A headline crawling across the top of my screen on the BBC Ticker caught my eye:
Fossil frogs yield ‘soft tissues’

Normally, when a creature is fossilized, the soft tissues are destroyed and you’re left with the fossilized bones. If you’re lucky, you can see where the soft tissues were and that’s about it. Well, it appears that about 10 million years ago, some frogs and salamanders were preserved in some swamps in northeastern Spain. However, unlike every other fossilized creature that’s been found to-date, some of these have both types of bone marrow preserved.

Needless to say, this opens up new possibilities for research into the ancestors of animals that are still around today.

I was over at my friend Darin’s place Wednesday evening.  We set up his new HF rig in the backyard and tried to see who we could hear and talk to.  I had my first DX QSO with the HF privleges I acquired when they updated the legislation a couple of years ago.  It was with OK4RQ, a ham named Pavel located in the Czech Republic.  Though it was a very short conversation consisting of not much more than exchanging signal reports, it was still very cool.  I’ve had an amateur radio license since 1992, but this is the first time I’ve been able to operate on HF.