SciTech For Writers - Newsletter #1

This is an experiment.  I'm going to try bringing together science and technology information that I think might be of interest to writers, and especially science fiction writers into brief newsletters to be published on Gather every month or so.  If you like this and want more, let me know in the comments.  If you think it's a waste of time, feel free to let me know that too. 

Sanctuary: Something I hadn’t seen before: A sort-of Science Fiction/paranormal show called Sanctuary.  The twist is that they claim TV quality but are releasing the show directly to the web.  Apparently the cash flow is supposed to come from DVD sales.  I don't know if that will work but they have two episodes out so far on YouTube.  They aren’t awful from what I’ve seen.  They’re short: roughly 16 and 17 minutes long.  The first one is at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6K-v4MJScz0

I thought they were worth watching.  They’ve got kind of a Buffy/Angel feel to them, though the dialog isn’t as sharp.  The actors and actresses seemed to be a little stiff at first, but they seem to gradually get into their roles more as the episodes go on.  In any case, it is an interesting experiment.   Can television-type entertainment  be popularized through the web and make money through DVD sales?  If so, that  could be a new market for writers.  Hey, somebody has to write the scripts for these things.

Chilean Chickens Char Columbus Claims: PreColumbian chickens, actually.  Researchers recently found chicken bones with radiocarbon dates in a range from the early 1300s to around 1420 in Indian sites in Chile.  Since chickens weren’t native to the New World, that means that someone brought them here before Columbus arrived.  Based on DNA extracted from the bones, it looks as though the chickens were closely related to ones from Polynesia.  If this proves out it looks like a smoking gun on contact between Indians and Polynesians.  That’s long been suspected but up until now hasn’t been proven.

First the Vikings and now this.  Will we have to change Columbus Day to Unknown Polynesian With a Chicken Day? 

A Huge Number of New Mammal Species Discovered in South America.  A guy with very good scientific credentials is claiming to have found an enormous number of living mammal speciesnew to science in Brazil.  The new species include a large new Peccary, a bunch of new monkeys, including rather large spider monkeys and wooly monkeys, a new species of Tapir, a new Coati larger than the common one we knew about, numerous other small carnivores, a manatee, a new species of Giant Anteater, and possibly a big cat larger than a Jaguar.  And that’s just a partial listing.  It looks like earlier naturalists overlooked an area and it happened to be a hot spot for unique species.

In some cases, it isn’t entirely clear if we’re talking an entirely new species or a unique variant on a known one, but in other cases the new animals are clearly distinct.  If you want more details on this, I would go to this website (Tetrapod Zoology) first for a good summary:

The discoverer of all of these animals also has a website:

The last article concerning this on the Tetrapod Zoology site says: … 'new species status' will not be universally accepted for all of the many new mammals we've been looking at. Others - such as the anteater and the big cat - are less ambiguous and cannot be anything other than highly significant new taxa. Regardless, it is clear that we are talking here about one of the most remarkable single contributions to the diversity of living mammals ever made by a single person….