Rosetta: Languages and Space Probes

Linguists estimate that around 50% of the worlds languages will go extinct by the end of this century (ref). Just as John Hammond used the the DNA preserved in ancient dino-hungry mosquitoes to revive extinct dinosaurs in Jurassic Park...

...future generations may use the information encoded on a three inch disk, known as a Rosetta disk, to bring long-dead languages back to life. At least that's the idea. The Rosetta disk project was hatched by people at the Long Now Foundation, who used technology developed at Los Alomos National labs to miniaturize 13,500 pages of text from over 1,500 human languages onto a three inch disk of nickel. I like to think about these disks as language time capsules.

The teaser-side of a Rosetta disk. via the Long Now Foundation.

Asteroid Particles

Recently the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency sent a spaceship to an asteroid named Itokawa.  A spaceship to an asteroid!!  As if that wasn't awesome enough, the spaceship landed on the asteroid, collected material, and returned home to earth!  These are images of tiny particles collected from the surface of that asteroid.

These particles are around half the diameter of a human hair.  Click to make them HUGE!

Here are three views of Itokawa, which is about 630 meters x 250 meters.  Assuming a spacesuit didn't slow you down, and the surface of the asteroid were boulder-free and easy to walk on, it would only take you ~20 minutes to walk around the whole thing the long-way.  Pretty small!!

I came from That??!?

Last weekend I visited the Field Museum in Chicago.  It may come as no surprise to some of you that this museum completely blew my mind.  My friend Willard and I spent almost the entire time in their "Evolving Planet" exhibit, which walked us from the formation of the earth through to the present day.  Afterwards we talked about asteroids and looked at some wicked crystals.

Anyhow, the most surprising discovery from this visit concerned Dimetrodon, which when I was a child was one of my favorite dinosaurs from my extensive collection of plastic dinosaur toys.  My Dimetrodon toy looked vaguely like the one below, minus the "Dino-Strike Clamping Jaws".

What an awesome sail on his/her back, right?  Coolest dinosaur ever, or so I thought until my weekend stroll past the "Synapsid vs Diapsid" section of the evolving planet exhibit.  It was in this section that one of my childhood dino dreams died, and out of the ashes rose what I like to call the phoenix of discovery!  I discovered that Dimetrodon was not a dinosaur, but was instead our ancestor!!!!!  While that sinks in, here are some cool Dimetrodon pictures.

The Crow

What makes humans special and different from other animals? Is it our ability to use tools? Maybe not, because other primates can use tools too, and so can birds!!! Crows can not only recognize human faces, they can use tools! Here is a crow using a stick to do something crazy:

But it gets better.