Horseshoe crabs are marine and brackish water arthropods of the order Xiphosura — a slowly evolving, conservative taxa.

Much like (slow) Water Striders (Aquarius remigis), (relatively sluggish) Coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae) and (the current winner on truly slow evolution) Elephant Sharks (Callorhinchus milii), these fellows have a long history in the fossil record with very few anatomical changes. 

We can trace the lineage of barnacles back to the Middle Cambrian. That is half a billion years of data to sift through. 

If you divide that timeline in half yet again, we begin to understand barnacles and their relationship to other sea-dwelling creatures — with a lens that reveals ancient migration patterns.

Barnacles are in the infraclass Cirripedia in the class Maxillopoda. They are marine arthropods related to crabs and lobsters. 

These delightfully friendly and super smart fellows are Dall's porpoise. Porpoise are marine mammals who live in our world's oceans and breathe air at the surface, similar to humans. They have lungs, inhaling and exhaling through a blowhole at the top of their heads instead of through their snouts.

In the Kwak̓wala language of the Kwakiutl or Kwakwaka'wakw, speakers of Kwak'wala, of the Pacific Northwest, a blowhole is known as a ka̱'was, whether on a dolphin (porpoise) or whale and a porpoise is known as a k̓ulut̕a. 

At the turn of the century, if you denied global warming or believed that vaccines cause autism, it was easy to know which political party you were in. When it came to acceptance of evolution, things were muddier. Though more Democrats than Republicans accepted evolution the margin was single digits and over half of all people didn't know what to make of it or flat out denied it.(1)

In 2019, astronomers spotted a snowball in space moving at over 110,000 miles per hour. They quickly realized they had never seen it before. It was not even from our solar system.

Now named Borisov, it was the first interstellar comet ever detected by humans. That doesn't make it rare.

A new computer estimate instead believes that in the Oort Cloud—a shell of debris in the farthest reaches of our solar system—interstellar objects outnumber objects belonging to our solar system.


Borisov comet. Credit: NASA, ESA and D. Jewitt (UCLA)

I am not running for President so I don't have any need to cater to Iowa corn farmers and voters, as former Vice-President Al Gore admitted he was doing when he broke a tie in the Senate and forced ethanol mandates on Americans.

Dietary supplements containing Garcinia cambogia extract and green tea can cause similar liver, finds an analysis of the Drug-Induced Liver Injury Network.

G. cambogia, alone or with green tea, are touted by companies who sell alternatives to medicine and bought by people who believe in them, commonly for weight loss. But the analysis reveals that in the period covered the drug-induced liver injury caused by the supplement led to 91% being hospitalized, while 2 died and 1 survived due to a liver transplant

A reader sent me an email asking about chewing gum and if it was really made of plastic and my first thought was 'Why ask me? Do what scientists do and go to Google, skip the first 10 entries, which will all be gamed by SEO experts at anti-science groups like Ecowatch, and then you will find the answer' but I was hooked when I saw the article linked was in The Economist.

“Thank you for being a regenerative farmer.

Earth shifted from an anaerobic atmosphere to an aerobic one early in its life. However, for a long time, the question as to how it got there was still unresolved.