EarthDate

For more than 20,000 years, humans have used poison—in hunting, in pest and plant control, and even to kill other humans.Castor bean residue is the source for ricin, which causes multiple organ failure. But it’s used by some indigenous tribes on their hunting arrows.But the deadliest synthetic poison is VX, a nerve agent that stops victims' breathing. Originally developed as an insecticide, it proved too lethal for that. One gram could kill 2,500 people.Another profoundly lethal poison is the radioactive isotope of polonium, famously used to assassinate a Russian dissident in 2006. One gram could kill 10 million people.The most deadly one, surprisingly, is used routinely. Extremely tiny quantities of botulinum toxin, produced by bacteria, are used to paralyze facial muscles to reduce wrinkles. But just one gram could kill one billion people!All these may be deadly, but the riskiest poisons are the ones found at home—cabinets full of pesticides, cleaning solutions and medications.There’s one poisoning reported in the U.S. every eight seconds, and 90 percent of them occur in households.Little kids tend to put things in their mouths, so they’re the most vulnerable. Nearly 4 percent of children below six will have a poison exposure.A good reason to put child locks on cabinets that contain potentially poisonous household chemicals.

Lobsters used to be considered the “cockroach of the sea,” food fit only for indentured servants and prisoners. My, how times have changed.Could the same change be coming for crickets?Today, nearly 40 percent of habitable land is used to raise livestock and their feed.By 2050, the UN projects global population will increase by two billion people—people who will need protein in their diet. There may not be enough real estate to produce today’s livestock for them.For the same amount of protein, farming insects requires 5 times less feed, 15 times less land and 50 times less water than beef—and produces 80 times less methane!Insects grow quickly, in days instead of months or years, produce huge numbers of offspring, and can be farmed vertically, like produce.In fact, raising insects may have less environmental impact than many crops!They can be fed organic waste. And their waste can then be used as fertilizer.And they’re good for you. Insects are rich in amino acids, vitamins and minerals. Flour made from ground crickets has more iron than spinach and more calcium than milk.The UN has catalogued 1,900 species of edible insects—and there are already two billion people who eat them: dried grasshoppers in Mexico, fried grubs in Africa, and roasted insects of all kinds in Asia.Once we get a taste for them, they may wriggle their way into many more diets.

Dung beetles. Scientists think they evolved 150 million years ago, along with flowering plants, which had become the main food of herbivorous dinosaurs.Much of the plant matter passed through the dinosaurs’ guts, producing huge volumes of poop with some nutritive value—for a new kind of beetle to capitalize on.Today, there are 8,000 species completely dependent on dung. They eat it, make homes of it, and lay their eggs in it so their hatchlings will have food.Some species live in the dung. Others tunnel under it, to pull it into their burrows. The most famous make big balls of it and roll them away for safe keeping.But first, they climb on top of the ball and do a little dance. Scientists think they’re taking a “photo” of the sky to orient themselves.They then push the ball off at top speed, to avoid it being stolen by another hungry dung beetle.If they get knocked off course, they climb back on the ball, reorient themselves to the sky, and carry on.They can orient to the sun, the moon, and when there are neither of these, even the Milky Way.Researchers have even put dung beetles in planetariums, and they’ve navigated just fine to the projected galaxy.But when they blindfolded the beetles, they couldn’t orient at all and just pushed their dung balls around in circles.Dung beetles’ chosen food, and their single-minded dedication to it, may seem funny to us. But like other nocturnal animals, from frogs to seals, they are amazing animal astronomers.

In the remote desert town of Coober Pedy, in South Australia, summer temperatures can reach 127 degrees—so hot that many residents live below ground, where the temperature is a constant 75 degrees.This tradition began 100 years ago when the first opals were discovered, and so was born an underground cottage mining industry that endures today.Only 5 percent of opals found worldwide are designated as precious, with a fiery play of color within them, and 95 percent of those come from Australia.Unlike other gemstones, opals are not minerals but instead made of microscopic spheres of quartz—silicon dioxide—that form very slowly in sediment layers at low temperature in the presence of water.Perhaps it’s not surprising then, that opals are 10 to 20 percent water.As they form, they may replace minerals in existing fossils. Some of the Coober Pedy opals inherit the fossil forms of ancient sea creatures.Here, the Australian government has discouraged large-scale mining by limiting prospectors to single claims.The result is more than 250,000 small mine shafts in the area, some of which have been converted into underground homes, hotels and businesses.To excavate a new home costs about the same as building one above ground. But the diggers may uncover more gemstones in the process, which helps to subsidize the cost of the home.Now that’s a valuable opal.

Octopuses are incredible, almost otherworldly creatures. They can change their color, shape and texture in less than a tenth of a second—making them masters of camouflage.With no bones, they can squeeze their entire bodies through tiny openings—making them great escape artists.They’re highly intelligent and demonstrate short- and long-term memory. They learn to recognize people and have even been trained to operate a camera to take their picture.They play, use tools and solve problems. They can learn how to open containers and do puzzles. They’ve even been seen stealing aboard fishing boats to eat crabs from a trap.But this intelligence doesn’t work anything like ours—perhaps because they diverged from us evolutionarily more than 750 million years ago.They have about the same number of neurons as a dog, but they’re distributed. A third are in a central donut-shaped brain that encircles their esophagus. The other two-thirds are in ganglia in each of their arms. This allows their arms to “think” their moves independently.And all those neurons are processing a huge amount of sensory data from their environment.Each of their hundreds of suckers can have more taste buds than a human tongue. Their skin has special proteins that allow it to sense the color of the surfaces it touches.Imagine tasting with your fingers, seeing with your skin, and changing your shape and color to anything you want, and you can begin to appreciate the amazing octopus.

Fjords are deep valleys with steep sides, formed by glaciers. They’re usually on the coasts of continents and filled with water.Over the past five million years, glaciers have migrated over continents then melted back, nearly 50 times.Modern fjords formed during the last glacial advance, from around 100,000 to 20,000 years ago, when glaciers covered a quarter of all land on Earth.Since so much water was locked up in glaciers, sea level was 400 feet lower than today. In the high latitudes, especially on the western edges of continents, prevailing winds brought moist sea air that fell as snow. Glaciers became so thick and heavy that they formed deep channels through rocky coastlines as they moved to the sea.In places, they cut valleys 3,500 feet deep down to sea level, then cut another 3,500 feet into the ocean floor. When the glaciers finally melted and retreated, they left valleys sometimes 7,000 feet deep, with more than half of that below sea level.This left the western coasts of Norway and Chile completely dissected by fjords. If you took a boat along Norway’s coastline, bypassing the fjords, you’d travel 1,600 miles. But if you sailed along the edge of land, slipping into and out of every one of its 1,200 fjords, it would be an incredible 18,000 miles. Here, and in places like New Zealand, fjords define the coastal character of the landscape.

A thousand years before the Inca, in the deserts of Peru where rainfall is almost nonexistent, lived a civilization so advanced they’d figured out how to use wind to pump water.The Nazca people were fantastic artists, famous among anthropologists and ancient art collectors for their textiles and ceramics. But they were also brilliant engineers.Over generations, they constructed a sophisticated water system.They trenched and tunneled into the gravelly water table of the Andean foothills, then built underground aqueducts, lined with smooth river stone, to move the water down to them.Miles of these tunnels supplied their towns and irrigated their fields in the coastal desert. Along them, they constructed broad spiraling holes called ojos, or eyes, some of them 50 feet in width.These served as access portals for the Nazca to descend into, clean and maintain the aqueducts.Recently, a team of scientists discovered that the ojos’ spiral mouths, and their positioning, had a further purpose. They caught the prevailing winds and ducted them down into the system, using the increased air pressure to pump the water along.It’s a system so well engineered and constructed that 36 of these aqueducts are still in service today, 1,500 years later, bringing water to a city that bears the name of these ancient architects: Nazca, Peru.

Whakaari/White Island is New Zealand’s largest active volcano. Its crater forms a huge natural amphitheater that opens to a bay.In December 2019, a large group of tourists arrived for a day trip. They donned gas masks to watch fumaroles spew clouds of yellow steam.Then, disaster struck. The volcano erupted suddenly, belching vapor and ash two miles into the sky. The cloud collapsed into the amphitheater, which funneled it directly at the tourists.Half were killed and the other half suffered severe burns and lung damage from sulfuric acid fumes.Scientists set out to analyze the eruption. Like most in the region, and many of the largest in the world, it was hydrothermal.Water trapped in rock pores becomes superheated by shallow magma, increasing pressure. Then an external trigger, like a seismic tremor, destabilizes the system causing a huge instantaneous steam explosion.Researchers used modern machine learning to analyze 40 years of eruption data at Whakaari. They found seismic patterns of magma movement in the subsurface, which superheated water and triggered the steam release.Their new understanding could help predict future eruptions here. But the technique will have to be customized for other volcanoes and, for some, warning time may be very short.If you’ve ever thought about visiting an active volcano, you should be aware that none are completely safe.

As we know, birds descended from dinosaurs. And with 18,000 species of bird now living, there may be more “dinosaur” species today than ever before. The birds that share the most DNA with their dinosaur ancestors are, surprisingly, the chicken and the turkey.The turkey, like the tyrannosaur, has a wishbone and a similar hip structure. And it has meaty drumsticks and thighs like a Velociraptor. Yum!The turkey probably evolved from prehistoric birds in South America and migrated northward.During the last Ice Age, the California turkey was a favorite food for humans, with bones found at cooking sites. That turkey went extinct 10,000 years ago, probably from overhunting and warming as the ice retreated.Luckily, the Mexican turkey persevered. It was domesticated by the Maya, then the invading Spaniards, who took it back to Europe and on to England.Because it was considered an exotic food, and many exotic foods came from the Ottoman Empire, it was called the Turkish cock, then simply, turkey.From England, the domestic bird was exported back to North America. Meanwhile, the wild variety here had again been hunted nearly to extinction.A reintroduction campaign has brought back the wild turkey. There are now 7 million in the US living free—while 45 million of their domesticated cousins are destined each year for the Thanksgiving table.

Here are two trivia questions for you: What’s the strongest metal on Earth? And why is it called “wolf cream”?It was discovered in the 1400’s when miners found a hairy black mineral with tin ore. When they smelted the two together, the surface of the melted ore foamed and a heavy slag consumed much of the tin.They named the mineral “wolf” for its furry appearance and appetite for tin and “rahm” or cream for the foam. Wolfram. In Europe, it’s still called that.But elsewhere, it has a name given by a Swedish chemist who found it with iron ore. It was much heavier, so he called it “heavy stone.” In Swedish, tung-sten.After separating the pure metal, he found tungsten was not only a new element but extremely strong.It’s now used today whenever a highly durable metal is required, especially in its even harder alloy form, tungsten carbide.You can find it in household items like the ball in a ball point pen.But it has more exotic uses, in X-ray machines and X-ray resistant aprons. In armor and armor-piercing artillery. In rock drills and tunneling machines. In jet and rocket engines.It won’t rust or react to acids. It’s 100 times as abrasion resistant as steel, yet it’s easy to recycle.Tungsten, wolfram, really is a beast of a metal.

Bloodletting with leeches seems a very primitive practice. So, it may surprise you to know it’s still very much in use today.There are 700 species of leech. Most dwell in water and drink blood from fish, turtles, ducks, frogs and other creatures. Scientists can even track which animals are living in swamps and rainforests by capturing leeches and DNA testing the blood in their stomachs.Leeches were first used in medicine at least 2,500 years ago. They became so popular in nineteenth-century Europe that overharvesting made them threatened.Today, we’ve recognized that leeches do in fact have surprising medical benefits.When they bite to extract blood, they inject over 60 compounds in their saliva that work as blood thinners, anti-inflammatories, antimicrobials and anesthetics. We’ve synthesized several of these and use them widely.We even still use the leeches themselves. In the U.S., they’re approved as medical devices!When surgeons reattach extremities like fingers or hands, leeches can be used to slowly drain blood that otherwise might pool and become deoxygenated.Tests have found that natural anesthesia from leeches is highly effective in controlling pain from joint diseases like rheumatoid arthritis. And they’re used for treating vein disease as well.So, if you need a medical procedure in the future, don’t be too surprised if your doctor prescribes leeches!

We’ve talked a lot about fossils on EarthDate, but we’ve never talked about how they form.Normally, when a plant or animal dies, it decays or is consumed. But occasionally its remains are preserved as a fossil.This usually happens when the organism is buried quickly in sediment. The sediment layer protects it from the elements, scavengers, even oxygen. Often soft parts decompose, leaving bones, teeth, shells, or exoskeletons.As the sediment gradually hardens into rock, mineralized water is absorbed into the pores of the remains, gradually replacing the original material with rock.Fossils are often skeletons or seashells, but other materials can be fossilized: feathers, trees, leaves and seeds—dinosaur eggs, even animal poop, called coprolites.Amber is lithified tree sap that may trap and preserve small organisms within it, like mosquitos.The footprints of animals can be covered in sediment and preserved as fossil trackways, allowing us to study the way creatures moved, even their social structures.But the most common and numerous fossils are microscopic. In some places where ancient plankton rained down to the sea floor for millions of years, their exoskeletons have compacted together to form thick chalk deposits.Fossils provide records of the ancient world for us to read today, informing science and underpinning many of the stories you’ve heard on EarthDate.

When the explorer Ferdinand Magellan finally made it ‘round the treacherous horn of South America in 1521, the ocean beyond seemed especially calm—so he named it the peaceful sea: Mare pacificum, the Pacific Ocean.Little did he know the Pacific is anything but. It’s surrounded by more than 1,000 volcanoes that make up what’s now called the Pacific Ring of Fire—a geologically active strip 25,000 miles long, in places 300 miles wide, that borders the Pacific on three sides.It would be more than 400 years later, in 1960, that scientists could understand what was going on: almost the entire periphery of the Pacific Ocean consists of plate boundaries where tectonic plates slide against or are pushed under other plates.Whenever this happens, extraordinary energy is released.Two-thirds of Earth’s volcanic eruptions since the last Ice Age have happened in the Pacific Ring of Fire, including famous ones like Mount St. Helens.Ninety percent of the world’s earthquakes each year happen along the edges of the Pacific.This includes massive events, like the Tōhoku quake that caused the tsunami that flooded the Fukushima nuclear plant.Of course, the Pacific is also vital for navigation and trade, fishing and national economies and provides a livelihood for millions of people.Like most things in life, there are pros and cons.