So they mostly come from the asteroid belt, which itself is likely a few large bodies that got ripped apart by Jupiter and each other… This isn’t surprising at all, just confirmation of what was assumed already.

The speculation that “most” of the ~17,000 meteorites that fall each year come from just a couple specific asteroids within the asteroid families seems like overweighted nonsense to me, though. They don’t really seem to have a way to verify that, just modeling of an event 470 million years ago, and composition. They just know that they likely come from a few asteroid families, which can contain thousands of individual asteroids (though it’s also entirely possible that portions of the asteroid family were ripped away and obliterated in a separate event), possibly with very similar or identical makeup, so to then assert they “may” or “very likely” (both terms used in the article) come from a singular asteroid within the asteroid family is giving this research way way more weight than it should have, imho.

Unless they are trying to say (it’s early and I just woke up, so that may be it) that the original large body that was broken up is the source, but that’s so intensely “no shit, Sherlock” as to be basically meaningless. After all, the entire belt is a result of those large body breakups, and the asteroid families responsible for the meteors are quite sizable (three of the named ones, Flora, Massalia, and Koronos, contain a combined ~27,000 bodies)

I used to have a cat named gin, but not named after the alcohol.

Her name was 銀 (gin, pronounced geen like green) which is silver in Japanese.

She passed this time last year, quite unexpectedly, after 16 years with me, but your post brought some happy memories :)

Do they not have to pay for the privilege? Or is this not referring to academic publishing? (It’s not super clear, but context indicates academic?)

Maybe, although the flavor of that probably does change somewhat due to being boiled, just like I imagine the bee concentration/dehydration process adds something.

Have you ever tasted flower nectar?

I grow gladiolus sometimes, and they produce a lot of nectar, but there aren’t any pollinators for those flowers around me, so I remove the nectar myself with a syringe. There isn’t a lot in each flower, but it’s nice in a cup of tea.

It doesn’t really taste like honey, even dilute honey. It doesn’t taste like just sugar water, either, though. I’m sure each flowering plant produces a subtly different flavor, like fruit.

And indeed, honey apparently tastes different depending what the bees are feeding on. But I’d say it’s probably a mix of something bee-specific and the nectar itself.

I thought you were saying the book is a bit pricy the way a tabletop art book in the $100 range is pricy. So I went to see if it was something I could justify for a friend of mine as a gift… but nope, way too expensive is 100% accurate. $620. Holy shit. It’s pricy the way textbooks are pricy (the worst textbook I got was $1200, and it resold for around $600… wasn’t rentable, and no pdf at the time)

What do you think would be the most offensive thing to say to a bear? Or maybe there’s a hand gesture or something that’s really taboo?

I just want to be prepared in case I ever need to know.

I’ve had a carrot cat too! I sliced some up and dehydrated them then sewed them into a toy and she just loved it! The trick I found is to break the pieces inside the toy now and then to release more of the smell (same way catnip works really).

Does your carrot cat also like swimwear that’s been used in a chlorinated pool, but not yet washed? Mine treated that like catnip, too.

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