Well it's been a while, but as you can tell from my previous posts I got somewhat distracted!
But this is a big day, we're at week 30 of 'What I learnt last week'! That's over half a year of doing this, and as many weeks as I am years of age.
Not sure if it's any more substantial than that but whatever. The problem is I'm really struggling to thin the ones I found down to just 5 so I might add some bonuses in this post while keeping it as succinct as possible.
Monday: AntiBEEotics
We humans have a problem. Thanks largely to China and its overabuse of antibiotics in battery-farmed animals (to prevent them dying of disease in their horrifying living conditions), but also to humans improperly taking medication and just generally the inevitable course of reality, bacteria have managed to terrify us with their ability to adapt and become multi-drug resistant.
We are already hitting many of our last bastions of hope in many cases whilst scientists struggle to find more permanent solutions.
Beewolves - neither bees nor wolves, but solitary wasps - don't have this problem. They have a cocktail of antibiotics created by working symbiotically with Streptomyces bacteria, and this cocktail of 45 substances has been stable and successful for arorund 68 million years - no drug resistance to be found.
This is not to say that their method is somehow magically more effective than our own; their lifestyles have to be taken into consideration. As stated, beewolves are solitary, and they don't typically hang around in hospitals with compromised immune systems, nor do they travel around the world in tour groups so there's been little opportunity for disease to adapt and spread among them.
Nevertheless, I'm sure our science brains will find something to learn from this symbiotic development!
Tuesday part 1: Spinning Spiders
Spiders are famous for spinning webs, of course, but not all spiders actually do that. In fact, half of all species don't make cobwebs. Many use their silk to build traps, fly, or as a support line for long jumps and much more.
But that's not the only spinning spiders can do. One family called flattie spiders take it more literally, and have the fastest physical spin in the animal kingdom.
They are capable of spinning their body 180 degrees and strike in roughtly 1/8th of a second!
Part 2: ANTibiotics
Sticking with the animal theme here, ants continue to be amazing. Ants have often beaeten us to our own game, with farming, slavery, waste disposal systems, ventilatioin systems and even military services concieved millions of years before we even existed.
The African Matabele ant adds another to the list of innovations; medics.
Whenever the wounded military return from war, presumably with termites, the matabele ants become medical officers and start licking their open wounds. One would at first compare this to dogs, but dogs only lick their own wounds, whereas these ants are providing a service to others.
This, like other animals, helps prevent infection and in a situation where the mortality rate would typically be 80%, that number is reduced to merely 10%!
Like a soldier crying for help, soldier ants release SOS pheremones that medics react to and run to their aid. But these soldiers are far more altruistic than you might expect. If a soldier ant is too injured, like it's missing half its organs and legs, it instead gives an 'eh, don't bother' signal, allowing the nurses to move on to less hopeless victims of war.
You can read more here (paywall)
Wednesday: Lifestyles of ancient kids
Image provided by Matthew Bennett
Archeology can tell some wonderful stories given enough information - go check out @zest if you wanna see more of history unfold.
A few years ago, some researchers started studying pristine examples of ancient footprints left in at-the-time drying mud. This allowed a great little story of the human's lifestyle at the time.
It turned out that the footprints, in Namibia, were about 1,500 years old and of a group of children as young as three chasing a flock of sheep!
Not only this, but they were able to determine that the kids were being playful, based on the skips and jumps identified in the foot patterns, and that responsibility was encouraged from an early age.
Going further back in time, these same researchers found Ethiopian footprints alongside the once soft, ashy base of a volcano from a now extinct species of hominid Homo heidelbergensis from as far back as 600,000 years ago.
Alongside the footprints of children as young as 1 or 2 years old, they found tools, a butchered hippo of all things, and the kids were presumably standing and observing the parents who were there doing their daily, hippo-butchering routine tasks.
It's amazing to see the stories unfold, but also the contrast between parenting then compared to now. Kids then were routinely taken along excursions of adventure to observe and learn the tricks of the trade - literally before they could even walk.
Thursday: Rabbit Domestication
When it comes to cats and dogs, theories on just how and when it occurred are somewhat well established. When it comes to rabbits however, we oddly have no clue.
As far as stories go, rabbit domestication occurred around 600 A.D when Pope Gregory decided it was ok to eat them. But a genetic analysis comparing domesticated rabbits with wild ones found that they diverged way earlier, during the last ice age - or long before any domesticated animals known at all.
The problem lies in our perception. We are happy to think of dog domestication as something that happened slowly over time, with more tame dogs getting advantage by getting closer to humans and enjoying a meaty reward, before helping us in the hunt over many generations.
Well it's no different with rabbits (though I find it hard to imagine a rabbit as a hunting partner). The stories try to imply there was a singular moment when rabbits went from wild to pets, but it would have happened over many generations, without any one individual really noticing.
Realistically, we would have hunted them, then kept them in cages for ease, bred them for even more ease, and then the occasional kid decided this one was particualrly cute and wanted daddy to keep it alive, friends got jealous so the dad ate it anyway. But that child grew up and learnt from that bad experience. When their child asked for a rabbit to stay alive... they probably would still have eaten it; food was not as accessible as it is nowadays. But you get the idea.
Friday: The fate of the Space Car
Everyone reading this likely is somewhat aware of the fact that there's a car in space now. Because why not. You may also know that the goal was to send it to roughly a Mars orbit, but it actually overshot that target and was headed for the asteroid belt.
So what will be the fate of the car given that the trajectory is not what we expected? Scientists are on the case!
Hanno Rein and his team decided to figure this out by running a series of simulations - the same simulations used for all Near-Earth objects to predict collisions and so forth.
It turns out that in 2091, the Tesla will have a close encounter with Earth as it loops back around, passing by at only a few hundred thousand kilometers.
But what about the long term? like REALLY long term? Looking that far ahead is pretty much impossible to do totally accurately, but the best results from the simulations show that in all likelihood, the Tesla will spiral in and crash into either Venus or Earth... 10 million years from now.
Assuming Elon Musk didn't coat the surface of the car with some particularly long lasting, protective material, it will probably burn up in our atmosphere, but if we do a good enough job destroying the atmosphere, maybe it'll disappear entirely and Elon's computerized brain can actually get its car back free of charge!
Not a bad investment after all!
I had a couple more but they can wait. Hope you learnt something today! Here's what I learnt:
- Wolves can save humans from disease
- Spiders are ninjas
- I should breed a colony of ants to lick me back to health
- Kids these days are spoilt brats
- Rabbits are likely delicious
- Elon Musk is evil, after all.
Bye for now!
All images CC0 Licensed