That's Interesting!

This will be an ongoing topic sharing some pics and factoids, courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History. Many will feature little-known animals that inhabit our planet today, with the occasional extinct or prehistoric species thrown in for good measure. It's a good way to not only share the wonder of our planet's beautiy, but also a reminder that we're not the only ones who exist on it.

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — A remarkably well-preserved Roman sarcophagus has been unearthed in Hungary’s capital, offering a rare window into the life of the young woman inside and the world she inhabited around 1,700 years ago. Archaeologists with the Budapest History Museum discovered the limestone coffin during a large-scale excavation in Óbuda, a northern district of the city that once formed part of Aquincum, a bustling Roman settlement on the Danube frontier. Untouched by looters and sealed for centuries, the sarcophagus was found with its stone lid still fixed in place, secured by metal clamps and molten lead. When researchers carefully lifted the lid, they uncovered…

This will be an ongoing topic featuring the latest images taken by the James Webb Telescope. All photos are credited to NASA.

ALBANY, NY — Scientists from the New York State Museum, in collaboration with researchers from Princeton University and the Northeast Ecological Recovery Society, have confirmed the first documented case of a wild gray wolf south of the St. Lawrence River in decades. The confirmation is based on extensive analysis of a canid shot by a hunter in Cherry Valley, Otsego County in December 2021. Gray wolves were eliminated from the northeastern United States by the late 19th century. The findings, detailed in a peer-reviewed study led by Dr. Jeremy Kirchman, NYSM Curator of Birds and Mammals, present evidence of occasional long-distance movement of wolves from eastern Canada i…

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by Carl Lipo Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, is often portrayed in popular culture as an enigma. The rationale is clear: The tiny, remote island in the Pacific features nearly 1,000 enormous statues – the moai. The magnitude and number of these monuments defy easy explanation. Since European ships first encountered these stone giants in the 18th century, outsiders have branded the island as fundamentally mysterious, possibly beyond archaeologists’ ability to explain. This characteristic is part of what makes the island famous. Tour operators market the inexplicable. Documentaries promise unsolved puzzles. Popular books ask how “primitive people” could possibly move…

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The night parrot—a brilliantly colored, nocturnal bird—once thrived in Australia’s outback. The arrival of colonists and feral predators, however, brought about an almost catastrophic decline in the species’s population in the late 19th century. In fact, the vibrant, green parrots were believed to be extinct for roughly a century, until one of them was found in western Queensland in 1990. While that was heartening for scientists, there was one problem: The specimen was dead. Then, another dead night parrot was identified 16 years later. It wasn’t until 2013 that a naturalist found a small, living population in southwestern Queensland. Since then, the species’s known popu…

ASM.orgASM Agar Art Contest | OverviewHave you ever seen art created in a petri dish using living, growing microorganisms? That's agar art! ASM's annual Agar Art Contest is a chance for you to use science to show off your creative skills.

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Nearly 300 years after the last execution, Scotland has created an official tartan to memorialize the thousands of people -- overwhelmingly women -- who were persecuted and executed under the Scottish Witchcraft Act between 1563 and 1736. Created by Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi, founders of the Witches of Scotland campaign, the tartan serves as a "living memorial" to honor victims who were falsely accused of conspiring with the devil during Scotland's witch hunts. The design emerged after the duo struggled to find a suitable location and funding for a physical monument, eventually finding inspiration at a tartan exhibition that sparked the idea of creating a wearabl…

VICEScientists Finally Solved the Weird Mystery of the Boomin...For centuries, something beneath Seneca Lake in upstate New York has been making a very loud, very disturbing noise. Locals called it the “Seneca Guns,” a cannon-like boom that erupted without warning

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by Dagomar Degroot In May 2024, part of the Sun exploded. The Sun is an immense ball of superheated gas called plasma. Because the plasma is conductive, magnetic fields loop out of the solar surface. Since different parts of the surface rotate at different speeds, the fields get tangled. Eventually, like rubber bands pulled too tight, they can snap – and that is what they did last year. These titanic plasma explosions, also known as solar flares, each unleashed the energy of a million hydrogen bombs. Parts of the Sun’s magnetic field also broke free as magnetic bubbles loaded with billions of tons of plasma. These bubbles, called coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, crashed t…

Posting this not so much to sell or help someone buy a cuckoo clock, but there's an interesting part that shows how they work.