Matilda's Lab Newsletter #44
This week we have an extra dog, the brightest thing in the universe, the smallest vertebrate, secret messages in classical music, how viruses helped nerves evolve and the solar system just got bigger
What we’ve been up to
We’ve had a rather uneventful week (just to kick you off with the high intensity stuff!). The weekend spend with friends and catching up on a lot of house jobs than needed doing. Work has been very busy this week as well which hasn’t left much time for anything else, however…
We have another dog! Not one of our own though. We’re looking after a friend’s dog for the week, and it’s nice to have another set of paws around the house. Our guest is smaller than Cassini and she doesn’t get up in Nathaniel’s face so much as our own dog, so she’s an absolute hit with him.
What is wonderful about children when they get to Matilda’s age, is that they start working on their own development. I’ve already mentioned how much of a bookworm she is, but she also loves drawing. On Thursday evening she showed me a new piece of artwork.
It’s great. But as she started pointing details out to me, I started telling her what I liked about it, and I kept on finding more bits. The list was much longer than I originally thought which really did surprise me.
New Blog content
That previous section won’t have filled you with much hope for this bit, will it? Despite the challenges of the week, I have managed to introduce an entirely different kingdom to the map of life with the first plant. It’s no longer a map of animals. Technically it is now a map of the Neokaryotes:
Although I’m still going to class the Pi song as new. Certainly I’ve updated the music page on the blog so that people can easily find the songs that are released as more them become available throughout the year.
From the Archive
This week went back to lockdown and home-schooling. Matilda and I looked at averages and weighed her in our own custom units. I feel like we should remake this as a video.
Science News
What has made my week a bit easier is that there appears to have been more science news than there was last week:
Information has been decoded from the classical works of Johann Sebastian Bach. Methods that physicists use to find information in data patterns was turned to the composers work and found “messages” in there. Maybe this is part of the reason why we have such a strong emotional reaction to music, even when it’s instrumental.
In another example of amazing details extracted from the deep past, it seems that the evolution of nerves within animals was assisted by viruses, and it happened more than one.
This one is a bit out there, on many levels. In the ongoing saga of trying to work out what it could possibly be, a new suggestion is that Dark Matter is actually present in a ‘dark mirror universe’ which is affecting our own universe. If true, we may have to start referring to the biverse?
It’s not every week that we get a new record being set. Astronomers have just logged the brightest object ever seen in the universe (we’re not in biverse territory yet).
That said, we have 2 records in a row. The world’s smallest vertebrate has been confirmed, the Papua New Guinean Flea Toad (actually frog (that’s biology for you!)) may be as small as it is physically possible for a vertebrate to be.
New Horizon’s, the spacecraft that gave us those wonderful pictures of Pluto, hasn’t stopped working for us. It’s just revealed that there is a lot more stuff out in the far solar system that anyone realised. The Kuiper belt is much bigger than expected.
Kicking back
School’s out. Let’s see what’s been making me smile this week…
What a lovely shade of South Africa. Does it also come in Australia?
I don’t what I like more, the results or the reactions to the results
What did you do with your lockdown?
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.