A group of scientists in Germany have studied a type of black pitch named birch tar (sometimes called birch bark pitch), claimed to be the “oldest synthetic substance made by early humans”. This substance has been found in Neanderthal sites and was used as an adhesive in tools and artefacts. It also has waterproofing and […]
Researchers in New Guinea have identified two new bird species that have toxic feathers. The regent whistler and the rufous-naped bellbird were found to contain a toxic substance named Batrachotoxin (BTX) in their feathers and bodies. This substance is better known from the skin of poison dart frogs. Poison dart frogs do not produce this […]
Scientists looking for the origin of Earth’s water have been studying the composition of meteorites. According to current theories of planet formation the earth was formed by gas, dust and rocky objects called planetesimals coalescing to form a solid rocky planet, and this process results in the formation of a hot molten mass that must […]
An international team of scientists asked people from 10 widely different cultures to rate how pleasant they found 10 distinctive scents. The research was carried out in diverse communities across the world, including hunter-gatherer societies, agricultural societies and urban societies. The scents were presented in the form of identical odour dispensers shaped like pens, so […]
When the human genome was first presented to the world it had many gaps in it, especially from regions where there were lots of repetitive sequences. These tended to be around the two ends of each chromosome, called telomeres, and around a region called the centromere, where the chromosomes are held together and then separated […]
Keratin socks it to evolution, as our Tasmanian colleague Craig Hawkins exposes Australian sock producer Merino Threads, who proudly proclaims on its sock packaging that Keratin based merino wool is “Nature’s evolution tested renewable performance fibre”, that it will “outperform any synthetic fibre” and that “No synthetic fibre can match the complexity and performance of […]
Rock hard skeletons resist climate change, according to articles in Rutgers University News 8 April 2021, SciTech Daily 18 April 2021 and, Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 24 February 2021, doi: 10.1098/rsif.2020.0859. Coral reefs are formed as coral animals lay down a hard rock-like material that consists of the mineral aragonite, a type of […]
Photosynthesis “old as life”, according to articles in Imperial College London News 16 March 2021 and ScienceDaily 24 March 2021, and Biochimica et Biophysica Acta (BBA) – Bioenergetics, published online 19 February 2021, doi: 10.1016/j.bbabio.2021.148400. The oxygen producing process of photosynthesis in green plants, algae and cyanobacteria begins with water molecules being split by an […]
Japanese bring asteroid sample back to earth and all types of claims emerge about finally finding the origin of the solar system and life. Over the past few years scientists have sent probes to the far reaches of the solar system and collected comet dust, meteorites and now asteroid material, all with the purpose of […]
Mosquitoes analyse flower chemistry, according to reports in ScienceDaily 22 January 2020 and The Daily University of Washington 6 February 2020 and PNAS 7 January 2020, doi:10.1073/pnas.1910589117. Although mosquitoes have a well-earned reputation for biting people and sucking blood, their main food source is flower nectar. As explained by Jeffrey Riffell, a professor of biology […]