Something round under the ground at King's Knot

Archaeologists using remote sensing devices have found evidence of a round subsurface structure at the fabled "King's Knot" at Stirling Castle.  As reported in The Telegraph:

Though the Knot as it appears today dates from the 1620s, its flat-topped central mound is thought to be much older. Writers going back more than six centuries have linked the landmark to the legend of King Arthur.

Archaeologists from Glasgow University, working with the Stirling Local History Society and Stirling Field and Archaeological Society, conducted the first ever non-invasive survey of the site in May and June in a bid to uncover some of its secrets. Their findings were show there was indeed a round feature on the site that pre-dates the visible earthworks...

Around 1375 the Scots poet John Barbour said that "the round table" was south of Stirling Castle, and in 1478 William of Worcester told how "King Arthur kept the Round Table at Stirling Castle". Sir David Lindsay, the 16th century Scottish writer, added to the legend in 1529 when he said that Stirling Castle was home of the "Chapell-royall, park, and Tabyll Round".

It has also been suggested the site is partly Iron Age or medieval, or was used as a Roman fort.

Further details at the link. Photo via Archaeology News Network.

Harvesting the blood of horseshoe crabs

One may wonder why the horseshoe crab is sensitive to endotoxin and, furthermore, how does the crab benefit from this phenomenon? As we know, seawater is a virtual "bacterial soup". Typical near-shore areas that form the prime habitat of the horseshoe crab can easily contain over one billion Gram-negative bacteria per milliliter of seawater. Thus, the horseshoe crab is constantly threatened with infection. Unlike mammals, including humans, the horseshoe crab lacks an immune system; it cannot develop antibodies to fight infection. However, the horseshoe crab does contain a number of compounds that will bind to and inactivate bacteria, fungi, and viruses. The components of LAL are part of this primitive "immune" system. The components in LAL, for example, not only bind and inactivate bacterial endotoxin, but the clot formed as a result of activation by endotoxin provides wound control by preventing bleeding and forming a physical barrier against additional bacterial entry and infection. It is one of the marvels of evolution that the horseshoe crab uses endotoxin as a signal for wound occurrence and as an extremely effective defense against infection.

Photo via Fresh Photons, but to read about this, I recommend the Horseshoecrab.org website.

Addendum:  A related story in the Washington Post in May 2012 reports at least an apparent temporary recovery in crab numbers.

The twin rate in the U.S. has skyrocketed

The twin boom can be explained by changes in when and how women are getting pregnant. Demographers have in recent years described a "delayer boom," in which birth rates have risen among the sort of women—college-educated—who tend to put off starting a family into their mid-30s or beyond. There are now more in this group than ever before: In 1980, just 12.8 percent of women had attained a bachelor's degree or higher; by 2010, that number had almost tripled, to 37 percent. And women in their mid-30s have multiple births at a higher rate than younger women. A mother who is 35, for example, is four times more likely than a mother who is 20 to give birth to twins...

Better-educated, richer parts of the country do produce more twins than anywhere else. Connecticut, for example, is the wealthiest state in the union (its residents made an average of $56,272 per capita in 2008) and it ranks in the top three when it comes to education (35.6 percent of its residents held a bachelor's degree). It's also in the top three for the availability of IVF clinics, with 2.52 per 1 million residents. And its twinning rate—43 for every 1,000 live births—is third in the nation...

...it turns out that black mothers are more likely to have twins than those of any other racial group. It has been known for decades that levels of FSH production differ among subpopulations in the U.S. and overseas. Black women in African countries produce more FSH than anyone else, and they have the highest fraternal twinning rate in the world. Women in East Asian countries, on the other hand, have the lowest FSH-levels and produce few twins. 

More at the Salon article. Image via.

90% of people can't search a web page

[According to a search anthropolist at Google] 90 percent of people in their studies don't know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page!..

"90 percent of the US Internet population does not know that. This is on a sample size of thousands," Russell said. "I do these field studies and I can't tell you how many hours I've sat in somebody's house as they've read through a long document trying to find the result they're looking for. At the end I'll say to them, 'Let me show one little trick here,' and very often people will say, 'I can't believe I've been wasting my life!'"

From Alexis Madrigal's column at The Atlantic.

Crocoite

The name comes from the Greek krokos, meaning “saffron,” a reference to the bright red-orange color of the mineral, which typically forms prismatic crystals sometimes two or more inches in length...

Its chemical formula is PbCrO4... The mineral was first described scientifically after its discovery in the 1760s in Berezovskoe, a gold-mining district on the east slope of Russia’s Ural Mountains. Frank Mihajlowits mined the specimen above in the 1970s at the Adelaide Mine in the Dundas area of Tasmania, Australia... the Honorable Sir Guy Stephen Montague Green, proclaimed the adoption of crocoite as the mineral emblem of Tasmania...

Source.

Zoo animals went bonkers before the earthquake

From a report in the Washington Post:

It happened a little before 2 p.m. Primate keeper K.C. Braesch was standing just a few feet away when Iris emitted a loud, guttural cry, known to scientists as belch-vocalizing. Iris then scrambled to the top of her enclosure...

...a gorilla, Mandara, shrieked and grabbed her baby, Kibibi, racing to the top of a climbing structure just seconds before the ground began to shake dramatically. Two other apes — an orangutan, Kyle, and a gorilla, Kojo — already had dropped their food and skedaddled to higher turf...

The 64 flamingos seemed to sense the tumult a number of seconds in advance as well, clustering together in a nervous huddle before the quake hit. One of the zoo’s elephants made a low-pitched noise as if to communicate with two other elephants. And red-ruffed lemurs emitted an alarm cry a full 15 minutes before the temblor, the zoo said. During the quake, the zoo grounds were filled with howls and cries. The snakes, normally inert in the middle of the day, writhed and slithered. Beavers stood on their hind legs and then jumped into a pond. Murphy the Komodo dragon ran for cover. Lions resting outside suddenly stood up and stared at their building as the walls shook. Damai, a Sumatran tiger, leaped as if startled but quickly settled down. Some animals remained agitated for the rest of the day, wouldn’t eat and didn’t go to sleep on their usual schedule... 

I love stories like this.

President Obama's summer reading list

A variety of sites are discussing the books President Obama has chosen to read during his vacation at Martha's Vineyard.  Here's some commentary from the National Review:

According to reports from the Los Angeles Times and the AP, Obama purchased five books on his trip to the Vineyard bookseller Bunch of Grapes: Marianna Baer’s Frost, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Daniel Woodrell’s The Bayou Trilogy, Emma Donoghue’s Room, and Ward Just’s Rodin’s Debutante. The second wave came when, according to Alexis Simendinger, White House aides listed for reporters the three books Obama brought with him to the Vineyard: two more novels — Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone and David Grossman’s To the End of the Land — and one nonfiction work — Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration...

Assuming that Brave New World and Frost are for his daughters, this leaves six books that are presumably for presidential consumption, and they may constitute the oddest assortment of presidential reading material ever disclosed, for a number of reasons. First, five of the six are novels, and the near-absence of nonfiction sends the wrong message for any president, because it sets him up for the charge that he is out of touch with reality...

Beyond the issue of fiction vs. nonfiction, there is also the question of genre. The Bayou Trilogy has received excellent reviews, but it is a mystery series. While there is nothing wrong with that per se, not every presidential reading selection is worth revealing to the public...

The Grossman novel, which is about an Israeli woman who hikes to avoid hearing bad news about her soldier son, could create complications for Obama on the Israel front. Grossman is a well-known critic of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians, so reading this novel will likely not assuage those concerned about Obama’s views on the Middle East. While the fiction-heavy aspect of the list is something new, the liberal authors should come as no surprise. Obama, like other Democratic presidents, has tended to read mainly liberal books, although he could stand to gain some insight from conservative ones...

This year’s list suggests that Obama needs to consider the messages sent by his reading more carefully. According to Mickey Kaus, the Obama list is “heavy on the wrenching stories of immigrant experiences, something the President already knows quite a bit about.” For this reason, Kaus feels that the list reveals an intellectually incurious president. Either that, or it is “a bit of politicized PR BS designed to help the President out.” In that case, he notes, “it’s sending the wrong message.” Either way, the annual book list should be a relatively easy way to make the president appear to be on top of things and in control. This year’s list, alas, reveals a president who appears to be neither. 

Good grief.  He's on vacation, and being criticized for reading fiction and mysteries.  Lighten up.

I hope nobody gets hold of my reading list.  More at the link.  And his reading selections from previous years is depicted in a graphic here.

Image credit: Zoe Pollock.