Matilda's Lab Newsletter #35
This week the holiday ended, in time for the holidays. We have an actual impossible planet, dolphins with super senses and penguins that take micro-napping to the extreme.
Back to reality…
What we’ve been up to
The last newsletter went out with barely 24 hours left of our holiday; so what to do with that last day?
We had more family to meet and we decided that taking a whale watching trip off long beach would provide a good opportunity for a catch up. It did, which is just as well because one thing that it wasn’t so good for was watching whales. It turns out that I’m something of jinx on whale watching trips. The few that I’ve been on have never yielded anything beyond a handful porpoises in the distance. This trip proved to be no exception.
There was a bright side though. There appears to be a contingency buoy where California sealions hang out to warm up during the day time. So that was pretty cool. There were also some pelicans knocking around which was a treat to a tourist like me.
The trip out was effectively a few hour long, thanks to the gift of time zones. Well time zones giveth and time zone take away. The trip home was effectively 24 hours long. Once again, our children were highly impressive. They coped with the long hours and disrupted sleep, strange planes and airports commendably.
Back to a cold and wet UK, but now that we are in December we can get into full Christmas spirit. The tree is up and decorations are out. There’s just a whole lot of work to get through before we finally hit the big day. Including no nursey for Nathaniel. He starts nursery at the school in the New Year so we pulled him out of private nursery for the holiday. That means we’ve got 3 weeks of no childcare to navigate. Reinforcements arrive next week, but this week it’s my turn to man to fort, as it were.
New Blog content
Not this week I’m afraid. Holiday catch up, jet-lag and childcare have put a scupper to that one.
From the Archive
It’s not the angel that you’ll find on a Christmas tree, but it is the kind that we celebrate here...
I had a reminder come up of one of the nice aspects of the COVID lockdown. Being able to spend more time spending time with and teaching Matilda.
Science News
It’s been busy but I’ve found some news stories for you:
I knew that Pythagoras Theorem was old than Pythagoras (there’s pretty clear evidence that ancient Egyptians were using). Now it appears to be even older and Pythagoras Theorem dates back to the Babylonians.
More James Webb Space Telescope news. A cosmic cloud has been appearing, disappearing and reappearing again when searched for. JWST has found it but it’s right on the limits of detection, and it’s huge. It means that star building factories in the early universe may have been much more common than previously thought.
Staying in space, astronomers have found the impossible planet! Well, a planet that our current theories say shouldn’t exist. The difference in size between the planet and it’s star is so small that some rethinking is in order.
This blog has spent a lot of time celebrating sharks and their electricity detecting capability. It now appears that dolphins may be able to detect electrical activity within their prey items too.
Finally, who doesn’t love penguins…and sleep? Then this story has it all. Life can be dangerous for flightless birds so chinstrap penguins only nap for seconds; but they do it over 10,000 times a day!
Kicking back
Fun time…click the links to brighten your day with fun things that I’ve found elsewhere.
All the better to see you with!
What, no hammer drill? No worries, I’ve got this…
Finally, someone is thinking about the children
I think that they call it character building
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.