Song of 165 Million Year Old Cricket Reproduced

A Bush Cricket, or Katydid. Image Source: Wiki.

Nature News reports that the fossilized remains of an extinct Jurassic bush cricket have enabled British researchers to reproduced the insect's song (Hat tip: Maria Popova):

The fossilized remains of long-extinct animals provide clear evidence of their size, stature and gait, but can we ever know what they sounded like? A reconstruction of the song sung by a fossilized katydid that lived 165 million years ago shows how it can be done. The results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Like other crickets, male katydids (also known as bush crickets) sing to females through a technique called stridulation, in which noise is generated by rubbing a thick, ridged vein (called a file) on one wing against a ‘scraper’ on another. The length of the file, and the speed with which it is dragged over the scraper, determines the frequency of the noise it generates. The fossil katydid in the new study, dubbed Archaboilus musicus and described in the PNAS paper for first time, is exceptionally well preserved for such an old specimen, allowing for detailed measurements of the sound-making file.

Russian Scientists Clone Ice Age Flower

Russian scientists regenerated this Sylene stenophylla plant from tissue of fossil fruit. Image Source: Institute of Cell Biophysics of the Russian Academy of Sciences; National News and Pictures via Daily Mail.

Several news outlets are carrying a story about a successful Russian cloning of a 30,000 year old plant, which bore fruit and seeds: "An Ice Age flower has come back to life. How exactly did that happen? Well, a team of Russian scientists discovered a burrow that contained fruit and seeds left in the Siberian permafrost by a squirrel that buried them about 30,000 years ago. Remnants of the Silene stenophylla blossom were found perfectly preserved, and in an experiment to extract the seeds, the scientists pioneered a new way ['micropropagation'] to resurrect the plant. For thousands of years, the flower was fully encased in ice, and no water was able to get to it. The storage chambers that the squirrels created were filled with hay and animal fur to protect their treasure. Stanislav Gubin, one scientist working with the discovery, called it a 'natural cryobank.' The blossom with its white flowers looks similar to its modern-day version, which also grows in the same region as its predecessor." (Thanks to -J.)

This outcome makes the cloned plant, "The most ancient, viable, multi-cellular, living organism on Earth," and it has researchers chattering about Beringia (the lost land bridge between Asia and North America) as being a great storehouse of ancient extinct organisms.

The successful experiment also has implications for space exploration: scientists are hoping that if extinct plants and animals trapped in our planet's permafrost can be brought back to life through cloning, then similar resurrections could be done on Mars.  They speculate that they could revive dead Martian lifeforms, which may be preserved in permanent ice on the Red Planet.

Love in the Old Millennium

Crow and Heron, or Young Lovers Walking Together under an Umbrella in a Snowstorm, ca. 1769.  Suzuki Harunobu (Japanese, 1725–1770; Polychrome woodcut print on paper). Image Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Time and romance: a topic of reverie, memory and contemplation. In another post, I mentioned a quote from the film, Crimes and Misdemeanors:

"You will notice that what we are aiming at when we fall in love is a very strange paradox. The paradox consists of the fact that, when we fall in love, we are seeking to re-find all or some of the people to whom we were attached as children. On the other hand, we ask our beloved to correct all of the wrongs that these early parents or siblings inflicted upon us. So that love contains in it the contradiction: The attempt to return to the past and the attempt to undo the past."

For love's paradox with the past, here are some words from one of the greatest modern Japanese poets, Kitahara Hakushū (pen-name of Kitahara Ryūkichi, born 5 January, 1885; died 2 November, 1942).  There is a review of a recent book about him, here (Hat tip: Michael Steger).  The review has a translation of one of Kitahara's tanka poems, which are masterworks of simplicity:

Usuakaki Tsume no urumi ni Hitoshizuku Ochishi miruku mo Natsukashi to minu

The drop of milk Which had fallen On the light red polish Of her nails Made me yearn for the past

Super Cool Nano Quadrators

A quadrator robot. Image Source: Robot Space Brain.

Below the jump, a great video of small nano quadrator robots flying in formation, courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania's GRASP lab (Hat tip: Slate via i09).  They remind me of something organic - a school of fish or flock of birds - but they reminded i09 of a 1980s' retro video game.

Millennial Mysteries: Dead Birds, Dead Birds, Dead Birds ...

Dead birds found on Feb. 20 at the University of Texas at Arlington. Image Source: The Shorthorn.

Curiouser and curiouser.  This week, three reports are circulating about dead birds: one from Maryland, one from Pennsylvania, and one from Texas.  Unlike earlier cases, two of these incidents now involve ritualistic aspects, just in time for Shrove Tuesday or Mardi Gras.

Happy Tibetan New Year!

2012 will cross cultures: A Czech Tibetan Buddhist New Year's card. Image Source: Brozkeff's Mandala.

Also known as Losar, the Tibetan Buddhist New Year festival is celebrated for 15 days, starting on the first day with drinking a kind of beer called chhaang. The holiday is celebrated in Tibet, Nepal and India and has pre-Buddhist origins. These origins reflect yet another the ancient connection between astronomy, astrology, and the way we measure time. Wiki: "The festival is said to have begun when an old woman named Belma introduced the measurement of time based on the phases of the moon. ... Later when the rudiments of astrology, based on the five elements, were introduced in Tibet, this farmer's festival became what we now call the Losar or New Year's festival." This is the year of the Male Water Dragon and the year is 2139 by the Tibetan count.

Photo of the Day: The Long Road Home

Image Source: The Atlantic.

In the 2010 movie, Repeaters, the characters get trapped in a time loop.  One of the film's commenters on the IMDB suggested that their predicament was a metaphor for post-traumatic stress, and the purgatorial relationship with time that it inflicts upon its sufferers, wherein they relive experiences over and over (see the trailer here).  The photo above is perhaps a related example of the so-called thousand-yard stare.  It is a photograph of an American Marine in Afghanistan from January 2012, but it made me immediately think of the experiences of the British military in the same region, recounted in Kipling's Plain Tales from the Hills, stories which were originally published in the Civil and Military Gazette.  This photograph could have been taken yesterday, or 120 years ago. From The Atlantic: "Men of 1st Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment, during an operation near the end of their third deployment in three years in Afghanistan. They were securing route 611, which runs Kajaki Sofla, an area that had long been a safe haven for insurgent sub-commanders and for arms and drug trafficking. (Cpl. James Clark/USMC)" Other photos from Afghanistan are here.

Calling all Chronomancers

 Image Source: TV Tropes.

Millennial Aporia - the collapse and evolution of values - may reflect an antagonistic attitude toward time, an attitude we must resolve. In a blog post earlier this month, Tara Mohr quoted the late Irish priest and poet, John O’Donahue, who said: “One of the biggest problems of modern life is that time has become the enemy.” Mohr argued that there is something extremely disturbing about our war with time.  To exist in conflict with time, she says, is to be in conflict with ourselves.  Since time shapes human consciousness, Mohr believes we should revise our current view of the passage of time.