I love this one. The picture of the little white flower on the plant looks so much like something you’d see growing around here; they did say it’s a very adaptable species.
Somewhere still in my brain is the formula for figuring out how old something is by the half life of the amount of carbon still left in it.
Thirty thousand years in carbon-dated rock sediment ago, a squirrel dug down and tucked away seeds and fruit in its burrow in Siberia. I love that they described the little den as the size of a soccer ball; when I was a kid, I had one of those hamster balls and the pet to match bumping into the furniture while I kept it away from the stairs.
I can just picture my own squirrels strutting around proudly, tails high, to say they always knew their work was important. See, there’s a reason they steal every apple from my two trees! Just helping future researchers do their work.
But I rather wondered if the original article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences actually mentioned soccer balls and put its measurements in the colloquial like that. The Washington Post doesn’t say the scientists sprouted a seed; it says they produced the fertile plant from the fruit, in ways the reporter didn’t try to describe.
I can just picture the reporter thumbing through their copy trying to figure out the jargon and how on earth to talk about it.
I’ve done likewise. The scientific articles presented in that top-rated journal are well beyond my expertise. They offer the culmination of many years’ studying and learning and hard work. Not to mention the joy of having discovered something new.
Which I know, because they also published our Sam.