Tootfinder

Fun Fact: ~35ya my sister and I were simultaneously users of what I understood to be the only 2 Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometers in the world, the instrument used for measuring stable isotope ratios. She was a PhD student at Columbia doing paleoclimate work and I was at WashU studying the effect of rHGH on mid-term nitrogen balance and correlation to long-term growth in short kids without GH deficiency.

Ars Technica (@arstechnica@mastodon.social)
Attached: 1 image Fermented meat with a side of maggots: A new look at the Neanderthal diet Researchers reconstruct ancient diets by studying stable nitrogen isotope ratios. https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/07/fermented-meat-with-a-side-of-maggots-a-new-look-at-the-neanderthal-diet/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

No influence of passing stars on paleoclimate reconstructions over the past 56 million years
Richard E. Zeebe, David M. Hernandez
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10158

No influence of passing stars on paleoclimate reconstructions over the past 56 million years
Passing stars (also called stellar flybys) have notable effects on the solar system's long-term dynamical evolution, injection of Oort cloud comets into the solar system, properties of trans-Neptunian objects, and more. Based on a simplified solar system model, omitting the Moon and the Sun's quadrupole moment J2, it has recently been suggested that passing stars are also an important driver of paleoclimate before ~50 Myr ago, including a climate event called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximu…