An eclectic assortment of stuff: food, archaeology, fun, books, history, geekery, etc.
Posted in miscellaneous on Jun 27th, 2007
From the Guardian: The sheer hell of bossy Britain.
Last month, the public address system at Earl’s Court tube station in London was served with a noise abatement order. Passengers, it seems, had had enough of being told the blindingly obvious. "They come over with these bizarre messages that you would know already unless you were [...]
Posted in science on Jun 27th, 2007
From the Scientific American: Scientists Reverse Mental Retardation in Mice.
In a case of life imitating art, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) reported today that they had successfully reversed mental retardation in mice, just as scientists did in the classic 1966 novel Flowers for Algernon. In the book by Daniel Keyes, scientists use [...]
Posted in history & archaeology on Jun 26th, 2007
From Aftenposten: Incan bones found in Østfold.
Archeologists in Sarpsborg have found one thousand year old skeletal remains that appear to be Incan.
The skeletal remains were found during conservations work at St. Nicolas church in Sarpsborg, a city 73 kilometers (45 miles) southeast of Oslo, [continue]
Posted in miscellaneous on Jun 25th, 2007
What does it look like when a tree does some drawing? Like this.
Drawings produced by pens attached to the tips of tree branches, as the branches move in the wind the tree draws on to a panel or drawing board on an easel. Like signatures the trees drawings tell of the tree’s character; a [...]
Posted in history & archaeology, language on Jun 25th, 2007
From the University of Chicago: Persians Found New Uses for Old Language.
For the first time, a text has been found in Old Persian language that shows the written language in use for practical recording and not only for royal display.
The text is inscribed on a damaged clay tablet from the Persepolis Fortification Archive, now at [...]
Posted in language on Jun 23rd, 2007
From the New Yorker: The Interpreter.
One morning last July, in the rain forest of northwestern Brazil, Dan Everett, an American linguistics professor, and I stepped from the pontoon of a Cessna floatplane onto the beach bordering the Maici River, a narrow, sharply meandering tributary of the Amazon. On the bank above us were some thirty [...]
Posted in history & archaeology on Jun 22nd, 2007
From Spiegel Online: 35,000-Year-Old Mammoth Sculpture Found in Germany.
Archaeologists at the University of Tübingen have recovered the first entirely intact woolly mammoth figurine from the Swabian Jura, a plateau in the state of Baden-Württemberg, thought to have been made by the first modern humans some 35,000 years ago. It is believed to be the oldest [...]
Posted in miscellaneous on Jun 21st, 2007
From New Scientist: Firstborn children are the cleverest.
Firstborn children score significantly higher in IQ tests than their younger siblings, according to a large study of 250,000 military draftees in Norway.
The researchers say the difference is due to social, not biological, factors, as younger siblings have higher IQs if they are raised as an eldest child [...]
Posted in history & archaeology, technology on Jun 20th, 2007
From Boston.com: Virtual explorers comb Egypt’s ruins.
With a click of his computer mouse, Peter Janosi, a lecturer at the Institute of Egyptology in Vienna, analyzes ancient statues and decodes hieroglyphs unearthed in the distant Giza Necropolis.
From the comfort of his study in Norwich, England, Colin Newton, a retired television repairman, explores rare Giza maps and [...]
Posted in history & archaeology on Jun 20th, 2007
From discovery.com: First Gunshot Wound Victim Found.
The musket blast was sudden and deadly, the killing nearly 500 years ago of what may have been the first gunshot victim in the Western Hemisphere.
"We didn’t expect it. We saw this skull and saw the almost round hole and thought people must have been shooting around here recently," [...]
Posted in science on Jun 20th, 2007
From the Globe and Mail: Dating daddy’s double.
If you were a daddy’s girl, chances are you grew up to choose a boyfriend or husband who looks a lot like him, according to a study out of Britain.
A team of British and Polish researchers used a series of measurements to show how the spacing of fathers’ [...]
Posted in history & archaeology on Jun 18th, 2007
From discovery.com: Ancient Graves Suggest Human Sacrifice.
Physically disabled people may have been ritually sacrificed by European hunter-gatherer tribes as early as 24,000 years ago, according to an investigation into burials from the Upper Paleolithic period.
Well known in large, stratified ancient societies, ritual human sacrifice has never been apparent in the archaeological data of Upper Paleolithic [...]
Posted in history & archaeology on Jun 18th, 2007
From EurekAlert: Ancient Etruscans were immigrants from Anatolia, or what is now Turkey.
The long-running controversy about the origins of the Etruscan people appears to be very close to being settled once and for all, a geneticist will tell the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics today. Professor Alberto Piazza, from the University [...]
Posted in food, history & archaeology on Jun 18th, 2007
From discovery.com: Ancient Romans Preferred Fast Food.
…researchers think the formal, decadent image of wining and dining in ancient Rome mostly just applied to the elite.
According to archaeologist Penelope Allison of the University of Leicester, the majority of the population consumed food "on the run."
Allison excavated an entire neighborhood block in Pompeii, a city frozen in [...]
Posted in health on Jun 18th, 2007
From Reuters: African twig brushes offer all-day dental care.
Brush your teeth every day, dentists say. In Africa, that can mean keeping your toothbrush in your mouth all day long.
Across the continent south of the Sahara, many people go about their daily business with a small stick or twig protruding from their mouth, which they chew [...]
Posted in animals, birds, insects, etc, history & archaeology on Jun 13th, 2007
From the Times Online: Weapon found in whale makes it more than 100 years old.
A fragment of a weapon used by commercial whalers in the late 1800s has been found in a massive bowhead whale caught off Alaska last month – suggesting that the whale was more than a century old.
The tip of a bomb [...]
Posted in history & archaeology on Jun 13th, 2007
From the BBC: Ancient Rome brought back to life.
Ancient Rome has been brought back to life through a unique digital reconstruction project, said to be the world’s biggest computer simulation.
An international team of architects, archaeologists and experts spent 10 years working on a real-time 3D model of the city called Rome Reborn.
Some 7,000 buildings were [...]
Posted in history & archaeology on Jun 12th, 2007
From theage.com.au: Tablets tell all: ancient athletes flogged for sins.
An ancient training manual for Roman athletes — carved in marble
almost 2000 years ago — prescribes far worse punishments than a
sending off or a week’s docked pay if they performed badly in the
Colosseum.
The manual recommends a flogging to get them to perform better. And
the same went [...]
Posted in books & lit, history & archaeology, technology on Jun 12th, 2007
From Wired: Robot Scans Ancient Manuscript in 3-D.
After a thousand years stuck on a dusty library shelf, the oldest copy of Homer’s Iliad is about to go into digital circulation.
A team of scholars traveled to a medieval library in Venice to create an ultra-precise 3-D copy of the ancient manuscript — complete with every [...]
Posted in Italy, history & archaeology on Jun 12th, 2007
From the New York Times: More Clues in the Legend (or Is It Fact?) of Romulus.
The story of Romulus and Remus is almost as old as Rome. The orphan
twins were suckled by a she-wolf in a cave on the banks of the Tiber.
Romulus grew up to found Rome in 753 B. C.
Historians have long since [...]
Posted in history & archaeology on Jun 8th, 2007
From Aftenposten: Viking graves to be re-opened.
The Viking graves that contained the famous ships Oseberg and Gokstad will be re-opened in September, in an effort to gain new knowledge from the remains of the two women and one man buried in them.
It will be the first time the graves have been opened in nearly 60 [...]
Posted in art on Jun 8th, 2007
Posted in history & archaeology on Jun 5th, 2007
From the BBC: Bridging London’s lost centuries.
Two very different finds, dug up close to each other by Trafalgar Square, shine new light on the greatest puzzle of London archaeology – the "silent" centuries after Roman rule.
That the skeleton of "London’s Last Roman" — or anything ancient and unknown — can be discovered in 2006 in [...]
Posted in history & archaeology, science on Jun 4th, 2007
From nature.com: Astronomer shows when and where his ancient counterparts worked.
Using modern techniques — and some rocks — a US astronomer has traced the origin of a set of ancient clay tablets to a precise date and place. The tablets show constellations thought to be precursors of the present-day zodiac.
The tablets, known collectively as MUL.APIN, [...]
Posted in history & archaeology, religion on Jun 3rd, 2007
From the Jewish Daily Forward: Shrine of False Messiah in Turkey May Be Razed.
Far away from the eyes of the Jewish mainstream, in modern-day Turkey there live hundreds, if not thousands, of crypto-Jews — and today, one of their most sacred shrines is in danger.
This is the hidden, fascinating tale of the doenmeh, descendants of [...]