Matilda's Lab Newsletter #56
This week we catch up on our holiday which featured a run in with the fire brigade, dolphins (just), dogs, smores, hill forts, more dogs and the beauty of Wales.
Catch up time. It’s been an eventful few weeks.
What we’ve been up to
Holiday! We ended the workweek early to set off on the nearly 4 hour journey towing our caravan down to New Quay on Cardigan Bay in Wales. We travelled in convoy with our friends. This was our first trip in the caravan for more than a long weekend and the first trip with Edison so we were slightly nervous about how the 4 month old puppy would cope. Our friends came with their 7 dogs (2 of which are under a year old), so we were going to make an impression pretty much anywhere that we went.
There was too much happening to update on everything so here here some selected highlights.
Regular readers may recall (from newsletter 35) that I’m a bit of jinx on whale watching trips. I’m also undeterred, so we took a boat ride in New Quay where there is a resident population of dolphins all year, and yes that includes the 9 dogs. We’d even seen some breaking the surface from the shore earlier. So was the cure finally broken?
Yes and no. I saw a dolphin and the kids saw a dolphin, but Cat didn’t. They were around sporadically and you had to be looking in just the right place and at the right time to spot one. But dolphins aside, the boat ride was lovely. We saw a grey seal, gannets, razorbills, kittiwakes and lots of other birds on the cliff-face nesting sites. Even without the animals, the landscape is beautiful.
New Quay itself is a lovely little town with plenty of places to where you can cover your 3 year old with ice cream.
Following a long weekend in New Quay, we received the rainiest day of the week for packing up and moving to our next stop: Llanidloes in mid-Wales.
On our first day of walking into the town, we were overtaken by a fire engine on our way back to the campsite. Hopefully there was no issue at the campsite, anyway the siren wasn’t on so no need for concern. We arrived at the campsite to find the fire engine parked up next to the river. There was a volunteer team on board and training. They had come to the site to hose some water and to let all the kids on site have a go!
Llanidloes is the first town on the course of the countries longest river, the Severne. One of the sources that feeds the river is Llyn (lake) Clywedog, which is a dammed lake. We went to see this dam, which has a cafe on the viewpoint. Bad news: the cafe was closed! Good news: there was a hillfort on top of the hill! Happy days. Matilda had a half term challenge to get a picture reading a book in an unusual place. This seems like as good a place as any.
The rest of the holiday was good times, with good friends, good food (including smores) and well needed break from the daily grind.
New Blog content
After much rewriting and trying to figure out what to include in the illustration (because none of it is really appropriate to the specifics of the post), I finally got around to publishing the next instalment of the history of science.
The Nucleotides is now available on the streaming platforms, even if it has taken me a while to get around to promoting it.
From the Archive
The last thing shared from the archive was another previous edition of the history of science. Pottery.
Science News
I’ve not had much time to keep an eye on the news recently, but these are the stories that I have clocked:
I noticed a lot stories about neaderthals so I thought that I should go with one of them. The oldest human virus has been discovered in the skeleton of a neanderthal.
Sticking with neanderthals, we know than our ancestors used to breed with them. Now we know when an for how long. Interbreeding between humans and neanderthals and humans occured 47,000 years ago and lasted 6,800 years.
Kicking back
Time for some fun:
And people says that maths isn’t fun…
Select a secure PIN. Not your date of birth.
I’ve got a research grant, a cow and tin of spraypaint: hit it!
That’s it for this week.
Please feel free to get in contact with any questions, suggestions or comments either via Substack or at matildaslab@gmail.com.
Please share this with anyone who you think will appreciate it. And remember to share with me any cool sciencey stuff that you find to make sure that I can pack this newsletter with best new science content each week.
Until next time, remember that one person’s old news is another’s revelation; so explore. Sometimes it’s not about being the first up the hill. The view’s still going to be breath-taking, no matter how many people have seen it before you.