Say what you like about all the fighting and pillaging and invading and stuff, Vikings were really good when it came to eating a healthy diet.
Being a seafaring and coastal people, it isn’t surprising that the great warrior hordes from the north ate a lot of fish – but that fact has proven to be troublesome for modern day archaeologists trying to tease out the history of Britain in the first millennium CE. Read more.
In a January 2, 2017 column, Aileen O’Donoghue wrote of the detection of the kilonova by both gravitational and electromagnetic waves in August of 2017. The detections, themselves, were remarkable and ushered in the completely new era of Multi Messenger Astronomy. But the data from the event also gave evidence confirming the origins of very heavy elements such as gold and platinum. Read more.
Just what is a second, exactly? The question has been open to interpretation ever since the first long-case grandfather clocks began marking off seconds in the mid-17th century and introduced the concept to the world at large.
The answer, simply, is that a second is 1/60th of a minute, or 1/3600th of an hour. But that’s just pushing the question down the road a bit. After all, what’s an hour? Read more.
Deep within Lake Clark National Park and Preserve, staff at a remote ranger station on the north shore of Telaquana Lake noted something amiss. Wolves, a mighty apex predator of the park, were seen scraping fish carcasses from the ice.
Though odd, the observation made sense. Wolves are opportunists and Lake Clark, situated at the headwaters of Bristol Bay, is flush with fish. Likewise, salmon make a relatively safe dinner. While moose fight back and can break a wolf’s legs, salmon simply flop or freeze.
Still, as one of the park’s top predators, wolves affect the balance of everything in the ecosystem. Seeing a wolf scrounging for salmon in an ice block raised a few eyebrows about the ecological balance of the park. Read more.
An international team of researchers studying globally declining shark populations report that they used carbon isotopes as biochemical markers in shark muscle tissue to identify where in the oceans the mobile predators have been feeding, in the hope that such analyses provide a useful tool for conservation. Read more.