressly because their typical hunting behavior is dependent on the presence of sea ice from which they can hunt seals and other prey. But, as National Geographic reports, a warming climate is resulting in more than just sad bears paddling through ice-free seas.
At 10,500 feet high, in the middle of the Greenland Ice Sheet more than 200 miles from the nearest coast, the remote U.S. scientific research station was about the last place anyone expected one of these sea ice-dwelling animals to be.
Yet here it was, lumbering around the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Summit Station, the highest-altitude, northernmost science operation in the Arctic, where key meteorology and other research is conducted. Kunz, a carpenter from Florida, was one of the half-dozen or so workers sleeping in “Tent City”—a collection of orange domes atop snow glinting in the June 24-hour sunlight. It was 5:13 a.m.
The scientific name of the Polar Bear is Ursus maritimus, “the bear of the sea” because those scientists who studied it in the 18th and 19th centuries were so taken by its association with water and its powerful swimming ability. Inland, mountaineering polar bears seems almost like an impossible mix. But then, if clover can change, so can bears. If a population of bears survives the onslaught of human-derived climate change, they may do so by adopting lifestyles very different from those of polar bears in the past. And they may need a new scientific name.