Interestica | Science

Iberian harvester ants can lay eggs that hatch into another species

Science

Scientists recently discovered that Iberian harvester ant queens (Messor ibericus) mate with males of another species, the builder harvester ant (Messor structor). When they do, the M. ibericus queens store the M. structor male’s sperm, then use it to fertilize some of the eggs they lay. Researchers think the M. ibericus queens remove their own genetic material from the eggs’ nuclei, so that when those eggs hatch, they effectively turn out to be M. structor male clones.

@ smithsonianmag.com

first posted: 2025-09-19

last updated: 2025-09-19

Lewis and Clark marked their trail with laxatives

The Corps of Discovery left on its journey with a trove of 600 giant pills that the men called “thunder-clappers,” which the soldiers and travelers used to jump-start things when they got bound up. And everyone used them pretty regularly.

And, strange as it seems, that fact is why we know several of their campsites along the way. The main active ingredient in “thunder-clappers” was a mercury salt, which is a pretty stable compound. Archaeologists simply have to search for dimples in the ground — which is what old latrine pits often end up looking like, hundreds of years later, after Nature has partly filled them in — and take samples of the dirt in them.

@ offbeatoregon.com

first posted: 2025-09-01

last updated: 2025-09-01

Lost Futures: A 19th-Century Vision of the Year 2000

What did the year 2000 look like in 1900? Originally commissioned by Armand Gervais, a French toy manufacturer in Lyon, for the 1900 World exhibition in Paris, the first fifty of these paper cards were produced by Jean-Marc Côté, designed to be enclosed in cigarette boxes and, later, sent as postcards. All in all, at least seventy-eight cards were made by Côté and other artists, although the exact number is not known, and some may still remain undiscovered. Each tries to imagine what it would be like to live in the then-distant year of 2000.

@ publicdomainreview.org

first posted: 2024-03-03

last updated: 2024-03-03

Collision May Have Formed the Moon in Mere Hours

Billions of years ago, a version of our Earth that looks very different than the one we live on today was hit by an object about the size of Mars, called Theia – and out of that collision the Moon was formed. How exactly that formation occurred is a scientific puzzle researchers have studied for decades, without a conclusive answer.

Most theories claim the Moon formed out of the debris of this collision, coalescing in orbit over months or years. A new simulation puts forth a different theory – the Moon may have formed immediately, in a matter of hours, when material from the Earth and Theia was launched directly into orbit after the impact.

@ youtube.com

first posted: 2024-01-10

last updated: 2024-01-10

The Land Under Antarctica

A team of glaciologists from the University of California Irvine (UCI) made public the most accurate portrayal of the land underneath Antarctica’s ice sheet yet.

@ ubique.americangeo.org

first posted: 2023-01-13

last updated: 2023-01-13

The Early History of Human Excreta

As humans kept wandering, they fertilized places along the way—especially those “rest stops” where their clans chose to stay for a while. Some of these early humans may have even noticed that plants tended to grow bigger, better, and tastier in such rest stops. So, tribes made a point of coming back to those spots the next season, or even several years in a row—and then, one year some decided to just settle at those convenient spots. These early settlers brought us to the advent of farming.

@ daily.jstor.org

first posted: 2023-01-11

last updated: 2023-01-11

Airport Runway Names Shift with Magnetic Field

For example, the Fairbanks International Airport in Alaska renamed runway 1L-19R to 2L-20R in 2009 when magnetic north shifted enough to mandate a change. And the airport operators know—from NCEI’s World Magnetic Model (WMM) and other sources—that they’ll likely need to update the name again in 2033…

@ ncei.noaa.gov

via https://news.ycombinator.com/

first posted: 2022-12-30

last updated: 2022-12-30

Lunar Eclipses – 2021-2030

Eclipses recur over the Saros cycle, a period of approximately 18 years 11 days.

The saros is a period of exactly 223 synodic months, approximately 6585.3211 days, or 18 years, 10, 11, or 12 days (depending on the number of leap years), and 8 hours, that can be used to predict eclipses of the Sun and Moon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saros_(astronomy)