“Landing on the tarmac is something planes routinely do — in fact, it’s where they usually land — but with a jetpack, something unfortunate happens when the pilot lands on concrete. The jet turbines on the pilot’s back blow 800-degree exhaust on to the ground, and this heat has nowhere to go but out, spreading across the pavement like a bomb radius.”
“Searle looked at two other locations much further to the south: the Azores and Madeira — and in both places they found mice there carried the same genetic signature as that carried by the Viking mouse. Crucially, they found very few mice that carried genetic signatures like those found in mouse populations in Portugal, whose mariners were also reckoned to be the first to settle on these islands.”