The big macguffin on our Moon is hydrogen. There isn't much. It was thought that there's some ice in Shackleton. Hence, attempts to land over the 80° parallel South; so far India's got the prize at 69°. China is aiming to Shackleton itself in 2026.
UPDATE 1/31: Maybe China will build a base. Good luck with that! Supply from Earth is no picnic, to the poles. The deltaV would be better off hitting up an asteroid.
Something I missed this weekend was this thing about the New World's branches of syphiloid bacteria, the Treponematoses. I didn't know they had any. Apparently they had bejel.
This is not a V.D.; it has little relation to Old-World tropical yaws. Bejel is a skin condition of the dry parts of Africa and Spain.
Schünemann says: As we have not found any sexually transmitted syphilis in South America, the theory that Columbus brought syphilis to Europe seems to appear more improbable.
Personally I dunno. I've been aware since Larry Gonick's History funnybooks that bacteria trade genetics; certainly they could do that in the same family.
I first must ask about bejel in Brasil before Year Zero Common Era. I wonder if sailors from northwest Africa brought the bejel over. Those randy Phoenicians!
As to the virulent venerea - that could be latest-fifteenth-century recombination. Which I've pinned on the Portuguese.
BAAACKDATE 1/30 this time my fault.
Around what's now Poland, after the Tollense war, a people lived we're calling the Lusatians [not Lusitanians]. Their neighbours were the Hallstatt culture - commonly accepted as protoGauls. The Hallstatt were bronzesmiths from time-immemorial; well, okay, it's all immemorial to us (the Gauls being replaced several times over there since then, then wiped out).
Anyway back in 1200 BC not all Lusatians cared for metals. I assume most used bronze and later, iron for woodwork. Southern Lusatians thought highly of metallurgy, and assuredly passed on that "Smith And Devil" tale. But the Chełmno at the lake Papowo Biskupie didn't feel like this stuff was natural; it was not Their Culture. The Chełmno accordingly did not bury their dead with metals. Precious things for them were probably ambers, in that region, traded with the Baltic coast.
Saraceni, again, comes through [1/29]: the Chełmno lake did take metal sacrifice. It's just that these Lusatians did it later than others.
Is this where the Balts and Slavs split from each other? Balts maybe more conservative?
BACKDATE 1/30 again. Sigh.
Coming off of one of my worse weekends, let's talk China's worst export: millet. During the Bronze Age, Saraceni is [1/29] informing us broomcorn millet was used in pastes and puddings in what we're calling "China". There wasn't any such entity as "China" over there at the time, although Erlitou looks like a candidate for what preceded the Shang state.
Along the Silk Road, from Samarkand to the Indus, they were feeding millet to cows. I've got to assume similar for Tibet; I just know what the five preLhasa Tibetan peoples weren't eating namely wheat. The Silk Road started eating millets 2700-1500 BC.
This is borne out in the "Xinjiang" Taklamakan fringe 1700 BC to AD 700, eminently Silk Road at that time. The locals were eating millet in breads. They were not eating the sticky porridges. The Taklamakan couldn't! Shang broomcorn doesn't share genetics with points west.
So, I take it, older broomcorns got west before Erlitou then the Shang had bred something they'd eat. Everyone was feeding that stuff to their flocks, like so much alfalfa. It was later that the east got a version for humans. By then, the west had figured out the bread process - I suspect, at first for millet beers. Then the west moved to breads. No more millet imports were needed, so the great central-Asian cities didn't bother.
MASSIVE BACKDATE 1/30
John Ortiz has sniffed out methane. After, I am sure, quite a bit of gags (and jokes) from his team; they'd figured it came from the Curiosity rover.
This CH4 constitutes atmospheric pressure fluctuations that pull gases up from underground
. (Yeah, that's what I'll start having to call it too.) It fluctuates daily and seasonally, in this near-airless world's harsh temperature fluctuations. Boyle's Law, and such.
Here's a little sword from the Danes' Mark. Well, it's just a knife; hirila is what the runes say on it.
In Late Antiquity, the -ila suffix is well-known in Germannic: "Attila", "Totila". I think the suffix tended not to be accented; "Attila" was spelt that way to force Romans to accent the "Att-". See also "Etzel" in Germannic legend.
Thus, hir is a real sword and this affectionate nickname should be pointed "hírila". Although I don't know if the "i" be long (like Tot) or short (Att).
Claim is that this language is already Old Norse. If so: not the ancestor to Gothic or Dutch.
Last week SciDaily flooded its zone with findings from our ancient and dry moon: early magmas, and more-earlier magmas. Also Japan's JAXA landed a lander, but (I hear) upsidedown so they're shutting it down to save power before daylight can hit it.
Inb4 jokes about Australia's upcoming effort.
The magma formed those basalts which we see in 3.5 Gya; from iron and magnesium. (Granites feature on the side we don't see.) 3.5 Gya's when the iron, which is more common on Earth, got swapped with the magnesium. Also a lot of those basalts are high in titanium now.
Before 4 Gya that crust had more water. One Tara Hayden has found apatite (another joke I could hardly miss); on a natural lunar sample, brought to us by meteorite. Formerly we hadn't seen apatite in ancient "anorthosite" crustal rocks; this meteorite was anorthosite. These weren't from the basalts which be more-recent; they're from the liquid-moon phase.
Meanwhile we are also pondering dusty rocks. These might tell us something about the Moon's magnetism. You'll recall magnetic powder from this blog as of use, in partic'lar, for telling the (relative) age of some rubble.
JAXA were going for a magmatic part of the moon too. Let's hope it works! NASA, this side of the world, are still planning to visit features by rover.
