Daily Archives: June 22, 2006

Ever wanted to see the inside of a dinosaur?

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Great Falls Tribune => Mummified Brachylophosaurus holds secrets millions of years old

A couple months ago, I reported about Leonardo, the most amazingly preserved fossil. Leonardo mummified before fossilizing, making him an unbelievably preserved specimen, complete with tissue that normally does not fossilize, like his beak, his toenails, skin and even the contents of his stomach!

Now, they’ve begun the painstaking process of X-raying the entire mummy. With the technology available, it’s quite possible that the organs are still intact and can be revealed through the X-rays.

The Discovery channel is spending 10 months making a documentary on it. I can hardly wait!

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June: A good month for ancient spiders

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BBC News => Ancient Web Spins Evolutionary Story
It’s been a good month for spiders trapped in amber… well, as much anyone can say you’re having a good month when you’ve been trapped in amber 100+ million years…

Earlier this month we reported that the oldest triue orb web spinning spider had been found in amber now the oldest actual silk web and prey have been found encased in amber.

From the BBC:

The find, described in Science, sheds light on the early evolution of spiders and the insects they fed on.

The web consists of some 26 silk strands preserved in a thin layer of amber together with arachnid prey.

Although it is not intact, enough of the web structure has survived to convince its discovers – from the University of Barcelona, Spain, and the American Museum of Natural History, New York, US – that it was probably a classical wheel-shaped, or orb, web.

It is possibly the oldest spider web on record; an earlier single strand of spider silk preserved in Lebanese amber has been discovered although it is unclear if this was part of a true web.

The prey found was a parasitic wasp.

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Reader’s Digest fails to digest the Whole Picture…

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The Taipei Kid => Taipei Tops for Rudeness (WTF?)
The China Post => New Yorkers most polite, Taipei residents among the rudest

My wife brought a Chinese-language news article siting a Reader’s Digest article to my attention the other day. Apparently Taipei came out at or near the bottom in terms of the Digest’s rudeness scale for cities. The article she was reading was in Chinese, so there wasn’t much point in my blogging it – and naturally, I haven’t read it, but the China Post has reported on it in English. (Found this by way of the Taipei Kid.)

Apparently the folks are the Digest secretly followed people around and observed things such things as opening doors, saying “thank you”, helping people pick things up that are dropped, etc. – All definitions of politeness entirely by Western standards. I don’t blame the people of Taipei for being miffed about this.

My experience has always been that people – at least those that have any real reason to interact with me – are kind to the point of being almost annoying. They try to do everything they can for you, even if you don’t want them to.

As for complete strangers… well, they exist in a state of polite indifference, but none have ever been rude to me.

The survey is a crock.

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