My Word with Douglas E. Welch

Archaeologists found the bones of three young African men in a 500-year-old mass grave in what is now Mexico City. The chemical makeup of their bones sheds light on their earlier lives in Africa, and forensic analysis reveals hard, painful lives and young deaths.

How the dead speak

Archaeologists unearthed the mass grave in 1992 while digging a new subway line in Mexico City. Five hundred years earlier, the site had been the grounds of the Hospital Real de San José de los Naturales. The Spanish colonizers had built the hospital to treat indigenous people—that’s what “los Naturales” means in Spanish—but these three men were African, not North or Central American. Their bones radiocarbon-dated to the 1500s CE, which makes them part of an important but often anonymous group of people: the first African people abducted in their homelands and brought across the Atlantic Ocean to European colonies in the Americas.

Read The 500-year-old bones of African slaves tell a traumatic story via Ars Technica

An interesting link found among my daily reading

Home School: [1020] SentrySafe Opened With a Coat Hanger! via The Lock Picking Lawyer on YouTube

Learn more about lock picking with this book

Bookshop | Amazon

Global Citizen Science Month (April 2020) is coordinated by SciStarter and the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University with support from the National Library of Medicine and in collaboration with the Citizen Science Association, National Geographic, and Science Friday.

The largest insect migration in the world ends each year in Michoacán, Mexico. Millions of monarch butterflies travel from the United States and Canada to pass the cold months in the towering trees of this beautiful forest. On their incredible journey, the butterflies travel around 2,800 miles.

Today, many science books are full of detailed photos that reveal the intricate parts of plant life, but prior to the invention of photography (and macro photography), it was up to botanical illustrators and researchers to record the fascinating forms of flora and fauna. One scientist who recorded his findings with drawings is Ernst Heinrich Haeckel, a German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, and physician.

The design site Dimensions.Guide is a clip art library for designers, architects, and anyone else who needs precise scale drawings. Every scale drawing in its database is composed in the same clean line-art style. Drawings include sports equipment, cars, furniture, people (in various poses and sizes), computers and phones, plants and animals, room and landscape layouts, and even Marvel characters. And it’s all free to use in your own projects.

Prior to the twentieth century, most environmental observations such as rainfall amounts and air temperatures were made by lay observers with interest and time on their hands. Later on, such measurements moved largely into the realms of professionals, but today the role of amateur observers is being revisited. The advent of smart phones and GPS is increasingly allowing citizen observers of wildlife, ecology, air and water quality, and flooding, to enhance our understanding of environmental science. What opportunities exist for individuals to help to solve some of the most complex problems on Earth? And what motivates people to join an environmental research team?

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website.

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.