Congratulations, you've made it through the week!

  Have a Happy Thought: People that study bones have long understood that at a certain age, the growth plates close over, and the bones don’t get any longer. In humans, this happens sometime in the late teens or early 20s. In other words, early adulthood. This pattern – bone growth stopping in early adulthood – is common to pretty much all animals. Including… dinosaurs. Palaeontologists have put this knowledge to use as they study fossilised bones – yes, apparently you can see in a fossil whether the growth plates are closed or not! In fact, this has very recently led to a discovery… or at least a naming… of (say this in a scary/dramatic voice in your head): the Nanotyrannus . Image: a pack of Nanotyrannus hunt a juvenile T. rex. Art by Anthony Hutchings. Yep, that’s right. There were mini-Tyrannosaurs running around the late Jurassic. For years, palaeontologists just figured that these were juvenile T. Rex, or even a “teenage” of the species. But now, by looking ...

  Have a Happy Thought: In the olden days, people told stories of going out into the desert to meditate, find (often divine) inspiration, or to refresh their spirits. And this is often portrayed as a huge sacrifice, going out into a desolate landscape. These photos might give you a different mental picture of what it would mean to "go out into the desert." Starting with Namibia, under the light of the Milky Way: Image: Daniel Kordan   Or Cappadocia, in central Turkey: Image: Daniel Kordan   Western Kazakhstan surely meets the definition of desert … Image: Daniel Kordan   Actually, have some more of Kazakhstan: Image: Daniel Kordan   Image: Daniel Kordan :   Or the Atacama desert: Image: Daniel Kordan   Of course, you could effectively travel the world through the camera lens of Daniel Kordan – His website is absolutely worth a visit, and I can almost guarantee you've seen his work somewhere! (Yes,...

Have a Happy Thought: (Before I go too far, do you ever have those times in your life when you just keep seeing the same thing over and over? Like you learn a new word, and then that word appears in a book you're reading, a tv show you're watching, and in a random-facts quiz later that week? Yeah, that's been my life lately. Which is why there is some cross-over between this week's topic and that from just a few weeks ago .) The world around us, especially the living world, is constantly surprising us. We humans continue to learn new things all the time (thanks, science!), and then of course there is the fact that " Life, uh, finds a way " to deal with an ever-changing environment. The latest example of this? Two species of jay birds, whose ancestors have not crossed paths in about 7 million years, have recently been finding themselves in the same place. Green jays are a tropical bird, living in the central Americas.  Image: Green Jay (Cyanocorax yncas) Photo ...

Have a Happy Thought:  Humans have almost always named places that we visit and live. Those names are sometimes just boringly descriptive, sometimes they are nods to history, or something interesting that happened in a place. One of the things that I have enjoyed learning about my latest adopted city (New Plymouth, New Zealand – a lot of “new”s!) is that the local museum has an explanation for many of the street names in the region. Some of these are sensible ( Airport Drive, which does indeed go to the Airport), others are whimsical ( Albatross Place , named after the airplane, not the bird), while others are... memorials to times or people that possibly don’t deserve such positive recognition (looking at you, Gustavus von Tempsky ) Sometimes, people new to an area give a new name to the place, even though it already has a name. Colonisation aside, this can lead to some fun “stacking” of names. You may have heard of Torpenhow Hill in England. The name comes from successive l...