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- Tut's Meteorite | Birds, Incognito | Sharknado - The Convo Kit #37
Tut's Meteorite | Birds, Incognito | Sharknado - The Convo Kit #37
When I met King Tut, I told him we had a lot ankhamun.
Researching this week’s first story had me reminiscing on a trip to Egypt right before the pandemic. The gif below shows me struggling on a camel behind my world travel companion, who helps edit every Convo Kit.
Looking forward to another big trip soon! Where will you be vacationing?
-Steve
Join The Convo for weekly briefings on tech, space, and science news!
Tut’s Meteorite
King Tut was buried with a meteorite-iron dagger. Recent chemical analysis found patterns on the dagger consistent with Widmanstätten.
Widmanstätten = pattern of nickel-iron crystals on octahedrite meteorites
Tut was buried ~120 years prior to the Iron Age
The pre-Iron Age dagger was likely gifted to Tut’s grandfather, Amenhotep III
Researchers believe the dagger came from the Mitanni region, an area stretching from modern Iraq to Turkey. Iron Age smelting temperatures would have destroyed the space-fingerprints and left us thinking this was just another burial item. When I visited Tut’s tomb, I found low ceilings, sick paintings, and no aliens.
Birds, Incognito
Like humans, birds don’t want to be tracked. Researchers hoped to learn Australian magpies’ travel schedules and social tendencies. Instead, they watched them rapidly remove each other’s trackers.
Trackers were designed for wireless charging, data gathering, and removal
Device weighs less than 1 gram
Magpies were trained to visit a feeding station that processed the trackers
The birds worked together to remove all five trackers within three days. Clever mechanical skills aside, this is the first known example of magpies assisting each other without an immediate reward. If only I could get one to remove my tracking device aka cell phone.
Sharknado
Sharks can’t fly, yet, but their skin is ready just in case. Millions of years of evolution lead to slightly ribbed skin that reduces drag. AeroShark is bringing this shark “tech” to airplanes.
AeroShark created a thin film emulating shark-skin “riblets”
Each riblet is 50 micrometers high, or 2/1,000th of an inch
Covering 950 feet of a Boeing 777 reduces fuel consumption by 1.1%
Swiss and Lufthansa airlines are using AeroShark’s film on 22 planes to reduce CO2 emissions by over 29k tons. The cost savings of ~9k tons of jet fuel doesn’t hurt. This is a small step towards zero-emissions airliners, but it’ll remain useful regardless of engine technology.
Stick Genders
A stick named Charlie is male and female at the same time. Well, it’s a stick bug, technically a Diapherodes gigantea, the first known gynandromorph of it’s kind.
Gynandromorph = an individual exhibiting both male and female characteristics
Females have bright green bodies and males have brown wings, Charlie has both
Grows to 3.5-7 inches and lives up to a year in captivity
The insect was donated to a museum for research by its owner after molting into its unique body. Prior to their one-way trip to be researched, Charlie made an appearance in the owner’s son’s show-and-tell. That’s one way to make sure he sticks with science.
Artemis 1
NASA updated its moon return timeline. Artemis 1 is currently set to launch between May 7-21st aboard the SLS rocket.
SLS = Space Launch System, a rocket taller than the Statue of Liberty
This will be SLS’s first launch and send an unmanned Orion spacecraft into lunar orbit
SLS + Orion will roll out to the launchpad for testing on March 17th
If all goes according to plan Orion will carry six astronauts around the moon in 2024 with a lunar landing expected in 2025 aboard SpaceX’s Starship. The ultimate goal is to learn how to send humans to Mars…or coverup moon-cheese conspiracy theories.
1 More Thing
Thank you for reading!
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