Blog Blender

There’s a whale graveyard

Along a stretch of the Indian Ocean, there’s a whale graveyard.

Here we report the discovery of a vast whale necropolis in the Diamantina Zone (4,616- to 7,001-m depth), extending about 1,200 km along the sea floor of the southeastern Indian Ocean. This area has a deep and extensive accumulation comprising five modern natural whale-fall communities and 476 fossil cetaceans recorded. We show that carcasses host specialized communities dominated by brittle stars, bone-boring worms and chemosynthesis-based bivalves and that the fossil record in this area comprises both extant and extinct deep-diving beaked whales. Isotopic dating shows that whale falls in this region have occurred since at least 5.3 million years ago. These findings reshape the understanding of the limits and biogeography of whale-fall ecosystems and establish some deep sea floors as a fossil archive for tracing cetacean evolution over geological time.

PJH Studios artwork, Portrait of a sun

PJH Studios

Movies, music, books, whiskey, and culture in a blog blender

  • There’s a whale graveyard

    Along a stretch of the Indian Ocean, there’s a whale graveyard. Here we report the discovery of a vast whale necropolis in the Diamantina Zone (4,616- to 7,001-m depth), extending about 1,200 km along the sea floor of the southeastern Indian Ocean. This area has a deep and extensive accumulation comprising five modern natural whale-fall communities…

  • Following the AI and crypto money

    Molly White is launching an initiative to track political donations related to AI and crypto. Continuing to track only crypto would mean missing half the story. The same operatives are running both campaigns. Josh Vlasto, longtime adviser and spokesperson for Fairshake — the cryptocurrency super PAC network responsible for the bulk of crypto’s 2024 spending — is…

  • Making a song out of white noise

  • Like a rolling stone

    A weird and amusing web site: click various sides of a rock face and click release to let it roll, making beats as it goes.

  • The bots have overtaken humans on the net

    With AI agents everywhere, bots now outnumber humans on the internet. The rise is attributed to the continued proliferation of AI agents, largely autonomous programs that use tools that collaborate with high-level programs and data, with little human feedback. Cloudflare, which has a feature to display bot versus human-generated search requests, says 57.4% of requests…

  • German discovers the American South

    Freddy from Germany is on a whirlwind trip through the American South, to the delight of everyone. That said, words aren’t always enough to fully convey the South’s cultural significance. Just ask X user Freddy (@FreddyLA7), a German soccer fan tweeting his way through the South en route to Texas for Germany’s upcoming match against…

  • Comparisons, a study

    Russell Samora performed an analysis on 200,000 works to find how common or unique a comparison was. The article presents an amusing and engaging read, providing charts and illustrations.

  • Moonlight Sonata on bass guitar

  • Haiku, a generative music album

    Haiku is software that creates a generative album of music. No two listens are the same.

  • Artists transform vacant hospital

    Super cool project where 70 artists transformed a vacant hospital into something interesting. Through July 31, visitors experience an alternative vision for communal healing, all through the lens of 70 artists. Dubbed the Hospital of Emotions, the pop-up exhibition converts 80 rooms into temporary installations based on eight themes: joy, love, fear, anger, hope, sadness,…