cab67
cab67's JournalFurthest voyage ever.
Artemis II has made it's pass of the moon and is headed back to earth.
In doing so, its crew has travelled further from earth than any other human beings - 252,756 miles. The furthest Apollo ever got was 248,655 miles. Statistically significant? Probably not. But it's still a record.
Both missions reached these distances for the same reason, and for different reasons. Same? They were on free-return trajectories that passed behind the far side, but never went into lunar orbit. The other Apollo missions orbited the moon and, thus, were closer to the lunar surface.
Different? Artemis II was intended to follow a free-return trajectory. Apollo 13 did so after an explosion in the service module precluded their intended lunar orbit and subsequent landing.
Reasonable people can disagree on whether the costs and risks of the Artemis program justify its existence. As I've said previously, my own opinions are mixed, and I can see serious merit on both sides.
But can we all at least agree that our species has accomplished something seriously cool? The distance flown by Artemis II is almost 32 times the diameter of the earth at the equator. Not so bad for a species that only learned to fly heavier-than-air vehicles 124 years ago. There is nothing about this that is anything less than mind-blowing.
useless natural history trivia IV
I hope y'all don't mind that most of this will be zoological or paleontological trivia, as those are the fields I know best.
1. There is a type of spider that feeds on human blood, but which never bites humans.
This is the vampire spider, Evarcha culicivora. It’s a kind of jumping spider found near Lake Victoria in Africa. It’s small – about half a centimeter long – and like other small jumping spiders, it actually can’t bite humans. Their chelicerae (fangs) can’t break our skin.
It feeds on blood by feeding on the mosquitoes that feed on humans and other animals.
2. Until humans first arrived in the West Indies, the land predators on many islands were giant flightless owls.
These actually arose at least twice independently from different flying owl ancestors. The form in Cuba, Ornimegalonyx oteroi, was a bit under 4 feet tall and was related to living barred and spotted owls (Strix). The one found in the Bahamas, Tyto pollens, is a giant barn owl. It was slightly smaller than Ornimegalonyx, but still taller than 3 feet.
Giant owls also appeared on other islands in the Hawaiian chain, Indian Ocean, and Mediterranean. The Hawaiian forms – so-called “stilt owls” – are thought to have been able to fly. Whether the other forms were flightless is unclear.
None of these was ever seen by a scientist, but the West Indian forms most likely survived until the earliest humans arrived, and may have even persisted until after European contact. The legend of the chickcharney – a three-foot-tall feathered,, mischievous, red-eyed, ghostlike creature in Bahamian folklore – is most likely a cultural “memory” of T. pollens. Neville Chamberlain was supposedly cursed by chickcharneys when he worked on a plantation in the Bahamas and scoffed at the legend.
(True story – a colleague of mine was excavating some subfossil deposits in the Bahamas many years ago, and he couldn’t get any of the locals to help him. They were afraid of the ghosts living in the caves. The ghosts they described would have looked and sounded a lot like a barn owl, though I don’t know if the word “chickcharney” was used.)
3. Animals on islands also become miniatures. This includes the miniature elephants that arose on many islands in the Mediterranean. These, too, arose independently from different large elephant ancestors. Those on Sicily, Malta, and the Aegean are related to Palaeoloxodon, an extinct elephant lineage related to African elephants. Those on Sardinia are miniature mammoths, and mammoths are more closely related to Asian elephants. Both types occurred on Crete.
The best-known form, Paleoloxodon falconeri from Sicily, stood about 3 to 3.5 feet tall. The dwarf mammoths were larger, but were still no taller than the average human.
Miniature mammoths also occurred on the Channel Islands off the coast of California. Other small elephants occurred in parts of modern-day Indonesia and the Phillippines, most of which are forms of Stegodon related to Asian elephants.
Whether modern humans saw any of these is unclear. One of them lived alongside the “hobbit,” Homo floresiensis, on Flores Island in Indonesia, but this one was probably extinct before modern H. sapiens arrived. But whether humans saw these elephants alive or not, discoveries of their skulls in the Mediterranean may have played a role in mythology. Someone who’d never seen an elephant, such as a seafarer from southern Europe during the Bronze Age, might have come across the skull of a miniature elephant. If you don’t know anything about elephants and see one of these skulls – especially if the tusks had fallen out, leaving two really big tooth sockets – it would be easy to confuse the large naris (nose hole) with an eye socket and the tooth sockets for nostrils.
The last surviving mammoths – those on Wrangell Island north of Siberia, which persisted until about 4000 years ago – were typically small, but they were at the low end of the size range for mainland mammoths.
For what it's worth - Island dwarfism and gigantism are well-known and widespread phenomena. There are/were giant tortoises on the Galápagos Islands and Seychelles, giant rabbits on Mallorca, and giant rodents pretty much everywhere. There were miniature crocodiles on Aldabra, New Caledonia, and Fiji. And the Flores Island "hobbit" (Homo floresiensis) is itself thought to be an example of island dwarfism.
4. Speaking of spiders - a giant fossil spider was featured in one of the "Walking With" series that featured CGI extinct animals in 2005. This was based on Megarachne, which was thought to be a nearly two-foot-long spider that lived about 300 million years ago. The problem? After the episode of Walking with Monsters featuring the beast started production, it was shown that Megarachne wasn't a spider at all - it belonged to a group called Eurypterida, which is only distantly related to spiders. (That said, some eurypterids were six or more feet long.). They couldn't retool the animation to show it as a eurypterid, so they just called it Mesothelae. Mesothelae is an assemblage of several types of primitive spider.
So far as I know, there have never been spiders anywhere near as large as Megarachne. That doesn't mean I'd want any of them on me.
I can't be the only one here disappointed that Bondi was fired.
I wanted her impeached next year.
Same thing with RFK Jr. I want him gone as much as the rest of us, but I want it to be with the least amount of dignity possible. I don't want him to have the privilege of a resignation, nor do I want to give Trump the satisfaction of firing him. I want him kicked out by Congress.
(I'm being somewhat sarcastic here. I don't actually care how they're removed from office. The down side is that, with her dismissal, someone even worse might get nominated. Had she stayed where she was until after December, there'd be a chance the Senate could decline to confirm her replacement.)
Here's something that blew my mind -
I teach college-level science classes. I had a graduate seminar and undergrad class today.
I mentioned the Artemis II mission and asked if they were going to watch. And I was mostly met with blank looks.
They literally had no idea it was going to happen.
How the f-word can this be? We're sending human beings to the moon for the first time in 54 years. The crew includes the first woman, first person of color, and first non-US astronaut to fly to the moon.
This should be huge. But it isn't.
I don't think it's apathy. I think there's just so much other shit going on these days that a crewed mission to the bloody moon - something truly historic - can't rise to the top of the headlines.
I cannot understate what Apollo meant for me. I was a month away from turning two when Apollo 11 launched, so I don't remember it. But I remember the later missions. Mom would put me in front of the TV, and I'd watch the men in the puffy white suits doing that weird bounding walk on the moon.
This was a central aspect of my childhood. It's part of the reason I became a scientist.
Harrison Schmitt (lunar module pilot, Apollo 17) visited the museum I was working at as a postdoc. I might as well have been meeting the Pope or Peter Townshend. He served in the Senate as a Republican, and he became a climate change denier, but he walked on the moon. That's way cooler than anything I'll ever do.
This is why my feelings about crewed spaceflight are mixed. Robotic probes can do most of the things astronauts do. They're cheaper, and they're safer. But I cannot forget how inspirational watching human beings on the surface of the moon was to me at a young age, and I have to hope children now can find the same kind of inspiration.
Assuming, of course, they and their parents even knew it was happening.
useless natural history trivia III
1.Birds have two sets of vocal cords – not one. There’s a set in each bronchus, and the structure is known as the syrinx. A bird can literally make two different sounds at once. A bird is a duet.2. Uniquely among modern primates, male humans don’t have a baculum.
The baculum is a bone that forms in a male’s unmentionable. You can remember the groups where it occurs with a simple acronym – Primates (except humans), Rodents, certain “Insectivorans” (shrews, etc.), Carnivorans, and Chiroperans (bats). PRICC. And they sometimes show up in whales (Cetacea).
The baculum of a gorilla is surprisingly small, given the size of the animal.
I have a replica of a walrus baculum I use in my classes. They're used as clubs by people indigenous to the walrus' range, and the Inuit word for this is "oosik." You can buy one from Bone Clones. When I first point out what it is, about half of the class suddenly feels inadequate. This is because it’s about 2 feet long.
And when I point to the healed fracture, those same students begin to draw their knees together in a defensive position.
No matter how bad things get, I say while pointing this out, they can always get worse.
3.Speaking of unmentionables and making men feel inadequate, snakes and lizards don’t just have one such structure. They have two.
(They only use one at a time.)
4. If you’re going to dress like a vampire for Halloween, please – do it properly!
A vampire’s fangs are nearly always depicted as the canines or second (lateral) incisors. They’re the canines in Hammer Film’s Dracula moves with Christopher Lee, the Blade franchise, Queen of the Damned (2002), and the animated Hotel Transylvania movies. They’re the second incisors in The Lost Boys (1986), Interview with the Vampire (1994), and the HBO True Blood series. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) does it both ways – they’re the canines for Dracula, but the second incisors for his brides.
But in an actual vampire bat, the fangs are the central (first) incisors. If you want to do a proper vampire costume, the fangs should be at the center of your mouth – not the sides.
This has been depicted accurately only twice – Count Orlock in the 1922 version of Nosferatu and a character appearing on a brand of cereal made by General Mills.
In fact, fangs weren’t a part of vampire lore until they showed up in moves. Bram Stoker wrote that all of Dracula’s teeth were sharp, which is sort of consistent with depictions in both versions of Salem’s Lot and the 2024 version of Nosferatu, though the teeth weren’t really emphasized in the novel, indicating that what’s shown in these movies exaggerates what Stoker had in mind. And in all of Bela Lugosi’s portrayals of a vampire beginning with 1930’s Dracula, he was never shown with fangs.
Stoker was also the first person to associate vampires with bats. But that’s got nothing to do with anything.
useless natural history trivia II
Some people seem to appreciate this, so I'll keep doing this on a weekly basis unless I'm told to knock it off. I won't run out of trivia.
1. Lamnid sharks (great whites, makos, etc.) are warm-blooded. So are xiphiids (swordfish, marlin, etc.) and tunas. Indeed, so are leatherback sea turtles, uniquely among turtles.
Lamnid endothermy (warm-bloodedness) doesn't work like ours. Mammals and birds have more mitochondria in their cells than related ectotherms. Mitochondria convert sugar into energy, releasing heat as they do so. But lamnids have specialized muscles in their body cores that repeatedly flex, generating heat the same way we do when we walk around in cold weather.
This, by the way, is why white sharks are infamous for attacks off the coasts of South Africa, California, New England, and southern Australia, but shark attacks in Polynesia, or the Atlantic coast south of Long Island are likelier to come from tiger or bull sharks. White sharks like cold water, where their preferred prey (seals and sea lions) can be found in abundance.
2. Crocodylians cannot stick out their tongues. Their tongues are completely fastened to the lower jaw. (Don’t believe me? Show me an alligator or crocodile sticking its tongue out. Using a scalpel to loosen it is cheating.)
3. Botany helped win the Second World War. Geoffrey Tandy, a marine biologist and expert on seaweed, worked at Bletchley Park, where the British were working to break Axis codes. As it happens, the techniques used to preserve delicate water plants are also highly effective at preserving water-logged paper with writing on it, such as the code books being fished out of wrecked German ships. There's a legend that Tandy ended up at Bletchley Park because someone confused the word “cryptogam” (a commonly-used term at the time for seaweeds and related forms) with “cryptogram," but although I think the world is a cooler place if this is true, it might not be.
4. The beak of a sword-billed hummingbird is longer than the rest of the bird.
5. The fastest land mammal today is the cheetah. The second-fastest, however, is the pronghorn antelope of North America. Nothing today in North America can catch a pronghorn at full run without a motorized vehicle. But until about 16,000 years ago, there was a cat closely related to the mountain lion that had independently evolved the proportions and adaptations for speed seen in cheetahs. The pronghorn evolved great speed to escape a predator that no longer exists.
(Actual cheetahs are also related to mountain lions. Cheetahs are big, and they’re cats, but they’re not big cats in the evolutionary sense. Big cats like lions, tigers, leopards, and jaguars are pantherines. They roar. Cheetahs are felines, and they don’t roar.)
6. The earliest camels appeared around 45 million years ago. For the first 40 million of that, camels were found in North America and nowhere else. There were antelope-like camels and giraffe-like camels. About 5 million years ago, one camel lineage crossed the Bering Land Bridge to Asia, giving rise to modern dromedaries and Bactrian camels. 3 million years ago, a second lineage moved down into South America and became the ancestors of today’s guanacos and vicunas, which were domesticated to become llamas and alpacas. And then, they died out in North America.
Useless Natural History Trivia
I've made some comments in recent posts that included factoids some people seemed to find interesting. I'm a systematist, so most of the superfluous facts in my head are about biodiversity - but here's more natural history trivia you'd only need if you're on Jeopardy someday -
1. There are two kinds of sloth - the two-toed sloth and three-toed sloth. Both are arboreal. But each evolved into a tree sloth independently from a separate ground sloth ancestor.
2. The stinger of an ant, bee, or wasp is the same as the ovipositor in other insects. This is the structure females use to lay eggs. This is why male ants, bees, and wasps cannot sting you.
3. The jackrabbit is a hare. There's a difference between a rabbit and a hare.
4. Likewise, the fur seal is a kind of sea lion. There's a difference.
5. Lungfish are more closely related to us than they are to other bony fish. And crocodiles are more closely related to birds than they are to lizards or turtles.
6. Many marsupial groups have evolved to resemble placentals - wombats look like woodchucks, Tasmanian devils look like wolverines, sugar gliders resemble flying squirrels and flying lemurs (which neither fly nor are lemurs), marsupial moles look a lot like our moles, and so on. But no marsupial has ever evolved hooves, and no marsupial has ever evolved flippers. This is, at least partly, because they're born at a much earlier developmental stage than placentals, but require a grasping hand to crawl from the birth canal through mom's fur to reach the pouch. You can't grasp things with a flipper or a hoof.
7. There's a giant vampire bat in the fossil record. Its name - I'm not kidding - is Desmotis draculae, and it's from Cuba. It was about 30 percent larger than a modern vampire bat, but modern vampire bats have wingspans of something like 8 inches, so this wasn't something that would carry you off to its castle. (There are birds in the fossil record with wingspans approaching 20 feet, but the largest bats in the fossil record are no bigger than the largest flying foxes and fruit bats of today.)
Maybe more next week? Let me know if there's interest.
It's the stupidity, stupid.
That should be the soundbite.
In 1992, it was "it's the economy, stupid." It's the economy now, too, but it's so much more. It's the grotesque incompetence. Every aspect of this administration screams it. His prosecutors can't get indictments and are regularly tossed out for not being legally appointed. His Secretary of HHS is a national joke - and not a very funny one, because the issues are so serious. He started a war he can't justify, and it's not going very well. He hasn't fooled anyone that this war, and the one in Venezuela, and his pushiness over Greenland, and his other stupid acts aren't efforts to distract us from the Epstein files and the crimes of ICE.
And the economy is going down the toilet, too.
I think incompetence is the one thing everyone sees. Even some conservatives are seeing it. It's becoming impossible to pretend the dementia patient in the White House knows what he's doing, and those who try are getting laughed at.
I think we're finally reaching the tipping point I keep saying might come one day - the one predicted by evolutionary biology. Runaway selection. If something is very attractive to the opposite sex, it tends to evolve very rapidly, even to the point of being deleterious to the one bearing it. Peacock tail feathers are an example. It's going to be tough for many Republicans to win their primaries without Trump's base, but just as tough to win the general election with them.
I won't make predictions, but it certainly seems that way to me.
So I did a thing (new fossil crocodile that ate our ancestors) -
I'm involved with this, sorta kinda:
https://www.discovermagazine.com/a-massive-pliocene-crocodile-may-have-hunted-lucy-and-other-early-hominins-3-million-years-ago-48801
Quick rundown - Hadar is a set of paleontological/paleoanthropological sites in the Afar region of Northeastern Ethiopia dating to between 3.0 and 3.5 million years ago. That's where Lucy is from - the female Australopithecus afarensis specimen discovered in 1974 that caused a real sensation. She was the most completely-known early human relative known at the time, and her remains are still central to our understanding of human origins.
I don't actually care about any of that. I don't do mammals. But the crocodile from the site turns out to be a new species, and the new publication names and describes it. Its name, Crocodylus lucivenator, basically means "hunter of Lucy."
It preserves a weird combination of character states that made it difficult to assess. At the moment, it's best viewed as part of an extinct radiation of crocodiles unrelated to the modern Nile crocodile that flourished in East Africa between 7.2 and 0.5 million years ago. But it also shares similarities with modern crocodiles, in particular those currently found in the Western Hemisphere (e.g. American Crocodile, Cuban crocodile, and so on).
To the casual observer, C. lucivenator would be neither more nor less exciting than any modern crocodile. But it was the largest predator in Lucy's ecosystem, and to the connoisseur of crocodile evolution, it tells an interesting story.
And by "involved with this, sorta kinda," I mean I'm the lead author. I know I shouldn't brag, but I don't get to very often these days.
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