Happy Birthday NYSK!

It's the 1st anniversary of NYSK and on January 27th, we celebrated by listening to various birthday songs and talking about organisms that live a loooooong time. For example, Prometheus is a Great Basin Bristlecone Pine that is estimated to be nearly 5000 years old! And in the animal world, researchers have dated a quahog clam from Iceland at 405-years-old!

All this talk of golden oldies led to the topic of aging and how it goes down in the cells. We heard a clip from the Naked Scientist Africa podcast series about how aging occurs. We also learned about negligible senescence, a phenomenon in which animals tend not to show signs of aging.

As for the news...

• Running shoes protect feet, but jog joints
• Is there really such thing as a mid-life crisis?
• Research expedition into truth behind Japanese whaling 
• Fossils reveal feathers of dinosaurs were orange

Musical artists included Weird Al, The Beatles, Sonic Youth, The United States of America, Joan Baez, Azure Ray, Tortoise, Bert Jansch, Doc Watson, Caliexico, Blonde Redhead, Badly Drawn Boy, and Andrew Bird.

We finished off the night with an awesome a capella version of Toto's Africa by Perpetuum Jazzile. They make rain with their fingers and thunder with their feet!