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Carolina Naturally
Carolina Naturally
Carolina Naturally is read in 210 countries around the world daily.
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Saturday, February 25, 2017
The Daily Drift
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Today in History
| 1570 | Pope Pius V issues the bull Regnans in Excelsis which excommunicates Queen Elizabeth of England. | |
| 1601 | Robert Devereux, the second Earl of Essex and former favorite of Elizabeth I, is beheaded in the Tower of London for high treason. | |
| 1642 | Dutch settlers slaughter lower Hudson Valley Indians in New Netherland, North America, who sought refuge from Mohawk attackers. | |
| 1779 | The British surrender the Illinois country to George Rogers Clark at Vincennes. | |
| 1781 | American General Nathaniel Greene crosses the Dan River on his way to attack Cornwallis. | |
| 1791 | President George Washington signs a bill creating the Bank of the United States. | |
| 1804 | Thomas Jefferson is nominated for president at the Democratic-Republican caucus. | |
| 1815 | Napoleon leaves his exile on the island of Elba, returning to France. | |
| 1831 | The Polish army halts the Russian advance into their country at the Battle of Grochow. | |
| 1836 | Samuel Colt patents the first revolving cylinder multi-shot firearm. | |
| 1862 | Confederate troops abandon Nashville, Tennessee, in the face of Grant‘s advance. The ironclad Monitor is commissioned at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. | |
| 1865 | General Joseph E. Johnston replaces John Bell Hood as Commander of the Confederate Army of Tennessee. | |
| 1904 | J.M. Synge’s play Riders to the Sea opens in Dublin. | |
| 1910 | The 13th Dalai Lama flees from the Chinese and takes refuge in India. | |
| 1919 | Oregon introduces the first state tax on gasoline at one cent per gallon, to be used for road construction. | |
| 1913 | The 16th Amendment to the constitution is adopted, setting the legal basis for the income tax. | |
| 1926 | Poland demands a permanent seat on the League of Nations council. | |
| 1928 | Bell Labs introduces a new device to end the fluttering of the television image. | |
| 1943 | U.S. troops retake the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia, where they had been defeated five days before. | |
| 1944 | U.S. forces destroy 135 Japanese planes in Marianas and Guam. | |
| 1952 | French colonial forces evacuate Hoa Binh in Indochina. | |
| 1956 | Stalin is secretly disavowed by Khrushchev at a party congress for promoting the “cult of the individual.” | |
| 1976 | The U.S. Supreme Court rules that states may ban the hiring of illegal aliens. |
Woman Shows Off Her '57 Chevy, The First And Only Car She Has Ever Bought
Case in point- this 2011 video from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel featuring Grace Braeger showing off her cherry 1957 Chevrolet, which is the first and only car Grace has ever bought.
Grace's beautiful 57 Chevy gives new meaning to the term "granny car"!
In 1914, Feminists Fought For the Right to Forget Childbirth
“I was so happy,” one women declared. “The night of my confinement will always be a night dropped out of my life,” says another. The association celebrated when a “tenement house mother” gave a twilight sleep speech on the corner of her street.The campaign was so successful that twilight sleep became the thing to do, and for decades, women weren't given the choice to remain alert during childbirth. With the rise of better painkillers and exposes about twilight sleep, the practice finally faded out in the 1960s. Read about the controversial technique and the campaign to bring it the the U.S. at Atlas Obscura.
The twilight sleep movement was immediately controversial, though. While feminist women pushed for access to the technique, doctors fought back. They “refused to be ‘stampeded by these misguided ladies,’” historian Judith Walzer Leavitt wrote, in her account of the movement. Doctors wrote in the popular and academic press about the dangers of twilight sleep and argued that one popular article shouldn’t guide medical practice. But the practice also had advocates in the medical community, and soon American doctors were also traveling to Freiburg to train in twilight sleep techniques.
ICE Invades Sanctuary Cities
As the DHS and ICE serve as a 2017 Gestapo, some are rising up and fighting back.
700,000-Year-Old Horse Found in Yukon Permafrost Yields Oldest DNA Ever Decoded
The horse was discovered in 2003 in the ancient permafrost of Canada’s west-central Yukon Territory, not far from the Alaskan border.
And although the animal was dated to between 560,000 and 780,000 years old, an international team of researchers was able to use a new combination of techniques to decipher its genetic code.
(Read about another recent find: “Wyoming Cave Yields a Trove of Ice Age Fossils — and Ancient Animal DNA“)
Among the team’s findings is that the genus Equus — which includes all horses, donkeys, and zebras — dates back more than 4 million years, twice as long ago as scientists had previously believed.
Previous to this, the oldest genome ever sequenced was of a 120,000-year-old polar bear — no small feat considering that the half-life of a DNA molecule is estimated to be about 521 years.
By this reckoning, even under the best conditions, DNA could remain intact for no more than 6.8 million years.
(See this recent amazing find: “First Columbian Mammoth With Hair Discovered on California Farm“)
But Orlando’s team was able to make the most of what they had for a number of reasons, he said.
The fact that the remains were frozen helped slow the rate of decay. But they also “targeted specific DNA preservation niches,” he said, like the protein called collagen found in the animal’s bones, which is more DNA-rich than other tissues.
“But also we pioneered the usage of what is called true Single Molecular Sequencing that basically reads through molecules as they stand, without further manipulation,” Orlando added.
By tracking a full, single DNA molecule, the team was able to avoid having to “amplify” fragments, which can often introduce errors.
To get a better sense of what this new, ancient genome held, Orlando’s team compared it against that of a 43,000-year-old horse, plus modern domestic horse breeds, and finally the Przewalski’s horse, an equid that makes its home on the Asian steppes and holds the title as the last surviving population of wild horses.
These full-genome comparisons allowed the scientists to construct “a molecular clock” that can reveal benchmarks in the horse’s evolutionary history, Orlando said.
And first among its revelations is that the shared ancestor of all horses, donkeys, and zebras lived more than 4 million years ago.
“So basically we know that members of the genus Equus are at least twice as old as previously believed,” he said.
The comparisons also shed light on genetic variations, and therefore population size, over time, Orlando noted, revealing “bursts of expansion” during cooler periods as grasslands grew, and contractions in size during times of warming.
(Learn more about how global warming affected the size of prehistoric mammals: “Prehistoric Global Warming Caused Dwarfism in American Mammals, Fossils Show“)
Two pieces of the 700,000 year-old horse metapodial bone, just before being extracted for ancient DNA. (Explore the history of humans and horses: “Ice Age Cave Dwellers in Oregon Lived Among Extinct ‘Stout-Legged’ Horses, Fossils Show“)
“Basically genomes of that age will enable us to test the validity of the many paleontological species in our family tree,” he said, “and to determine how they relate to each other, and whether they exchanged genes or not.”
“It’s not the future,” he said of whether this technology is in reach.
“It’s basically already there.”
The Water Man
Between road trips, Mwalua runs a conservation project called Tsavo Volunteers. The 41-year-old also visits local schools to talk to children about the wildlife that is their legacy.A few Americans are raising money to help Mwalua pay for gas and truck costs as he delivers water to wildlife. See how his road trips help the animals at The Dodo.
"I was born around here and grew up with wildlife and got a lot of passion about wildlife," he says. "I decided to bring awareness to this so when they grow up they can protect their wildlife."
Last year, Mwalua started renting a truck and driving water to several locations in Tsavo West. His mission would extend to several trucks, keeping him on the road for hours every day as he drives dozens of hard miles between stops.
Siberian Tigers Take Down Drone
They soon found out it didn't taste good, and it wasn't quite dead, either. The staff was able to recover the drone and the footage.
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