Good morning.
Whitewater looks to hit a high of about fifty today, with sunny skies. In Manchester, New Hampshire, voters will go to the polls on a mostly sunny day with a high temperature of forty-three.
The Wisconsin Historical Society recalls a terrible Wisconsin fire from this day in 1883:
1883 – Newhall House Fire
On this date in 1883, one of America’s worst hotel fires claimed more than seventy lives when the Newhall House burned at the northwest corner of Broadway and Michigan Streets in Milwaukee. Rescued from the fire were The P.T. Barnum Lilliputian Show performers Tom Thumb and Commodore Nutt. The fire, shown here, was discovered at 4:00 a.m. on the 10th, but sources give the date variously as 1/9/1883 or 1/10/1883. [Sources: The History of Wisconsin, Vol. 3, p.452; WLHBA]
Hopeful news from the Galapagos: Extinct Giant Tortoise May Still Be Alive in Galapagos. Believed extinct, some have survived —
Photo:
Matthew Field, http://www.photography.mattfield.com of related Geochelone elephantopus
Genetic traces of a supposedly extinct giant tortoise species have been found in living hybrids on the Galapagos island of Isabela.
A few pure Chelonoidis elephantopus almost certainly still exist, hidden in the island’s volcanic redoubts. The hybrids have so much C. elephantopus DNA that scientists say careful breeding could resurrect the tragically vanished behemoths.
“To our knowledge, this is the first rediscovery of a species by way of tracking the genetic footprints left in the genomes of its hybrid offspring,” wrote researchers led by Yale University biologists Ryan Garrick and Edgar Benavides in a Jan. 9 Current Biology paper….
For the new study, the researchers traveled to Isabela island. On the island’s northern tip, on the slopes of Volcano Wolf, they took genetic samples from 1,600 C. becki individuals. Of these, 84 contained so much C. elephantopus DNA that at least one recent ancestor must have been a purebred C. elephantopus.
None of the purebreds was spotted, but because of the genetic signals’ strength and the hybrids’ youth — many were juveniles — the researchers estimate that about 40 purebreds still survive….
Later this year the researchers will return to Isabela, where they hope to establish a captive breeding program using hybrids and, if they can find them, a few true C. elephantopus. The tortoises could roam again, their slaughter an evolutionary chapter rather than an end.
Google’s puzzle for today: “Starting at the White House, walk directly north on 16th Street NW to reach a traffic circle named for a famous American general. This man ran for president and lost to what Democrat?”