I must be old, because I’ve done this before. I tell you what, it was a durn sight better then having to chisel those stone slabs, which was even better than smearing ochre on a cave wall with a stick.
As the comet it’s parked on moves closer to the sun, the Philae lander has woken up! It better get busy and upload all the data it’s got stored and start collecting more. It’s been sleeping long enough!
The giant cuttlefish fades and dies after mating. Somehow they maintain a little dignity in dying.
This new movie, Jurassic World, is stirring up a fascinating love/hate reaction from paleontologists. We all love to imagine dinosaurs resurrected, and the movies give us an image of what they’d be like, so everyone is happy to see that…and it also inspires new enthusiasm for fossils, so it helps lead to better support for good science. But at the same time, couldn’t they at least get the science right?
Kirkland, the state paleontologist at the Utah Geological Survey who has been involved in the discovery of 20 dinosaurs including the Utahraptor, admits such Hollywood blockbusters could inspire a whole new generation of fossil lovers. Yet, he frets that this movie – much like its three predecessors – will be filled with so many factual errors as to spread misinformation.
Celebrate the occasion, appreciate what’s going on in the deep!
A reminder: I’ll be off to Traverse City, Michigan to speak to the Grand Traverse Humanists in the evening. It’s free! Come on out! I’m going to talk about bad biology!
The discovery of a new ceratopsian, Regaliceratops, has been published, and because it is a triceratops, I must say three things about it.
The pope has been freaking out American conservatives. He keeps saying things that annoy right-wingers.
In recent months, the pope has argued for a radical new financial and economic system to avoid human inequality and ecological devastation. In October he told a meeting of Latin American and Asian landless peasants and other social movements: “An economic system centred on the god of money needs to plunder nature to sustain the frenetic rhythm of consumption that is inherent to it.
“The system continues unchanged, since what dominates are the dynamics of an economy and a finance that are lacking in ethics. It is no longer man who commands, but money. Cash commands.
“The monopolising of lands, deforestation, the appropriation of water, inadequate agro-toxics are some of the evils that tear man from the land of his birth. Climate change, the loss of biodiversity and deforestation are already showing their devastating effects in the great cataclysms we witness,” he said.
It may be a bit unkind to crush the ambitions of a 19 year old, but Boyan Slat seems to mainly excel at self-promotion. He’s come up with a scheme to clean up the oceans of debris with anchored, floating booms and short suspended nets (or something — it’s totally unclear) that are laid out over ocean currents that bring the garbage to it. Did I mention that he’s 19? And not an oceanographer? And that his scheme hasn’t really been tested on any significant scale? But it’s still bringing in millions of dollars in donations.
