“Settlements typically include a small group — usually a few dozen people — branching off from a larger population on the island of origin. By chance, a few of the genetic variants that are rare in the large population would be common in the settlers.”
“Tromelin Island had its rats eradicated in 2005 and has since seen an eightfold increase in seabirds. Six locally extinct species of seabirds have also returned.”
“A major reason that these odd-sided cells were necessary is that the bees will start building at different sites by making honeycombs with different orientations. Thus, as these different segments grow to meet each other, their hexagonal arrays will be oriented with incompatible angles.”
“Dupree and her colleagues suggested that as the star expanded in one of its usual cycles, a portion of the surface accelerated much more rapidly, thanks to a convection cell that had traveled from the interior of the star to its surface. Those two events combined pushed out sufficient material far enough from the star that it cooled down, forming stardust. That dust could account for the dimming.”
“This latest detection is a neutrino that began its journey in a faraway, as yet-unnamed-galaxy in the constellation Delphinus, born from the death throes of a shredded star.”
“The findings suggest that some of the most important members of our gastrointestinal menagerie—the ‘keystone taxa,’ as Candela and his colleagues put it—have been with us even longer than modern humans have existed.”
“The lone teenager carrying the toddler cut across that route at a right angle. At least three times, mammoths crossed the teenager’s trail, obscuring the small human footprints with their own massive feet. The teenager stepped in some of those fresh mammoth tracks on their way back south-southeast.”
“The reverberation time lasted about 0.6 seconds inside [Stonehenge’s] circle for mid-frequency sounds—ideal for amplifying human speech, or the sounds of musical instruments like drums.”
“Cattle with the painted eyes on their rumps were significantly more likely to survive than those cattle that had crosses painted on their butts and those that weren’t painted at all.”
“The researchers started rolling d20s: they set primordial black holes to an arbitrary low number and then concluded that capturing a black hole is about as likely as capturing a wandering planet.”
“Flint-knapping in bed is probably an even worse idea than eating crackers in bed, but it’s a delightfully human thing to find traces of. Grains of red and orange ocher also mingled with the bedding layers, and Wadley and her colleagues say the grains had probably rubbed off from someone’s body art.”
“The researchers conclude the South American DNA was introduced in the Marquesas, a group of islands northeast of Tahiti, shortly after 1100 CE. Over the next hundred years, it spread south from there and eventually on to Rapa Nui.”
“The Okmok II eruption lasted from 43 BCE to 41 BCE, but its effects on the other side of the world lasted more than a decade. Ancient writers describe crop failures and famine in northern Italy and northern Greece from April 43 BCE through 36 BCE.”
“Grotte de Cussac [is] the only site from this period where people buried their dead deep in the interior of a cave (or in a bear nest), mingled the bones of multiple people, or removed skulls from the dead.”
“This single discarded piece of ancient chewing gum tells us that the ancient woman … was probably lactose intolerant, ate duck and hazelnuts, and may recently have had pneumonia. She also had blue eyes, dark brown hair, and dark skin.”