Matilda's Lab Newsletter #67
This week, I get immunity and a frog in my house! There is a tough octopus boss, a bulbous planet, a brand new ghost-shark, bio-secure ants and an orca wielding a knife.
What we’ve been up to
I skipped the newsletter again last week. It was never going to happen.
The week started with me travelling 3 hours across the country for work because I had to start an audit at an unreasonably early hour. I showered into the biosecure facility at just after 5am. It was almost as soon as I turned the shower off that I realised that I had left my breakfast in the car. By the time I was finished and could get to it, the time was 12:30; so I bypassed breakfast and went straight to lunch, before my 3-hour drive home again.
Wednesday was a more normal day, but I did need to get my seasonal flu-vaccination. These are provided by my work. Not for my protection, but for the protection of the turkeys that we farm. It is possible for turkeys to get influenza from humans, and given the risks of having influenza in domesticated birds, it makes flu a death sentence for any farmed birds that get it. If the flu doesn’t kill them, the authorities will. So I had my jab. I have a bit of a chequered past with reactions to this vaccination in the past, so let’s see what I get this year.
That evening, it was another high school open day for Matilda. A lot of what was on offer was similar to the last one. Matilda once again was far too keen to stick her fingers into a pig’s internal organs. What was nice was that Nathaniel was able to be much more involved this time. He was even allowed to burn various powers in a Bunsen burner to create different coloured flames. We all had fun and ended up being one of the last families to leave.
The next morning, the vaccine was showing its hand. It wasn’t too bad, just fatigue; but a lot of fatigue that hounded me for the rest of the week.
Other points of note for that week. What slight suggestion of summer may have been alluded to during the middle of this year well and truly departed. The rain bordered on biblical. So much so that we discovered a frog outside our garage. A particularly adventurous frog, because when I headed upstairs to bed that night, I found it in the house. Next to our closed front door. The back door had been open for the dogs, so the little fella must have hopped all the way through the house!
The turn in weather also started to make quince fall from our tree, so it looked like it was harvest time!
Cat and Matilda went off to another dog show at the weekend, so Nathaniel and I hit the zoo again. I decided to take him onto the boat ride that he had never been on before. He said he didn’t like it. It was too slow (fair comment). It entirely stopped for a while. Fortunately, it did this right next to the gibbons, which are always entertaining.
We also encountered some of the boldest starlings that I’ve ever seen; when food is about, at least.
New Blog content
The only update this week has been the map of life again. I’m doing okay with this at the moment. I added the medicinal leech this week, in another effort to include a currently underrepresented branch of life.
Lunar light remains the newest release on the music side of things. I played it on stage this last week, for the first time in its current incarnation. It felt very strange. The only solution is more practice, so I guess that means that I’ll have to play it a lot more.
From the Archive
In the featured posts, we unearthed an old fossil (insert your own jokes).
Science News
Octopuses are an anomaly in many ways. One enigma is why these solitary animals are so intelligent, a trait normally associated with social species. Octopuses do partake in teamwork, but with predatory fish. New footage shows an Octopus punching a fish that was not co-operating sufficiently well. Tough boss!
Regular readers will notice some themes in the news stories that feature here. Here is one of them: bizarre exoplanets. The star WASP-107 has a planet with a bulge. WASP-107b is the size of Jupiter, but only a 10th of its mass. It’s also close to its parent star. The gravitational forces are pulling the atmosphere away from the planet.
A superorganism is a group of animals that behave like parts of a single creature. The classic example is ants, where individuals sacrifice their own reproduction for the benefit of the colony and the production of closely related clones. It turns out that superorganisms can have an immune system of sorts. Ants suffering from a viral infection change the structure of their nest to minimise the spread of the virus through the colony.
Another theme that I enjoy is cartilaginous fish, not just sharks and rays. The holocephali used to a massive sister group to the sharks and rays. They are all extinct now, except for the chimera. About 50 species remain, and now one more. A new species of ‘ghost shark’ has been discovered off New Zealand.
The Nazca lines are ancient drawings on the Peruvian desert. Only visible from the air, no one really understands what they were made for (aliens, of course (shhh, don’t tell anyone)). Now AI has helped identify many more drawings that have become obscured over the centuries, including a knife wielding orca?
Kicking back
What bizarre or cool stuff have I found online recently (other than knife wielding orca):
A little something for those who believe that science is no place for political correctness.
Fear the AI, although not necessarily for the reasons you may think.
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 the 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 breathtaking, no matter how many people have seen it before you.