Month: September 2023

[This is excellent. A lovely simulation with fascinating lessons in it. Timber is able to handle earthquakes to an amazing degree!!! Jan]

Here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynxj-KTAoyo

[Nuclear rocket engines are very important. This is the best solution to space travel for now and for quite a long time. This will be awesome. Jan]

Here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnAOvjcxcwM

[A short video showing how weird Komodo Dragon venom is. Jan]

Here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/LYRTAILzHGI

[This is very important. Some people might not know this. Jan]

Here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2sgWUNWKqE

[Some of this film footage is stunning. Like the White guy who falls unconscious into the water – the shock is so intense. Jan]

Here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/AsX4e8g0Mz8

An "extraordinary" secret fossil spot in Wales contains the preserved eyes and brains of 462 million-year-old creatures hidden amidst a hoard of unknown species, a new study finds.

Last year, weird "bramble snout" fossils were documented at the site called "Castle Bank," but new research published May 1 in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution describes the whole fossil deposit.

Hosting a myriad of soft-bodied marine creatures and their organs, which are scarcely preserved in the fossil record, the site resembles the world-renowned Cambrian deposits of Burgess Shale in Canada and Qingjiang biota in China. The rocks of Castle Bank, however, are 50 million years younger and give researchers a unique window into how soft-bodied life diversified in the Ordovician Period (485.4 million to 443.8 million years ago), according to a statement released by Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales.

Researchers believe they’ve recovered more than 170 species from the site, most of which are new to science. These include what appear to be late examples of Cambrian groups, including the weirdest wonders of evolution, the nozzle-nosed opabiniids, and early examples of animals that evolved later, including barnacles, shrimp and an unidentified six-legged insect-like creature. The rocks are also home to the fossilized digestive systems of trilobites and the eyes and brain of an unidentified arthropod, as well as preserved worms and sponges.

"Every time we go back, we find something new, and sometimes it’s something truly extraordinary," Joseph Botting, an independent researcher and honorary research fellow at Amgueddfa Cymru, said in the statement. "There are a lot of unanswered questions, and this site is going to keep producing new discoveries for decades."

Botting and co-author Lucy Muir discovered the site near their home in Llandrindod Wells during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown. The exact location is a secret for the site’s protection and by request of the landowner, but the authors describe it as a small quarry within a sheep field.

The pair spent more than 100 days at the site, carefully extracting the fossils as the landowner’s sheep watched them work. "The sheep appear to have found us interesting, rather than disruptive," the authors wrote in a reporting summary attached to the study.

Botting and Muir are both independent researchers and not employed as academics, so they crowdfunded to buy a microscope to study the fossils in more detail, many of which were at most 0.1 inch (3 millimeters) long, according to a statement released by the pair. They then teamed up with an international team of colleagues to complete the newly published research.

The ecosystem preserved at Castle Bank may have been a nursery for young animals, with only juvenile examples of the most common trilobite species — named Ogyginus corndensis — found at the site. However, the study authors also noted that the small size of the fossils, in general, was "striking" and may simply be a feature of the community of animals that lived there.

Source: https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/fossils/462-million-year-old-fossilized-eyes-and-brains-uncovered-in-secret-welsh-fossil-site?utm_term=237098

[This is not something that one would even believe is possible. This is amazing. Jan]

One person wrote some interesting comments on this video:

“Not a biologist, but have some basic knowledge of bug anatomy that i kinda remember, insects don’t have a “brain” in their head, they have a series of small brains called a ganglion that are in a few places in their body, so a separate brain would control one pair of legs, and another controls the wings, etc. so this wasp has managed to lose its head, but was not killed by the injury or other problems, which means that its body’s ganglions are intact and controlling the body with not much issue other than that theres no more signals coming from the eyes (and antennae and other head sensors). Not sure why it picked up the head, but for the most part this wasp will be totally fine to fly around until it eventually starves to death in the very near future.“

Here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LmdmltW-XU

Here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6FWsPJJp40

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