Graham's your news-hound today, so if you detect any slight Hawkwind overtones in the subject titles, don't be surprised...
The Elements that Gather Here...
Discoveries continue at the La Brea Tar Pits (Los Angeles) and I even like the name of their current news-making endeavour: Project 23. A prosaic name, but it appeals. Perhaps it carries echoes of Area 51 or Hanger 18, or whatever.
"...an endeavor of discovery and research so enormous that it could potentially rewrite the scientific account of the world-famous La Brea Tar Pits and their surrounding area....
"Most rare of all is a well-preserved male Columbian mammoth fossil, about 80% complete, with 10-feet long intact tusks found in an ancient river bed near the other discoveries. This latter fossil is the first complete individual mammoth to have been found in Rancho La Brea. In recognition of the importance of the find, paleontologists at the Page Museum have nicknamed the mammoth 'Zed.' "
Zed? Find out why, at Vast Cache Of Ice-age Fossils Uncovered.
In Here We Are
Professor Paul Davies, a physicist at Arizona State University, is calling for new thinking on the search for alien life... right here on Earth. Has life has evolved on Earth more than once, a recent symposium has asked.
"We don't have to go to other planets to find weird life," he says. "It could be right in front of our noses - or even in our noses."
OK, then: you have been warned. More here.
Every Time I Go Out, I Think I'm Being Checked Out....
It's not only humans that are being computer-logged and monitored by the authorities. Now, it's bacteria too.
"A new website has been launched which allows scientists everywhere to collaborate on the identification of bacterial strains. This new resource ... provides a portal for electronic bacterial taxonomy."
Professor Brian G Spratt of Imperial College, London, says: "Bacteria are currently assigned to species by cumbersome procedures and every unknown bacterial isolate has to be compared to many others to find out what species it is. Our website functions as a kind of taxonomic wikipedia, allowing many hands to make short work of the entire process".
More on this here.
And on the CFZ front, we've just been donated a computer and monitor, so I'll be testing that out, this weekend.
I'll do a blogs news round-up tomorrow. Cheers!
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