Month: June 2024

Paleontology News for June 2024: Almost all Dinosaur Edition.

There have been several interesting discoveries made recently about animals that lived during the Mesozoic Era, the ‘Age of the Dinosaurs’ from about 230 to 66 million years ago. Three of the four studies deal with dinos themselves but since I like to start with the oldest and work my way forward in time I’m going start with the non-dino story.

The two most destructive mass extinctions is the history of Earth were the Permian and Cretaceous. The time between these two events was the ‘Age of Dinosaurs’! (Credit: Amazon.com)

However I suppose most people would regard an Aetosaur as a dinosaur, in the Triassic period Aetosaurs were a group of large reptiles with extremely thick, bony scales covering their bodies for protection. The Aetosaurs dominated the land about 220 million years ago just before the rise of the dinosaurs and are in fact the ancestors of our modern crocodiles and alligators.

The resemblance to a modern Crocodile is evident but ancient Aetosaurs like this illustration of Garzapelta muelleri were land dwellers and some were actually vegetarians! (Credit: University of Texas at Austin)

Aetosaur fossils have been unearthed on every continent except Antarctica and Australia but for the most part the fossils have been isolated specimens of those thick bony scales.  Bones and nearly complete skeletons of Aetosaurs are quite rare. That’s what makes the recent paper describing a new species of Aetosaur from Texas so important; the animal’s remains are about 70% complete. In a new article describing the fossil it has been given the name Garzapelta muelleri because it was discovered in Garza county in Texas, it’s covered with a very strong skin or pelt and it was originally unearthed by paleontologist Bill Mueller.

Because they fossilize so easily most Aetosaurs are mostly known from the hard, boney plates on their backs. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Garzapelta muelleri is actually not a new discovery however; in fact the fossil had been lying in a storage room at Texas Tech University for almost thirty years. It wasn’t until graduate student Bill Reyes came across the fossil and decided it might be worth spending several years cleaning it up and preparing it for study that G muelleri could finally be described and published. Another example of how some of the best fossil hunting is done in the basements and storage rooms of natural history museums.

Some of the most important discoveries made in biology, or geology or archaeology are not made in the field but by re-examining specimens that may have been stored for decades in a museum storage room. (Credit: Southwest Solutions Group)

Getting back to actual dinosaurs, not all fossils are from the remains of animals who died long ago, many are the remains of the activity of extinct creatures, especially their tracks or footprints. Hundreds of examples of dinosaur footprints are known, from many different types of dinosaurs, although narrowing any footprints down to a single species that made them is difficult.

Paleontologists can usually identify the type of dinosaur that made a set of tracts but trying to narrow down the exact species is a lot more difficult. (Credit: The Great Cretaceous Walk)

A newly recognized track of footprints in Colorado are now being announced as the longest known track by a sauropod dinosaur, those huge long necked and long tailed dinosaurs that were the largest animals to ever walk on land. The site contains an estimated 134 steps by the animal who appears to have been heading north, turned east before changing it’s mind and turning around to go west. The turning around motion is something never seen before for sauropods and will tell us a lot about how they moved.

Aerial view of the tracks made by a sauropod in Colorado. The animal’s decision to turn around and head the other way is obvious. (Credit: Times of India)

The trail is now the property of the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison National Forests who bought the property from the Charles family whose children had played among the ‘potholes’ for years without knowing they were dinosaur footprints. The good news is that you can visit the footprints in the National Forest. The bad news is that it’s a three-kilometer hike up a steep grade to the 2800-meter elevation site.

High up in Colorado Rockies the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison National Forests are obviously a very beautiful place to visit, but be prepared to ‘rough it’. (Credit: Visit Telluride)

Back when I was first learning about dinosaurs it was assumed that they were cold blooded animals like other reptiles but nowadays nearly all paleontologists think that at least some groups of dinosaurs were warm blooded. The clearest evidence for this idea comes from well preserved fossil impressions showing that some dinosaurs had evolved feathers, not for flight but instead as insulation to keep warm. At the same time there are many early bird fossils that show anatomical similarities to dinosaurs!

Archaeopteryx, the little lizard with feathers! A mixture of reptile and bird anatomies this fossil was unearthed shortly after Darwin published his ‘Origin of Species’ and provided considerable evidence that Darwin was correct. (Credit: Live Science)

So if dinosaurs did evolve warm bloodiness the questions we need to ask are, when did dinosaurs become warm blooded, which dinosaur groups evolved to be warm blooded and perhaps most critically, just how do we answer those two questions? Now a new study by a group of paleontologists from the University College of London and the University of Vigo in Spain has tried to understand warm bloodiness in dinosaurs by examining their distribution in various temperature regions of the Mesozoic world.

The Velociraptor made famous by the Jurassic Park Movies was probably at least partly covered by feathers, not in order to fly but rather to help keep them warm! (Credit: NBC News)

Look at it this way, the whole reason for an animal to evolve to be warm blooded is so that they can be active in cold temperatures. That’s why you don’t see many reptiles in Polar Regions and that’s why both reptiles and insects like to sun themselves in the morning to warm their bodies. It’s the heat that they get from the Sun that allows them to become active. On the other hand the metabolism of mammals and birds is always high because of their warm blood. So, the researchers reasoned, if fossils of dinosaur species have been found in locations that were cold back when the dinos lived there then it’s a fair bet that those dinosaur species were warm blooded!

A fossil site in northern Alaska has provided specimens of different dinosaur species, but notice no sauropods! (Credit: ScienceDirect.com)

According to that logic the study found that it was the members of the Theropod and Ornithischian groups of dinosaurs that became warm blooded approximately 180 million years ago. The theropods are the two legged predators like T rex and Velociraptor while the ornithischians contain such species as triceratops and the hadrosaurs. The sauropods, the biggest of the dinosaurs stayed in the warmer, tropical regions and do not appear to have evolved warm bloodiness. The study suggests that the sauropods may have evolved their huge size in order to store heat in their massive bodies rather than generate it by becoming warm blooded. 

Titanosaurus, the largest dinosaur discovered so far. Did the sauropods evolve to be so big in order to help regulate their body temperature? (Credit: YouTube)

Finally, I mentioned above that there is now abundant evidence that some species of dinosaur possessed feathers over at least some parts of their bodies in order to keep them warm. The Velociraptor is thought to be one of those species. However the precise details of the evolution of feathers from reptile scales are still rather mysterious.

Feathers and scales are made from the same kinds of proteins and it appears that bird feathers evolved by the splitting of reptile scales. (Credit: Avian Biology)

Now a new specimen of a feathered dinosaur called Psittacosaurus is revealed some of those details. A small creature from about 135-120 million years ago Psittacosaurus belonged to the branch of dinosaurs that would soon evolve into the birds we know today. Previously examined fossils of Psittacosaurus have shown that the animal had some feathers that covered a portion of its body and initially the specimen NJUES-10 appeared to be the same.

Artist’s impression of the species Psittacosaurus, feathers in some places, scales in others. (Credit: Everything Dinosaur Blog)

It was only when specimen NJUES-10 was examined under Ultra-Violet (UV) light that impressions of its skin from other places on its body were discovered. After further examinations with both X-rays and Infra-Red (IR) light it became clear that Psittacosaurus had lizard like scales everywhere on its body that didn’t have feathers. In other words, even as dinosaurs were evolving feathers they still kept their reptilian scales in order to protect the rest of their bodies. Psittacosaurus therefore appears to have been truly half dinosaur and half bird, a real missing link.

The NJUES-10 specimen of Psittacosaurus under visible light (top) and UV light (bottom. By looking at fossils in different kinds of light paleontologists can see different things in the fossil. (Credit: Sci.news)

Even with all of the research that has gone into studying dinosaurs over the last 200 years there’s still plenty of questions left to be answered.

Book Review: ‘Tyranny of the Minority’ by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

I never knew there were so many ways to subvert democracy. ‘Tyranny of the Minority’, the new book by Harvard professors of Government Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt is a detailed and sobering account of the many ways that a democratic nation, a nation that at least tries to apply the rule of law fairly and equally to all its people can be derailed and even destroyed by an authoritarian minority. Although the main thrust of the book is the current state of our American democracy the authors use examples from nations around the world and times past to illustrate their arguments.

History textbooks will tell you that the idea of Democracy first started in ancient Athens. It didn’t last too long! (Credit: Wikipedia)

Democracy is a risky thing for a politician, losing an election can mean no job, an uncertain future and worst of all no power. In a democracy however a politician has to be willing to accept the choice of the people. If a politician losses they must congratulate the winner and plan for the next election, that’s the only way to learn from their mistakes. It’s no wonder therefore that many politicians try to seize power against the will of the majority, not only by violent means but by cheating as well. 

Despite all the recent ballyhoo about voter fraud the actual evidence is that only a very few illegal votes are cast in any election. Claiming voter fraud is just a excuse for the losers! (Credit: Shutterstock)

Professors Levitsky and Ziblatt begin by looking at examples of coup d’etat over the last hundred years or so to discover both the rules that a loyal supporter of democracy must follow as well as the techniques that authoritarians use to sabotage a working democracy. As the authors see it a politician who values democracy and wants to see it thrive must accept three rules:

Cover art for ‘Tyranny of the Minority’ by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. (Credit: Amazon)

1. They must accept their losses. This is primary because without one side accepting defeat, even if they feel irregularities have cost them, then the peaceful transfer of power, which is the greatest benefit of a democratic system of government, will soon descend into violence. An example of this was when Al Gore accepted his defeat in 2000 even though the final vote counting in Florida was not yet completed. He accepted his loss for the sake of America’s democracy and the peaceful transfer of power.

Even the best of us lose sometimes. Refusing to accept those losses not only makes you an ill mannered lout but it will make further losses more likely because you refused to learn from your mistakes. (Credit: A-Z Quotes)

2. Every politician loyal to democracy must immediately sever all ties to any other politician who even attempts to overturn the results of an election, whether by violence or by cheating. Toleration of authoritarian politicians, even if they are popular with your party’s base, only empowers them leading to further attacks on democracy. Recent examples of this form of toleration are the many Republicans who remain silent about the attacks on our democracy by Donald Trump.

Kowtowing to a authority figure has been commonplace throughout human history. Here in the United States we thought that we had eliminated that degrading practice. Not any more! (Credit: South China Morning Post)

3. Politicians of all parties must be willing to work across party lines in defense of democracy, even at the risk of their own politician ambitions. Examples of this are the way that the conservative politicians Liz Chaney and Adam Kinzinger worked with liberal Democrats to investigate the January 6th attack on the Capitol that was instigated by Trump, a choice that cost them both their seats in the US House.

Bipartisanship in defense of Democracy used to be considered honourable and praiseworthy. Today bipartisanship of any kind is considered a weakness if not actually treason! (Credit: Yes! Magazine)

At the same time ‘Tyranny of the Minority’ also details the playbook of those politicians to seek to cheat, who try to obtain some slight advantage over their opponents. Of course in the end this cheating continues until democracy is gone and a dictatorship has been established. Some of the techniques used by extremists include:

Who does this immediately make you think of? (Credit: Marriage.com)

1. Exploiting gaps in the law. As an example, over the more than 200-year history of the American Presidency many holders of that office have had to make many difficult decisions, decisions that were later often criticized by both their opponents and historians. In all of those years however no President has ever claimed immunity from legal prosecution, no President has ever had to, ever wanted to. Until Trump, who is currently arguing that a President must have immunity in order to do their jobs. Of course Trump’s real desire is to escape the consequences of his actions in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

No president has ever asked for let only demanded immunity from the law until Trump. I wonder why he thinks he needs it!!!! (Credit: YouTube)

2. Excessive or Undue use of the Law. An example of this would be the use by the President of his power to pardon in order to keep co-conspirators from giving evidence against him. During Watergate President Nixon never pardoned any of those who were involved in the burglary or cover-up. Trump however has promised to pardon all of those who have been convicted of crimes committed during the January 6th attack on the Capitol.

Racial profiling is a classic example of overuse of the law. If you concentrate your law enforcement efforts against any particular group you will find some law breaking in that group that you can then use to justify your initial prejudice against them. A self fulfilling prophesy.(Credit: Notes from an Aspiring Humanitarian)

3. Selective enforcement of the law, especially voting laws. This one is insidious. During the Jim Crow era in the Southern US laws requiring voters to pay a Poll Tax or pass an Intelligence Test were strictly enforced against black voters while white voters were simply allowed to vote without any of those requirements being enforced against them.

Obviously denying any citizen the right to vote is the antithesis of democracy. We do it anyway! (Credit: Center for public Integrity)

4. Lawfare. This is a new term created for those laws that are intended for no other purpose than to give one party in an election an advantage against the other. Examples of this include the Poll Taxes and Intelligence Tests of the past that are now being replaced by Voter I.D. laws. The process of Gerrymandering, the creation of political districts in such a way as to put all of your opponents supporters into a few districts while your supporters are spread out over a large number of districts is a prime example of Lawfare.

Elbridge Gerry, governor of Massachusetts and the contorted congressional district he designed. Gerrymandering is the practice of putting all of your opponents into just a few districts so that you can win all of the others, giving a minority all of the power! (Credit: Fair Districts Pa)

Simply reviewing these anti-democratic practices brings to mind much of the politics of the last 40 years here in the US. It’s at this point that ‘Tyranny of the Minority’ goes into the process of how the Republican Party, a party than once prided itself on its adherence to democratic principles has become distorted into the party of Trump. To be certain Trump did not start the process, it really began in earnest in 1992 when the Democrat Bill Clinton won the Presidency. Rather than try to learn a lesson and reform their party in order to win in a later election the Republicans decide to start cheating, to “win at all costs” as they did in Florida in 2000. Then, when Barack Obama, the first black president was elected the Republicans simply went crazy, a madness from which they have still to recover.

When people began to insist that Obama’s Hawaiian ‘Certificate of Live Birth’ wasn’t a ‘Birth Certificate’ partisanship turned into a mental illness! (Credit: The New York Times)

Because of this obstinacy the Republican Party has slowly but surely become a minority party. In the last eight Presidential elections the Republican candidate has won the popular vote only once, but thanks to the antiquated Electoral College, which as recently as 1970 the Republicans wanted to get rid of, they have won the Presidency three times. Republicans have become welded to their low taxes on the rich while distracting people with culture wars policies. They know that they cannot achieve a majority with those principles so they can only cheat, and by cheating subvert and eventually destroy democracy.

In the year 2000 George w. Bush lost the popular vote and only managed to win the electoral college because the Supreme Court ordered the vote counting in Florida to end. Rather than accepting the divisions in the country and trying to govern in a bipartisan manner he proceeded to push a hard conservative agenda that left our country more divided than it has been since the Civil War! (Credit: BBC)

‘Tyranny of the Minority’ is a very sobering book but at the same time that it details to dangers to our democracy it also offers the hope of those people, those politicians who will work for, and when necessary fight for democracy. If you support democracy I can only hope that you will take the time to read ‘Tyranny of the Minority’.

A Worldwide Conference to reduce the enormous amount of Plastic that Humans produce and then just throw away achieved little if anything.

We all know that plastics are almost everywhere nowadays. There are many reasons for this but two are most important. First of all plastic is versatile; it seems like nearly anything can be made out of plastic. And its cheap, derived from petroleum the chemical process of making plastic is simple and by the process of injection molding turning plastic into a product is again very simple and easy to accomplish. Because of its usefulness and low cost the human race is currently producing about 400 million tonnes of plastic waste every year. That’s about the same mass as that of every person on this planet.

The plastic waste per person varies greatly around the world with people in developed countries wasting a huge amount while those in the developing world hardly contributing anything. (Credit: Forbes)

So as I said plastic is everywhere, too much of it and it is piling up not only in landfills but in places we don’t want it, like our rivers, streams and oceans. Plastic is a miracle, but I like to say it’s a miracle that doesn’t go away once it has accomplished the task it was created for. To be specific plastic is so stable a chemical that it doesn’t breakdown chemically in the way wood or paper or even iron will eventually do.

The irony is that their sign is made of plastic! The message however is real, plastic is everywhere nowadays. (Credit: Greenpeace)

So all of the plastic trash that we throw out just piles up, layer by layer. Because of this plastic pollution is now vying with Global Warming to be our biggest environmental problem. Even worse, although plastic doesn’t breakdown chemically it will over time breakdown mechanically, that is to say plastic products will break into smaller and smaller pieces of plastic. Pieces so small that they are called microparticles, so small that they get into our water, into our food and even the air that we breath. Pieces so small that they have now been detected inside us, in our stomachs, in our lungs and even in our blood.

Although plastics do not decay chemically they do break down mechanically into smaller and smaller pieces called microplastics and in this state they have even been found in our bodies! (Credit: Fast Company)

Plastics have become so big a problem that last month negotiators from 175 countries met in Ottawa, Canadian to try to hammer out an international treaty to regulate plastics. Like the annual COP conferences that are held to address Climate Change the plastics meeting is a yearly affair, last year’s gathering was held in Kenya.

Press Conference at the international conference on Plastic Pollution held in Ottawa, Canada. (Credit: UN Web TV – The United Nations)

Also like the COP Climate Change conference the meeting on Plastics was not only attended by negotiators with their scientific and environmental advisors but also by representatives of the petroleum industry, lobbyists whose only concern is the profits of the oil companies who pay them. Worldwide the manufacture of plastics is valued at over $700 billion dollars annually so the industry can afford to hire a lot of lobbyists.

It often seems as if our elected officials are really working for the special interests represented by lobbyists rather than the people for voted for them. Maybe that’s because it’s true! (Credit: The Vagabond Blog)

These special interests have formed themselves into organizations like the Plastics Industry Association and America’s Plastic Makers in order to use their influence to prevent any actual limits to plastic production from getting into any treaty. Aiding them in their efforts are negotiators for counties with national oil companies like Saudi Arabia, Russia and Venezuela who also sought to avoid anything that would reduce oil production.

Logo for the Plastics Industry Association. Funded by the Petroleum Industry it’s their job to tell us about all of the benefits there are to be gained by poisoning our planet! (Credit: Plastic News)

Instead of legally limiting the amount of plastic that is produced in the world these apologists for the plastics industry advocate recycling as the best approach to eliminating the plastic trash that is choking our planet. If you think about it that argument doesn’t really work for the petroleum industry because if we recycled all of the plastic products we use into new plastic products then we still wouldn’t need to make any more plastic, so we wouldn’t need any more oil from them.

The seven different types of recyclable plastic. The very fact that there are so many different types, and they have to be separated before they can be recycled, makes the job of recycling both labour intensive and expensive. That’s why we don’t actually recycle very much! (Credit: Alleycho)

In truth however the lobbyists for the oil companies know that we do a lousy job of recycling, only around 5% of the plastic that gets produced every year ends up being recycled. To make matters worse the plastic companies themselves sabotage the recycling effort they promote by making seven different types of plastic, each of which requires a different technique to recycle. In fact several of the types of plastics being manufactured cannot even be recycled economically. Combined these factors make the handling and sorting of recycled plastic products very labour intensive and therefore so expensive that in reality very little of the plastics being produced are ever actually recycled.

So all of that effort environmentally conscious people put into sorting their recyclables from their trash mostly goes to waste as plastics are too expensive to actually recycle. By the way that’s not true of glass and aluminum, they do get recycled so keep up the good work! (Credit:

At the conference itself there was a proposal by the delegates from Peru and Rwanda to actually cut back on the scale of plastic production. This proposal was supported by 29 other nations but in the end the US and UK bowed to pressure from the plastics manufacturers and the conference ended without any agreement on cutbacks.

In the end it was plastic that won at Ottawa. (Credit: Greenpeace)

The lobbyists had good reason to gloat about their victory. According to Matt Seaholm. CEO of the Plastics Industry Association the US did “a very good job of trying to balance all of the interests.” Which is just another way of saying the conference achieved nothing. Not only was there no agreement on reducing production of plastics but there was also no implementation of any policy that could actually increase the amount of plastics that are recycled. The plastics industry, which is just a subset of the petroleum industry, got everything they wanted and environmentalists got nothing.

So get used to seeing more of this because nobody’s really doing anything to stop it! (Credit: Stern Minds)

There will of course be another international conference on plastics next year in Busan, South Korea. Bureaucrats just love big conferences that allow them to travel to other countries on taxpayer’s money. Like the annual COP conference on Climate Change however it appears that nothing will happen to combat either of these environmental threats until there is a real crisis, until there are so many people dying that the problems can no longer be ignored. By that time it will be too late because the buildup of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere along with the plastic on the land and in the oceans will continue to poison our planet for at least decades to come.

Archaeology News for April 2024: New tools in the Archaeologist’s toolkit are providing answers to old questions

When most people think of the kind of tools that an Archaeologists use in their study of ancient people the first thing to come to mind would probably be either a shovel or a trowel. After all, archaeology is about digging up the lost artifacts from bygone civilizations isn’t it?

Archaeology is all about digging up fabulous treasures from the past, isn’t it? Well despite what Indiana Jones does, there’s more to it than that! (Credit: Egypt Museum)

Well in my post today I’ll be discussing a couple of studies that employ the latest technological tools that archaeologists now have to help them learn about past cultures. As usual I’ll start with the oldest story and work my way forward in time.

‘Man the Tool Maker’ is a classic in the field of archaeology making the point that civilizations are characterized by the tools they possess as a measure of the progress they have made! (Credit: Amazon.com)

Surprisingly enough over the last few years DNA has become one of the most important tools in archaeology, see my posts of 10 August 2019, 22 July 2020 and 14 January 2020 for example. The ability to demonstrate, or refute, genetic connections between two or more archaeological sites has answered many long disputed questions about the past.

The famous Double Helix of DNA, the molecule that makes us related to family, ethnic group, species and etc! (Credit: Medline Plus)

Now a new study published in the journal Science Advances has used both ancient and modern DNA to reveal some surprising facts about the genetic relationships of the indigenous people of North America, in particular the people of the Blackfoot Confederacy. Historically these tribes lived in the northern plains of the US and southern Canada between the Rocky Mountains and the Great Lakes. According to Blackfoot legends those plains had been their home as far back as the end of the last ice age more than 10,000 years ago. These legends have also been supported by archaeological evidence collected from the region.

The pre-Colombian lands of the Blackfoot people. (Credit: Pinterest)

The new study compared DNA taken from seven ancient burials unearthed in the region inhabited in the Blackfoot to that of six modern day members of the Blackfoot Nation. What the researchers, led by Dorothy First Rider of the Blood First Nation Organization in Canada discovered was a high proportion of shared alleles between the ancient and modern samples, strong evidence for a direct genetic relationship, even after thousands of years. Comparisons were also made to nearby native peoples. These comparisons indicated that the Blackfoot / Blood native nations separated as long ago as 18,000 years while the separation of the Blackfoot and Athabascan peoples occurred about 13,000 years ago.

Living to the northwest of the Blackfoot people the Athabascan people occupied a large part of western Canada and Alaska. (Credit: Wikipedia)

The fact that the Blackfoot Nation may have remained a homogenous group living in the same place for so long may even have legal repercussions. That’s because the Blackfoot legacy has for decades been at the center of numerous lawsuits over land and water rights in the ancestral Blackfoot homeland. The DNA evidence detailed in the study may help the original inhabitants to have a greater say in how those lands are treated today.

Many of the lawsuits being filed by the Blackfoot nation concern the use of water that originates on their ancient lands. (Credit: KRTV)

Another high tech tool that is starting to find applications in archaeology is Artificial Intelligence or AI for short. Computer algorithms that can learn from their mistakes are now appearing in a wide range of research fields from driverless cars to deep fake images to deciphering ancient cuneiform tablets. See my post of 16 September 2023.

Artificial Intelligence is actually a broad field covering several areas of cybernetics. Together they may revolutionize human civilization. (Credit: The Motley Fool)

Now a contest, open to literally anyone has succeeded in using AI to reveal the text written on a 2,000 year old papyrus scroll that was charred beyond recognition, but still kept in one piece, by the eruption of Vesuvius that buried the town of Pompey. The scroll is one of hundreds that were excavated from a luxury villa in the nearby town of Herculaneum back in the 18th century.

One of the ancient scrolls unearthed at Herculaneum. Burned beyond readability their contents have been a mystery for over 200 years. (Credit: Euronews.com)

In the more than 200 years since their discovery many attempts had been made to read the scrolls, all without success and some of which caused considerable damage to the fragile remains of ancient writing. Then, in 2019 Brent Seals, a computer researcher at the University of Kentucky developed software that could virtually unwrap the outer layers of two of the scrolls using the scans produced by Computed Tomography (CT). Those scans by themselves were still unreadable however because the density of the ink used on the scrolls was the same as the papyrus itself. CT scans generate 3D images of the inside of objects by measuring the difference in densities of the materials of which the object is composed. 

While CT Scanners are primarily used in the field on medicine that have also made major discoveries in both Archaeology and Paleontology. (Credit: Wikipedia)

It was at this point that Seales thought of the idea of a contest among AI researchers in the hope that someone, or some team could take the scans he had produced and finally decipher the text of the ancient scrolls. With the financial assistance of Nat Friedman, a well known Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur, Seales raised $700,000 dollars and announced the Vesuvius Challenge. The criteria set for the winners was to decipher at least 4 passages of at least 140 characters each.

Brent Seales of the University of Kentucky. He carried out the CT scans of the scrolls while also organizing the contest that finally deciphered them. (Credit: University of Kentucky College of Engineering)

Three students, Luke Farritor, a undergraduate computer science major at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, Youssef Nader, a Ph.D. candidate from Egypt who is studying in Berlin along with Julian Schilliger a robotics student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich pooled their respective talents in order to decipher 15 columns of text, about 15% of the entire scroll, enough to win the prize.

A drawing of what the final deciphering looked like. Any Greek scholar could read most of the text giving us a look into what the reading public of the 1st century was interested in. (Credit: Wikipedia)

The scroll turned out to be a treatise on pleasure based upon the Greek Epicurean school of philosophy. Specifically the writing discussed the pleasures of music and food spiced with capers. The ability of the AI programs developed by Seales, Farritor, Nader and Schilliger to decode the blackened remains of the scroll has given archaeologists hope that at least some portions of the other 200 Herculaneum scrolls may also be deciphered.

Like Pompey the town of Herculaneum was buried in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. And like Pompey some potions of Herculaneum have been left unexcavated for future archaeologists to explore with even better instruments than we have today. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Not only that, but the ancient Roman villa in which the scrolls were discovered has never been completely excavated. Large sections of both Pompey and Herculaneum have been intentionally left for future archaeologists, with more advanced technology to study. Who knows what other wisdom from the classical Roman period lie waiting to be unearthed and hopefully read?

Some ancient Roman wisdom that our modern politicians would benefit from. (Credit: X)

Just two examples of how new technology, new tools can bring new discoveries that allow us to better understand the ancient world.

Book Review: ‘The Space Between Worlds’ by Micaiah Johnson

‘The Space Between Worlds’ is the debut novel for author Micaiah Johnson and she’s got a good solid hit for her first at bat. The Space in the title specifically refers to traveling to alternate Universes across the Multiverse. Cara, the main character in the novel, is traverser, one of the few people who can safely travel to some of those alternate worlds.

Cover art for ‘The Space Between Worlds’ a novel by author Micaiah Johnson. (Credit: Amazon)

You see there are a couple of catches to traversing, one is that travel is only possible to Universes that are closely similar to our own and second, if you try to go to an alternate Universe where you are still alive that Universe will reject you and send you back to Earth zero either dead or dying.

Most of us have been rejected by a lover but being rejected by a Universe, that must be really tough! (Credit: wikiHow)

That’s what makes Cara so valuable, on the 380 Universes that can be reached by the inhabitants of Earth zero; she’s already dead in 372. That means she can visit more Universes than anyone else. Part of the reason why Cara has died so often is that she grew up in Ashland, the ‘poor side of town’ where life is hard, violent and short and Cara’s early life was hard even for Ashland.

In ‘The Space Between Worlds’ Cara, the main character grew up in the slums of her world. (Credit: Habitat for Humanity GB)

Now however she lives and works in Wiley, a walled city where life is comfortable and rich, and she plans on staying right where she is. I don’t know if author Micaiah Johnson was thinking about a future where an ecological disaster had turned our present day ‘gated communities’ into walled cities like Wiley while the rest of Earth turns into an Ashland but that’s definitely how I pictured the novel’s Earth zero, Cara’s Universe. Ms. Johnson is quite good at describing just enough of Earth zero, and the technology of Traversing to let your imagination do the rest.

Now she lives with all of the rich folk in the wonderful, and exclusive walled city of Wiley. (Credit: Diamond Art Club)

Ms. Johnson is also good at plot twists, I lost count at how many there were in ‘The Space Between World’s’ but the first one was a real duzzy, it grabbed me and definitely made me want to finish the story. Indeed, the whole novel is pretty fast paced with more than a few memorable scenes.

Author Micaiah Johnson with her new novel. I’m going to have to check it out! (Credit: Orange County Register)

There’s a bit of romance in ‘The Space Between World’s’ as well with Cara yearning for a relationship with her handler Dell. This attraction brings a bit of classism and racism into the story because while Cara is dark and from Ashland, Dell is light and from a rich Wiley family leading to a lot of sexual tension between the two women.

Hollywood may love stories of romance between rich and poor but how often do you think that really works out? (Credit: Empire Magazine)

I do have a couple of criticisms of ‘The Space Between World’s’, for one thing you know right from the beginning that Cara and Dell will wind up together and sure enough while at the end it’s not quite ‘happily ever after’ there’s a good possibility that it eventually will be. More importantly, after a terrific beginning and an exciting middle I found the ending to be a bit of an anticlimax, not bad, but not really as grabbing as the first two-thirds of the novel.

The ending of ‘The Space Between Worlds’ wasn’t that bad but it wasn’t an SF ending either. After a terrific start and middle it was a bit trite. (Credit: Thesaurus.plus)

Nevertheless, ‘The Space Between World’s’ is certainly a good debut novel for author Micaiah Johnson, telling a story that’s both interesting and exciting. I heartily recommend ‘The Space Between World’s’ and I’m looking forward to Ms. Johnson’s next novel.