The newspapers this last week were full of science stories, exhibiting the broad diversity and strangeness of life on our planet. Here are some of the highlights:
Seeds are preserved in an Arctic vault in Svalbard, preserving humankind's agricultural legacy:
Crop seeds are the source of human sustenance, the product of 10,000 years of selective breeding dating to the dawn of agriculture. The "doomsday vault," as some have come to call it, is to be the ultimate backup in the event of a global catastrophe -- the go-to place after an asteroid hit or nuclear or biowarfare holocaust so that, difficult as those times would be, humankind would not have to start again from scratch.
A whale is found in an Alaskan river, far from the sea:
A fisherman from Nenana, Ed Lord, told Brunner Thursday that he spotted the carcass in early May, four days after ice left the river. He speculated that the whale followed salmon upstream last fall, and when the river froze, it could not surface for air and died. The carcass was near a section of the river that jammed with ice this spring.
Residents of a village above Telluride are disturbed by a plague of aspen-eating caterpillars:
Millions of Western tent caterpillars took over swathes of the village for the fourth year in a row. The crawlers stripped every last leaf of foliage from many aspen trees. They built their white silky tents in the bare branches. They carpeted the plaza around the gondola that links the village to Telluride. They covered Mountain Village Boulevard in a slick, mashed mess. They crawled over walls and windows and even climbed onto shoes and trousers.... Walraven [Mountain Village Police Department Investigator] said his department fielded caterpillar calls - first from people freaked out by the squirming creatures - and later from frightened villagers wondering if a spray plane spreading an organic pesticide was a bomber.
A 110 million-year-old fossil suggests birds evolved from aquatic ancestors:
Before their discovery, reported in today's issue of the journal Science, the only evidence for this creature -- Gansus yumenensis -- was a single, partial leg discovered in the 1980s. Now researchers have dozens of nearly complete fossils of Gansus, said Matt Lamanna of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.... Gansus was about the size of a modern pigeon, but similar to loons or diving ducks, the researchers said. One of the fossils even has skin preserved between the toes, showing that it had webbed feet. The remains were dated to about 110 million years ago, making them the oldest for the group Ornithurae, which includes all modern birds and their closest extinct relatives. Previously, the oldest known fossils from this group were from about 99 million years ago.
Images via their respective news stories; map from The Washington Post, caterpillars via The Denver Post.
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