M.J. Rose

Something wonderful from our friends over at A Bloody Good Read:

FROM HOMER TO THE HOBBIT: THE HISTORY OF THE NECROMANCER
By Nancy Bilyeau

“Vampire. Witch. Zombie. Werewolf. In films, books and TV series, it seems as if the supernatural run the show as never before.

I admit to a weakness for Dracula, whether it’s in the hands of the one-and-only Bram Stoker, the gifted Elizabeth Kostova (The Historian) or the audacious Francis Ford Coppola in his adaptation (fantastic soundtrack). Anne Rice, Charlaine Harris and Justin Cronin have taken the vampire myth in fascinating directions. And, yes, I admit it: I’m a Twilight mom.

My favorite “modern” witch has to be the determined and erudite Diana Bishop in Deborah Harkness’s wonderful novels, A Discovery of Magic and Shadow of Night. She’s come a long way from “Double, double, toil & trouble.”…”

For the rest click here.

Chickens with dino snouts. What will they think of next?

Chicken Grows Face of Dinosaur

by Melissa Hogenboom (Earth Blog – BBC)

A chicken embryo with a dinosaur-like snout instead of a beak has been developed by scientists

“Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid is believed to have crashed into Earth. The impact wiped out huge numbers of species, including almost all of the dinosaurs.

One group of dinosaurs managed to survive the disaster. Today, we know them as birds.

The idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs has been around since the 19th century, when scientists discovered the fossil of an early bird called Archaeopteryx. It had wings and feathers, but it also looked a lot like a dinosaur. More recent fossils look similar.

But these early birds didn’t look the same as modern ones. In particular, they didn’t have beaks: they had snouts, like those of their dinosaur ancestors.

To understand how one changed into another, a team has been tampering with the molecular processes that make up a beak in chickens…”

Click here for the rest.

Civilization is very, very ancient indeed. But did it start with humans, or someone much older?

Oldest stone tools raise questions about their creators
The 3.3-million-year-old implements predate the first members of the Homo genus.
by Ewen Callaway (Nature)

“The oldest stone tools on record may spell the end for the theory that complex toolmaking began with the genus Homo, to which humans belong. The 3.3-million-year-old artefacts, revealed at a conference in California last week, predate the first members of Homo, and suggest that more-ancient hominin ancestors had the intelligence and dexterity to craft sophisticated tools.

“This is a landmark discovery pertaining to one of the key evolutionary milestones,” says Zeresenay Alemseged, a palaeoanthropologist at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, who attended the talk at the annual meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society in San Francisco, on 14 April.

More than 80 years ago, anthropologist Louis Leakey found stone tools in Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. Decades later, he and his wife Mary and their team found bones from a species that the Leakeys named Homo habilis — ‘the handy man’. This led to the prevailing view that human stone-tool use began with Homo, a group that includes modern humans and their big-brained and tall forebears. The oldest of these Oldowan tools date to 2.6 million years ago — around the time of the earliest Homo fossils. Climate upheavals that transformed dense forest into open savannah might have catalysed ancient humans into developing the new technology so that they could hunt or scavenge grass-eating animals, the theory goes…”

For the rest, click here to go to Nature.