Curio Cabinet / Daily Curio

Here's a chance to take a literal step into the past. For a dinosaur 150 million years ago, leaving some footprints behind probably wasn’t particularly exciting. But as fossilized imprints on limestone, they’re a thrilling paleontological treasure today. Once located on private property, the track of 134 consecutive sauropod footprints near Ouray, Colorado, will soon be available for public viewing. Named the West Gold Hill Dinosaur Track site, it’s the longest such track at 106 total yards. Its path reveals the movement of a giant, long-necked dinosaur that seemed to walk straight for some time before making a 270 degree turn and partly looping around. It may not sound like much, but such long, well-preserved tracks are rare, and ones that show a distinct change in direction are even rarer, with only five other examples—four in China and one in Utah. Of those, none of the tracks show a turn greater than 180 degrees. The tracks in Colorado weren’t discovered until 2021, when the family who owned the land where they’re located noticed a line of strange divots. According to family members, they had been camping in the area for years and merely appreciated the rainwater-filled divots as convenient sources of water for their dogs. After they realized that the divots were actually dinosaur tracks, the family contacted the United States Forest Service in 2022 in order to sell them the land so that the natural wonder could be shared with the public. Recently, the Forest Service acquired the surrounding land for $135,000, with plans to expand an existing trail system in the area leading to the site. But the footprints can be seen even by those who can’t make the trek to Colorado—they are actually visible from Google Earth. You could say it’s a pterosaur’s eye view.

 
[Image description: A black-and-white illustration of a long-necked dinosaur, or sauropod.] Credit & copyright: Pearson Scott Foresman, Wikimedia Commons. This work has been released into the public domain by its author, Pearson Scott Foresman. This applies worldwide.

The robot uprising is coming, and their first targets are those dastardly feathered fiends—geese. Way up north, the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities have brought on a robot they’ve named Aurora to keep airports clear of geese and other wildlife that can interfere with airplanes. Geese might not seem particularly menacing, but a single goose can bring down a plane if its body gets sucked into a jet engine—and the geese don’t exactly leave such encounters in fighting shape. Airports around the world are vigilant about keeping birds and other wildlife away from runways, with many employing other animals to keep tarmacs critter-free. Some places use falconers to chase away birds, while others turn to herding dogs for help. Some geese-infested locales have resorted to culling local populations, but officials in Anchorage, Alaska, have brought on Aurora, a four-legged robot made by Boston Dynamics. One of the company’s commercial offerings, Aurora is an iteration of their “Spot” models, though she has a bit of customization. To better frighten away animals, she is covered in interchangeable panels that mimic the look of coyote or fox fur. At about the size of a Labrador retriever, she can tread through deep snow, an ability that’s mandatory in snowy Anchorage. At $70,000, Aurora may seem like overkill, but some would argue that’s a bargain compared to the alternative. In 2023 alone, Alaska had 92 animal strikes (incidents where a plane hits wildlife), and aircraft are costly to repair. Not to mention that any one of those cases could have ended in tragedy. While most animal or bird strikes only result in superficial damage to the aircraft, more serious disasters can and do happen. Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger III’s famed emergency landing over the Hudson River in 2009 was actually caused by a flock of Canada geese. Birds of a feather, indeed.

 
[Image description: Two Canada geese in a grassy field with trees in the background.] Credit & copyright: Brett Sayles, Pexels

Waste not, want not, stay hot. In Finland, where winters are long and cold, an energy supplier is working on an underground thermal energy storage system that would run partially on waste heat. While the Finnish love their saunas, it takes more than a little steam to keep warm through the country’s brutal winters. In Vantaa, Finland, residents rely on Vantaan Energia to heat their homes through the frigid months, and soon they’ll be using heat generated from waste, then stored underground. The facility that will make this possible is called Varanto, and it will measure a whopping 38.85 million cubic feet and boast a total thermal capacity of 90 gigawatt hours (gWh). That’s enough energy to heat a medium-sized Finnish city all winter. Once completed in 2028, it will be the world’s largest seasonal heat storage system.
 
The advantage of systems like Varanto is that they’re resilient against fluctuations in demand since they store energy ahead of time. As Vantaan CEO Jukka Toivonen said in a statement, “The biggest challenge of the energy transition so far has been the inability to store these intermittent forms of energy for later use. Unfortunately, small-scale storage solutions, such as batteries or accumulators, are not sufficient; large, industrial-scale storage solutions are needed." In this case, thermal energy will be stored in three caverns located 330 feet under the surface in the bedrock. Each cavern will be 984 feet in length, 131 feet in height and 66 feet in width and will be filled with water. Throughout the summer, the water will be heated by waste heat from industrial sources and with renewable energy like wind or solar when there’s a surplus. Insulated and under pressure due to the weight of the ground above, the water will stay liquid while reaching a temperature of 284 degrees Fahrenheit. Then, during the winter, the water will be piped to individual homes and businesses to keep them warm. Imagine feeling the heat of the summer sun in the middle of a blizzard.

 
[Image description: Description ] Credit & copyright: StAnselm, Wikimedia Commons. The copyright holder of this work has released it into the public domain. This applies worldwide.

Winding roads can be dangerous for humans, never mind fish. Just ask the thousands of salmon that barely managed to escape after the truck carrying them crashed while en route to their new home in late March. Every year, rivers in Oregon are stocked with young salmon—referred to as smolt—to compensate for their declining populations. The program was started after several dams built in the region in the 1960s and 70s decimated large populations of salmon. Today, salmon are raised in hatcheries and released around the state in what is (usually) a low-risk procedure. However, on the morning of March 29, a truck carrying over 100,000 smolt from the Lookingglass Hatchery in Elgin to the Imnaha River flipped over while rounding a corner and spilled its living payload all over the road. Instead of spending a few days relaxing in an acclimating tank built into the river, the smolt were thrown into the wide open world to fend for themselves. Amazingly, about 77,000 of the smolt managed to slip into Lookingglass Creek, which happened to be situated just below the crash site. The remaining 25,529 fish died on the road, where they were left for a time so that they could be counted by wildlife officials. Despite the tragedy, the good news is that, according to officials, the surviving salmon will likely make it to the Pacific Ocean on their own. Wild salmon actually begin their lives in freshwater streams before making their way to the ocean. There, they spend up to six years until they are ready to reproduce, at which point they return to their freshwater birthplaces, guided by their sense of smell and their sensitivity to Earth’s magnetic field. After spawning, the adult salmon rapidly die off, and their carcasses become a valuable food source for a variety of animals, bringing valuable nutrients from the ocean far inland. Gone today, gourmet tomorrow.

 
[Image description: A black-and-white illustration of a salmon laying out of water.] Credit & copyright: Wikimedia Commons, 1897. Page 1031 in Henry B. Scammell's 1897 handbook Cyclopedia of Valuable Receipts, a guide to all and sundry with 2000 illustrations. Public Domain.

There’s not enough clam chowder in New England to cheer people up in this kind of weather. Last Thursday, the Northeastern U.S. was hit by a type of storm called a nor'easter. While they may look like hurricanes on satellite images, nor'easters bring a colder type of devastation than their tropical cousins. The term “nor’easter” has been around since the late 1500s, and refers to a storm that forms in the North Atlantic Ocean. They only happen when cold, dry air from Canada meets warm, moist air over the ocean. Like hurricanes, nor'easters can cause strong winds and heavy precipitation, but they tend to happen during cold, winter months while hurricanes are usually summer storms. In fact, nor'easters can grow in severity the colder it is, while hurricanes get stronger the warmer it is. Nor'easters can also bring snow and tornadoes. The nor’easter that recently hit New York buried some areas in over a foot of snow overnight. There were also major power outages affecting around 700,000 homes in Maine and New Hampshire, where the storm did the most damage. Nor'easters aren’t necessarily more dangerous than hurricanes, but they cause just as much property damage. Contrary to popular belief, the storm doesn’t get its name from the region it primarily affects, but rather the direction from which it approaches. Nor’easters can actually hit any part of the East Coast, not just the Northeast. Speaking of names, nor'easters aren’t given human names the way that hurricanes are. Instead, they’re referred to by the year and/or month in which they occurred. There have been plenty of notable ones over the years, like the 1991 Nor'easter, sometimes referred to as “The Perfect Storm”, which inspired a movie of the same name. That year, the nor'easter combined with a tropical hurricane, forming a hybrid storm with massive surges that ended up killing 13 people at sea and on land. With weather like that, it won’t matter if you remembered to pack an umbrella.

 
[Image description: A satellite image of a nor'easter from 2018.] Credit & copyright: Wikimedia Commons, The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This image is in the public domain because it contains materials that originally came from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, taken or made as part of an employee's official duties.

Add “clocks and calendars” to the list of things being impacted by climate change! While it may not seem possible for changing weather to impact how we keep time, it’s all just a matter of science. A geophysicist from the University of California, San Diego, recently published a study in the journal Nature detailing how climate change is changing the speed at which Earth rotates, which in turn may change our current timekeeping standards. Because the Earth is warming, massive ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting at a rapid rate. By measuring the melt via satellites, it was found that the resulting water is causing more of Earth’s mass to shift inward, toward the equator. This, in turn, is causing the planet to rotate slightly slower. The speed at which Earth rotates affects humanity’s Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) because we base our timekeeping on the planet’s rotation. A second, for example, is a specific fraction of the amount of time it takes Earth to spin, once, on its axis. Gravitational quirks and even large earthquakes can impact the speed of Earth’s spinning, causing headaches for international timekeepers, who are sometimes forced to add “leap seconds” to international atomic clocks to keep everyone in sync. However, no one quite knows how a permanently slowed-down Earth will affect timekeeping. For now, it may actually be a boon to timekeepers, since one of their recent concerns was Earth’s outer layers spinning more quickly as the planet’s core slowed down. For now, climate-change-induced slowing may help to bring atomic clocks back into sync with the planet’s rotation…but that certainly doesn’t make the melting ice a good thing. After all, a planet that rotates too slowly can cause unusually long days and nights as well as altered ocean currents and weather. Not exactly ideal, even if adding leap seconds is a bit of an annoyance.

 
[Image description: A portion of a globe.] Credit & copyright: NastyaSensei, Pexels

Her voice is the talk of the town. Like a story straight out of a sci-fi movie, a woman in South Korea has become the first patient in the world to receive a 3D-printed trachea, more commonly known as a windpipe. While it may remain out of sight, a person’s windpipe forms an important part of someone’s identity by affecting the sound of their voice. So when the organ is damaged by surgery or injury, the change can be traumatic. In this case, the 50-year-old woman’s windpipe was severely damaged during the removal of a thyroid tumor. Because windpipes are largely made of cartilage, the tissue can’t grow back on its own and conventional procedures to repair such damage are complicated with low rates of success. But a novel procedure developed by the Catholic University of Korea and Gachon University appears to have been successful at patching the woman’s missing tissue. For the transplant, they printed a trachea made of polycaprolactone (PCL), a type of biodegradable polyester, and bio-ink stem cells harvested from other patients. The idea isn’t to permanently replace the patient’s trachea; in fact, the 3D-printed windpipe is expected to degrade within 5 years. Instead, the artificial trachea is meant to let the patient’s natural trachea heal in a way that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. And after six months, the procedure appears to have been successful, with researchers noting that there are healthy blood vessels growing over the implant and no signs of rejection despite the patient not taking immunosuppressants. Just as surprising is how simple the procedure was once all of the components were ready—the trachea took about two weeks to print, but the surgery itself only took half a day. Researchers note that 3D-printing is unlikely to satisfy the needs of whole organ transplants anytime soon, but this case proves that it could very well lead to safer, more effective methods of repairing and patching damaged organs. Imagine a world in which fixing an organ is as simple as darning a sock.