The Drift

Welcome to today's issue of Carolina Naturally

'Nuff Said!

Today is May 2, 2023

Today is: World Tuna Day

On This Day In History

In 1936CE: Sergei Prokofiev's musical "Peter and the Wolf" premieres in Moscow

Ain't That The Truth

Oh, and while you're at it - check out our sister blog Come What May for off the cuff and off the wall seriousness. Heck, who are we kidding, it's just fun and hilarity.

Editorial Comment

What is with everyone trying to harsh our mellow ...

Spring is the time of birth and new beginnings - or we have always held to that notion ... not too sure about some today.

The recent unpleasantness otherwise known as the Covid Pandemic has brought all the snakes and cockroaches out of their slime holes and they are infecting the rest of us with their delusions and negativity.

Granted there have always been snakes and cockroaches out there, but most tried to be unnoticed - not any longer ... 

We do want to give a shout out to our readers on the planet and say thanks for stopping by to read Carolina Naturally.

Remember to have fun and enjoy life.

Editorial Staff

A Brief and Deadly History of Steamboat Races

Steam-powered boats revolutionized trade and travel on American rivers in the 1800s, but they were dangerous. The wooden boats were powered by huge boilers that tended to explode. But new technology is something to get excited about, and any human endeavor will eventually turn into a competition, so steamboat races became a thing. These races were an ego trip for the boat captains, a way to advertise for boat owners, a new sport for gamblers, and something to do for spectators.

During competitions, the boilers on these steamboats would be pushed to their breaking point, which could spell disaster for all involved, especially passengers aboard at the time. The first steamboat race in 1811 didn't see any explosions or deaths, but the boats crashed into each other. Then in 1852, a steamboat boiler exploded during a race and 80 people died. Still, the story seemed to only add excitement to the races, which continued to be held on rivers far and wide, drawing millions in wagers. Read about the era of steamboat races at Smithsonian.  

Big sister at home ...

They 'can’t win, so they cheat'

Last year, after the U.S. Supreme Court ended the federal right to abortion, voters in Kansas, California, Michigan, Vermont, Kentucky, and Montana used the ballot initiative process to show their support for reproductive freedom, both by defeating wingnut-backed anti-abortion measures and approving constitutional amendments aimed at preserving abortion access.
Those losses for anti-abortion wingnuts and their wealthy backers have led the cabal to ramp up its attacks on the ballot initiative process itself in several states.
Wingnuts try to keep abortion rights off ballot after major losses: 'Can’t win, so they cheat'

Habits That Separate the Rich and the Poor

Tom Corley tells us:

In my five-year study of the daily habits of the wealthy and the poor I tracked over 300 activities that separate the rich and the poor. Here is a sampling of some of the differences in their daily habits:

18 Habits That Separate the Rich and the Poor

Hobbies You Must Keep Secret (Unless You Want to be Judged)

We all have hobbies and interests that bring us joy and fulfillment, whether reading, hiking, or playing video games. But there are some hobbies out there that, despite being seemingly harmless or even niche, have sparked intense backlash from others. ...

25 Hobbies You Must Keep Secret (Unless You Want to be Judged)

Momma got game ...

Butterflies and dodos hold clues to protecting biodiversity

Although too late for the famed flightless bird, new scientific findings on the winged insects could help preserve animal species.
By  MICHAEL ALLEN
Yolanda Melero, an ecology researcher in Spain, has a bit of good news to offset some of the increasingly unsettling scenarios regarding biodiversity.
As part of an EU-funded project into butterflies, Melero said researchers found that some populations of the insect are better adapted to local extreme weather than others. What’s more, the resilience seems to be linked to evolutionary relationships rather than to specific species traits.
Hopeful sign
In short, while some groups of closely related butterfly species cope well with extreme events and others don’t, no common characteristic or obvious similarity links these different families. The discovery has implications for other insects.
‘It means that not all populations are going to suffer as much as we thought,’ said Melero, who works at Spain-based research centre CREAF and the University of Barcelona.
Drives to maintain animal biodiversity need all the support, including from science, they can get. Around the world biodiversity is declining at an alarming rate as a result of climate change, land use and other human activities.
Researchers have described this collapse in the number of animal and plant species as a “biological annihilation” and warn a sixth mass extinction is occurring that could destroy the ecosystems on which humankind relies for its own survival.
Modelling by European researchers suggests that, as more and more individual species become extinct, a chain reaction could cause entire ecosystems to collapse as important ecological interactions disappear. They predict that ecosystems may lose 27% of vertebrate diversity by 2100.
The models highlight the importance of individual species and their population stability. But working out why some are more vulnerable to extinction than others is no easy task.
Globally heatwaves, droughts and heavy rains are increasing in frequency, length and magnitude as the climate warms.
Butterfly surprises
Melero has been exploring how these extreme events affect different populations of around 143 species of butterfly across Europe.
The lead researcher in the two-year EXTINCT project that ended in 2021, she expected to find that species able to cope better with extreme weather share certain characteristics.
‘We were surprised because we thought that being locally adapted, or not, would be related to species traits,’ said Melero.
For instance, she and colleagues from the University of Reading in the UK thought butterflies that reproduce more often would be better adapted to varying local conditions and weather extremes because they evolve faster. But this wasn’t always the case.
The team also expected a link to exist between how widespread butterfly species are and their level of local adaption.
The assumption was that, for example, a butterfly species that spreads from Scotland to Spain might struggle more with a Spanish heatwave than a type that lives only in Spain.
But again, this wasn’t always true.
Volunteer help
EXTINCT used historical data collected by volunteers as part of various butterfly surveying projects across Europe, some of which began in the 1970s, to analyse how different species and populations coped with extreme weather in the past.
In addition to the availability of these large datasets, Melero said there was another good reason for focusing on butterflies.
‘Butterflies are species models for all insects,’ she said. ‘What happens in butterflies also can happen in other arthropods.’
The relationships that the EXTINCT team pinpointed to explain the resilience of some butterfly species relate to their evolutionary history.
Evolutionary relationships illustrate the association among species that have a common ancestor. This helps researchers understand when and how certain traits were developed in specific species.
Following on the results of EXTINCT, the challenge now for ecology researchers is to study these relationships to work out which branches of the various family trees of butterflies are well adapted to extreme events and which are not so that conservation efforts can be directed to the right places.
Melero says that these results can likely be extrapolated to other insects.
Flightless icon
For a stark warning about the threats posed by humans to other animal life, consider the tale of a bird known as the dodo.
Endemic to the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, the dodo is an iconic example of an animal driven to extinction through human activity.
Dodos became extinct in the late 17th century through a combination of direct and indirect human factors, according to Delphine Angst, who was the lead researcher in an EU-funded project into the bird.
The NINEDOMA project, which also ran until 2021, unpicked information on the dodo’s ecology such as its diet and gait to understand why some species are more prone to extinction than others.
While conventional wisdom holds that much is known about this flightless bird, the opposite is true, according to Angst.
‘We don’t know what its diet was, how it moved, its reproduction cycle – we have very little information about the biology and ecology of this bird,’ she said.
Mixed messages
Written descriptions of dodos and their behaviour exist from sailors who stopped on Mauritius before the bird became extinct, but their accounts are inconsistent.
‘It’s funny because they describe things really differently,’ said Angst. ‘Some say the dodos are running everywhere, while some say they are walking very slowly. That is the same problem with every single thing about the ecology and the biology of the dodo – it’s obvious that the people who stopped on Mauritius had no background in natural history.’
To work out how dodos actually moved, Angst took advantage of the hundreds of dodo bones in museum collections across Europe. In flightless birds, there is a relationship between the way they move and the relative sizes of their leg bones – the length, for example, of the thigh bone compared with the shin bone.
Angst’s analysis suggests that, while not super-speedy runners like ostriches, dodos were able to walk or run relatively fast.
‘A bit like a turkey,’ she said.
To learn more about the dodo’s diet, Angst used a technique known as isotopic geochemical analyses.
Chemical isotopes in samples taken from dodo bones and from other animals and plants discovered nearby were compared to provide a picture of the fruits and seeds dodos likely ate.
In giving an overall idea of the composition of their diet, this helped shed light on the fate of dodos.
Unwelcome visitors
Sailors who stopped on Mauritius hunted the birds and collected their eggs for food. Laid on the ground, the eggs were an easy target.
The ships also brought invasive animals such as cats, rats, pigs and monkeys to the island.
As well as eating dodo eggs and chicks, these new arrivals consumed many of the plants on the island, competing with the dodo for food and disrupting Mauritius’s ecosystem. The dodo didn’t stand a chance.
‘To stop other animals facing the same fate as the dodo, you really need to understand them and how they live,’ said Angst.
The story of the dodo shows that knowledge about an animal’s connection with its environment – where it lives, what it eats and how and when it reproduces – is vital. Destroying crucial aspects of its surroundings means the animal can’t survive.
THE EU’S NATURE RESTORATION LAW
People across Europe are taking an active role in campaigning for new legislation to restore biodiversity. A European Citizens’ Initiative called “Save bees and farmers!” voiced public concern about the fate of Europe’s butterflies, bees and other pollinators if European farming practices continue using synthetic pesticides.
In responding to the initiative, European Commission Executive Vice-President Frans Timmermans said: ‘Reducing the use of chemical pesticides is essential to help nature recover and to allow bees, butterflies and other pollinators to continue their indispensable work in Europe’s fields and orchards.’
Since 2019, the European Commission has proposed numerous legislative initiatives to protect and restore biodiversity, including the Nature Restoration Law in June 2022. A key element of the EU Biodiversity Strategy, the proposal includes objectives for the long-term recovery of the EU’s land and sea areas as well as binding restoration targets for specific habitats and species, including pollinating insects.

Scientists Plan to Build Factory That Can Breed 5 Billion Mosquitoes Every Year

Yes, that's billion with a b. The good people at the World Mosquito Program have a vision for the future of our world and it involves the mass production of mosquitoes on a previously impossible scale.
Nature reports that the WMP's new facility will produce the mosquitoes and release them into urban areas in Brazil over the next 10 years. These modified mosquitoes carry the Wolbachia pipientis bacterium which prevents them from transmitting viruses. The plan is that these mosquitoes will breed with wild mosquitoes. Over time, the enhanced mosquito population will reduce the infection rate for dengue, which infects 2 million people in Brazil every year.

If It Pays To Be A Jerk, Why Isn’t Everyone That Way?

Throw a tantrum. Threaten, shove aside or steal from your colleagues. Science confirms, yet again, that brutish behavior can be an effective path to power. And not just in humans, but in chimpanzees, too.
A new study appearing April 24 in the journal PeerJ Life and Environment found that male chimps with more bullying, greedy and irritable personalities reached higher rungs of the social ladder and were more successful at siring offspring than their more deferential and conscientious counterparts.
But if that’s the case, researchers ask, why isn’t every chimp a bully?
A team led by researchers at the University of Edinburgh and Duke University followed 28 male chimps living in Gombe National Park in Tanzania.
A previous study of Gombe chimpanzees led by Edinburgh’s Alexander Weiss along with Duke professor Anne Pusey and colleagues showed how some chimpanzees are more sociable, while others are loners. Some lean towards easy-going, while others are more overbearing or quick to pick fights.
Tanzanian field researchers who knew the chimpanzees well performed the personality assessments, based on years of near-daily observations of how each chimpanzee behaved and interacted with other chimps.
In the current study, researchers found that male chimps with certain personality traits — in this case, a combination of high dominance and low conscientiousness — tend to fare better in life than others.
“Personality matters,” said Joseph Feldblum, assistant research professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke and the other lead author of the study.
It may not be shocking to learn that bullying has its perks. But for some researchers, findings like these pose a conundrum: If males with certain personality tendencies are more likely to rise to the top and reproduce, and pass the genes for those traits on to their offspring, then shouldn’t every male be that way?
In other words, why do personality differences exist at all?
“It’s an evolutionary puzzle,” Feldblum said.
One long-held theory is that different personality traits pay off at different points in animals’ lives. Even if being aggressive gives young male chimps an edge, it might backfire when they’re older. Or perhaps certain traits are a liability in youth but an asset in old age.
“Think of the personality traits that lead some people to peak in high school versus later in life,” Weiss said. “It’s a trade-off.”
But when the team tested this idea, using 37 years of data going back to some of Jane Goodall’s early work at Gombe in the 1970s, they found the same personality traits were linked to high rank and reproductive success across the lifespan.
The findings suggest that something else must explain the diversity of personalities in chimpanzees. It might be that the “best” personality to have varies depending on environmental or social conditions, or that a trait that is beneficial to males is costly to females, Feldblum said.
If that were true, then “genes associated with those traits would be kept in the population,” Weiss said.
Not too many years ago, the mere suggestion that animals have personalities at all was considered taboo. Jane Goodall herself was accused of anthropomorphism when she described some of the Gombe chimpanzees as “bolder” or “more fearful” than others, some as “affectionate” and others “cold.”
Since that time, scientists studying creatures ranging from birds to squid have found evidence of distinctive personalities in animals: quirks and idiosyncrasies and ways of relating to the world that remain reasonably stable over time and across situations.
Weiss says personality ratings for animals have proven to be as consistent from one observer to the next as are similar measures of human personality.
“The data just don’t support the skepticism,” Weiss said.

CITATION: “Personality Traits, Rank Attainment, and Siring Success Throughout the Lives of Male Chimpanzees of Gombe National Park,” Alexander Weiss, Joseph T. Feldblum, Drew M. Altschul, D. Anthony Collins, Shadrack Kamenya, Deus Mjungu, Steffen Foerster, Ian C. Gilby, Michael L. Wilson, Anne E. Pusey. PeerJ,April 24, 2023. DOI:  10.7717/peerj.1508.

Attitude is everything ...

 

How Marching Soldiers Can Make a Bridge Collapse

Suspension bridges are an engineering marvel, allowing access across water in all parts of the world. But they have their drawbacks. They must be somewhat flexible to avoid breaking apart, but if they move too much, they will break apart anyway. And strangely, a bridge full of pedestrians moving slowly puts more weight on a bridge than normal vehicle traffic. When soldiers march across a suspension bridge in unison, they can cause a bridge to sway rhythmically, called a "mechanical resonance." The Broughton Suspension Bridge in Manchester, England, was built in 1826. But in 1831, a unit of soldiers marched across the bridge in cadence, causing it to sway more than usual. They found this amusing and marched even harder. Then the bridge fell in. No one was killed in that incident, but the British army afterward enacted a policy to break cadence when crossing a bridge. Then in 1850, a French bridge fell under the same circumstances, killing 226 people!
The effect of marching on a suspension bridge became known, but it doesn't have to be a military unit marching in cadence to produce the effect, as other bridges have failed due to the natural cadence of crowds experiencing swaying while crossing a bridge. Read about this effect and the harrowing examples of what can happen at Amusing Planet. 

Spanish Athlete Beatriz Flamini’s 500 Days In A Cave Provides Insights Into How We Perceive Time

Spanish athlete Beatriz Flamini thought she had only stayed in the cave for 160-170 days. Almost half a year ago, she agreed to participate in a study attempting to understand the effects of isolation in humans, and her estimate meant that she still had over 300 days to go. Only it wasn't half a year ago. When the support team came to retrieve her, she was surprised to hear that her time was up. She had already spent over 500 days. On April 14, 2023, Flamini finally went out of the cave with a smile (although her mind was still stuck on November 21, 2021). Imagine enduring a year and a half inside a cave with almost no contact with the outside world.
Flamini explains that she quickly lost her sense of time during her stay in the cave. But how could one lose sense of time?
We keep track of time using environmental and social cues like the rising and setting of the sun and our daily routine like work. Flamini lost these cues during her time in the cave alone, and she may have relied more on her psychological processes, specifically her memory.
As it turns out, the memories we create during certain events become our reference in tracking time. The more memories created during an event, the more we perceive said event to have lasted longer. We perceive busy days as longer compared to days when nothing significant happens.
Because Flamini had no social interaction and no schedule to follow except her own, Flamini was free to do whatever she wanted anytime. This situation may have made the passing of time irrelevant.
But we can only let go of our sense of time when we believe we have control over our own time and behavior. Prisoners who serve sentences, for example, report becoming obsessed with monitoring time.
Flamini's 500 days inside the cave provide many insights into how we perceive time. The full story is told over at ScienceAlert.

Archaeologists unearth 1,000-year-old teenage mummy still in a 'good state'

Peruvian archaeologists have unearthed a more than 1,000-year-old teenage mummy.

Found on Monday in an underground tomb on the outskirts of the country’s coastal capital of Lima, the body is thought to date back to pre-Inca times.
The mummified adolescent was wrapped in a funerary bundle, with ceramic objects, rope and bits of skin and hair nearby.
Archaeologists believe the mummy, found at an archaeological site in Cajamarquilla, is one of 20 buried in the area likely killed as a ritual sacrifice.
The burial bundle was found in a ‘good state of conservation’, said lead archaeologist Yomira Huaman.
The way the teen was buried was unlike other mummies that have been discovered in the past.
Archaeologists unearth 1,000-year-old teenage mummy still in a 'good state'

Searching For Ancient Bears In An Alaskan Cave Led To An Important Human Discovery

The first people to live in the Americas migrated from Siberia across the Bering land bridge more than 20,000 years ago. Some made their way as far south as Tierra del Fuego, at the tip of South America. Others settled in areas much closer to their place of origin where their descendants still thrive today.
In “A paleogenome from a Holocene individual supports genetic continuity in Southeast Alaska,” published Friday in the journal iScience, University at Buffalo evolutionary biologist Charlotte Lindqvist and collaborators show, using ancient genetic data analyses, that some modern Alaska Natives still live almost exactly where their ancestors did some 3,000 years ago.
Lindqvist, PhD, associate professor of biological sciences in the UB College of Arts and Sciences, is senior author of the paper. In the course of her extensive studies in Alaska, she explored mammal remains that had been found in a cave in the state’s southeast coast. One bone was initially identified as coming from a bear. However, genetic analysis showed it to be the remains of a human female.
“We realized that modern Indigenous peoples in Alaska, should they have remained in the region since the earliest migrations, could be related to this prehistoric individual,” says Alber Aqil, a UB PhD student in biological sciences and the first author of the paper. This discovery led to efforts to solve this mystery, which DNA analyses are well suited to address when archeological remains are as sparse as these were.
Learning from an ancestor
The earliest peoples had already started moving south along the Pacific Northwest Coast before an inland route between ice sheets became viable. Some, including the female individual from the cave, made their home in the area that surrounds the Gulf of Alaska. That area is now home to the Tlingit Nation and three other groups: Haida, Tsimshian, and Nisga’a.
As Aqil and colleagues analyzed the genome from this 3,000-year-old individual — “research that was not possible just 20 years ago,” Lindqvist noted — they determined that she is most closely related to Alaska Natives living in the area today. This fact showed it was necessary to carefully document as clearly as possible any genetic connections of the ancient female to present-day Native Americans.
In such endeavors, it is important to collaborate closely with people living in lands where archeological remains are found. Therefore, cooperation between Alaska Native peoples and the scientific community has been a significant component of the cave explorations that have taken place in the region. The Wrangell Cooperative Association named the ancient individual analyzed in this study as “Tatóok yík yées sháawat” (Young lady in cave).
Genetic continuity in Southeast Alaska persists for thousands of years
Indeed, Aqil and Lindqvist’s research demonstrated that Tatóok yík yées sháawat is in fact closest related to present-day Tlingit peoples and those of nearby tribes along the coast. Their research therefore strengthens the idea that genetic continuity in Southeast Alaska has continued for thousands of years.
Human migration into North America, although it began some 24,000 years ago, came in waves — one of which, about 6,000 years ago — included the Paleo-Inuit, formerly known as Paleo-Eskimos. Importantly for understanding Indigenous peoples’ migrations from Asia, Tatóok yík yées sháawat’s DNA did not reveal ancestry from the second wave of settlers, the Paleo-Inuit. Indeed, the analyses performed by Aqil and Lindqvist helped shed light on the continuing discussion of migration routes, mixtures among people from these different waves, as well as modern territorial patterns of inland and coastal people of the Pacific Northwest in the pre-colonial era.
Oral history links an ancient woman to people living in Southeast Alaska today
The oral origin narratives of the Tlingit people include the story of the most recent eruption of Mount Edgecumbe, which would place them exactly in the region by 4,500 years ago. Tatóok yík yées sháawat, their relative, therefore informs not just modern-day anthropological researchers but also the Tlingit people themselves.
Out of respect for the right of the Tlingit people to control and protect their cultural heritage and their genetic resources, data from the study of Tatóok yík yées sháawat will be available only after review of its use by the Wrangell Cooperative Association Tribal Council.
“It’s very exciting to contribute to our knowledge of the prehistory of Southeast Alaska,” said Aqil.

Arias for Aria

Physicists Discover a Strange New Theoretical Phase of Hydrogen

By teaching a machine to learn a few quantum tricks, physicists have uncovered a strange new phase of hydrogen in solid form. While it's purely theoretical for now, the discovery could help us better understand the behavior of matter from the tiniest scales to the internal mechanics of the largest planets in the Universe.

This new solid hydrogen phase discovered by an international team of researchers followed the model's presentation of hydrogen molecules under extreme conditions: to use a food analogy, their shape morphed from spheres stacked like a pile of oranges to something that more closely resembled eggs.
Hydrogen typically requires very low temperatures and very high pressures to form a solid. It was through a novel machine learning study of this particular phase change that the scientists came across the new molecular arrangement.
Physicists Discover a Strange New Theoretical Phase of Hydrogen

Gravity Can Create Light, All on Its Own

As far as we know, our universe kicked off a long time ago by the Big Bang. One giant explosion set everything into motion and scattered the first material out into space.
Over time, the universe has changed and evolved in huge ways, forming generations of stars and planets, black holes, electromagnetic fields—you name it. But throughout all of this change, we can still see evidence of some of the earliest states of the universe.
Some of the most mysterious signatures from the beginning of time are gravitational waves. These waves, often referred to as ripples in spacetime, radiate through the universe and carry the effects of gravity out and away from the generating body. The strongest ones come from cataclysmic events like black hole mergers and supernovae—of the rapid expansion of the universe immediately following the Big Bang.
And, according to a new paper, some of the waves from that last category are strong enough that they can spontaneously generate light.
This Is Extraordinary: Gravity Can Create Light, All on Its Own

NASA thought it knew source of annual Geminid meteor shower

Turns out, it was wrong ...

NASA just admitted a big scientific “oopsie” — and the ripple effect has left experts scratching their heads over Earth’s annual Geminid meteor shower. The mistake involves the tail of Phaethon, an asteroid long assumed to be the source of meteors showering Earth each December. Closer analysis of Phaethon by a team of scientists revealed its tail isn’t dusty at all. Instead, it’s sodium gas, NASA revealed in a Tuesday news release. So, if the tail of the asteroid is gas, not dust, where are the dazzling Geminid meteors coming from? Scientists aren’t sure. 
Read More

A new look at ‘Einstein rings’ around distant galaxies just got us closer to solving the dark matter debate

Physicists believe most of the matter in the universe is made up of an invisible substance that we only know about by its indirect effects on the stars and galaxies we can see.

New look at ‘Einstein rings’ around distant galaxies just got us closer to solving the dark matter debate

See but not see ...

Northern Elephant Seals Only Sleep For About Two Hours When They Are At Sea

On land, when it spends its time mating and molting, the northern elephant seal sleeps for nearly 11 hours a day. But when it’s time to forage for food and it has to swim out to sea for months, the seal’s sleep pattern changes significantly.
But how does the seal sleep while in the water? Scientists also asked the same question, as these seals were always seen diving almost all the time. Could it be that they sleep while they dive?
To find the answer, scientists equipped 13 young female seals with a watertight EEG cap and sensors to monitor their brain waves, heart rates, and 3-D motion. The team, led by ecophysiologist Jessica Kendall-Bar, found that these seals do sleep while diving.
The seals first dive 60 to 100 meters below the surface. For a few minutes, they try to maintain themselves upright before REM and sleep paralysis kick in. Then they unconsciously flip upside down and gently descend in a spiral motion to depths where their natural predators do not normally go. After 5 to 10 minutes, the seals wake up from their power naps and swim back to the surface.
Scientists found that northern elephant seals sleep around two hours a day on average when they forage for food at sea.
It is worth noting that the sleeping habits of northern elephant seals are different from other marine animals like dolphins and fur seals who sleep only with half of their brains (one-sided sleep). Unlike other marine animals who try to be alert at all times, these seals leave themselves completely vulnerable.
The study of sleep behaviors across the animal kingdom is an essential step to understanding the function of sleep for all animals (including us humans).

Animals learn survival tricks from others

Many animals live in groups. One of the main benefits of this is shared knowledge. This information can help animals tackle problems such as where to find food and mates, how to follow migration routes and how to avoid predators.

Animals learn survival tricks from others – even if they live alone

Animal Pictures