Contrary to popular belief, Charles Darwin did not have a eureka moment in the Galapagos Islands. Aside from the 25-year gap in between his visit to the archipelago and the publishing of On the Origin of Species, there’s evidence that he didn’t pay much attention during his time there. He’d forgotten to properly label the finches everyone thinks were integral to his theory; he didn’t know which specimens were taken from which islands, and had not even noticed the differences between them until after a zoologist pointed them out. Read full article here
Oddities
The Curious Case of the Ancient Brain
In 2008, archaeologists examining the University of York discovered something strange: the decapitated head of an Iron Age man and his very shrivelled but very much intact brain. How a centuries-old brain was preserved is still unknown, but research suggests that it could have been because of brain diseases like dementia. The Yorkshire man’s brain’s proteins were bunched up together, much like how dementia causes brain proteins to bunch up into plaques. This bunching up, or aggregation, could continue even after death, turning regions of the brain into hard masses. Read full article here
Merv
September 30, 2022
