It’s almost like an Arts & Crafts wallpaper swatch.

The engines here are mostly rotary piston engines, with the last, Fig. 1333, being Mellor’s patent pump, which “has a rocking vane or partition, with packing device which accommodates itself to the revolving oval piston.” Some of these are different perspectives on the same mechanism; Fig 1316: “The small crescent-shaped piston revolves three times to one revolution of the three-armed piston,” or Fig. 1326, “a modification of Fig. 1323.” Fig. 1325 is simply labeled “Baker’s pressure blower.”

Each of these little shapes was thought out to solve a specific problem, and then shared in this massive compendium of cleverly conceived bits and pieces.

I found the book, with many more pages like this one, on archive.org.

The post Science Art: Figs. 1315-1333 (Various rotary piston engines), 1890. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: This isn’t based on any specific research. It’s a cover of a majestic song by the mighty Giant Squid.

ABSTRACT
Notorynchus cepedianus is the broadnose sevengill shark, a predator and scavenger of the Pacific. Giant Squid is, or was, a San Francisco heavy metal band who wrote lots of songs about marine biology, and archaeology, and horror, and awe. They sometimes had a cello and a flute, so sometimes they got called “symphonic metal.” They use odd time signatures and have songs with sections, so sometimes they got called “progressive metal” or “post metal.”

I do not have a metal voice.

This is as far as I can tell a song about suicide, or about despair turning a lovelorn man into a shark in San Francisco Bay. It may be that the shark has eaten a man who jumped from the Golden Gate bridge and absorbed some of his memories. The survival of the memories has made the suicide a failure. (There is a whole narrative for the album it came from which is a little bit impressionistic, but not inconsistent with my interpretation here.)

I don’t believe there is such a thing as an uncoverable song, unless it is a very bad song, and this is a very good song. It was nearly uncoverable by me. The first half of it has a very 1950s/60s dream rock vibe, and then there’s a cello solo, and then a sludge metal end with harmonizing female voices and a throat-shredding screamed chorus. Weird thing, the first bit (which is a mode I write in) was harder for me than the last bit (which is so beyond me that I knew I’d do something different). Part of it is that there are odd time signatures, which do my head in as a solo multitrack guy, because I have to make drums separate from everything. There are also odd *tempo changes* between sections, which is very hard to do on a DAW. And also… Giant Squid’s lyrics have a weird scansion – there are unusual emphases on specific syllables. They make it work with good musicianship, but man, that’s a challenge for me.

I spent more than a month tweedling out the various riffs and underlining syllables in the lyrics. I knew it’d be funny to swap the cello (which I can’t play but often fake with a SoundFont sample) with a banjo (which I do play, and which I’d need to play to make this arrangement work).

(I am not as good a banjo player as the Giant Squid’s cellist is a cellist.)

The thing that made this song fall into place — at least the first section — was figuring out a rhythm guitar part (which doesn’t exist in the original), which somehow converted that song into an almost upbeat indie pop song. I had no idea that would happen, and it delighted me. The melancholy of the choruses was suddenly very obvious — the original is more haunting and creepy than actually sad, if that distinction makes sense. I added a recorder, a SoundFont of a woodwind instrument, to sort of stand in for a foghorn or a beacon, as well as to fill in for where the original has a flute doing some jazzy arpeggios in that one part.

The last section… well, I recorded the riff with the banjo first, then considered turning it into a sort of jamboree, but to do that justice would have taken six *more* weeks of learning, and this is a penitential cover… I had to just get it out. So I recorded two basses (one as a lead guitar, more or less), whomped the arrangement as metal as possible, and then just sang the thing like a song, and tried layering voices in the shoegaze way instead of screaming in the death metal way. At the last minute, I slowed the end section down electronically (just stretched a mixed-down track) to more of a sludgy pace and added some lady-voice oohs. and tried to clear up my own vocals. There’s some sonar sounds from an Acid CD-ROM from the 1990s in the chorus. It’s metal, I guess, in my way.

There’s so much more I could do here, but no, it’s time. The first section is kind of amazing as a stand-alone song… I think if I was still gigging, I’d add it to my setlist.

LYRICS:

[IN 8] D-C-BbBb, Eb-A-GG
Down here I wait / with all my benthic friends
Underneath the gate / listening to lives end //
Those with seven gills / will investigate
each thunderous crash / and corresponding shape
In great detail, / I described you to each of them
In case the bridge / is how you choose to end //

[IN 9/8] A-A-Bb-Eb-G
I’d like to have some last words with you before
you end up on the Farallones’ rocky shores
Where the real beasts await to have their way
With all the failures washed out from the Bay //

[IN 8]D-C-BbBb, Eb-A-GG
A hundred years have passed / since just last autumn
Please come to the Bay, / see who now lives on the bottom //

[IN 10/8] A-A-Bb-Eb-G
I’d like to have some last words with you before
I forget how to walk upon these muddy shores
and cease entirely to breathe like a man
Seeing things with only the tips of my hands

[SOLO IN 7, then 3 3s, then 7]
[RIFF OUTRO][IN 8] (Eb-D-CC, C-Bb-GG)
My heart is crushed by the jaws of regret
Upon knowing where you now make your bed
The depths at which I’m chained to you, I pray
those shackles eventually rust through

(G – F – G# ) [IN 6]x8
Held under / by chiton like lies
Amongst the corpses
I’ll never surface
Debris bouncing
off my hide
Covered in detritus
I’ve lost purpose

[IN 8]
What comfort lies in years of hating me?
Haven’t you in some way found a rare peace?
Please re-alize / your very soul’s at stake
you’re still a man, and I was just / a tool of fate

(G – F – G# )[IN 6]x8
Your bite marks
riddled my soul
It got damn cold
with all those holes
So I left it on shore
for all the gulls (Take it)
There wasn’t much left (Take it)
But it’s all yours (Take it)

The post SONG: Sevengill (Notorynchus Cepedianus) (a penitential Giant Squid cover) first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

The findings are based on a study of five populations conducted by the Michigan and Wisconsin Departments of Natural Resources, Michigan State University and Michigan Technological University. Researchers published their results in the Journal of Fish Biology in April.

The study’s lead author, Ed Baker, said they found male lake sturgeon could live as long as 279 years and their female counterparts may live even longer, to 427 years old.

Baker always thought lake sturgeon lived longer than previous reports, but even he was surprised by the findings.

“I had no expectation that we would get ages in the 2- to 3- to 400-year range for sturgeon from a couple of the populations,” Baker said. “It’s quite evident to us at this point that lake sturgeon live very long lives. Some of them have been swimming around in the Great Lakes since before the U.S. was a country.”

…

For this study, researchers used data on lake sturgeon that had been caught, measured, tagged and recaptured over up to 44 years in the case of Lake Winnebago. They used that data to determine annual growth rates and estimate how long they live.

They worked backward to calculate longevity for males that were 160 centimeters, or about 63 inches, in length and females that were 180 centimeters, or about 71 inches, long. Males typically reach breeding age at 15 years old and females reach maturity at about 24 years of age.

The findings will guide future management of lake sturgeon. The Center for Biological Diversity previously estimated more than 15 million lake sturgeon once thrived in the Great Lakes, but overharvest and other factors reduced its population to less than 1 percent of its historical range.

—

You can read more of the research here, in the Journal of Fish Biology.

The post Sturgeons alive today from before Columbus sailed. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

This skeleton visualization was made by the Wikimedia Commons user Llez, who’s got quite a lot of great science images collected there.

The post Science Art: Mirounga leonina 01, by H. Zell first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

Known to archaeologists as Skeleton 150, the man was killed more than 700 years ago by a massive blow that shattered his skeleton in dozens of places before pinning him to the ground.

In a presentation at the biannual European meeting of the Paleopathology Association in Berlin last week, University of Bradford bioarchaeologist Jo Buckberry called the skeleton the first confirmed evidence of trebuchet trauma in the archaeological record. “The breaks indicate a very large area of impact and devastation,” she says. “It’s likely the individual was killed by a siege engine.”

…

Skeleton 150 came to light in 1997, when excavations underneath Stirling Castle’s chapel uncovered the graves of nine skeletons dated to the early 1300s. Five, including Skeleton 150, dated to the 1300s. Their bones bore injuries and cut marks indicative of violent lives—and violent deaths.

…

Skeleton 150 stood out. Buckberry counted more than 160 separate fractures on the 165-centimeter-tall remains, including a skull smashed in 61 places, a deep, zigzag break to a shoulder, and nearly 60 strange, zigzagging breaks to the ribs. “It’s very clear the energy is going through the chest,” says Uppsala University biological anthropologist Patrick Randolph-Quinney, who worked with Buckberry on the skeletal analysis. “The individual is pinned to the ground quite quickly afterwards.”

The extensive injuries to the rest of the body—particularly the strange breaks on the rib cage and a shattered right leg—ruled out the most obvious possibility, a head-first fall from the castle’s walls. The shape and texture of the breaks eliminated trampling by horses and damage to the skeleton after burial.

To solve the mystery, Buckberry scoured the forensic and medical literature and searched through anatomical collections for equivalent injuries. “It looks like he was hit from behind by something traveling at a great velocity. The most similar cases I was finding were car crashes and people hit by trains,” Buckberry says. “But how do you get from there to a guy in medieval Scotland? What is large and moving very, very quickly in 1304 [C.E.]?”

Buckberry found the likeliest answer in history books. During Edward I’s 1304 siege of the castle, English forces deployed the recently invented trebuchet, a weapon first documented in the 12th century. A cousin to the catapult, trebuchets were capable of hurling boulders weighing more than 100 kilograms hundreds of meters. One at Stirling, dubbed “War Wolf,” “was the biggest trebuchet ever built at that point,” Buckberry says. Eyewitness accounts confirm the giant siege engine was used during the 1304 battle, tearing through two stone walls “as an arrow would fly through a piece of cloth.”

Skull photos at the link.

The post Broken medieval skeleton first confirmed death by trebuchet first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

Ampex tape is maybe more of a key element of our culture than many folks realize; this was the stuff that practically every professional studio recording would have been made on from the 1940s up to the 1990s. Sound for films, too. And video tapes of television performances like, for instance, the Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen Debate. And Ampex were military contractors, so their tape recorded defense flight tests and the first images of Earth from the Moon. Just like Elvis Presley’s first song, “That’s All Right,” recorded on an Ampex reel-to-reel recorder.

The company has won an Oscar, a Grammy, and 12 Emmys for technical achievements like instant replay and slow-motion color recording. So a lot of the history of the 20th century was literally recorded on this stuff.

The post Science Art: What can make any tape recorder sound a little more like an Ampex?, 1963. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

Named Spea labreae, the extinct amphibian was identified in the long-studied collections of the La Brea Tar Pits, where its small bones had remained largely overlooked since they were excavated in the 1950s. The discovery adds a rare amphibian to the North American Pleistocene fossil record and offers scientists a new window into the environmental conditions that shaped Los Angeles at the end of the last Ice Age.

The species is described in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology by Dr. Alberto Cruz, a paleoecologist and paleogeographer who reviewed the Tar Pits’ understudied reptiles and amphibians while working as a postdoctoral fellow at La Brea Tar Pits. Cruz did not initially suspect that he was looking at an unknown animal. The unusual features of one specimen appeared so distinctive that he first considered whether the toad had suffered an injury or disease during its lifetime. Only after comparing the fossil material repeatedly with modern spadefoot toads did he conclude that the differences represented a previously unrecognized species.

“I’m really more of a paleoecologist, paleogeographer, not a taxonomist,” Cruz said, explaining that the discovery emerged unexpectedly during a broader review of the collection. The fossil material was originally collected decades ago, but detailed anatomical comparisons revealed characteristics that had escaped earlier investigations.

…

The extinction of S. labreae therefore suggests that the habitats surrounding Rancho La Brea were reorganized as the Pleistocene ended and Southern California shifted toward the ecological conditions seen today.

The study also reports the first fossil record of the Mexican burrowing toad, Rhinophrynus, from the southwestern United States. Living members of this lineage are absent from modern Los Angeles, and their nearest populations occur nearly 2,500 kilometers away in southern Mexico. Finding evidence of the group in Ice Age Los Angeles indicates that its historical range once extended dramatically farther north. Together, the northward ancient presence of Rhinophrynus and the disappearance of S. labreae describe a complex ecological transition rather than a simple story of warming or cooling.

The post Prehistoric toad discovered in Los Angeles first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

Summary
The human gut is shaped by environmental factors, producing distinct microbial communities. Indigenous individuals practicing traditional lifestyles often harbor more diverse microbiota, with taxa often absent in industrialized people. However, little engagement has occurred with American Indian communities in North America who experienced forced relocation and dietary programs during colonization. Here, shotgun metagenomics profiled the gut microbiome of people from a Northern Plains tribe (NPT) reservation in comparison to 12 global populations engaged in traditional, agrarian, or industrialized lifestyles. Analysis of the 532 samples revealed that the NPT microbiota exhibited greater bacterial and archaeal diversity than industrialized populations but reduced diversity compared to global traditional and agrarian populations. Relative to the general United States population, NPT microbiomes encoded more virulence factor and microbial defense genes and fewer CAZyme-encoding genes. These findings suggest that the NPT gut microbiome is in transition between lifestyles associated with global Indigenous and industrialized populations.

…

Here, we profiled the gut microbiome of individuals from a Northern Plains tribe (NPT) reservation community. Comparison to 12 different global populations found that NPT individuals had a distinct microbial signature from other traditional, agrarian, and industrialized populations. NPT individuals harbored more microbial taxa than industrialized populations, with a greater representation of more rare phyla and species, but less diverse and fewer taxa than traditional and agrarian populations. Many classical “pathobionts” were more prevalent among NPT microbiota when compared to the United States (US) general population, despite individuals being healthy adults. Yet, the US general population microbiome encoded higher frequencies of CAZymes, which are typically associated with Indigenous populations, than in NPT microbiomes. This contributes to a unique NPT microbiome relative to non-Indigenous people in the US, which may limit generalizations of “healthy” and “diseased” microbiomes determined for majority of populations to other groups in the same geographic region and provides additional insight into microbial resilience in the gut despite the influence of industrialization.

…

This work was built on a decades-long relationship between the authors and the participating community. Importantly, the corresponding author was invited to initiate this work at the request of entities within the community and performed all sample collection, sample processing, and data analysis in partnership with individuals on site, including training individuals from our partner community in approaches used here.

…

Discussion
The gut microbiota of humans is influenced by multiple factors of host physiology, lifestyle, and the environment.52,53,54,55 People in the NPT are uniquely situated through their continued practice of traditional lifeways combined with the adoption of certain aspects of large-scale agrarian and industrialized life that distinguishes them from the broader US population and over half of the global population that reside primarily in urban settings and engage exclusively in industrialized lifestyles. Taxonomic profiling revealed bacterial and archaeal compositions of NPT people reside between populations with industrialized and non-industrialized lifestyles. In general, the NPT population had less diverse gut microbiota than traditional and agrarian populations. Yet, the NPT microbiota were composed of more taxa and greater microbial diversity than the surrounding US general population and other industrialized populations for some taxonomical comparisons. Greater microbial diversity compared to the US general population did not necessarily result in a detectable level of more gene diversity. Microbes found in the US general population encoded higher numbers of CAZymes relative to NPT individuals but had a reduced abundance of defense mechanisms for viral and microbial competitors. Thus, the gut microbiota identified in NPT people are distinct from that in the other global populations analyzed here and may result from a combination of environmental and lifestyle factors that are common to reservation communities in North America.

…

It is unclear what factors are leading to this mosaic state, but we speculate that patterns of colonization that affect dietary patterns, environmental exposures, and place-based cultural practices likely play a role.19,35,58 For example, harvesting traditional foods like prairie turnips and fish is still practiced by many individuals, but agricultural and processed foods sold in gas stations, grocery stores, and through federal food programs dominate the diets of many individuals.59
Compared to industrialized populations, we observed a higher prevalence of classical pathogens and pathobionts among the gut microbiota of NPT individuals. It is important to note that definitions of pathogenic potential for many microbes are centered within industrialized contexts that often fail to acknowledge that the absence of these species may negatively impact health.

…

In conclusion, the NPT have a distinct microbial signature in the gut compared to global traditional, agrarian, and industrialized populations that suggests a transitional state between a non-industrialized and industrialized state. Associations between environmental exposures common to reservation communities in the Northern Plains and specific gene signatures suggest that microbiota of Indigenous people may be substantially shaped by their surroundings that could also promote greater microbial diversity. Lastly, we would like to highlight the importance of working alongside of community members in production of biological datasets to address questions of interest and importance in the partner community. Strong ethical research relationships improve the contextualized understanding of results through discussion and reinforce data sovereignty.

The post Plains tribe’s gut genes are half indigenous, half industrialized. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

In more detail, from the Wikimedia Commons page where I found it:

Numerous emission nebulae in the constellation Cygnus seen by the Northern Sky Narrowband Survey. In this false color image, doubly ionized oxygen ([OIII] at 500.7 nm) is mapped to red, ionized hydrogen (Hα at 656.3 nm) is mapped to green and singly ionized sulfur ([SII] at 671.7 nm and 673.0 nm) is mapped to blue. The brightest stars are added to visualize the regions contaminated by strong continuum light. (Aside from that, the image does not contain continuum light.)
The field of view is 40° × 28°. Equatorial center coordinates are RA=20h40m and DEC=40°. North is up.

The yellow regions are HII regions ionized by young stars recently formed within giant molecular clouds. Most of the bluish and reddish filaments spreading across the image are supernova remnants.

User Tk833 (that is, the Northern Sky Narrowband Survey) can be proud of making this Featured Picture, which will be highlighted as the site’s Picture of the Day for 31 July 2027, when and if we get there.

I mean, if anything, this picture does show that some stars just blow up….

The post Science Art: Cygnus region in emission lines, 2025 first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

Between around 600 BCE and 850 CE, a civilization known as the Aquiry transformed swaths of southwestern Amazonia, carving enigmatic geometric earthworks into the landscape.

Now, a new LIDAR survey suggests that civilization was even larger than archaeologists imagined, hinting at a people that built as many as 30,000 earthworks and had a peak population of up to 3 million people around 200 CE.

For archaeo-anthropologist Martti Pärssinen of the University of Helsinki, the realization was transformative.

“I first experienced such a moment in 2002, when I flew with Alceu Ranzi and Sanna Saunaluoma over the monumental geometric earthworks and observed ancient roads connecting the sites in the state of Acre, Brazil, a region that had long been regarded as pristine rainforest,” Pärssinen told ScienceAlert.

“It completely transformed my understanding and made me realize how mistaken earlier assumptions had been.

“More recently, I felt something similar when I came to understand that there may actually be up to ten times more of these earthworks in the region than I had previously imagined.”

…

The researchers surveyed 4,497 square kilometers (1,736 square miles) of rainforest by flying a series of long, roughly 450-kilometer (280-mile) transects over the region.

Their entire dataset yielded 432 earthworks – 396 of which were previously unknown.

“What surprised us most was the extraordinarily large number of geoglyphs and other earthworks found within an area representing less than 3 percent of Greater Amazonia,” Pärssinen said.

“The scale of the archaeological record suggests that many other regions across Amazonia may have been far more densely populated and intensively modified than previously assumed.”

By extrapolating their results, combined with existing surveys, the researchers estimated that, at its peak, the Aquiry civilization may have covered an area as large as 183,000 square kilometers.

…

It would have been a dramatically different place than the wilderness we see today – a forest threaded with clearings where people lived, farmed, celebrated, and gathered.

“At the center of many of these clearings would stand large geometric earthworks connected by broad and narrow roads,” Pärssinen told ScienceAlert when asked what the landscape might have looked like around 200 CE.

The post The Amazon jungle swallowed ancient earthworks and roads. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.