That's Interesting!

NEW YORK (AP) — The space between stars just got a little sweeter. Astronomers have detected a type of sugar in space that’s also found in raspberriesand self-tanners. The sugar, called erythrulose, lurks in what’s called the interstellar medium: thin clouds of gas and dust littered between stars. Sugar does more than sweeten tea and powder doughnuts. Different varieties fuel our cells and even make up DNA. Scientists are itching to know how sugars form because they’re a key ingredient for life as we know it. Using two dish-shaped radio telescopes in Spain, researchers collected data from a large gas cloud near the center of the Milky Way. They identified the sugar in gas…

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.

LONDON (AP) — A massive ancient oak tree linked to the legend of Robin Hood may have been loved to death. The 1,200-year-old Major Oak in Sherwood Forest is believed to have died after it didn’t sprout leaves this spring, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds said Thursday. Visitors over the past two centuries who viewed the tree’s gnarled limbs and sprawling canopy in Nottingham compressed the soil, making it difficult for rain to reach its roots, the conservation group said. The forest has been under threat for years and the tree had been rumored to have died in the past — only to have the group confirm it was still alive. That is no longer the case. “The tree’s…

Would you consider living in a place like this? If you were in charge of design, what would you do in our own Arnot Mall?

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

NEW YORK (AP) — A surprising gut feeling may help pigeons find their way home. Animals use various techniques to navigate including following the stars and remembering key landmarks. Birds, fish and turtles orient themselves using Earth’s magnetic field as a compass. But it’s not yet clear how exactly they do this. Pigeons are a well-known group of frequent flyers that can traverse hundreds of miles (hundreds of kilometers) in a single day. For thousands of years, humans have used them to carry news, notes and military messages. Scientists have long tried to untangle how pigeons travel without getting lost. Some think the birds detect magnetic cues using light-sensitive m…

Cornell professor of entomology, Bryan Danforth, and his research assistant, Henry Steig, are walking slowly through Webster Union Cemetery, eyes to the ground, when Danforth sees it. A cloud of dozens of bees, swirling and darting close to the earth. "Whoa, look at this! We did not waste our time," Danforth told Steig, who is an undergraduate at Cornell studying entomology. They were in Rochester last week to put a theory to the test. Their question: Are graveyards natural gathering places for ground-nesting bees? What brought them here was a remarkable discovery at East Lawn Cemetery in Ithaca in 2022: an aggregation of bees thought to be among the largest in the world.…

Let's have another ongoing thread, this time the focus being interesting trivia and tid bits of info. First up, have you ever wondered the origin of the term, "spick and span"? Reportedly, it comes from an old Norse word for nail which is "spik," referring to shiny, bright new nails on a ship. The word "span" is said to be derived from the Old Norse spánn (meaning chip or shaving of wood), which gave rise to the Middle English term "span-new" (meaning fresh from the carpenter's knife). Sometime around the 1300's the term "span-new" began to be used, meaning something is brand new. By the mid-16th century, the phrase was expanded to "spick-and-span-new". Sailors and shipw…

Seven years ago, Lisa Anderson surveyed what then seemed like an insurmountable task: sifting 70 dump-truck piles of soil filled with 18th-century human bones. It took 15 months of sifting and years of piecing back together what they could of the Continental Army soldiers. Anderson, one of the bioarchaeologists at the New York State Museum, would count femurs and 833 teeth to determine that contractors digging an apartment building foundation in the village of Lake George had disturbed 44 graves. Most of the remains were that of young men in their teens and twenties and a few older than 40. One was a child younger than 10 and one was a young woman. On Wednesday, they al…

NEW YORK (AP) — A biotech company that aims to resurrect lost creatures said Tuesday it has hatched live chicks in an artificial environment — a development that was met with mixed reviews from scientists and critics of its de-extinction mission. Twenty-six baby chickens — ranging from a few days to several months old — were born from a 3D printed lattice structure that mimics an eggshell, according to Colossal Biosciences. Colossal previously announced it had genetically engineered living animals to resemble extinct species, including mice with long hair like the woolly mammoth and wolf pups that take after dire wolves. Colossal’s CEO Ben Lamm said the artificial egg tec…

An asteroid roughly the size of one to two school buses will fly by Earth Monday, coming as close as 91,593 kilometers (56,913 miles), according to the European Space Agency — equivalent to about one quarter of the distance between Earth and the moon. Astronomers at the Mount Lemmon Survey in Tucson, Arizona, discovered the asteroid on May 10 and named it 2026JH2. The object belongs to a class of asteroids called Apollo, which orbit the sun on trajectories that intersect with Earth’s own orbit around the sun. At its closest pass, 2026JH2 will be about 24% of the average distance between Earth and the moon, and about two and a half times the distance at which hundreds of g…

You can read a little more about this here.

Archaeologists working in southern Italy have identified a Romanfortification built to contain the slave revolt leader Spartacus and his army. Researchers have concluded that the wall, which extends over 2.7 kilometers (1.7 miles), was built by the Roman general Marcus Licinius Crassus in 71 BCE. Spartacus served in the Roman army before becoming a bandit and being caught and sold as a slave. He escaped from a gladiator school in 73 BC with around 70 other slaves, and would eventually lead a slave revolt that took over most of southern Italy with around 90,000 men. Read the rest here. While this article is from 2024, I only just heard about it last night while I was wa…

by Karen Stollznow You’ve probably seen it on social media before: a paragraph of scrambled text that looks like nonsense at first glance, yet somehow you can read it with surprising ease. Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteers be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. This effect, often playfully referred to as typoglycemia, is frequently shared online as a quirky insight into how our brains work. …

This looks neat!! Check out out!

Reed, who studies the speech variations of the Appalachian region, uses the concept "rootedness." It's the local attachment people place onto pronunciations and certain words, he said. "[With] a pronunciation like 'warsh,' it's always the stories about someone's aunt or their grandfather or their grandmother, their mama or their papa," Reed said. "These pronunciations and these words stick around because they are meaningful," he continued. They're indicative of home. In a park in southeast Baltimore, near where filmmaker John Waters shot his 1980s classic Hairspray, which features the classic Baltimore accent, locals and transplants alike offered their perspectives on the…

This is neat! A NASA website that converts your name to pics from satellites https://science.nasa.gov/specials/your-name-in-landsat/?fbclid=IwY2xjawReosFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZA80MDk5NjI2MjMwODU2MDkAAR4aF9luj_hgkkffMDsBU-YTpIW-7z3ATlTkUkwaMPBiTJTewgS9zod_OVeDTA_aem_380DrPfiPRiNXq2wzQvP0Q

Dogs have been man’s best friend for a long, long time. The beloved animals were living alongside humans in western Eurasia around 14,000 to 16,000 years ago—before humans developed agriculture—according to two studies published in the journal Nature on March 25. The findings push back the earliest genetic evidence of a domesticated canine by about 5,000 years and provide new insights about how dogs spread. Today’s barking furry friends descended from ancient wolves, but researchers aren’t sure exactly when domestication began. An analysis published in 2015 that involved computer simulations of the canine family tree suggests that the split occurred around 27,000 to 40,00…

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…