In August 2020, a Steller’s sea-eagle was spotted inland in Alaska, far from its home range of East Asia. In March 2021, another Steller’s sea-eagle was spotted all the way down in Texas — the furthest any of its kind had been found away from home. Bird watchers begun speculating if these birds were one and the same. It was all but confirmed when another sighting was reported in eastern Canada months later; high-quality pictures show that the eagle’s wing markings matched that of the bird spotted in Alaska. 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
