The only thing growing faster than the global drone population is the population of people thinking “how can I knock these annoying things out of the sky?” DroneShield offers a way to do just that, and now in a much more portable package, with the DroneGun Tactical — that is, if you’re an authorized government agent, which I doubt. Read More
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DroneGun Tactical is a portable (but still illegal) drone scrambler
Enlarge / Entrance of Hernan Cortes into Mexico (credit: Kurz & Allison ) In the wake of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire in 1521, waves of epidemics slammed Mexico. By 1576, the population, which had been more than 20 million before the Spanish arrived, had crashed to two million. One brutal outbreak in 1545 was estimated to have killed between five and 15 million alone—or up to 80 percent of the population . But, like the other epidemics, the disease behind the 1545 outbreak was a complete mystery—until now. Genetic evidence pulled from the teeth of 10 victims suggests that the particularly nasty bacterium Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica serovar Paratyphi C contributed to the scourge of fever, bleeding, dysentery, and red rashes recorded at the time. The genetic data, published Monday in Nature Ecology and Evolution , offers the first molecular evidence to try to explain what’s “regarded as one of the most devastating epidemics in New World history,” the authors conclude. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Gut bacteria linked to cataclysmic epidemic that wiped out 16th-century Mexico
The eggs of some dinosaurs took much, much longer to hatch than the eggs of their avian relatives and descendants — and it could have contributed to their demise. A team of researchers from various institutions examined the embryonic tooth from a soccer-ball-sized egg. It was laid by a 30-foot-long duck-billed non-avian dinosaur called Hypacrosaurus that’s closely related to reptiles like crocodiles. By calculating the daily growth markers in the teeth, they discovered that the animal’s eggs take around six months to hatch. It’s also likely that the bigger the egg, the longer the incubation time. In comparison, ostrich chicks burst out of their shells after only 42 days, and smaller birds have even shorter incubation periods. A longer incubation time means non-avian dinosaurs were definitely at a disadvantage when an asteroid or a comet slammed into our planet 65 million years ago. Since it took much longer for them to reproduce and to replace the population that perished in the impact, their incubation period could be one of the factors that led to their extinction. Meanwhile, the birds that already existed in that era that didn’t need the same amount of time to hatch thrived and led to the birds we know today. That said, their long incubation period is only one of the factors why they died out. Lead researcher Gregory M. Erickson of Florida State University said: “These animals were profligate wasters of energy. They were big and warmblooded and even the smallest dinosaurs took over a year to mature. The dinosaurs found themselves holding some bad cards. They had a dead man’s hand.” Source: The New York Times
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Dinosaur eggs reveal one possible reason why they went extinct
The amount of people in the whole world is pretty wildly unfathomable. For that matter, even a subset like just the 300,000,000 or so that live in the United States can be hard to wrap your head around. This interactive map by Brandon M-Anderson helps by showing one dot for each of them . It’s pretty wild. More »
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This Crazy Map Has One Dot for Every Person in the United States