M.J. Rose

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.

Don’t they remind you of little witch’s mandrakes?

Human-Shaped Species Of Mushroom Discovered In UK

by Stephen Luntz

“It’s amazing what is right under our noses without being noticed. A species of mushroom that can look remarkably like stick-figure humans has been discovered, and far from being in some sparsely inhabited jungle, they were found by a road in England

Jonathan Revett has a hobby for collecting mushrooms, which he tracks on his fenfungi website. In 2000, he noticed some specimens with an unusual shape by a roadside in Norfolk. While Revett recognized the specimens as being a type of Earthstar mushroom, he doubted they were Rayed Earthstars, the most similar species.

It took many years after his sending samples to be checked, but Revett’s hunch has been confirmed. This is a new species, named Geastrum britannicum, that was identified in Persoonia as part of a DNA analysis to establish the relationships between the variety of related Earthstar species.

The paper identifies seven new species, but G. britannicum’s distinctive shape makes it stand out (sorry, not sorry) from the common mushroom herd. In Field Mycology, the authors report that G. britannicum is “surprisingly common,” having been found at 15 locations across southern Britain…”

For the rest, click here.

A genius take on creative genius…

Leonardo’s Brain: What a Posthumous Brain Scan Six Centuries Later Reveals about the Source of Da Vinci’s Creativity
by Maria Popova

How the most creative human who ever lived was able to access a different state of consciousness.

“One September day in 2008, Leonard Shlain found himself having trouble buttoning his shirt with his right hand. He was admitted into the emergency room, diagnosed with Stage 4 brain cancer, and given nine months to live. Shlain — a surgeon by training and a self-described “synthesizer by nature” with an intense interest in the ennobling intersection of art and science, author of the now-legendary Art & Physics — had spent the previous seven years working on what he considered his magnum opus: a sort of postmortem brain scan of Leonardo da Vinci, performed six centuries after his death and fused with a detective story about his life, exploring what the unique neuroanatomy of the man commonly considered humanity’s greatest creative genius might reveal about the essence of creativity itself.

Shlain finished the book on May 3, 2009. He died a week later. His three children — Kimberly, Jordan, and filmmaker Tiffany Shlain — spent the next five years bringing their father’s final legacy to life. The result is Leonardo’s Brain: Understanding Da Vinci’s Creative Genius (public library | IndieBound) — an astonishing intellectual, and at times spiritual, journey into the center of human creativity via the particular brain of one undereducated, left-handed, nearly ambidextrous, vegetarian, pacifist, gay, singularly creative Renaissance male, who Shlain proposes was able to attain a different state of consciousness than “practically all other humans.”…

For the rest click here to go to the oh so wonderful Brain Pickings.