Fifth Period of the Paleozoic Era 359-299 million years ago
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When thinking of giant animals, dinosaurs might be the first creatures you think of. But before the dinosaurs became extinct, and before the first ever humans existed, there was megafauna. In zoology, this means large animals.当思考巨型动物时,恐龙可能是您想到的第一批生物。 但是在恐龙灭绝之前,在有史以来第一个人类存在之前,有Megafauna。 在动物学中,这意味着大动物。One of the largest known mammals to have ever walked the Earth is the Paraceratherium – picture a gigantic hornless rhino, and you'll have a rough idea of what they looked like. They lived around 25 million years ago and were most common in areas of the world that are now part of Asia, such as China, India and Kazakhstan. From excavated fossils, these creatures are estimated to have been almost six metres tall – that's the height of two buses on top of each other! 曾经走过地球的最大的已知哺乳动物之一就是游牧 - 想象一个巨大的无角犀牛,您将对它们的外观有一个粗略的了解。 他们居住于大约2500万年前,在现在已经是亚洲的一部分的地区,例如中国,印度和哈萨克斯坦。 从挖掘的化石中,估计这些生物已经高六米,这是两辆公共汽车的高度! And it's not just land enormous creatures lived on – they were in the skies and oceans too. The Argentavis is the largest flying bird to have been discovered. It lived until around six million years ago and had a wingspan of seven metres, over twice the size of the Andean condor, which is one of the largest birds on Earth today. And we can't forget the giant shark that roamed the oceans, megalodon. Imagine swimming in the sea and coming across an 18-metre-long shark! Don't worry. They died out around 2.6 million years ago. 而且,这不仅是土地巨大的生物,而且还在天空和海洋中。 阿根廷是发现的最大的飞鸟。 它一直活到大约600万年前,翼展为7米,是安第斯秃鹰的两倍以上,这是当今地球上最大的鸟类之一。 而且我们不能忘记漫游海洋的巨型鲨鱼,Megalodon。 想象一下在海里游泳,遇到一条18米长的鲨鱼! 不用担心。 他们大约在260万年前去世。So, why were pre-historic animals so huge? There are a number of reasons. One is that, in the past, resources were more plentiful, so species were able to grow larger because they could eat more. Scientists also believe that during certain periods of history, such as in the Carboniferous period, there were higher oxygen levels on Earth. At this time, some insects grew to the size of cars because of better oxygen delivery in their tracheal system, the network of tubes that enable insects to breathe. 那么,为什么史前动物如此巨大? 有很多原因。 一个是,过去的资源更丰富,因此物种能够生长更大,因为它们可以吃得更多。 科学家还认为,在历史的某些时期,例如石炭纪时期,地球上的氧气水平较高。 目前,由于气管系统中的氧气递送更好,该昆虫的大小是汽车的大小,这是使昆虫呼吸的试管网络。 Can you picture animals being so huge today? 您能想象动物今天如此巨大吗?
This is where life on Land really became fashionable and very quickly got more species than the ocean for a the first time on earth. Season 8 is underway and we need YOUR questions. Send your science questions, name and country of origin to LITTLEBODIESBIGBRAINS@gmail.com for a chance to be featured next season.
Catie chats with Dr. Sapphire McMullan-Fisher, an ecologist with a special interest in biodiversity conservation, particularly macrofungi and mosses.Sapphire is a renowned scientific researcher, speaker, teacher and author with a knack for communicating fungi's vital ecological roles — and why we should all pay a lot more attention to these remarkable, all-connecting entities.She's is also a pretty radical member of the community here in Naarm/Melbourne, who last year let Catie + George transform her suburban backyard into a market garden through the Growing Farmers program. Wise, lively and friend of the fungi, enjoy this cracking convo with Sapphire McMullan-Fisher.SHOW NOTESBeing a GondwananGrowing up in a mining town in the Pilbara.From saving African animals to fungi fascination.A fire and fungi pHD in Tasmania.Overcoming dyslexia in academia. Ecosystems need fungi!Decomposition + partners of plants. Why to leave the tree debris be.Journey back to the Carboniferous period when all the coal and oil was formed.Fungi eats wood, invertebrates eat fungi, birds eat invertebrates... hey presto!Life goes on. (Even though we're seriously messing with systems.) How an understanding of matter recycling gives an appreciation of post-humous existence.Patterns + process + life = wow.Where do humans fit in the bigger picture? Should we just hurry up and extinct ourselves, or…?Making space + food in your garden for other organisms who deserve to be here in the landscape. How mindfulness of observing nature increase your understanding of it.Find the things that make your curiosity pop. Ask: what is it? How do I found out more about it?Re-activating our patterning brain.Curiosity as a practice.Being on the spectrum as a superpower. Growing up thinking you're not clever. Absorbing information in tiny little bites.Expanding communicating styles so that everyone gets it.How expectations shape your view of self. Looking to ecosystems to confirm our need for diversity. Allowing ourselves to learn and love learning.Biology is not a soft science!How a car accident changed everything. Having trust that humans won't be assholes.They say you need a village to raise a child… I need a village just to survive!The impossibility of going life alone.How do you learn to ask people for help?Letting people self select in how they help.Ways to be be radical and resist the status quo.Being sustainable within your limits.What's the #1 priority in taking action for the world?Letting your inner child guide us towards more fulfilling life and work.LINKS YOU'LL LOVEGrowing FarmersFun Fungi EcologyFungi4Land on InstaSupport the show
In How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America (Princeton UP, 2024), Caroline Winterer, William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies at Stanford University, takes her reader on a journey through the historical strata of the United States' relationship with deep time. From the early days of the republic to the first half of the twentieth century, Winterer retraces how the study of the continent's geological past provided Americans with “a vocabulary with which to frame their nation's place in the cosmic order.” If the bones of dinosaurs found in the West play an expected part in this history, the book highlights the forgotten roles of less conspicuous, yet just as fascinating, fossils, such as the remains of Silurian trilobites and Carboniferous ferns. The book shows how fossil finds throughout history helped re-imagine, many times over, the past, present, and future of the United States. Far from simply ennobling the “New World” with an antiquity that could compete with the depth of Europe's past, the study of American fossils influenced how Americans thought about the origins, landscapes, resources, and the many peoples of the continent. Indeed, if the author makes room for the intriguing developments of paleontological discoveries and the riveting story of how “Americans crafted a virtual deep time” made of paintings, magic lanterns, and other models, she also addresses the violence, both toward ecosystems and people, often justified by deep time imaginaries. Through its historical investigation, How the New World Became Old reminds the reader that today's responses to intertwined ecological and social challenges will inevitably be informed by our conceptions of deep time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
In How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America (Princeton UP, 2024), Caroline Winterer, William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies at Stanford University, takes her reader on a journey through the historical strata of the United States' relationship with deep time. From the early days of the republic to the first half of the twentieth century, Winterer retraces how the study of the continent's geological past provided Americans with “a vocabulary with which to frame their nation's place in the cosmic order.” If the bones of dinosaurs found in the West play an expected part in this history, the book highlights the forgotten roles of less conspicuous, yet just as fascinating, fossils, such as the remains of Silurian trilobites and Carboniferous ferns. The book shows how fossil finds throughout history helped re-imagine, many times over, the past, present, and future of the United States. Far from simply ennobling the “New World” with an antiquity that could compete with the depth of Europe's past, the study of American fossils influenced how Americans thought about the origins, landscapes, resources, and the many peoples of the continent. Indeed, if the author makes room for the intriguing developments of paleontological discoveries and the riveting story of how “Americans crafted a virtual deep time” made of paintings, magic lanterns, and other models, she also addresses the violence, both toward ecosystems and people, often justified by deep time imaginaries. Through its historical investigation, How the New World Became Old reminds the reader that today's responses to intertwined ecological and social challenges will inevitably be informed by our conceptions of deep time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
In How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America (Princeton UP, 2024), Caroline Winterer, William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies at Stanford University, takes her reader on a journey through the historical strata of the United States' relationship with deep time. From the early days of the republic to the first half of the twentieth century, Winterer retraces how the study of the continent's geological past provided Americans with “a vocabulary with which to frame their nation's place in the cosmic order.” If the bones of dinosaurs found in the West play an expected part in this history, the book highlights the forgotten roles of less conspicuous, yet just as fascinating, fossils, such as the remains of Silurian trilobites and Carboniferous ferns. The book shows how fossil finds throughout history helped re-imagine, many times over, the past, present, and future of the United States. Far from simply ennobling the “New World” with an antiquity that could compete with the depth of Europe's past, the study of American fossils influenced how Americans thought about the origins, landscapes, resources, and the many peoples of the continent. Indeed, if the author makes room for the intriguing developments of paleontological discoveries and the riveting story of how “Americans crafted a virtual deep time” made of paintings, magic lanterns, and other models, she also addresses the violence, both toward ecosystems and people, often justified by deep time imaginaries. Through its historical investigation, How the New World Became Old reminds the reader that today's responses to intertwined ecological and social challenges will inevitably be informed by our conceptions of deep time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history
In How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America (Princeton UP, 2024), Caroline Winterer, William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies at Stanford University, takes her reader on a journey through the historical strata of the United States' relationship with deep time. From the early days of the republic to the first half of the twentieth century, Winterer retraces how the study of the continent's geological past provided Americans with “a vocabulary with which to frame their nation's place in the cosmic order.” If the bones of dinosaurs found in the West play an expected part in this history, the book highlights the forgotten roles of less conspicuous, yet just as fascinating, fossils, such as the remains of Silurian trilobites and Carboniferous ferns. The book shows how fossil finds throughout history helped re-imagine, many times over, the past, present, and future of the United States. Far from simply ennobling the “New World” with an antiquity that could compete with the depth of Europe's past, the study of American fossils influenced how Americans thought about the origins, landscapes, resources, and the many peoples of the continent. Indeed, if the author makes room for the intriguing developments of paleontological discoveries and the riveting story of how “Americans crafted a virtual deep time” made of paintings, magic lanterns, and other models, she also addresses the violence, both toward ecosystems and people, often justified by deep time imaginaries. Through its historical investigation, How the New World Became Old reminds the reader that today's responses to intertwined ecological and social challenges will inevitably be informed by our conceptions of deep time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies
In How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America (Princeton UP, 2024), Caroline Winterer, William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies at Stanford University, takes her reader on a journey through the historical strata of the United States' relationship with deep time. From the early days of the republic to the first half of the twentieth century, Winterer retraces how the study of the continent's geological past provided Americans with “a vocabulary with which to frame their nation's place in the cosmic order.” If the bones of dinosaurs found in the West play an expected part in this history, the book highlights the forgotten roles of less conspicuous, yet just as fascinating, fossils, such as the remains of Silurian trilobites and Carboniferous ferns. The book shows how fossil finds throughout history helped re-imagine, many times over, the past, present, and future of the United States. Far from simply ennobling the “New World” with an antiquity that could compete with the depth of Europe's past, the study of American fossils influenced how Americans thought about the origins, landscapes, resources, and the many peoples of the continent. Indeed, if the author makes room for the intriguing developments of paleontological discoveries and the riveting story of how “Americans crafted a virtual deep time” made of paintings, magic lanterns, and other models, she also addresses the violence, both toward ecosystems and people, often justified by deep time imaginaries. Through its historical investigation, How the New World Became Old reminds the reader that today's responses to intertwined ecological and social challenges will inevitably be informed by our conceptions of deep time.
In How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America (Princeton UP, 2024), Caroline Winterer, William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies at Stanford University, takes her reader on a journey through the historical strata of the United States' relationship with deep time. From the early days of the republic to the first half of the twentieth century, Winterer retraces how the study of the continent's geological past provided Americans with “a vocabulary with which to frame their nation's place in the cosmic order.” If the bones of dinosaurs found in the West play an expected part in this history, the book highlights the forgotten roles of less conspicuous, yet just as fascinating, fossils, such as the remains of Silurian trilobites and Carboniferous ferns. The book shows how fossil finds throughout history helped re-imagine, many times over, the past, present, and future of the United States. Far from simply ennobling the “New World” with an antiquity that could compete with the depth of Europe's past, the study of American fossils influenced how Americans thought about the origins, landscapes, resources, and the many peoples of the continent. Indeed, if the author makes room for the intriguing developments of paleontological discoveries and the riveting story of how “Americans crafted a virtual deep time” made of paintings, magic lanterns, and other models, she also addresses the violence, both toward ecosystems and people, often justified by deep time imaginaries. Through its historical investigation, How the New World Became Old reminds the reader that today's responses to intertwined ecological and social challenges will inevitably be informed by our conceptions of deep time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The swamps of the Late Carboniferous Period teemed with giant insects, but it's time for the amniotes - the ancestors of all reptiles, birds, and mammals to come - to earn the title of Fully Terrestrial Vertebrates. It's getting more crowded on land - could you survive?--Eons is a production of Complexly for PBS Digital Studios.If you'd like to support the show, head over to Patreon and pledge for some cool rewards!Want to follow Eons elsewhere on the internet?FacebookYouTubeTwitterInstagram
The gang discusses two papers that detail interesting findings about the soft tissues of extinct arthropods. The first paper does a detailed study of the limbs attached to the trilobite head. The second paper describes the newly discovered head of the ancient myriapod Arthropluera, and discusses the larger implications this fossil has for the evolution of millipedes. Meanwhile, Curt explores new advertising ventures, Amanda unpacks automotive anxiety, and James has no ethical complications to report concerning this podcast. Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition): The friends look at two papers that look at parts of dead animals that have lots of parts that repeat over and over again and take off their skin every time they get bigger. The first paper looks at a group of these dead animals that are no longer around but are found a lot in the past. This paper shows that the number of legs in the head is different than we thought it was. They show that there are five legs in the head, and that it was hard to see in a lot of these animals because of the ways that we get these animals in the rocks makes it harder to see. The second paper looks at an animal that we think is a lot like animals we see today with long bodies and two legs on each part. But we never actually found the head of these animals. This paper finds the head and it helps to show us a lot of cool things about not just these animals in the past, but also how these animals have changed over time. This helps us understand why the groups we have today are the way that they are. References: Lhéritier, Mickaël, et al. "Head anatomy and phylogenomics show the Carboniferous giant Arthropleura belonged to a millipede-centipede group." Science Advances 10.41 (2024): eadp6362. Hou, Jin‐bo, and Melanie J. Hopkins. "New evidence for five cephalic appendages in trilobites and implications for segmentation of the trilobite head." Palaeontology 67.5 (2024): e12723.
What do you wish you had learned in school? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice go back to school to answer questions about simulation theory, time dilation, white holes, the sound of space, and more!NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://startalkmedia.com/show/cosmic-queries-back-to-school-edition/Thanks to our Patrons Goat34, Mark Dent, Edwin J Roldan, Evan Moorhead, and Abby GIll for supporting us this week. (Originally Aired Tuesday, October 4 2022)
Get FREE access to the award-winning documentary Evolution’s Achilles’ Heels here. The standard explanation for coal is that it was formed over millions of years in a swamp environment.But Christians who believe the biblical account of a global Flood (in Genesis 6–8) claim that coal is a direct result of this global, watery catastrophe. The question is, which explanation better matches the physical evidence? Join geologist, Dr Tas Walker, for a fascinating exploration of coal—and the true history of Earth. ✍️ Links and Show Notes Does coal prove the earth is young? Coal: memorial to the Flood Polystrate Fossils: Evidence against millions of years The Z-factor Forests that grew on water Forked seams sabotage swamp theory Coal, volcanism and Noah’s Flood The origin of the Carboniferous coal measures The recent origin of Bass Strait oil and gas The geology transformation tool
Join us on a fascinating journey through Scotland's geological history in this episode of the Full Circle Podcast. From the ancient rocks of the Northwest Highlands to the volcanic landscapes of the Isle of Skye, we explore the diverse and captivating geology that shapes Scotland's stunning scenery. Find Luisa on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/scottishgeologist In this episode, we delve into the formation of sandstones, mudstones, and coals during the Carboniferous period, uncovering the secrets of Scotland's coal-rich past. We also discuss the impact of tectonic events like the Caledonian Orogeny and the formation of the Highland Boundary Fault Line, which divides the lowlands from the highlands. Discover how ancient magma chambers and volcanic activity have left their mark on Scotland's landscape, from the rugged peaks of the Southern Uplands to the majestic cliffs of the Isle of Arran. Learn about the role of glaciers in sculpting the land during the Quaternary period and the fascinating concept of supervolcanoes. Join us as we unravel the mysteries of Scotland's geological past, blending informative insights with engaging storytelling and a touch of humor. Whether you're a geology enthusiast or simply curious about the Earth's history, this episode offers a captivating exploration of Scotland's geological wonders. Tune in and embark on a geological adventure like never before!
Die Themen in den Wissensnachrichten: +++ Abbauprodukt von verbotenem Weichmacher in hunderten Urinproben entdeckt +++ Dieser außergewöhnlicher Zeitkristall tickt alle 6,9 Sekunden +++ Warum leugnen Menschen den Klimawandel? +++ **********Weiterführende Quellen zu dieser Folge:Neue Funde von Weichmacher im Kinderurin, LANUV, 31.01.2024Deutsche Umweltstudie zur Gesundheit, GerES VI (2023-2024), Umweltbundesamt, 17.07.2023Robust continuous time crystal in an electron–nuclear spin system, nature physics, 24.01.2024Enigmatic fossil plants with three-dimensional, arborescent-growth architecture from the earliest Carboniferous of New Brunswick, Canada, Cell, 02.02.2024A representative survey experiment of motivated climate change denial, nature climate change, 02.02.2024Alle Quellen findet ihr hier.**********Ihr könnt uns auch auf diesen Kanälen folgen: Tiktok und Instagram.
Let's take a look at some new findings about the temnospondyls this week! Further reading: Ancient giant amphibians swam like crocodiles 250 million years ago Fossil of Giant Triassic Amphibian Unearthed in Brazil Kwatisuchus rosai was an early amphibian [picture taken from article linked above]: Koolasuchus was a weird big-headed boi: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to revisit an animal we talked about way back in episode 172, the temnospondyl. That's because a new species of temnospondyl has been named that lived about 250 million years ago, and some other new information has been published about temnospondyls in general. In case you haven't listened to episode 172 in a while, let's brush up on some history. The temnospondyls arose about 330 million years ago during the Carboniferous period. Ocean levels were high, the continents were coming together slowly to form the supercontinent Pangaea, and much of the land was flooded with warm, shallow water that created enormous swampy areas full of plants. Naturally, a whole lot of animals evolved to live in the swamps, and the temnospondyls were especially successful. Temnospondyls were semi-aquatic animals that probably looked a lot like really big, really weird salamanders. This was before modern amphibians evolved, and scientists still aren't sure if the temnospondyls are the direct ancestors of modern amphibians or just cousins that died out with no living descendants. Temnospondyls do share many traits with modern amphibians, but they still had a lot in common with their fish ancestors. Most temnospondyls had large heads that were broad and flattened in shape, often with a skull that was roughly triangular. Some had smooth skin but many had scales, including some species with scales that grew into armor-like plates. The earliest species had relatively small, weak legs and probably spent most of their time in the water, but it wasn't long before species with stronger legs developed that probably lived mostly on land. Many temnospondyls were small, but some grew really big. The biggest found so far is Prionosuchus, which is only known from fragmentary specimens discovered in Brazil in South America. It had an elongated snout something like a ghavial's, which is a type of crocodilian that mostly eats fish, and a similar body shape. That's why its name ends in the word “suchus,” which refers to a crocodile or an animal that resembles a crocodilian. Inside, though, prionosuchus probably had more in common with its fish ancestors than with modern crocodiles, and of course it wasn't a reptile at all. It was an amphibian, possibly the largest one that's ever lived. The biggest specimen found so far had a skull that measured just over 5 feet long, or 1.6 meters. That was just the skull! The whole animal, tail and all, might have measured as much as 30 feet long, or about 9 meters, although most paleontologists think it was probably more like 18 feet long, or 5-1/2 meters. That's still incredibly big, as large as the average saltwater crocodile that lives today. The resemblance of many temnospondyls to crocodilians is due to convergent evolution, since researchers think a lot of temnospondyls filled the same ecological niche as modern crocodiles. If you're an ambush predator who spends a lot of time hiding in shallow water waiting for prey to get close enough, the best shape to have is a long body, short legs, a long tail that's flattened side to side to help you swim, and a big mouth for grabbing, preferably with a lot of teeth. A study published in March of 2023 examined some trace fossils found in South Africa that scientists think were made about 255 million years ago by a temnospondyl. The fossils were found in what had once been a tidal flat or lagoon along the shore of the ancient Karoo Sea. You didn't need to know it was called the Karoo Sea but I wanted to say it because it...
What do coal seams tell us about Earth’s history? Do they show signs of having formed very slowly—over millions of years—in huge swamps? (This is the most common naturalistic explanation of how coal formed.) Or does the evidence point to vast quantities of vegetation being rapidly, catastrophically buried in a flood of, well, biblical proportions—only a few thousand years ago? (This is what biblical creationists claim.) The real-world evidence is consistent with one of these stories—but directly contradicts the other! But which one? Join geologist, Dr Tas Walker, for a fascinating exploration of coal—and the true history of Earth. ✍️ Links and Show Notes Coal: Memorial to the Flood https://youtu.be/hqUtY23L4iQ The Z-factor Forests that grew on water Forked seams sabotage swamp theory Coal, volcanism and Noah’s Flood The origin of the Carboniferous coal measures
"Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar" is a classic American radio drama series that originally aired from 1949 to 1962. It is often considered one of the best and longest-running detective shows in the history of old-time radio. Created by writer Jack Johnstone, the series followed the adventures of Johnny Dollar, an insurance investigator known for his dedication to solving insurance-related cases and his distinctive catchphrase, "Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar."The show typically featured a format known as the "expense account" format, where Johnny Dollar was portrayed as a freelance insurance investigator. Each episode began with Johnny receiving a phone call from an insurance company, assigning him to investigate a suspicious insurance claim or loss. He was then sent to various locations across the United States (and sometimes abroad) to unravel the mysteries surrounding the claims.One unique aspect of the show was its narrative structure. Johnny Dollar's investigations were presented in a flashback format, where he would detail the events of his investigation to the insurance company's accountant, explaining how he spent the money allocated for the case. This storytelling device allowed for a first-person narrative style that drew listeners into the mysteries and the life of the investigator.Throughout the series, Johnny Dollar was portrayed by several talented actors, including Charles Russell, Edmond O'Brien, John Lund, Bob Bailey, and Mandel Kramer. Each actor brought their own distinctive style to the character, contributing to the show's longevity and popularity."Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar" is celebrated for its well-written scripts, engaging mysteries, and the charismatic character of Johnny Dollar himself. It combined elements of crime drama, suspense, and adventure, making it a beloved radio program during its heyday. The show's memorable theme music and Johnny Dollar's sign-off, "Yours Truly," became iconic elements of the series.
LOOP 3.2: Producer Sophie Lanfear gives us our first insights into how documentaries are shaped. She tells us about the enormous scope of episode three and the difficulty of trying to fit in so many significant events. We analyse her use of emotion throughout the episode and she explains why she opted to use comedy. Finally, we look at the problem of anthropomorphism in documentaries. Life On Our Planet (LOOP) is a new 8-part series created for Netflix by Silverback Films and Amblin Television. This Steven Spielberg produced series, narrated by Morgan Freeman, is hugely ambitious in its scope, telling the story of life throughout the whole Phanerozoic Eon. Ancient organisms and environments are painstakingly recreated by the supremely talented Industrial Light and Magic, whilst modern natural history scenes add vital context to the story. This show has been worked on for six years, during which time countless papers were read and around 150 different palaeontologists contributed their time and knowledge. The whole production had culture of letting the scientific research dictate scenes, resulting in one of the most accurate on-screen representations of prehistoric life there has ever been. And how do we know all this? Well, our very own team members Tom Fletcher and Dave Marshall have been embedded within the LOOP team since day one! We are therefore in a totally unique position to reveal to you the work that went into this series, from both the production and research side of things. In this unofficial series, we've been granted exclusive access to many of the people responsible for creating LOOP, we explore what it takes to create a palaeontological documentary and we delve deeper into the science with some of the show's academic advisors. Each day, we will be releasing batches of interviews, each relating to a specific episode of LOOP. Image courtesy and copyright of Netflix.
LOOP 3.1: We introduce episode three of Life On Our Planet and discuss one of the most significant stories in the series. We're in agreement that lichens are the unsung heroes of the whole series and that Arthropleura is the crunchiest animal to ever exist. We talk about the ‘fishapod' Strepsodus and its locomotion. Life On Our Planet (LOOP) is a new 8-part series created for Netflix by Silverback Films and Amblin Television. This Steven Spielberg produced series, narrated by Morgan Freeman, is hugely ambitious in its scope, telling the story of life throughout the whole Phanerozoic Eon. Ancient organisms and environments are painstakingly recreated by the supremely talented Industrial Light and Magic, whilst modern natural history scenes add vital context to the story. This show has been worked on for six years, during which time countless papers were read and around 150 different palaeontologists contributed their time and knowledge. The whole production had culture of letting the scientific research dictate scenes, resulting in one of the most accurate on-screen representations of prehistoric life there has ever been. And how do we know all this? Well, our very own team members Tom Fletcher and Dave Marshall have been embedded within the LOOP team since day one! We are therefore in a totally unique position to reveal to you the work that went into this series, from both the production and research side of things. In this unofficial series, we've been granted exclusive access to many of the people responsible for creating LOOP, we explore what it takes to create a palaeontological documentary and we delve deeper into the science with some of the show's academic advisors. Each day, we will be releasing batches of interviews, each relating to a specific episode of LOOP. Image courtesy and copyright of Netflix.
This week we look at some cockroaches and go into some facts about why they actually aren't great to have around. AND of course, a little myth-busting as well. Patreon -> https://www.patreon.com/user?u=46499107 IG: https://www.instagram.com/insects4fun/ FB: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100085443614825 Email: Insectsfordummies@gmail.com Music provided by Lofi Girl with featured artist: Brillion, Softy, Squeeda, No one's perfect. Transcript: Welcome back everyone to episode 61 of insects for fun! The weekly entomology podcast hosted by your not so local entomologist. Before we dive in, if you're a fan of the podcast, make sure to rate it and leave a review if you can on whatever platform you listen! It's real easy to do and the impact is incredible! We are almost at 50 ratings on Spotify and 20 ratings and reviews on apple which are the only ones I can really check to be honest, but the current goal is to get those numbers to 100! And if I'm being real, we could have done that a long time ago based on followers alone (sfx) It's spooky season and this week we are going to talk about roaches because why not! They're totally spooky to many including myself, and there is a lot of information out there that most people just have no idea about. So this episode we are going to tackle all things roach and get to the bottom as to what's scary about them and what isn't! Cockroaches belong to the order Blattodea of which there are 4,600 species! Yeah, that's a lot, and they're all pretty different. In fact humans only really come into contact without about 30 of those and if you happen to be a US citizen it's much less, but simply telling you this isn't gonna change how you feel so we're gonna move along. Now when it comes to the roaches that we most often see and deal with, those would be the German roach and the brown banded roach. These are the only two domestic roaches, which means they live exclusively in our living quarters and they've actually been living with us since we were living in caves. Now fortunately or unfortunately, they are also on the smaller side so they don't really make big flashy appearances. I'll be putting the pictures up on the instagram page so you guys can see them. Let's start our episode with the german roach. This small light brown roach with dark bands on its head happens to be the most common roach and is found throughout the entire world. Its place of origin however is not Germany… You see this roach started its journey in Borneo, which is a tropical island in the south china sea. They were just doing their thing within caves for thousands of years when people started storing peppercorns for spice trades in the 1600s. I think you can probably guess what happened next.. Fast Forward to today and now we have these annoying critters everywhere, but it wasn't just the food that was necessary for their survival. Their populations actually exploded only after plumbing got introduced around the world, and they happen to love kitchens and bathrooms. A german roach can actually last for 12 days without food and water but with access to water they can live up to 42 days without food. Of course german roaches do prefer having food and they mostly stay near it in kitchens or cupboards etc. These ones, like most indoor roaches, are active at night and early morning before sunrise. You might not see them often but one way to know you have them is if you see small pepper-like droppings around. Unfortunately German roaches are on the faster side when it comes to reproducing, and a female roach can lay up to 8 oothecas in her life with each one carrying up to 48 eggs. They actually carry these around too until right before they hatch. Now I know you want to know how to get rid of them, and I will tell you of course! But before that I want to share some information about the 2nd domestic roach. The brown banded roach is another small roach that honestly looks pretty similar to the german roach, at least when it comes to males. The females have a different body shape with brown bands on the abdomen, and the nymphs also have these brown bands. These roaches used to be incredibly common but these days they aren't so much. It's believed that air conditions have sort of ruined housing for them by making the environment too cool because these guys prefer much warmer temperatures and are actually believed to come from Africa. They are now found across the world thanks to US troops from world war 2, but again they aren't too common. I don't think I've ever seen one, but I know for a fact I've seen german roaches, even here in Japan. Now unlike German roaches, the brown banded ones do not spend the majority of their time near food. In fact another name for these is furniture roach because they can be found anywhere with furniture such as living rooms, bedrooms, and even behind framed pictures on walls. The brown banded roach prefers to stay at higher elevations with their oothecas being found in the upper 3rd of wall spaces. A brown banded female can lay up to 13 of these in her life, but each one only has up to 18 eggs. Also yes, ootheca is also the term used for mantis egg cases! Turns out roaches and mantids aren't actually that different, but I'm gonna tell you about that later. So now I've mentioned the two domestic roaches and here's why you don't actually want them in your home. Roaches are actually a source of allergen and cause asthmatic symptoms or even asthma attacks in people who are sensitive. In fact according to the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology, roach allergens are one of the most common! Yikes… you'd never notice them either because they just kinda sit still with dust until it gets stirred up when cleaning or moving furniture etc. What's scarier is that 78% to 98% of urban homes within America have between 900 and 330,000 roaches. Yeah that's a very wide spread but uh having 900 being the lower number is still terrifying! The problem with urban roaches is that they are not clean like farm raised roaches, and yes people definitely farm roaches for their pets. My younger brother has bins filled with dubia roaches which get fed fruits, vegetables and protein powder. Now I personally don't fear those at all because I know where they came from and they aren't disease ridden, but I wouldn't trust any roach that comes crawling out of a drain or into your house from the streets because they're able to live in the worst of environments. In fact roaches can carry and harbor E. coli, Strep throat bacteria, Pneumonia, Salmonella etc. But I think I've traumatized us all enough for the time being, so let's look at what we can do to get rid of house roaches! The first and easiest thing to do if you suspect to have or have seen roaches in your home is to clean! Make sure your floors don't have crumbs which isn't hard if you have a dog, keep your kitchen surfaces clean, don't leave food in your sinks, and keep everything sealed tight. It's also recommended to keep your indoor humidity levels low but I think most people are trying to do that anyway. Next it's time to trap and vacuum any roaches you find, but to be honest I wouldn't count vacuuming as the end all solution unless you filled your vacuum with bleach or alcohol because roaches are crafty creatures, and if there is a way out they will find it. Now if you happen to have roaches in your home and you're looking for a way to lure them out and trap them then have no fear! It's totally possible to do so. The first method would be to use Diatomaceous Earth which is a dehydrating powder created from fossilized algae. You basically wanna sprinkle this in areas with known roach activity and it will dehydrate them to death. The only downside is it's kind of messy and requires you to pick up dead roaches which could really die anywhere. If you are more interested in knowing exactly where those roaches are then it might be a good idea to set up traps. One really good method for collecting roaches would be using boric acid or even baking soda. If you go the baking soda route you wanna take some food, like diced up onions or something else that roaches will want and cover it with baking soda. You wanna leave this out in areas where you suspect there are roaches, but this of course means you need to make sure your animals won't try eating this either. I would keep your pets safely in another room the night you do this or place the trap in an area where your animals can't access like under your sink in a cabinet or something. Using boric acid is similar but instead you'll want a paper plate with a lure in the center like peanut butter and then sprinkle the boric acid around the lure on the plate so the insects are guaranteed to touch it. Again I don't recommend doing this in an open area accessible to pets like dogs or cats. Boric acid targets a roaches nervous system while baking soda makes them explode from the inside… lovely I know, but hey, that's why I'm not in the pest control business. Moving along to the non domestic roaches comes the most well known roach and that would be the American Cockroach. These are called peridomestic because they live around humans but don't rely on them, but they don't actually come from America. I don't know who's naming these things but they clearly don't care about geography. American roaches actually come from Africa and were introduced into America via ships in the 1600s similar to the German Roaches. These ones usually invade our homes through pipes, or cracks in infrastructure. I've actually seen terrifying videos where swarms of American roaches come running out kitchen sinks. That's definitely not normal though and it probably means there was a massive sewage break or flood nearby which was making them all flee the underground. Either way it's clearly a bad sign and you can expect something terrible. The american roaches are actually less likely to be in your home than they are in restaurants or other service industry places and the reason is simply that there is more accessible food around. When I worked at Gyu Kaku in Hawaii which is a Japanese chain for all-you-can eat meats, I would always see American roaches in the kitchen looking for scraps on the floor in dark corners or underneath storage bins while cleaning. You really can't escape them in urban areas. That being said I should also mention that roaches in general do not like light so if you're scared of seeing one or don't want to risk having them near you at night you can simply leave a light on. It's a waste of electricity but hey, it'll give you some peace of mind I guess. Actually here's a fun fact for you, the name cockroach comes from the spanish word for them “cucaracha” which was derived from the latin word blatta meaning insect that shuns the light! So earlier I mentioned that roaches and mantids aren't all that different and here's why. The ancestors of roaches roamed the earth around 320 million years ago, placing them in the Carboniferous period. This time period is characterized by having swamps with large ferns, Fern trees, horsetail trees, fish, amphibians, and giant arthropods. The ancestor to cockroaches was actually 3 feet in length and that wasn't anything extraordinary either. Now it just so happens that this ancestral roach also happens to be the common ancestor to Mantids and Termites as well. In fact all three of them are in the same super order Dictyoptera and mantids separated from roaches around 127 million years ago in the cretaceous period when a new proto-roach evolved with raptorial arms. Termites separated around this time as well. So yeah, you can thank cockroaches for the mantids and termites. And really, not all cockroaches are bad. There are plenty of cool ones out there as well like the madagascar hissing roaches, sky blue roaches in Guyana and Emerald roaches in Vietnam. I know for a fact that Hissing roaches and emerald roaches are sold and kept as pets with the emerald roaches fetching a high price, but I'm not sure about the sky blue ones. Now Let's get into the myths and facts regarding cockroaches because I think a lot of us have heard quite a few. One of the most commonly spread rumors is that roaches can live without their heads, and this is actually true! To an extent, if a roach loses its head it can still walk around and breathe, but it's not going to live a normal life. It's going to starve to death because it now has no way of eating or drinking. Another big myth is that roaches will release their babies if you step on them. This is not a given scenario at all, and if you do step on a pregnant one, you can be sure those eggs are now scrambled. HOWEVER if you only crush the upper half of the roach and an ootheca comes out then those might still be viable (bleck) Here's a fun one, Cockroaches can survive microwaves! And uh yeah they can! Actually cockroaches don't go through nearly as many cell divisions as we do, and because the rate at which they do is slower, they can withstand up to 125% more radiation than other animals. Can they survive a nuclear bomb? No… but they'll last longer than we would in the aftermath. Okay here's a good one, Roaches only live in dirty homes. This is false! You can have a home that is spotless and still have roaches living in it. They'll even resort to eating bar soap if you have nothing else available. This wraps up today's topic, but we're not quite finished! I'm going to share with you a piece of this month's bonus episode available on Patreon because it really is a different flavor from the mainline content, and I go into much broader topics. Here's a clip. There's plenty more where that came from on Patreon.com/insects for fun. As always thank you for listening, and if you enjoyed the episode please make sure to rate and review the podcast. It's easy to do and it really helps grow the show.
A quick heads up before we come to today's piece: I am taking my “lecture with funny bits” about gold to the West End for one night only. October 19th is the date. (That's the show I did at the Edinburgh Fringe). If you like gold, you will like this show. I promise. It's super interesting. You can get tickets here. Hopefully, see you there.So, continuing the recent theme of portfolio allocation, today we talk cockroaches …I narrated a documentary once about cockroaches. Never mind the repulsion we may feel towards them, they really are the most amazing creatures. In fact, that repulsion may work in their favour because nobody wants anything to do with them, thereby bettering their chances of survival. Cockroaches have been around since before the dinosaurs. According to Wikipedia, they are some 320 million years old, having originated during the Carboniferous period. They are hardy as hell. They can survive and thrive in tropical heat or in freezing, sub-Arctic temperatures below minus one hundred degrees (Fahrenheit or Celsius). They can survive the dryness of the desert where there is no access to water, but they can also survive in and under water. Many cockroaches even survived the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 - they are known to be resistant to radiation. You can even cut off a cockroach's head and it will live on, at least for a bit.How nice to have a portfolio that is as hardy. We should all have something of the cockroach to our portfolios.In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis back in 2009 I remember seeing a presentation by Marc Faber in which he described a portfolio for all economic weathers. It broke down as follows:* 25% gold and cash. * 25% equities. * 25% bonds. * 25% real estate. Dylan Grice, who at the time was an analyst with SocGen, advocated something similar. He called it the Cockroach Portfolio, after that most hardy of creatures.But the idea of a permanent, cockroach portfolio for all weathers was probably first popularised by an American investment advisor, Harry Browne, who died in 2006. Browne was also an author and politician. His books, mostly centred around investment, sold more than 2 million copies, and in 1996 and 2000 he was the Libertarian Party's presidential nominee. But, as an investment advisor, in 1982 he developed what is known as “the permanent portfolio” investment strategy, which he then wrote about in his 1999 personal finance book, Fail-Safe Investing: Lifelong Financial Security in 30 Minutes. This portfolio would assure "you are financially safe, no matter what the future brings."Browne's idea was that there are four macroeconomic environments - four seasons if you like: inflation, deflation, growth and recession. One of those macroeconomic environments would always apply.So his portfolio was allocated in such a way that some of it would perform well in each of those seasons.* 25% in US stocks. That would do well in times of growth. * 25% in long-term U.S. Treasury bonds. These would also do well during times of growth - and in deflation too. * 25% in cash. That's for recession. * 25% in gold, meanwhile, would see you through the inflation.All in all, therefore, Browne's portfolio for all economic seasons looked something like this. (You would re-balance once a year to maintain that allocation)Browne's differs from Grice and Faber's because it contained no allocation to real estate.But there you have it: a portfolio allocation that might even make it through a financial nuclear financial fall-out like a cockroach.I have two criticisms. First, if you go back to 1982, when Browne first conceived this portfolio, the S&P500 has outperformed by some margin. Sure, the cockroach portfolio is much less volatile, but what's the point of it, when you can just get an S&P tracker? You could argue that this has been an extraordinary period for US equities, but even so …Indeed, if you want total cockroach, why not own gold and gold alone? Gold, being indestructible, is even more hardy. It's been around a lot longer, and it lasts a lot a lot longer. When you, me, humanity and the cockroach itself are all long gone, gold will still be there shining away. (If you are interested in buying gold, by the way, Pure Gold Company is the place).The reason not to just own gold is that you want diversificationA word on diversificationLook at some of the richest people you know and I'll bet you close to none of them made their fortune by having a diversified portfolio. They might have made their money from their profession or by building a successful business, in property, bitcoin or trading. Out of an inheritance or a divorce, maybe. Perhaps they wrote a book, a film, a play or a song that turned out to be a smash hit. Perhaps they are a celebrity or sports star. Whatever. Most of the time they were anything but diversified. Rather they were concentrated.But if the majority of the super rich made their money being concentrated, they kept it by being diversifiedThe purpose of a diversified portfolio is not so much to make your fortune, but to keep and grow what you have. I understand that even Warren Buffett, who is the big example that counters my argument, had a few big wins early on and then grew his fortune building a successful investment business and levering what Einstein called the eighth wonder of the world - compounding - in his favour. I was chatting with a mining investor I know the other day. He made $40 million in 2005-2006. But he was moaning about the fact that he stayed concentrated and so handed a vast lump of it back. Had he instead diversified and then grew his wealth at say 5% a year, he would now be sitting on a pot more than double that size. At 10% a year, he would now be sitting on over $200m. Concentration is how you make your fortune. Diversification is how you keep and grow it. Unfortunately, concentration is also how you can lose a fortune. Let's say you went all in on bitcoin in 2013. Or tech or whatever. You'd be minted. But if you went all in on mining in 2013. You'd be borassic. I think you get the point.My do very-little-portfolio is coming soon. Keep your eyes peeled.Interested in buying gold to protect yourself in these uncertain times? My recommended bullion dealer is The Pure Gold Company, whether you are taking delivery or storing online. Premiums are low, quality of service is high. They deliver to the UK, US, Canada and Europe, or you can store your gold with them. More here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe
A quick heads up before we come to today's piece: I am taking my “lecture with funny bits” about gold to the West End for one night only. October 19th is the date. (That's the show I did at the Edinburgh Fringe). If you like gold, you will like this show. I promise. It's super interesting. You can get tickets here. Hopefully, see you there.So, continuing the recent theme of portfolio allocation, today we talk cockroaches …I narrated a documentary once about cockroaches. Never mind the repulsion we may feel towards them, they really are the most amazing creatures. In fact, that repulsion may work in their favour because nobody wants anything to do with them, thereby bettering their chances of survival. Cockroaches have been around since before the dinosaurs. According to Wikipedia, they are some 320 million years old, having originated during the Carboniferous period. They are hardy as hell. They can survive and thrive in tropical heat or in freezing, sub-Arctic temperatures below minus one hundred degrees (Fahrenheit or Celsius). They can survive the dryness of the desert where there is no access to water, but they can also survive in and under water. Many cockroaches even survived the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 - they are known to be resistant to radiation. You can even cut off a cockroach's head and it will live on, at least for a bit.How nice to have a portfolio that is as hardy. We should all have something of the cockroach to our portfolios.In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis back in 2009 I remember seeing a presentation by Marc Faber in which he described a portfolio for all economic weathers. It broke down as follows:* 25% gold and cash. * 25% equities. * 25% bonds. * 25% real estate. Dylan Grice, who at the time was an analyst with SocGen, advocated something similar. He called it the Cockroach Portfolio, after that most hardy of creatures.But the idea of a permanent, cockroach portfolio for all weathers was probably first popularised by an American investment advisor, Harry Browne, who died in 2006. Browne was also an author and politician. His books, mostly centred around investment, sold more than 2 million copies, and in 1996 and 2000 he was the Libertarian Party's presidential nominee. But, as an investment advisor, in 1982 he developed what is known as “the permanent portfolio” investment strategy, which he then wrote about in his 1999 personal finance book, Fail-Safe Investing: Lifelong Financial Security in 30 Minutes. This portfolio would assure "you are financially safe, no matter what the future brings."Browne's idea was that there are four macroeconomic environments - four seasons if you like: inflation, deflation, growth and recession. One of those macroeconomic environments would always apply.So his portfolio was allocated in such a way that some of it would perform well in each of those seasons.* 25% in US stocks. That would do well in times of growth. * 25% in long-term U.S. Treasury bonds. These would also do well during times of growth - and in deflation too. * 25% in cash. That's for recession. * 25% in gold, meanwhile, would see you through the inflation.All in all, therefore, Browne's portfolio for all economic seasons looked something like this. (You would re-balance once a year to maintain that allocation)Browne's differs from Grice and Faber's because it contained no allocation to real estate.But there you have it: a portfolio allocation that might even make it through a financial nuclear financial fall-out like a cockroach.I have two criticisms. First, if you go back to 1982, when Browne first conceived this portfolio, the S&P500 has outperformed by some margin. Sure, the cockroach portfolio is much less volatile, but what's the point of it, when you can just get an S&P tracker? You could argue that this has been an extraordinary period for US equities, but even so …Indeed, if you want total cockroach, why not own gold and gold alone? Gold, being indestructible, is even more hardy. It's been around a lot longer, and it lasts a lot a lot longer. When you, me, humanity and the cockroach itself are all long gone, gold will still be there shining away. (If you are interested in buying gold, by the way, Pure Gold Company is the place).The reason not to just own gold is that you want diversificationA word on diversificationLook at some of the richest people you know and I'll bet you close to none of them made their fortune by having a diversified portfolio. They might have made their money from their profession or by building a successful business, in property, bitcoin or trading. Out of an inheritance or a divorce, maybe. Perhaps they wrote a book, a film, a play or a song that turned out to be a smash hit. Perhaps they are a celebrity or sports star. Whatever. Most of the time they were anything but diversified. Rather they were concentrated.But if the majority of the super rich made their money being concentrated, they kept it by being diversifiedThe purpose of a diversified portfolio is not so much to make your fortune, but to keep and grow what you have. I understand that even Warren Buffett, who is the big example that counters my argument, had a few big wins early on and then grew his fortune building a successful investment business and levering what Einstein called the eighth wonder of the world - compounding - in his favour. I was chatting with a mining investor I know the other day. He made $40 million in 2005-2006. But he was moaning about the fact that he stayed concentrated and so handed a vast lump of it back. Had he instead diversified and then grew his wealth at say 5% a year, he would now be sitting on a pot more than double that size. At 10% a year, he would now be sitting on over $200m. Concentration is how you make your fortune. Diversification is how you keep and grow it. Unfortunately, concentration is also how you can lose a fortune. Let's say you went all in on bitcoin in 2013. Or tech or whatever. You'd be minted. But if you went all in on mining in 2013. You'd be borassic. I think you get the point.My do very-little-portfolio is coming soon. Keep your eyes peeled.Interested in buying gold to protect yourself in these uncertain times? My recommended bullion dealer is The Pure Gold Company, whether you are taking delivery or storing online. Premiums are low, quality of service is high. They deliver to the UK, US, Canada and Europe, or you can store your gold with them. More here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe
Fabiany Herrera is a paleobotanist specializing on a diverse array of time periods and paleofloras, including the Mazon Creek Flora from the Carboniferous when Lycopods were friggin' trees, as well as the utterly bizarre Jurassic and early Cretaceous Bennettitales & Corystospermaceae from the excellently preserved Mesozoic lignite of Mongolia.Many of the plants we talk about in this episode HAVE NO LIVING OR EXTANT RELATIVES - they represent fantastical lineages of plants whose base branches that simply got clipped off the tree of life either during mass extinctions events or gradually during climatic changes. Umaltolepis - a ginkgo relative - is an exception to this, but still an equally bizarre plant.This was a really fun conversation and it could've gone on much longer but we ran outta time. Hope you enjoy.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/5634537/advertisement
Release Date: March 08, 2013Johnny investigates mining sabotage in Indonesia.Original Air Date: July 13, 1954Support the show monthly at patreon.greatdetectives.netSupport the show on a one-time basis at http://support.greatdetectives.net.Mail a donation to: Adam Graham, PO Box 15913, Boise, Idaho 83715Take the listener survey…http://survey.greatdetectives.netGive us a call 208-991-4783Follow us on Instagram at http://instagram.com/greatdetectivesBecome one of ourfriends on FacebookFollow us on Twitter@radiodetectivesThis show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/5901852/advertisement
Hello and welcome to Episode 94! Today we'll be exploring the taxonomy of the reptiles, those sturdy tetrapods that diverged from their amphibian ancestors, during the warmer, drier period after the collapse of the Carboniferous rainforests.
#Pangea #BlackTribes #aboriginal https://cash.app/$BlackConsciousness Spotify Link - Listen Now: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/realblackforum/episodes/Black-People-Were-The-Only-People-Living-During-Pangea--Law-Of-Entropy-e21i3at Blog: https://realblackconsciousnessesforum387099824.wordpress.com/ Email the podcast: rbcforum313@yahoo.com Join us as we have a conversation discussing the theory of Pangea (Pangaea) and whether or not humans were living on the planet at that time. According to wikipedia, Pangaea or Pangea (/pænˈdʒiː.ə/)[1] was a supercontinent that existed during the late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic eras.[2] It assembled from the earlier continental units of Gondwana, Euramerica and Siberia during the Carboniferous approximately 335 million years ago, and began to break apart about 200 million years ago, at the end of the Triassic and beginning of the Jurassic.[3] In contrast to the present Earth and its distribution of continental mass, Pangaea was centered on the equator and surrounded by the super ocean Panthalassa and the Paleo-Tethys and subsequent Tethys Oceans. Pangaea is the most recent super-continent to have existed and the first to be reconstructed by geologists. So make you tap into the conversation and don't forget to like, share, and comment! Thanks! #RBCF Hashtags: #pangea #godlevel #godlevelfest #reptiles #quintoescalon #crestedgecko #a #trueno #fmsespa #gecko #batalladegallos #duki #reptilesofinstagram #rapargentino #kodigo #batallasdegallos #skone #lizard #supremacia #redbull #dtoke #canada #marbella #marbs #repashy #lizards #reptile #freestylerap #geckosofinstagram #fmsargentina #natives #blackhistory #africa #america #humans #original #orginalman #asiatics #asia --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/realblackforum/message
Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar was a radio drama that aired on CBS Radio from February 18, 1949, to September 30, 1962. The first several seasons imagined protagonist Johnny Dollar as a standard private investigator drama. Listen to our radio station Old Time Radio https://link.radioking.com/otradio Listen to other Shows at My Classic Radio https://www.myclassicradio.net/ Remember that times have changed, and some shows might not reflect the standards of today's politically correct society. The shows do not necessarily reflect the views, standards, or beliefs of Entertainment Radio
Today's Mystery:Johnny is called to Sumatra by an oil man, who wants him to protect a test oil well, in exchange for which the oil man will relinquish a $60,000 insurance claim.Original Radio Broadcast Date: July 13, 1954When making your travel plans, remember http://johnnydollarair.comTake the listener survey at http://survey.greatdetectives.netGive us a call at 208-991-4783Follow us on Twitter @radiodetectivesJoin us back here tomorrow for another old time radio detective drama.
Yours Truly Johnny Dollar – The Great Detectives of Old Time Radio
Today's Mystery:Johnny is called to Sumatra by an oil man, who wants him to protect a test oil well, in exchange for which the oil man will relinquish a $60,000 insurance claim.Original Radio Broadcast Date: July 13, 1954When making your travel plans, remember http://johnnydollarair.comTake the listener survey at http://survey.greatdetectives.netGive us a call at 208-991-4783Follow us on Twitter @radiodetectives
The gang talks about two papers that look at evidence of parental care in the fossil record, in early synapsids and in insects. Meanwhile, Amanda is going to have an island, Curt is trying not to die, and James has some unique alternative interpretations to explain these fossils. Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition): Our friends talk about two papers that look at moms and dads from a long long time ago. Not all animals have moms and dads that stick around or do anything to keep the babies from not getting dead. The first paper looks at a group of animals that looks like some animals today and is part of a group that is close to the group that has hair. This paper looks at some hard parts from these animals that were in a thing made by pulling up the ground so you can live there under the ground. There is a big one and a small one. The big one looks like it was holding the small one when the place under the ground fell in and covered them. The other thing about this paper is that the small one looks like a lot of other animals we have found from this group, which could mean that most of our animals we have named from this group could be kids. The second paper looks at a type of small animal with hard parts on the outside and many legs that lives in water and can go deep in the water but takes in air to live. This animal is old but looks a lot like the ones we still have around today. Some of these animals have a leg that looks different from the others, and this leg has a whole lot of small balls that hold babies in them on it. So some of these animals carry the babies with them until they are ready to leave the small balls. This is different from how the animals like these ones that we have today handle their babies. References: Fu, Yanzhe, et al. "The earliest known brood care in insects." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 289.1978 (2022): 20220447. Maddin, Hillary C., Arjan Mann, and Brian Hebert. "Varanopid from the Carboniferous of Nova Scotia reveals evidence of parental care in amniotes." Nature Ecology & Evolution 4.1 (2020): 50-56.
What do you wish you'd learned in school? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice go back to school to answer questions about simulation theory, time dilation, white holes, the sound of space, and more!NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free.Thanks to our Patrons Goat34, Mark Dent, Edwin J Roldan, Evan Moorhead, and Abby GIll for supporting us this week.Photo Credit: NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Follow us on Twitter: @worstfoot @bazmcstay @benvandervelde To trivia...and beyond! The podcast goes galactic this week with an episode about the World's Worst Planet and yes, we know, if you have a problem with the show's naming convention you're too late. We're 259 episodes in, we ain't going back now! Alongside us is astrophysicist Dr. Alfredo Carpineti who explains to us EXACTLY what a planet is, while Ben looks back in time and Barry cheats a bit by mentioning some moons. Follow us on Instagram: @worstfoot Join us on our Discord server! https://discord.gg/9buWKthgfx Visit www.worstfootforwardpodcast.com for all previous episodes and you can donate to us on Patreon if you'd like to support the show during this whole pandemic thing, and especially as we work on our first book and plan some live shows! https://www.patreon.com/WorstFootForward Worst Foot Forward is part of Podnose: www.podnose.com
Gavin teaches Fia about the giant forests, salamanders, and insects of the the Carboniferous Period. Fia teaches Gavin about the most naked fish in the Gulf, the Naked Gobi. Follow us on Twitter Topic form Guest Form Gavin's Blog Leave us an audio message Youtube Channel
On today's ID the Future Casey Luskin hosts distinguished German paleontologist Günter Bechly to discuss Bechly's essay in the recent Harvest House anthology, The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos. Darwinian evolution predicts a gradually branching tree of living forms, with one form shading into another over long periods of evolution, with each transitional step almost too modest to notice. Does the fossil record suggest such a pattern? Quite the opposite, Bechly says. Instead the pattern of the fossil record is consistently one of sudden appearance, and evolutionists have yet to successfully construct a single robustly populated series of gradually transitioning fossils that move chronologically from one form to a distinctly different Read More › Source
For the first episode of The Backpacker's Guide To Prehistory season two, host David Mountain travels back to the Carboniferous period, 359-299 million years ago. In this weird world of giant horsetails and monster arthropods, what creatures should you look out for? What clothes should you pack? And is it really such a good idea to light a campfire? Providing the answers are two Carboniferous experts: Dr Bill DiMichele, Curator of Palaeobotany at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History (https://naturalhistory.si.edu/staff/bill-dimichele), and Dr Russell Garwood, a palaeontologist at the University of Manchester (https://russellgarwood.co.uk/; https://twitter.com/RussellGarwood). Massive thanks to Bill and Russell for sharing their travel advice. If you're interested in the plants and animals of the Carboniferous - and I know you are - then make sure to check out their research! Follow the podcast on Twitter @prehistoryguide. Find out more at prehistoryguide.co.uk. Sound effects from Zapsplat.com.
A Gift from the Dying: https://atheopaganism.wordpress.com/2018/10/07/a-gift-from-the-dying/?fbclid=IwAR3bJs7PVCSeK6UgNLJqki7a_qdlxRSxHo0pO1_-tgQcIgbWrKKwJjPWE1E S2E38 TRANSCRIPT ----more---- Mark: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-Based Paganism. I'm your host Mark. Yucca: And I'm Yucca. Mark: And today we are going to talk about death And decomposition, especially the latter part. It's a it's Halloween season, Hallows, samhain season. And so we're going to talk about that aspect of the life cycle. That includes the the disassembly of. Organisms after they are no longer functioning as alive. Yucca: And I'm very excited for this topic today because this is one that I really like to nerd out on. So I look forward to getting into some of those details. But why don't we start with. The death side. And we did an episode about this last year. Let's start with talking about death and the, the pagan approach to it, which is a little bit different than we see in mainstream culture. Mark: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I really appreciate about pagan culture in which was one of the things that attracted me early on to pig And, culture is that it was very unflinching about looking at the fact that we die. We're all going to die. and it has a time of the year to reflect on that fact and to. Do whatever preparation we can in order for things to be better for those that survive us. And just to really reflect on people that have gone before us and have died and just to be aware of that whole very key pivotal section of the cycle of living. Yucca: Yeah. And, and although it is fun to do this, you know, the spooky stuff and all of that, but to also just to honor death in as a, as a beautiful part of the whole cycle as part of life, that that life requires death. And it requires an awful lot of death for there to be any life. Mark: It does. When, when you think about it, when you think about what you eat, and this is true, if you're a vegan or if you're a carnivore or if you're an omnivore, it's true. In all cases, what you eat involves a lot of death. The it's all made of living cells and those living cells die within you and are converted into energy and nutrients for us to survive on. And that's a beautiful thing about the nature of the biosphere, actually, that it's able to produce this abundance of life. that can then support more complexity. Yucca: Yeah. We are part of that process. Not only in that we are consumers who are eating other living things and things that could only live because this cycle has been happening for literally billions of years, but that we also are what gets consumed Mark: Yes. Yucca: already. Right? Eventually we're all going to die. Right? Where. The, the person that is me, the person that is you, we will die. We will cease to function, but they're still all of the material that was part of us that already has died, which has already been consumed and eaten and incorporated into new life. Mark: Yeah. One of the things about being a human is that we operate at a particular scale. And so we tend to be, we tend to think of ourselves as these very encapsulated sort of enclosed being. But if you look a little closer, we are radiating. I mean, I'm not only talking about, you know, direct excretion. We are radiating flakes of skin and hair and fingernails and toenails and just all of this stuff Yucca: Photons to Mark: Oh. And photons. Yucca: literally light. Mark: That is coming off us all the time. And all of that stuff gets digested by decomposers. All of that stuff gets reabsorbed into the biosphere and incorporated into new stuff. And the key point that we were talking about before we started recording on that is to really get, these are the same atoms. They're exactly the same atoms. You know, your body is made up very like. Of atoms that were incorporated into other people right now. Not, not just animals and plants, but other people as well, because we've been around for a very long time. We've got a lot of matter floating around, out there, ready to be incorporated into a living being. Yucca: Yeah. love to, just to visualize, to just think about the earth going back four and a half billion years ago, forming the creating out of this swirling disc of material around the young star, around our young son and that material that clumped up little by little. It grew from a few grains of sand up to pebbles and pebbles up to rocks to boulders to the earth. It's the same stuff. That same stuff has just been used over and over it. Yeah. A little bit falls down from space every year, but basically all of that over and over and over again, it's gone through the bodies of the, of the earliest you know, relatives of Luca into our cyanobacteria that caused snowball earth all the way to now. And just as mark was saying, other human beings, so same carbon atoms. So same. Oxygen and hydrogen and, and they've been rearranged. They're broken apart, like Legos, right? We're just like little Legos that we get broken apart, put back into, into things. And you know, here we go. Here's some going to pass some Legos out right now. We're, we're all breathing out. Right. We're breathing out carbon dioxide and that carbon, well that's being released from. To our lungs from our blood and our blood picked it up as a waste product from ourselves. But ourselves got that from the food that we ate that was in trees and that was in the air and just on and on and on. And it's just, I mean, it's just so much fun to just think about. Mark: It, it is. And, and it's so important to think about it in a holistic sense, including all of the aspects of that cycle, because I. Talking about. this before we started recording. In some ways you can think of a multicellular organism or any organism, really as kind of a, a sustained reaction, right. A very, very complex chemical reaction. And in that sense, it's like a simple. Chemical reaction like a fire, for example, which uptakes carbon and it uptakes oxygen. And it causes a reaction that makes all this heat and light. And then after a while, when it's exhausted all of that, then it goes out and we go out to, and when we do the decomposers are there to disassemble us into those component pieces so that we can get cycled back into the circle of life. Yucca: Yep. And this is how it's, this is how it's been, right. This is just when, when that happens and again, it's a win then what is our body just returned? What it was before, right. Which is just part of this planet, part of the biosphere, the living part of this planet. Mark: Right. So let's talk a little bit about the details of that, about the specifics of how decomposition works and, and what the players are, Because we were talking about this as well. One of the things that we find is that because humans are kind of hardwired to have a revulsion at things that are rotting mostly. Yucca: Because we're not scavengers in Mark: we're not scavengers and we can't eat it. So we have this sort of automatic sort of gag reflex when we're confronted with stuff that's wrought because it's not something that we can eat and we need to stay away from it Yucca: Right. And we don't want to get sick too. Like, you know, if there's another body like, okay, well, did that body die from an infectious disease? Right. We don't want to get, we instinctually know to keep away so that we don't get that disease as well. Mark: Right. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: So that being the case, we tend to shy away from looking very closely at the decomposition process. Yucca was mentioning that even when she looks at her school textbooks, her biology textbooks, they really kind of give short shrift to the decomposition process, which is a shame because it's really super cool. Yucca: It is. Yeah. And some of that, I think part of that is some of that, that phobia. That we have of death and dying. And some of it is just biophilia in general, but some of it's also what you were talking about with scale. This is happening on a scale that is outside of our normal scale. And we as humans and actually animals in general, we live in a very unusual scale for life and in the universe too. So. normal to us because it's what we experienced, but we are really weird compared to most life. Most life is really, really tiny. Just, I mean, it's, it's hard to even communicate how tiny and comparison. To us this life is, and some of the decomposers or the first steps in decomposition are on scales that we can relate to. If we start to talk about worms or termites or things like that, we can see them. We don't usually think about them very much, but those are probably the things that come to mind when we first think of a decomp of a, of a decomposer decomposition. It's all life. And so why don't we actually let's step back before going there and talk about what, what life needs to do to be life. So we can really broadly separate things into two huge categories. We can say we've got bias. Which are things that are alive are made by living things. They might not be alive anymore. Like say your book, your books made of paper, right. That's biotic. And then we've got our Abe biotic, which is the opposite. It's the things that aren't life and life needs. At least the life. As we know it here on earth needs very specific arrangements of matter to be able to work. So we've got producers and what they do is they take that abiotic. it into a form that's biotic. And what we're used to for that would be our photosynthesizer turns out there are way more strategies to do that, but we're usually familiar with our plants and our algae, like our cyanobacteria. They take the sun. So photons, they take carbon from the air, so they take water, they rearrange it and then make an organic compounds. And then that's what goes into the food chain and that's what we're eating. So, and then we attach little other things to it, like, oh, let's attach some iron, let's attach some copper and all of that. And, and that's how it travels through our bodies. As we eat it, they eat it, they eat it. But what life is really, really good at. Is taking these little pieces and making more and more complex and complicated structures. So we ended up making these huge molecules, but those molecules are usually only useful to the organism that is. Using it, right? So the plant is going to make cellulose and the tree is going to make some lignin or something like that. Or, or we're going to end up on a larger level yet we're making bone and all of that. But when somebody else needs to use that, they don't need the whole cellular. They need it broken down into simple sugars. So we take it apart and then we put it back together into something bigger. So this is constantly ripping it apart, putting it back, ripping apart, putting it back and that breaking it down, breaking it into pieces. That's what digestion. So big things like us, we digest on the inside. That's what we're doing. When we eat, we take the food, we chew it up to us. We that's the mastication. Right. And then it goes into our stomach and in our stomach, we have acids and enzymes that, break it apart, and then we can redistribute it through our body and use it the way we. So decomposers are also breaking things down, but for the most part, they aren't doing it inside of their body. They're doing it on the outside. So they're releasing enzymes into the environment to break those things down. So our, and it's mostly our bacteria and fungi are though archaea are a little bit involved with that. And for organisms that are bigger than we think of as decomposers like worms. Well, it's not actually the worms who are doing the decomposition. It's the microbes living in their bodies that are doing it. They're just big micro factories basically. And this is the same inside of our bodies or the body of, of cattle or anything like that, too. We've got lots of microbes living in us that with. Our bodies wouldn't work, right. We're working in as a team. So our, our decomposers, they are releasing enzymes into the environment, around them to break down those more complex molecules into smaller forms that they can then directly absorb into their bodies and different. Organisms are specialized in different types of material. So our fun guy are typically really, really good at breaking down Woody material and that had to evolve. I think we talked about this, a few episodes back about the Carboniferous and how, yeah. For a while. Life hadn't figured out how to break down all that Woody stuff and it built up and it built up and it caused all kinds of fires. And that's where our coal comes from today and all of that. But they release those enzymes into the environment. It breaks it down into these simple forms that then life can, can take up again and it can go back into that food web. So the bacteria breaks it down and then. They eat some of that. And then the protozoan, which are larger microbes there, you carry it. So they're like us, they come and eat it and then the nematodes eat them. And then the nematodes are eaten by micro arthropods and up and up and up. But if it hadn't gotten digestive, hadn't gotten broken down, this material would just build up and there would be nothing for us to then be making our bodies from now. And I'm not just talking about us as a humans. Life right. Surface, terrestrial life. And this process, we talk about it from, from our perspective as terrestrial organisms, but it's happening in aquatic systems. It's happening, it's different players, but it's happening at the hydrothermal vents. It's happening deep in the crust of the earth, everywhere that we find life. We see this basic process happening to them. Somebody eats it and turns it into a form that someone else can use to eat and on and on it goes. Mark: Right. Right. And it's important to recognize that this is, it's not just that this is a good idea. From the standpoint of our being able to eat, it's also. The world, if we were to suspend the decomposition process and survive that even after one winter's worth of leaves, we would be up to our knees and leaves and decomposition is what turns those Woody's those, those Woody cellulose. Dead leaves into soil, into, into stuff that can then be used by living creatures, living plants in order to to survive. So it's the, the sheer volume of stuff that is subjected to this decomposition process at all times is really overwhelming. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: It's it is such an important part of the cycle. Without it, we simply couldn't be here and life, as we know it couldn't work. Yucca: Yeah. And, and life like us to use an old image where the tip of an iceberg, right? The big stuff like us, plants and animals, most of the life or the micro. Right there that the vast amount, and there they're the ones doing the decomposition on the outside. They're the ones in our bodies doing the decomposition we're full of them. This, this process isn't just happening in the soil. This is happening everywhere. Now this time of year in temperate environments, this there's it's kicking up. This is when the fun guy are getting really, really active because those Leafs you just talked about, they dropped down and it's time for the fun guy to grow. They just start eating that up and converting it into forms that then are going to be taken back up by the plants. And by not just the plants, we usually talk about plants and animals because those are who we're most familiar with. They exist on our scale, but our bacteria and archaea and, and fungi and, and all of those other things too. So that don't fit nicely into one category or the other that we're still kind of trying to figure out how to, how to categorize those. Mark: Right, Yucca: So. Mark: Yeah. As you say, this is the season when that gets going. One implication of this is that we encourage you if at all possible not to rake your yard. Yucca: Yes. Mark: Because what you're doing is you're suspending of the necessary decomposition process. That turns all of that leaf cover into nourishment for your lawn. You know, if, if you have a lawn or some other sort of bare area that ends up covered with leaves, leave him, leave him and let them decompose because that's actually the healthiest thing you can do for the environment. There. Yucca: It really is. Yeah. And, and any place that you can keep the Sarah, the soil, not bear is really, really helpful because these decomposers that we're talking about, they need water. All microbes are. All of them. They exist on very different scales, so they live in a little tiny drop. Right. But when you dry out. That soil. That's how you start to turn it into dirt from an agricultural perspective, right? Soil is the living thing. Soil has got all of that life in there. It's got the, the water, it's got the, the organic material, the dead broken down stuff that the microbes have been working on. Just turning into basically this wonderful. Soft. So it's like cake, it's just this and the air pockets. And when we rake away the leaves or we carry, we, we move away all the, the, the detritus and, and all of that. We're exposing that to dry. And so it starts to kill all of those things. And then you're left behind with the minerals and the minerals are important, right? Life's got to get in there and convert those minerals into a form that we could use, but life has to have certain conditions to be able to do that. Mark: Right. Yucca: When it's there, when the life's there to do it, it does a great job. There's a, there's so much life. If you have a light microscope and these are really, really inexpensive, you can. Really good light microscope for like $40. Right? If you're thinking about getting your kid on microscope, the like kid Microsoft sets, like don't even bother with that, just get them a real microscope because they cost the same amount and you'll be able to do so much more with a real one. But with just a real one, you can take a tiny drop of soil, put it on a slide. Look at it. Put a little drop of water in there as well. And you can spend hours looking at the literal billions of organisms who are in there. Even if you're in an area that's got pretty poor soil. It's just, I mean, it's, it's one of those wow. Things just to go, whoa, there's so much life they're busy as it can be just breaking things down, eating each other. And then this is a topic for another time, but we can start, we can talk at another time about how the plants and the. Soil microbes have a, basically this really complex communication network in which the plants can ask for what they need. They can be like, I need some more calcium and they send out exit dates that, that encourage the growth of specific bacteria that are going to start to accumulate that calcium. And then the plants can get that. And so there's just this amazing communication. How. Mark: Right. Yucca: But let's come back to that one in the spring, because this is, this is talking more about the let's let's get that eating happening, that breaking down. And we, we got onto this with saying that this is when a lot of the fun guy are really coming into their season and they're working below, below that leaf litter. They're working below the ground and transforming. The previous year's material back into a form that could be used again. Mark: And that's what they do to us. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: And that's, that's an important consideration. I mean, my feeling, I, personal feeling around this is that there's sort of a moral component to this in that, you know, I've used all these materials and I've consumed all these living things for all this time. I feel like. It's it's my obligation to give the assembly of my body when it no longer works back into this cycle so that it can be created in, in different ways. And that's very different than the sort of mainstream interest in involving and stuff like that. We'll talk in a few minutes about alternatives to, to some of the death practices that are popular in the over culture. But I just feel like, Yeah. This is it's the price of the ticket, you know, you you gotta pay it back, Yucca: Yeah. No matter how hard you try not to eat, you're going to be decomposed anyways. Mark: Right. Yucca: why not doing it in a way that's going to be, that's not going to poison things in the meantime. Right. Which is what a lot of those embalming practices will end up doing. Right. Mark: Yeah. Yucca: And it's uncomfortable to think about, because we don't like to think about our own. Death, right. It's it's really it's. We have a deep primal fear of that. Because we're trying to avoid it as living things. We're trying to avoid it as long as possible. Right. But that's one of the really nice things about this year is that this time of year is that we can come back to that and have the time to think about it and to try and be present with it. Mark: Yes. And what I find is that having, having been a pagan now for more than 30 years I am a lot more comfortable with the idea of my death than I used to be. I mean, I don't want it to be anytime soon, unless I'm, you know, very uncomfortable and unable to have a quality of life, in which case send me off I'm I'm done. I'm okay with the idea that it's going to happen. And that is kind of contrary to what seems to be the implicit conventional wisdom in the mainstream culture, which is, don't think about it. Don't talk about it because that might make it happen somehow. There's this sort of superstitious. Idea about, you know, thinking or talking about death, that it's sort of bad luck in some way. And what I find is that I come to a much more peaceful coexistence with the fact of my own mortality, because I do these rituals every year at this time. And I contemplate these things every year at this time. You know, I, I, I think, I mean, Halloween has been commercialized so terribly, but it still contains grains of. You know, the fear and yet the excitement, the sort of morbid fascination, you know, all those sorts of pieces that I think it's very healthy for a culture to contain ironically, you know, the, because decomposition is not just a good idea, it's the law it's going to happen to you. Right. It's going to happen to everybody and we, Yucca: And if it stopped, that would be the end of life. Right? If you take death away, there is no more life. Mark: that's right. That's right. And so death is, is what life is built on. You know, we are these assemblies, these biological assemblies. And when we stop functioning, we get disassembled, as I said before, and that kind of brings me to. Talking about decomposition and you the listener we have a lot of, kind of messed up ways of looking at death in our mainstream culture. You know, we're so avoidant we give our dead people to strangers at funeral homes to process them and, you know, pickle them in. Carcinogenic formaldehyde and, you know, hide them away in ridiculously expensive boxes so that they can be buried and can become a pollutant to the water table. And you know, we're talking about millions and millions of gallons of formaldehyde going into the water table just in the United States every year. And that's. I mean it, and it's a problem. Not only environmentally from a scientific standpoint, it's a problem, culturally, because if we had a more healthy relationship with death, we would be a happier and more contented people. People are phobic about dealing with dead bodies. They, they, you know, when someone dies, suddenly they go from being, you know, my beloved relative to becoming this. Terrifying object that we have to get away from us as quickly as possible. And the truth is that until around the 1850s in the United States 1860s, actually during the civil war when embalming to ship bodies back from the war to their loved ones, became commonplace until then most funeral arrangements were made at. There would be a viewing of the body with a wake and or some other kind of, you know, acknowledgement in the home. And then the body would be buried with a minimum of any kind of preservative treatment, you know, nothing for that purpose in a simple wooden box. And that was how it was done. And. The thing that many people don't know is that that's still perfectly legal, even though a funeral home may lie to you and tell you that it's not, it is perfectly legal in every state, in the United States. And, and I am unaware of a country anywhere in the world that requires you to use a funeral home, or that requires you to be involved unless you're going to be shipped over a vast distance. You can do this for your loved ones at home. And there's a lot of work being done to transform the deaf industry right now. Caitlin Doughty of the ASCA mortician YouTube channel has written several books on this, and she's really kind of a, a leader on this the natural burial home funeral movement. And I really encourage you to look into her, her materials. She's very funny. So it's, it's very entertaining stuff to watch but it also answers and demystifies questions. She's the mortician herself and has a kind of an alternate funeral home in the Los Angeles area. So. This, you know, this is the time of year. When you get to think about your own decomposition and. Right down, hopefully provide some written instructions to the people that love you about how you would like your body disposed of, let them know that, let them know where this document is, get your will together. And you're, you know, maybe a farewell letter that you'd like to say to the people that love you or a video or something like that. You can A health directive so that people know when you no longer want heroic measures to keep you alive. There is a there's a workbook that you can download from the atheopagan ism website that we'll put a link to in the. Episode notes that we'll kind of walk you through all the stuff that you need. Once he filled out this workbook, it really gives you everything that you need to have a death packet that will help your loved ones. Through that time, there is a very real phenomenon called grief brain. When people are grieving, they go into this kind of fog and it becomes very, very difficult for them to do the sort of. Dealing with insurance and dealing with, you know, putting obituaries in the newspaper and, you know, figuring out about Yucca: There's just so much. And, and you're just dealing with, yeah, you've got your feelings of what's going on here. Yeah. Mark: Yeah. So, you know, do your, do your loved ones, a favor and yourself a favor, because it really does take a big weight off your mind, download that workbook and go through it and, you know, do some preparation for your death. And you may think to yourself, well, I'm only 35. I, I don't need to worry about this. That's not the way the world works. Yucca: Hopefully you'll make it to a hundred. Right. We're shooting. We're all shooting for that, but, but. Mark: That's Right. We we Yucca: know, you know, there could be a car crash or whatever, or a diagnosis, or we just don't know. Mark: we don't know. And the, the good thing about that about really embracing the fact that we don't know. and that our mortality is real, is that it helps us to live well. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: It helps us really to embrace this life because. It's an amazing journey and it's a finite journey. It's not going to last forever. And being aware of that really helps you to take the time to smell the flowers. Look at the sunset, look at the stars, watch the moon come up. All those things that are so, that, that make our lives so rich and. Yucca: Well, mark. Thank you. I think this is a, I think that's a perfect note to finish today up on. Mark: Oh, well, thank you. Thank you for saying so we wish you, of course, the very best of the hellos cell and see. And we'll be back with more sort of seasonally appropriate stuff coming up in the next couple of weeks. And Thank you for listening as always. We really appreciate her and listeners. So take good care. Yucca: Thank you all.
Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com Suntree Retreat: https://theapsocietyorg.wordpress.com/news-and-events/suntree-retreat-2022/ ----more---- S2E34 TRANSCRIPT and Recipe: Reconstituted Yule Metheglin Recipe Ingredients Montrachet yeast (1 packet) Yeast nutrient, 1 oz. 12 lbs. high-quality honey (thyme, thistle, or wildflower honeys are nice for this recipe) Zest of four large or eight small oranges 5 cinnamon sticks, broken into pieces 12 cloves, broken 10 large slices fresh ginger, bruised with a hammer to release flavor 5 gallons water Equipment Large cooking kettle Candy thermometer Jar Muslin Rubber band Food-grade five-gallon fermenting bucket Brewing airlock Glass carboy, 5 gallon Champagne bottles Caps and capping press Method Start the yeast 2 days ahead. Take a sterilized jar and add a tablespoon of honey. Pour on a ¼ pint to ½ pint of boiling water and stir to mix. When cooled to 20°C or below, add the yeast and yeast nutrient. Keep covered but not airtight, a muslin cover affixed with a rubber band or string is ideal. Put the spices, zest and ginger into a large cooking kettle. Add about 2 gallons of water. Bring to a boil and simmer for 20 minutes, covered. Put all but 2/3 cup of the honey into a food-grade fermenting bucket and strain the herb liquid through muslin cloth onto it whilst still hot. Stir the honey until dissolved. Top up with water to four gallons total. Allow to cool to 20°C and then add the prepared yeast starter A fierce fermentation should begin quickly. After a few days to a week the rate will have slowed and the must can be poured into a carboy and topped up to five gallons with cooled boiled water prior to fitting the air-lock. Keep in a warm place until fermentation stops. Move the carboy into a cool place and when ready to bottle, stir in 2/3 cup additional honey. Rack off into champagne bottles, and cap. Mark: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-based Paganism. I'm your host Mark. Yucca: And I'm Yucca. Mark: And it has rolled around to this time of year. Once again, we are at the autumnal Equinox. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: Which is sometimes called Mabon, although there's great debate. And in some cases scorn about that term. And I prefer to call harvest. Yucca: Mm. So it's for me, at least it's amazing that here we are all around. It's this year has flown by, but also just seasonally what's happening doesn't quite feel like we're there yet. It's still, the summer has just been really, really dragging. We're still having our hot days. The nights are, you know, you need sweaters and whatnot, but there's that chills just not there yet. And we wonderfully, still got some rains recently. I just haven't quite turned that corner. Although I suspect in the next few weeks, it'll be like the snap of a finger and it'll all of a sudden it'll be autumn, but it just really isn't here yet. Mark: You know, here in California, where I am coastal Northern California we're in really kind of a Mediterranean climate cycle. And. I agree with you this year, that the things that I look forward to kind of signal the change into autumn are still not really happening. There's a particular kind of hard blue that the sky becomes because the angle of the light is different. And I know the angle of the light is still different, but I'm not seeing that blue. And it may be because of smoke in the air or something else, but could be, yeah, could be. Moisture as well. But I'm just, I'm not seeing the signals. People's gardens are still pouring out tons and tons of vegetables. And although the nights are coming sooner, it's still feels as though summer really has kind of got its talons in and it's holding on. Yucca: Yeah. So of course it's, it's going to be different everywhere, but that's interesting that that's happening and in both of our climates, Mark: Right because they are so very different. Yucca: they are Yeah. so it's always fun to see where we line up and where we're very different. Mark: Yes. Yucca: Tom. Mark: So let's talk about this holiday that has a controversial name and all that good kind of stuff. Yucca: Luckily it is one. We can just simply call the Equinox, right. So the in-between ones are a little bit trickier, but this one is easy. We can say it's the Equinox. And everybody knows what we're talking about. And of course mentioning that the two hemispheres are different. So for those of us in the Northern hemisphere, we're moving into the dark part of the year. And those in the Southern hemisphere are moving out of it Right. Going into their spring. Or of course, anyone in there. The tropical areas is having their wet and rainy, rainy, and dry cycle instead of the temperate four seasons. Mark: Right. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: Yeah, so it's getting to be time to celebrate again. And before we started recording, we talked about whether to save this episode for next week with when this episode would be released on the Equinox. But it seems like it's a better idea to talk about the Equinox this week, so that if there are any ideas that you have for how to celebrate you can plan for those and, and be ready for it coming up next month. Yucca: It's kind of get Mark: Monday. Yeah, Monday is the is the actual Equinox and that may not be true worldwide. I think it's Tuesday in Australia and Japan and the far east. Yucca: To check what the actual time is, Mark: yeah. Yucca: there abouts usually ranging from the 20th to 22nd. They're around in the month is usually when we have the, the Equinox. Mark: Right. Right. So, when we talk about celebrating the the solstices and equinoxes and the points between on the wheel of the year we, we talk about what's actually happening, happening. Our natural environment. And we also talk about the metaphorical meanings that these holidays can have for us. So maybe we should start with the first one. Yucca: Do you want to cover that or should I Mark: why don't you go ahead Yucca: oh, Okay. Yeah. So Mark: Okay. Yucca: we have, we've inherited the, the view of the world or the frame of reference of the world with where we think of earth being. Circled by these other objects. Right. And it makes it a lot of sense. You go outside, you look at the sky and it looks like the sun rises and goes around the earth. It looks like the moon rises. It goes around that case. It does, but it looks like the stars. Right. And so a lot of hours. When we talk about solstices equinoxes, it's based on that former geocentric view. We now know though that we are on a planet, that's orbiting a star, not the star orbiting us. And so sometimes our language is still a little bit confusing about that, but what's happening is. Earth is going around the sun and it's going around the sun on a plane, which we called the ecliptic. And this is confusing because the path that the earth is taking is the ecliptic, but also the apparent path of the sun and the sky is the ecliptic as well. But then we have earth is tilting. It's not straight up and down in that plane. That's our 23 and a half degree tilt, which changes over very, very long time period. Not within the human time period or the individual lifetime. So for us, we can just think, Okay. it's to say that's not changing, but we have basically, you can think of the, the plane coming out from the equator, the equatorial plane, or the celestial equator. And. We have earth going around the sun and then we have that plane and twice a year, those two planes, there's a node where it appears to us that they're crossing over each other. These are both imaginary lines. They're not really there, but that's what the Equinox is, is when the planet is passing through that plane. Now what that ends up doing for the equator is on the equator. It seems like there's equal night and day length. That's not the case for the rest of the world, though. It's pretty close. The closer you are to the equator, but that's where Equinox equal night. That word actually comes in. Mark: Right. And so as you get farther from the equator, The proportion of day and night shifts. And so you will have a slightly, somewhat longer day than night or a somewhat longer night than day, depending on whether you're in the north or in the south. Yucca: And if you happen to be at the south pole station, then it's a you have your six months of day, six months of night. Mark: right. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: So, that's what's happening in the natural world. That's, that's, what's causing this apparent effect of having these roughly equal days and equal nights and metaphorically speaking, what that often inspires people to think of this holiday as being about, is about balance is about. The, you know, looking at our lives and understanding the need for, you know, the, the proper proportionality of the different things that we are doing in our lives, whether it's our relationship with ourself, our relationship with a partner or partners, our relationship with our family, our relationship with work, our relationship. Friends and with creative endeavors and so forth. I find this a really useful time to take a look at my life and say, well, okay. What am I not putting enough time into right now? That is That's working to my detriment. And because I am unemployed at the moment, the obvious answer this year is I'm not putting enough time into work. Although I'm putting a lot of time into trying to get work. But that said, I've also noticed some other patterns. You know, I, I want to invest a little more time in my relationship now than I have been. I think I've been neglecting that a little bit and so forth. So, that's an exercise that you can do for this time of the year. You know, really kind of try to get the 20,000 foot view of your life and see where's the energy going and ask yourself. Is that really what I want is that, does that feel balanced to me? Yucca: Yeah. And so, because Equinox has happened twice a year. There's a really nice opportunity to return to that. It's just, it's not just once a year, but it's a Ooh, every half, half year, right. We have the, the fall or the autumn, and then also the spring time for looking at that balance. Although it's a good practice to do it anytime of the year, but it's nice to have a place on the calendar that reminds us to do that. Mark: Yes. Yes. And another layer of metaphor that I use in thinking about the, the wheel of the year around the, the course of the calendar is mapping the human life span onto that calendar. So for example, well, the spring Equinox becomes a time to focus on the very young on. Toddlers and children that are maybe up to 10 or 11 years old. I'm not preteens that comes a little later or teenagers comes a little later. But yeah, pre-teens and young children time to celebrate them and really kind of do some activities that are really focused on them. This time of year I considered to be about the elders. The, the matriarchs and patriarchs and other arcs, I haven't heard a gender fluid term yet for, for what that would be. But if somebody does, please email us@thewonderpodcastqueuesatgmail.com and let us know, because I I'd like to be using the right terminology. Yucca: And it's just fun to learn new words like that, too. Mark: Yeah, you Yucca: we could. If there isn't a word, there should be. Mark: Right? Right. So you know, those folks who have lived the, the great, the greatest proportion of their lives are coming towards the end of their life. And. One would hope they have learned something. They have gained wisdom in the course of passing through their lives because this is after all a harvest festival. This is a time when in, in the Northern hemisphere anyway. Gardens and so forth are pouring out. Tremendous agriculture is just producing tremendous amounts of food right now. And it's very traditional to have a kind of late September. Harvest feast of some kind celebrating the end of the harvest and there's and there are many ways and traditions of people doing that all over Europe, certainly. And I'm sure here in the Americas as well among indigenous people. So. It's a time to understand the harvest of your life in a way as well too, to celebrate those people who have lived long lives. And our experience who's experienced brings us a harvest of memories and lore and knowledge and wisdom and to celebrate them for that, that they bring to us. Yucca: Hm, that's really beautiful. I love hearing your take and perspective on the holidays and the wheel of fear Mark: Thank you Jaco. So you have a a different way of, of mapping the wheel of the year. Yucca: We do. Yeah. So instead of mapping the lifetime of an, of an individual human, we look at the wheel of the year, more on a what's happening on an ecosystem scale. Right. So what are the different components of ecosystems? What are the different roles and also the whole biosphere. So not just an individual specific biome, but, but the whole thing. Right. And we then relate that a little bit to, Okay. What's going on in our own environment. So here, although it's running a little bit late this year, this is the time when the shift between. The warm and the cold part of the year is happening even though with the light and the length of days. Yeah. That happened at the solstice. But really it's not until now that that we're going to start leaving summer. And for us summer is the that's. When we have moisture, it's a very dry climate, but that's when the moisture comes. And so if one's to go out and take a walk and look around, that's when you might notice. There are in fact mushrooms that grow here, but they only come up when there is that moisture. They only come up when the temperature is shifting. So we have those cool evenings, the days aren't so blazing and what's happening is that the, the phase of decomposition. Is starting to really get going. That's always happening, but in the temperate regions and whether a year in an arid or a humid temperate region, Mark: Hmm. Yucca: The decomposition really takes over during the cold part of the year, especially in the forests, in deciduous forests, underneath all of that litter of that organic matter. And underneath the snow and the ice that's when the fungus is working away, breaking down, the soil is alive. The soil is an incredible system and everything. Might look dormant and asleep, but underneath it's active and it's, you know, fun guy are like, some people say that they're all mouth, cause they really are. They're digesting on the outside, eating up, eating up. And it's not just the fun guy, but it's also many other organisms. The bacteria. Of course, not all bacteria, not all, all fungi are decomposers, but many of them are, and there are decomposers who partner with our microbes and fungi, like the termites and other insects that are animals, but really there's this whole other part to nature that we don't notice because they aren't happening on our scale. It's the normal scale. We're weird. We are abnormally giant compared to most life. And what that life is doing is it's breaking things down. It's taking it apart. It's eating and we think of it as death, Right, When something's decomposing, when it's rotting, we go, oh, it's dying and death and all of that, but it's actually feeding its life. It's both at the same time. Mark: right. Yucca: So this is the time that we really are looking at compost. We're looking at the decomposition and seeing that happening in the natural world, but also thinking about how that can apply to our own life. So I think this connects in a little bit with what you're talking about with the balance, where we can look at our lives and go, what's serving me. What's not, what can I put in the compost? All Right. What is not working that needs to be, take that energy, take that focus and use it as feed to transform into something new. So that's, that's what this whole kind of autumn. Transitioning towards the cold. That's what it really feels like along with, of course. Wow. Look at all the food that's coming in, look at all of the bounty, but what happens to the scraps that zucchini Bush that you have, you're getting loads and loads of the zucchini is that you have no idea what to do with, and you're sick of zucchini, bread and Columbus cheetahs, or whatever else you're making of it. But that plan. Is eventually dying down. And what happens to that? The plant that bore those fruits, it's going to get eaten, consumed. It's going to become part of the soil and on and on that cycle goes, Mark: Right, right. We would certainly notice it if it didn't because we would be buried in leaves. The, when you consider the sheer volume of, of vegetable detritus, that's consumed by the decomposers every year. It, it allows us to live really because. Yucca: vegetable, but animal as well, the flesh and Yeah, Mark: Absolutely. And you know, we consider it kind of normal while you go to a forest and it's got a few leaves on the ground and you walk around and you enjoy it. And then when you go there the next year, Has a similar amount of leaves around there, on the ground? Well, if it wasn't for the decomposers, there might be six feet of leaf accumulated there and you wouldn't be going anywhere in the forest. Yucca: Yeah. Well, we had a really interesting period during earth history where plants figured out this strategy called trees and they started making these compounds, which were much more difficult to break down. And the decomposers at the time. Hadn't figured it out yet. So breaking down those ligaments and things like that, and it took fun guy a while. They've they? They got it eventually, but we have this big period of time where we had this buildup of lots and lots and lots of Woody material, which eventually what caused huge fires. But a lot of it ended up getting buried and that's where our coal today come. Mark: Hmm. And that's why coal is full of fossils. It's full of leaf fossils and insect fossils, and all kinds of, you know, imprinted remnants from all of that detritus that was then compressed and fossilized into the call that we have today. Yucca: Yeah. So just unimaginable amounts of. Vegetable matter. Right, Just huge. So we call that the Carboniferous because there's so much carbon during that time period. Yeah. Mark: right. The, when, when you were talking about thinking about your life and what needs, what needs composting? You know, what. What harvest can we take from what we've been doing? And then what do we kind of give up on and fold back into the earth and hope will bring up something else. That's very much like my approach to to the harvest season as well, because, you know, we make plans early in the year. We start new initiatives, at least I do kind of. Annual schedule where during the deep of winter, it's, it's less, it's less a doing time and more of a kind of planning and getting ready to do time. But by the time the Equinox, the autumnal Equinox rolls around. I know pretty well whether a project has succeeded or not. And in some cases, you know, you plant stuff and it just doesn't. It's the nature of cultivating a garden. There, there are things that just fail. They either don't thrive in the conditions that you've given them or the seeds were defunked or something. Yucca: Or you realize that that's not what you want growing there. Mark: Right, Yucca: Right, And you know, that's, that's great. Mint is delicious, but maybe you don't want it right. there where it's going to take over everything. Mark: Right. Yucca: Okay. Maybe it's time to pull that up and put it and put it in a pot or just say, sorry, man. Mark: Yeah. Yucca: Maybe a different garden, maybe a different time. But right now this isn't, this isn't what I want to be working on. Mark: Right. So that's a, that's a place where our approaches kind of overlap in terms of the decomposers. Because I do think about, you know, With the metaphorical harvest of the year, what is it that needs to go onto the compost pile? Yucca: Hmm. Mark: What is it that didn't work out or that maybe did work out and turned out? Not to be what I wanted. All those kinds of things. So that's, that's another, another exercise that you can do at around this time of year, as you're looking at your life and thinking about, you know, how's the energy balance working there in terms of the energy that you invest in different activities, you can also be thinking about, you know, what what am I. What am I pouring any energy into that is not thriving. And maybe I need to pull the plug or maybe I need to put in even more energy, but you gotta sort of figure it out. If it's not working now, Yucca: Yeah. And, and one thing that you could do is actually physically compost. While making those decisions and there's, you know, there's a million, one different ways to compost that are going to be appropriate in different situations. If you're in a, an apartment you might think of like a little worm bin underneath the kitchen sink, or if you've got more space, you might do a traditional pile in the backyard. Or if you've got lots and lots of land, of course, there's always the trench and trench and, and. Let the existing soil, microbes and worms And all of those get at it. But, but it's the sort of thing that you could be physically doing and having that, that metaphoric meaning as you're doing it. Mark: And then the last thing that I think of when I think of. Holiday is just the straight-up harvest feast. Yucca: Hm. Mark: It's a thing that I really liked to do with friends at this time of year. And of course COVID has pulled the plug on all of that recently, although we did, we did have a gathering at our house of a small group of people yesterday, which felt like an early harvest celebration. They were the people who helped us to move. You know, loaning us trucks and helping us pack and helping us move stuff over and all that kind of stuff. And everybody was vaccinated. So we, you know, it was, it was reasonably safe and it just reminded me of how much I really enjoy being around other people and sharing their company and having conversations and all that good kind of stuff. If you're in a place where you. No of people who are your friends and loved ones who are vaccinated Yucca: Yeah. Mark: and, you know, can gather a small group for a harvest feast. It might be really good for your, for yourself at this point, because we've been so isolated for so long. If, if that's something that works for you and you feel comfortable with doing it you know, even, even just a group of like six people for a dinner party can be awfully nice. And it'll give you a chance to get rid of some of that zucchini. Yucca: Yes. And depending on what your climate and what the weather is like this year for you, this can be a really lovely time to still be outside. Right. So have that back porch or park gathering, or, you know, let's go to the national forest or something like that. And, you know, it's still a time that you could do a, kind of a, more of a picnic feel. Mark: Yeah. Yucca: but you know, the, the idea. Of sitting around a table in the backyard, or even a campfire or with friends and a good cider or, you know, just that, that nice atmosphere is, that's one of my favorite things about autumn. I just, that all that kind of cozy, Mark: right. Yeah. And it's it's, I mean, we know that at least, you know, where we are, we know that the elements are going to get more. In hospitable soon. Right. But there is this sort of last hurrah that happens in September into early October sometimes where you can, you can just really enjoy being outside and Celebrating with, with friends. So I, I really commend that to you. If you can. I know we've been protecting ourselves, protecting our health for so long that people have kind of developed this kind of knee jerk, get away from me, impulse because of COVID. But if you know people who are vaccinated and you know that they're safe, then that can be a great thing to do. Yucca: Yeah. And, you know, I don't know how it is for you, but there's also something about this time of year, which has that kind of excitement and anticipation for being done with the summer, done with the heat done with that part of the year and ready for the like, Ooh, I'm ready for the chill chilly. I'm ready for the sweaters. I'm ready for the, you know, whatever it is. The Halloween. Yes. Halloween. please. The pumpkin's Mark: The month long Sabbath. Yucca: Yes. Yeah. this, the pumpkins and the cloves and cinnamon and all of that. Just, yeah, we're getting there Mark: Yeah. Yucca: It's going to, Ooh. Mark: There's another thing that I used to do. And I'm, I'm thinking about doing it again this year, which is that I would brew a , which is a spice to Meade around this time of year, so that it would be ready in bottles to give us gifts that you'll. Yucca: Mm. Mark: And I think, you know, we can probably put this recipe in the. Yucca: Yeah, we could Mark: In the notes. Yeah. In the show notes, it's really, it's not very difficult. The most important thing to recognize about it is first of all, sanitize everything, because that's how you, you know, you don't get weird bacterial infections in your in your liquid and you must use champagne bottles. This, this is sparkling need. It is high pressure. The bottles will explode if they're not champagne bottles and it'll make a big sticky mess and it can hurt people if they're around when the bottle goes up. Yucca: I can, Mark: please use champagne bottles. Yucca: I'm laughing right now because do you know what a Winogradsky column is? Mark: No. Yucca: So, really beautiful, but if you live anywhere near a salt marsh or something like that, there are these bacteria. A lot of them are actually Kia that, that live in these different kinds of mud and all kinds of. Environments. That would be very difficult for us as large aerobic creatures, but you can get the mud and put them into jars and they, and, you know, maybe give them some hard-boiled eggs or some, you know, their sulfur eaters and that sort of thing. So, over time, these, these columns or these jars develop these unbelievably beautiful colors because you're looking at. These colonies of microbes? Well, I have several of those and we also moved recently and someone helping us move, tightened the lids onto some of my Mark: Oh, no. Yucca: And luckily it, this only happened to one of them, but. They are of course releasing carbon dioxide. And when you have that inside of a glass bottle and we heard from the other room and. Mud and sticky bacterial colonies all over the walls and the, you know, and it was just like, oh, good thing. Nobody was there because that was shards of glass. And that's the same thing which is going to happen with with your, when you're brewing. Right. Mark: right, right. Yeah. I had a direct experience of this once. I used to do two batches of Mead every year. I would do this spice champagne. that we're going to provide the recipe for. And then I did a straight, dry Mead that would come out around Mayday or bell team. And I was at a belting celebration weekend and I brought this need out to donate that I had put it in 22 ounce beer bottles because it was supposed to be a dry need. It apparently got a little fuzzy. Apparently there was enough sugar to do a secondary fermentation in the bottle. And one woman grabbed a bottle of this and started to run up a hill with it, to her campsite. And it exploded in her hand. Yucca: Oh, wow. Was she okay? Mark: She got some cuts, but nothing very serious, but it was really a reminder to me that you just don't want to take a chance with this. Even, even if what you're doing is supposedly going to turn out still, rather than sparkling, it's just so much safer to use champagne bottles. Yucca: Okay. Now I should say we're, we're talking about. The dangerous part of it. But for people who are interested in getting started, the means insiders are. really great places to start. They're much. They're very simple in comparison to beer, right? You really, a lot of times it's well clean all your equipment and put your ingredients, but the Easton, you know, you've got your special lid on it and that's and wait. Right. Mark: Yeah, pretty much. So, I mean, and the equipment that you need is not all that much. This, as I said, is a spice needs, so it has, you know, orange zest and ginger slices and cloves and cinnamon sticks and things like that. And it Yucca: give us the recipe, but do you put those in later on or do you Mark: No, I start, Yucca: with them? Okay. Mark: well at first I do a yeast starter just to, you know, get the yeast population up so that when I pitch it's it's really raring to go. But other than that, what I do is I simmer all of those ingredients with a little bit of honey in the bottom of a big. Like a four gallon or three gallon kettle. And then I taught that all with the remainder of the honey and water, and then stir that all up and then rack it over into a five gallon carboy and top it off with water so that it comes up to five gallons. So this is this is a a recipe for five gallons of need. Which is enough to keep you for awhile. Yucca: That's a lot. Yeah. Mark: it is it's enough to, you know, give away his presence and have some for yourself. And it's, it's, it's Yucca: It depends on how many adults are in your household, right? Yeah. But That's still five gallons is a lot. Mark: That's a lot. It is. It's a lot. And for those of you who don't know, for some reason, meat is just honey wine. It's wine that's made where the fermenting sugar is from honey, instead of. Typically grapes in the case of most wine. And it's good. It's very good. And it, at least if it's made well, it's good. Yucca: It's, it's one of those that I've found that most of the inexpensive stuff at the stores is not very cheap. Cheap meat is not. Mark: really Yucca: find cheap beers that are good. You can find cheap ciders, but cheat, Mead tip meat is like cough, syrupy Mark: Yeah, it's the, the problem is that both the yeasts and the honey are somewhat more expensive if you want to get good quality stuff. And so if the meat is cheap, that means they went cheap with the ingredients. And so it doesn't taste very good. Yucca: Yeah, but there are some really, you know, it's, it's worth spending just a little bit more to get the better meat when you are buying it. And then of course, when you're making it yourself, it's, it's one of the much easier ones to make. Mark: Yes. And it's, you know, it's a wonderful sort of out chemical process. It's, you know, it's life bubbling away in there making the, the alcohol and the CO2 and it's. It's a science project as much as anything else. And and then you have this product at the end of it. It's actually nice to drink. Yucca: And if you're going for that witchy aesthetic, It fits in real nice there. Mark: It does it absolutely does. You've Yucca: got your, own BS even better, right. You get your BS and make it with your own. yeah, Mark: yeah, yeah. That, that, that would be really exciting. I've I've never kept bees, but I have friends who have in there. I, in fact, I, I have a friend who used to keep bees. He doesn't anymore, and we did exchanges. You know, he, he would give me the bees, the honey that I needed to do a batch of meat. And then I'd give him half of the need that I made. So pretty. Yucca: like a great deal. Mark: Pretty good deal all the way around. Yeah. So anyway, today's tangent is about is about Mead making and brewing. And if you're, if you're interested in getting into that and you haven't been doing it so far this, this is a, an easy recipe that is really delicious. So it's, it's well worth giving it a shot. And the good news is that once you have the equipment to do it, then that's, that's the expense. Right? Other than the honey, that's really the expense. Yucca: Okay. And that, and for the most part, you can use all of that for your site or two, so yeah. Mark: Yep. Yeah. Basically anything with romantic sugar, you can make wine that way too. It's just that wine. I mean, modern wine generally tends to be blends of several different vintages that are all kind of made to balance together and adjusted for flavor. And so. Yucca: Mm. Mark: I've never gotten into winemaking cause I live in the wine country and I can get a really good bottle of wine for 10 bucks. So it never struck me as making much sense to try to get 30 years of experience so that I could get as good as the guy that made the wine that costs 10 bucks. Yucca: Oh, you did mention, did we, did we talk about this while recording that that's another association that you have for this time of year? Mark: I did mention that briefly, but yes. This is the time of the grape harvest in my area, which is called the crush. And when you drive the rural roads in the Western part of the county, everything smells like. Fermenting grape juice. It just everywhere you go, it just smells, it fermented grape juice. And there are giant trucks on the roads that are overflowing with bunches of grapes. It's really a pretty dramatic thing. It's a huge industry here. Yucca: How has the harvest deer to Sierra heard? It was a little bit of a rough year. Mark: Yeah, because of the lack of rain. I know that there are actually a number of vineyards that have been taken out of production because. I mean, ordinarily what, the good thing about a vineyard, there are a lot of bad things about vineyards in terms of diversity and stuff. But the good thing about a vineyard is that once it's established, you generally don't have to water it. You can dry farm. Yucca: Okay. Mark: In our, in our local environment, there's enough ambient moisture in the air and enough moisture in the soil that the grapevines will persist, but they have to be established for a couple of years with irrigation first. And we're in the middle of a drought now. So I know that there are some vineyards that have been abandoned and aren't because they, they won't be able to survive without irrigation. And there's no water. Yucca: Yeah, you have to have water to put out. So. Mark: The, the other factor though, is that the very best wine grapes are highly concentrated in flavor because they grow on hillsides. And so they have access to less water. So it may very well be that some of the flat land grapes are similarly high in quality this year, because with less water, they've grown berries that are smaller, but much more concentrated. Yucca: And it works that way with the with Chili's too. Mark: Does it? Yucca: Yeah. So there, there's all, there's a whole art to when you withhold water and when you give water to get the, to really get that wonderful spice and the flavor and all of that. Mark: Hmm. Yucca: But unfortunately chilies are annuals, whereas grapes are perennials. And so when you're mono cropping, annuals you're destroying the soil Mark: Yeah. Yucca: single year. Whereas your grapes mono crops of any kind is a, is a big problem, but less so than that happened to till every year. Mark: Right. And we do have more and more people here who are trying to do integrated agriculture, where they'll grow other kinds of crops in the rows between the, the rows of grapes or you know, minimal pesticide use that kind of stuff that are trying to be more in balance with the natural world. Yucca: Yeah, it seems like there'd be a lot of opportunity for that with a vineyard. Mark: Yeah, there is. It's just that there's a lot of expense involved and some of the things that you really need to do in order to be friendly to your local environment, welcome the birds to come and eat all your grapes. Yucca: Yes. Well, and sometimes your trouble with, if you're growing things between then you're harvesting becomes challenging and yeah. So it's, you know, it's, it's great in principle and I think we need to work there. You know, it's things haven't shifted for a reason. There's there are challenges that we have to work through to be able to make those shifts. Mark: Yes. Yes. So that was your second tangent an exploration of the environmental impacts and opportunities for improvement of the wine industry. Yucca: Yes. Mark: And with that, I think we probably want to go into our final piece of discussion for you, which is that the atheopagan community is holding an in-person event. Next year. We've mentioned this before. It's called the century retreat and it's going to be from May 13th through 16th. Of 2022 in Colorado Springs, Colorado at a retreat center. Yucca: Okay. Mark: And we are trying to get a handle on how many people are coming. So we're going to put a link in the notes. In the episode notes where you can go and you can register. If you're, if you're planning on going you, what you do is the, the event itself for the three days cost $215, and then you select your lodging choice. And that's an additional amount, which can be anything from 15 bucks. If you're camping too, if you want a private room in a cabin, it can be quite a bit more than that. Yucca: Or not if you're local, Right. If you're in the area, Mark: If you're local then. Yeah, Yucca: It's great. Yeah. Mark: It's going to be a wonderful event with workshops and rituals and socializing and just all kinds of great stuff and Yucca and I are both going to be there Yucca: Who knows. Maybe we'll record an episode there. Mark: we might very well. W yeah, Yucca: In person. Mark: wouldn't that be amazing? Yucca: Yeah. At the same table. Mark: So. You know, if you, if you really want to hang out with some, you know, non-ferrous pagans and do some non theist pagan stuff really consider coming and joining us, we would love to have you be a part of that event. And as I said, we'll put a link to the the registration page with all the information in the episode notes. So we hope we'll see you there. Yucca: And it, it feels like a long time away, but it's really not. So, and that's why we're trying to get that handle on the numbers and see how many people are coming, because it's going to be here before we know it. Mark: that's right. That's right. Well, happy Equinox, Yucca. Yucca: Likewise, mark. And thank you for another wonderful discussion. So I can't believe we've we're already, already at the Equinox yet. Another one. Mark: yeah. In fact that makes, that means we've been going here for more than a year and a half yeah. Something like six weeks, more than a year and a half. So it's kind of amazing. Yucca: it is. Mark: Yeah. All right. Well, thank you so much and we'll see you next week. Yucca: All right.
Catie chats with Dr. Sapphire McMullan-Fisher, an ecologist with a special interest in biodiversity conservation, particularly macrofungi and mosses. Sapphire is a renowned scientific researcher, speaker, teacher and author with a knack for communicating fungi's vital ecological roles — and why we should all pay a lot more attention to these remarkable, all-connecting entities. She's is also a pretty radical member of the community here in Naarm/Melbourne, who last year let Catie + George transform her suburban backyard into a market garden through the Growing Farmers program. Wise, lively and friend of the fungi, enjoy this cracking convo with Sapphire McMullan-Fisher.SHOW NOTESBeing a GondwananGrowing up in a mining town in the Pilbara.From saving African animals to fungi fascination.A fire and fungi pHD in Tasmania.Overcoming dyslexia in academia. Ecosystems need fungi!Decomposition + partners of plants. Why to leave the tree debris be.Journey back to the Carboniferous period when all the coal and oil was formed.Fungi eats wood, invertebrates eat fungi, birds eat invertebrates... hey presto!Life goes on. (Even though we're seriously messing with systems.) How an understanding of matter recycling gives an appreciation of post-humous existence.Patterns + process + life = wow.Where do humans fit in the bigger picture? Should we just hurry up and extinct ourselves, or…?Making space + food in your garden for other organisms who deserve to be here in the landscape. How mindfulness of observing nature increase your understanding of it.Find the things that make your curiosity pop. Ask: what is it? How do I found out more about it?Re-activating our patterning brain.Curiosity as a practice.Being on the spectrum as a superpower. Growing up thinking you're not clever. Absorbing information in tiny little bites.Expanding communicating styles so that everyone gets it.How expectations shape your view of self. Looking to ecosystems to confirm our need for diversity. Allowing ourselves to learn and love learning.Biology is not a soft science!How a car accident changed everything. Having trust that humans won't be assholes.They say you need a village to raise a child… I need a village just to survive!The impossibility of going life alone.How do you learn to ask people for help?Letting people self select in how they help.Ways to be be radical and resist the status quo.Being sustainable within your limits.What's the #1 priority in taking action for the world?Letting your inner child guide us towards more fulfilling life and work.LINKS YOU'LL LOVEGrowing FarmersFun Fungi EcologyFungi4Land on InstaSupport the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/futuresteading)
In this episode, we talk to our very own Dr Elsa Panciroli about her new book Beasts Before Us. In it, she tells the untold story of mammalian evolution, tracing the origin of synapsids back to the Carboniferous. You'll be taken to fossil sites around the world to meet some of these pioneering animals and some of the palaeontologists that discovered them. For this interview, we'll give you an overview of the early evolution of synapsids and dispel many of the misconceptions about what our ancestors were really like. We've got a couple of copies of the book to give away, so look out on our social media channels for details of the competition! For everyone else, Beasts Before Us is available to buy online and in all good book shops.
Continuing on in what is becoming one of our most in depth and lengthy book dives, we move forward in The Hidden History of the Human Race by Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson, finishing up the anomalous human remains section with some extremely anomalous finds, including well-documented and discussed sets of human-like footprint tracks in Carboniferous strata.We then move on to Part II of the book, which details finds of ancient human remains that are well accepted in the literature and by modern science as part of the human evolutionary story, and all of the interesting and sometimes strange circumstances that surround them.Brothers of the Serpent Episode 199If you cannot see the audio controls, your browser does not support the audio element
Continuing on in what is becoming one of our most in depth and lengthy book dives, we move forward in The Hidden History of the Human Race by Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson, finishing up the anomalous human remains section with some extremely anomalous finds, including well-documented and discussed sets of human-like footprint tracks in Carboniferous strata. We then move on to Part II of the book, which details finds of ancient human remains that are well accepted in the literature and by modern science as part of the human evolutionary story, and all of the interesting and sometimes strange circumstances that surround them.
Rob is the project manager for the Blue Book project at iCRAG, an upcoming online repository of borehole information about the Carboniferous strata in Ireland, home to many Pb and Zn ore bodies. With Eoin from Geological Survey Ireland, they tell us why un update from the original Blue Book by Mike Philcox was needed, and what impact the new version will have on the mining industry sector in Ireland. Hosted and produced by Niamh Faulkner and Ben Couvin. Edited by Niamh Faulkner and Ben Couvin.
Go searching in the right spots in Illinois and you’re liable to find a hard chunk of ironstone with a gorgeous fossil inside. The Mazon Creek Fossil Beds represent some of the best Carboniferous fossils in the world, yielding exceptionally preserved plants and animals from a tropical river delta over 300 million years old. This episode, we discuss the history, the geology, and some of the most famously bizarre creatures of Mazon Creek. In the news: a “winged” shark, digging ankylosaurs, the oldest cephalopods, and a fly full of pollen. Time markers: Intro & Announcements: 00:00:00 News: 00:04:30 Main discussion, Part 1: 00:33:30 Main discussion, Part 2: 00:56:00 Patron question: 01:22:00 Check out our blog for bonus info and pictures: http://commondescentpodcast.wordpress.com/ Find merch at the Common Descent Store! http://zazzle.com/common_descent Follow and Support us on: Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/commondescentpodcast Twitter: https://twitter.com/CommonDescentPC Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/commondescentpodcast Instagram: @commondescentpodcast YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCePRXHEnZmTGum2r1l2mduw PodBean: https://commondescentpodcast.podbean.com/ iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-common-descent-podcast/id1207586509?mt=2 The Intro and Outro music is “On the Origin of Species” by Protodome. More music like this at http://ocremix.org. Musical Interludes are "Professor Umlaut" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
On today’s ID the Future, German paleontologist Günter Bechly unpacks what Charles Darwin referred to as an “abominable mystery,” the sudden appearance in the fossil record of a certain group of flowering plants. It was a mystery to Darwin because according to his theory, there should have been a long succession of precursors gradually evolving toward the flowering plants of the Cretaceous. Bechly and host Eric Anderson focus their conversation around a recent paper by Richard Buggs in the American Journal of Botany showing that the problem for evolutionary theory has actually grown more acute since Darwin’s time. What about a recent article claiming to have found evidence of flowering plants in the Jurassic? Bechly says that the “evidence” amounts Read More › Source
You may have seen some lovely plant material in dark nodules of siderite or iron carbonate coming from the Mazon Creek Fossil Beds. the Mason Creek Biota are lovely fossil lagerstätte found in northeastern Illinois. These marine and terrestrial fossils are preserved in ironstone concretions that tell the tale of our world some 309 million years ago — back in the Carboniferous.
Join us as we attempt to assemble this fragmented monster of an episode! So many legs. So many pop culture references. So many research papers to sift through! We try our best to separate fact from video game, and find ourselves caught in the crossfire between science and media. Our reputation may be at stake, but in the end…our mutual fascination with poop may unite us all! ====================== Download SCAM: Supreme Coelenteratan Advanced Multiplayer on you mobile devices NOW! Become the Ultimate HAC-er! May eternal be thy Squishy! ====================== Send us suggestions and comments to darwinsdeviations@gmail.com Intro/outro sampled from "Sequence (Mystery and Terror) 3" by Francisco Sánchez (@fanchisanchez) at pixabay.com Sound effects obtained from https://www.zapsplat.com Image Credit (Episode image is heavily edited, the image owner reserves all rights to their image, and is not affiliated with our podcast) SOURCES: ARK: Survival Evolved Wiki: Arthropleura Dinosaur Wiki: Arthropleura The Fossil Forum: Lycopods on the Menu? A herbivore coprolite mystery... Wikipedia: Carboniferous Wikipedia: Trace Fossil Largest Land-Dwelling “Bug” of All Time National Geographic: Carboniferous Period Why Giant Bugs Once Roamed the Earth Arthropleura, the Giant Prehistoric Millipede Czech Paleontological Society - Images of Arthropleura armata fossils Whyte, Martin. (2018). Mating trackways of a fossil giant millipede. Scottish Journal of Geology. 54. sjg2017-013. 10.1144/sjg2017-013. BRIGGS, D. E. G., PLINT, A., PICKERILL, R. K. 1984. Arthropleura trails from the Westphalian of eastern Canada. Palaeontology, 27, 4, 843–855. Rolfe, W. D. Ian and J. Ingham. “Limb structure, affinity and diet of the Carboniferous ‘centipede' Arthropleura.” Scottish Journal of Geology 3 (1967): 118 - 124. Pearson, P. (1992). Walking traces of the giant myriapod Arthropleura from the Strathclyde Group (Lower Carboniferous) of Fife. Scottish Journal of Geology, 28, 127 - 133. Proctor, C.. “Arthropleurids from the Westphalian D of Writhlington Geological Nature Reserve, Somerset.” (1998). McGhee, G. (2018). Carboniferous Giants and Mass Extinction: The Late Paleozoic Ice Age World. New York; Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press. doi:10.7312/mcgh18096
Emily Parsons-Lord re-creates air from distinct moments in Earth's history -- from the clean, fresh-tasting air of the Carboniferous period to the soda-water air of the Great Dying to the heavy, toxic air of the future we're creating. By turning air into art, she invites us to know the invisible world around us. Breathe in the Earth's past and future in this imaginative, trippy talk. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
On this week's episode we talk about fossil fuels, the EPA, and the yoga industry.We also discuss the Carboniferous period, clean coal, and corporate sociopathy. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe