“The original silphion was said to have appeared suddenly, after a great
downpour. Miski observed that, when rains came to Cappadocia in April, Ferula
drudeana would spring from the ground, growing up to six feet in just over a
month.”
Taras Grescoe, Alice Zoo, and Nirupa Rao ,
This miracle plant was eaten into extinction 2,000 years ago — or was it?
(National Geographic ,
September 23, 2022 )
posted 10/19/2022 8:00pm ∞
“[P]eople who were homozygous (had two copies) of this protective gene variant
involved in antigen presentation were 40 percent more likely to survive the
plague than those with two copies of a deleterious variant, which encodes a
broken protein.”
posted 11/3/2022 8:00pm ∞
“[I]t turned out that the strain of plague that ravaged northern Kyrgyzstan in
1338–1339 was an ancestor of every other 14th-century plague genome that has
ever been sequenced. The plague strain from the Lake Issyk-Kul villages also
seems to be the most recent common ancestor of four Y. pestis lineages that
circulate in modern rodent populations.”
posted 9/25/2022 8:00pm ∞
“The Norse may have been at the site slightly earlier, but they were definitely
there and cutting down trees by 1021. Based on the development stages of
certain cells in the waney layer, Dee, Kuitems, and their colleagues say that
one of the trees was cut down in the spring, while another was cut down in the
summer or fall.”
Kiona N. Smith ,
Vikings were in North America by 1021 CE
(Ars Technica ,
October 20, 2021 )
posted 8/18/2022 8:00pm ∞
“[T]he Iron Age sample also had a high abundance of two species of fungi:
Penicillium roqueforti — commonly used in the fermentation of cheese — and
Saccharomyces cerevisiae , used for fermenting bread and alcoholic beverages
like beer, mead, and wine.”
posted 8/16/2022 8:00pm ∞