Matilda's Lab Newsletter #33
We go to Las Vegas, I learn the correct plural for uterus, consider our extinction, pull an all nighter to treat depression, shut down Mars, find a fluffly planet and see the point of wolves.
Viva Las Vegas!
What we’ve been up to
Life has not been service as usual this week I am writing this week’s instalment of the newsletter from sunny Las Vegas!
It’s been a long old year waiting for our holidays to come around, we’ve definitely heavily stacked the back end of the year and we can finally start enjoying the biggest adventure of the year.
This big trip to the USA has brought the end of Nathaniel’s time in private nursery, we couldn’t keep paying those prices for 2 weeks where he isn’t even going to be there. So it was goodbye to one group of friends, but in the New Year he’ll be reunited with many friends who have already made the move to the school nursery.
I’m frequently blown away by how remarkable my children are and they’ve done it again. Having aced a couple of short haul flights a few weeks ago, this week we had a significant step up. A 2 flight journey, where the second flight was ten and half hours long. The coped brilliantly. Unlike in last week’s newsletter, there was barely a drama to report!
Of course, the duration of the journey was only one challenge. Neither of the children have ever had to adjust to more than an hour’s shift in daily routine. Las Vegas is 8 hours behind the UK. This means that the best way to make this adjustment is to stay awake as much as possible on the flight. Nate had a brief nap earlier in the flight and after the managed to stay up until the last couple of hours (which would be 1:30am UK time). Little trooper!
It Nathaniel was good then Matilda was on a completely different level. She didn’t sleep a wink on the flight (even I tried to nap for a hour or so to tide me over). I think that the secret to her success was a constant stream of excitement that has been flowing through her. Much earlier in the year, I mentioned how she properly met her second cousin for the first time, in person. The two of them have been in constant contact ever since, mostly talking about books, and Matilda has been smashing her way through books so that the two of them have more to talk about on this trip. I was thinking that there was no way she could keep it up for the whole journey. She only went and proved me entirely wrong!
Matilda is very familiar with our planet’s place in the solar system and how time zones work around the world, but this was a great opportunity to bring this understanding to life. The sun was setting as we took off from Heathrow, so the whole flight took place in darkness. I explained to Matilda that we would be chasing the sun around half of the Earth, which is why our 10.5 hour flight would look more like 3 hours on a clock. That’s because, whilst we were chasing the sun, we were 3 hours slower. But at around midnight, UK time, I was able to point out the window of the plane to Matilda and show her the final glows of sunlight disappearing behind the shadow of the Earth. That’s not something that you can do everyday.
So we’re Vegas, with family, for thanksgiving; and it’s lovely. Unsurprisingly, we were all up fairly early on thanksgiving morning; so we decided to take an early hike up the Las Vegas strip before everything got too crowded. There were no Bellagio fountains or Mirage volcano as the grandstands and lighting are still be taken down after the first Formula 1 race in decades took place in the city last weekend. But it’s Vegas, so there were no lack of things to see and do.
We’re only just starting day 2 of our trip as I write this, so we really are still bedding in. I’m sure that there will be a lot more to report in next week’s edition.
New Blog content
I’ve not shared any new content this week. You’ll know by now that we’ve been quite busy week and the last 2 days of work before we left have been, to put it mildly, eventful.
From the Archive
I did at least get a featured blog post shared:
Science News
In a change to the normal format, any news stories here are from the first half of the last week:
A woman has an extra uterus and is pregnant in both at them at once. Remarkable, but I was more amazed to learn that 1 in 300 women are born with 2 uteri!
A new discovery as found that staying up late and pulling an all-nighter can help out with depression.
It’s all gone quiet on Mars. Missions have been suspended as the Red Planet disappears behind the sun.
I try to stay clear from depressing news stories, but it is interesting to see all the ways that people think that we could drive ourselves extinct.
The James Webb Space Telescope continues to reveal a weirder universe than we had expected as NASA find the first “fluffy” planet.
The JWST is also showing us that the more central areas of our universe are much more crowded than anyone had thought.
Elephants are my usual go to example of a species that couldn’t decided if it wanted to be terrestrial or aquatic through it’s evolutionary past. Now it appears that crabs have also moved in and out of water whilst evolution was finding them a niche.
Kicking back
Fun time…
Of course I can handle it, you can’t handle it!
There are 4 people in this photo (no, seriously, there are!)
It’s called ecology, and it is beautiful
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.