Curio Cabinet

Social distancing? These birds have never heard of it! The annual spring migration of sandhill cranes in Nebraska had researchers concerned about the possibility of a bird flu super-spreader event, but those fears were thankfully put to rest. This year, a record-breaking 736,000 sandhill cranes gathered in central Nebraska. Conservationists and bird-lovers would normally hail this as a joyous occasion, but this year is a little different. That’s because the H5N1 virus, also known as bird flu, killed 1,500 of the cranes earlier this year in Indiana. It was only natural to be concerned about the much larger Nebraska gathering, which accounts for around 80 percent of the total sandhill crane population in North America. In such a large group, just a few sick birds would have been enough to cause devastation. Unfortunately, the danger for this year hasn’t completely passed. Sandhill crane migration begins in February and continues through April, so there could still be some late comers who might be carrying the virus.
 
That would be especially bad news since sandhill cranes have a hard time recovering from population dips. The cranes can begin breeding at age two, but many of them wait until they are at least seven years old. The cranes mate for life, continuing to breed for upwards of 20 years, but chicks take a while to become independent. Hatchlings stick close to their parents and only strike out on their own after seven months. Once they mature, sandhill cranes are some of the largest birds in North America, measuring over 47 inches long with a wingspan of nearly 78 inches. If only they could use that impressive wingspan to keep at wing’s length from one another.

 
[Image description: A sandhill crane, with white feathers and some red on its head, flies over a snowy landscape.] Credit & copyright: National Park Service, Jacob W. Frank. NPGallery Digital Asset Management System, Asset ID: 06545f00-50a9-41bd-9195-f8663386cb17. Public domain: Full Granting Rights.

How big can something be before it’s no longer useful? That’s the question that many in the tech industry are asking in reference to computer chips. As modern computers demand more and more processing power, standard silicon, closed-circuit chips are having to get bigger and bigger to handle the extra workload. The fear is that, at some point, chips will grow too big and bulky for modern electronics, which tend to be small, lightweight, and portable. Enter the California tech firm, Lightmatter. Their new, photonic computer chips, which were described in two papers in the scientific journal Nature, use not just electricity, but also light to process information. Because the chips utilize photons rather than electrons, they are able to process more, and at much faster speeds, than traditional chips, while remaining fairly small. Studies have shown that the chips are strong enough to power several modern AI systems, which require an immense amount of processing strength. In fact, the chips are capable of performing 65.5 trillion adaptive block floating-point 16-bit (ABFP) operations per second. If that's not enough, photonic chips also use far less energy than normal electron-based ones, consuming just 78 watts of electrical power and 1.6 watts of optical power. That’s a breakthrough in the realm of photonic processing, but only time will tell if photonic chips turn out to be the future of computing. Other technologies, like quantum computing and carbon-nanotube chips, are also being investigated as solutions to our modern processing problems. Phones and laptops might get even lighter in the future, especially if they’re running on light!
 

[Image description: A burst of light with white rays.] Credit & copyright: Limonc, Wikimedia Commons. The copyright holder of this work has released it into the public domain. This applies worldwide.
 

Hold onto your iron throne, dire wolves are back! For the first time in history, an extinct species has been revived…sort of. Dire wolves were large canids that went extinct around 13,000 years ago. Now, an American biotech company called Colossal Biosciences is claiming to have brought the species back from extinction via three dire wolf cubs, fittingly named Romulus, Remes, and Khaleesi. Some experts, however, disagree on whether these pups are truly dire wolves. Others are taking the time to remind the public that, despite their appearance, dire wolves weren’t actually wolves at all.
 
Dire wolves are often portrayed as giants, larger than any living wolf species, but that’s not particularly accurate. Dire wolves were only slightly larger than modern gray wolves: the former grew to lengths of around six feet and weighed around 150 pounds, while the latter is just a little smaller, reaching similar lengths and weighing around 110 pounds. Dire wolves were native to the Americas, and like modern wolves they hunted in packs, preying on large animals like bison and camels, though their diets also included extinct megafauna like giant ground sloths and mastodons.
 
Despite their similarity to extant wolves, recent genetic discoveries revealed that dire wolves weren’t very closely related to them. In fact, dire wolves’ lineage diverged from that of modern canines like coyotes, wolves, and dogs almost 6 million years ago. They ended up looking and behaving like modern wolves through a process called convergent evolution, in which two or more species evolve similar traits in order to fill a certain ecological niche—in this case, the role of pack-hunting predator.
 
As for the recently “de-extincted” dire wolves, there’s no doubt that there are no other canines like them alive today. Whether that actually makes them true dire wolves is a topic of some debate among experts. The pups weren’t, after all, cloned from a full, intact genetic sample from an extinct dire wolf. Instead, damaged and fragmented dire wolf DNA was extracted from fossils and then edited into the DNA of a modern gray wolf. This has caused some biologists to contend that the pups are modified gray wolves with some dire wolf traits. Regardless, such “de-extinction” technology could one day make it possible to see all sorts of long-gone animals (or at least something close to them) again. Hopefully it's not a Jurassic Park situation.

 
[Image description: A photo of a gray wolf lying in the grass.] Credit & copyright: USFWS National Digital Library, Hollingsworth, John and Karen, USFWS. Public Domain.