08 APR 2013 by ideonexus
Rational Potter Plots to Take Over the Magical World
Professor McGonagall undoubtedly knew every last detail of how you went about turning into a cat. But she seemed to have literally never heard of the scientific method. To her it was just Muggle magic. And she didn't even seem curious about what secrets might be hiding behind the natural language understanding of the Retrieval Charm.
That left two possibilities, really.
Possibility one: Magic was so incredibly opaque, convoluted, and impenetrable, that even though wizards and witches had ... 1 
notes
notesThrough science!
21 SEP 2011 by ideonexus
The Laetoli Footprints
team of paleoanthropologists led by Mary Leakey confirmed the
bipedality of A. afarensis with another remarkable find in Tanzania: the
famous “Laetoli footprints.” In 1976, Andrew Hill and another member
of the team were taking a break by indulging in a favorite field pastime:
pelting each other with chunks of dried elephant dung. Looking for
ammunition in a dry stream bed, Hill stumbled upon a line of fossilized
footprints. After careful excavation, the footprints turned out to be an
... 1 notes
notesNot only do these prints demonstrate A. afarensis could walk upright, but the nature of their preservation, having been made in volcanic ash and their proximity to one another, paints a image of two ancestors huddling together in an ashen landscape.
