An eclectic assortment of stuff: food, archaeology, fun, books, history, geekery, etc.
Posted in history & archaeology on May 31st, 2008
From BBC Wales: Dig aims to uncover lost villages.
A team of archaeologists is hoping to solve a centuries-old mystery and discover the remains of two medieval ancient towns in Carmarthenshire. (…)
Their existence is recorded in several medieval documents and researchers are hoping to pinpoint the exact locations later this month.
Previous digs in the grounds have [...]
Posted in Italy on May 31st, 2008
Dear heavens! These people kayaked through Venice. Part of me wants to shout "sacrilege!" and part of me wishes I’d thought of doing that. From the New York Times: On Venice’s Grand Canal in a Kayak.
They helped fleeing Romans evade Attila the Hun and held a glittering city aloft for more than 1,500 years. But [...]
Posted in strange stuff on May 31st, 2008
From The Telegraph: Tokyo homeless woman lived in stranger’s cupboard for a year.
The woman, identified as 58-year-old Tatsuko Horikawa, was found by police searching the home of the man, who believed he lived alone in Fukuoka.
The resident of the house, who has not been named, became suspicious that he was the victim of repeat burglaries [...]
Posted in Italy, history & archaeology on May 29th, 2008
From The Telegraph: Thousand-year-old Lombard warrior skeleton discovered buried with horse in Italy.
Italian archaeologists have discovered a perfectly preserved skeleton of a 1400-year-old Lombard warrior, buried with his horse.
The skeleton, which was found in a park at Testona, near Turin, is of a 25-year-old Lombard who died of a fever. Unusually, his horse was buried [...]
Posted in history & archaeology on May 29th, 2008
From Reuters: Archaeologists find ancient army HQ in Sinai.
Egyptian archaeologists have discovered what they say was the ancient headquarters of the Pharaonic army guarding the northeastern borders of Egypt for more than 1,500 years, the government said on Wednesday.
The fortress and adjoining town, which they identify with the ancient place name Tharu, lies in the [...]
Posted in history & archaeology on May 29th, 2008
From the Beeb: Isolated tribe spotted in Brazil.
One of South America’s few remaining uncontacted indigenous tribes has been spotted and photographed on the border between Brazil and Peru.
The Brazilian government says it took the images to prove the tribe exists and help protect its land.
The pictures, taken from an aeroplane, show red-painted tribe members brandishing [...]
Posted in history & archaeology on May 29th, 2008
From The Telegraph: Rag and bone cup dates to 300BC.
The grandson of a rag and bone man who acquired a small metal cup is in line for a windfall after discovering it is a pure gold vessel dating back to the third or fourth century BC.
The piece could be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.
The [...]
Posted in DNA, history & archaeology on May 29th, 2008
From Authentic Viking DNA Retrieved From 1,000-year-old Skeletons.
Although "Viking" literally means "pirate," recent research has indicated that the Vikings were also traders to the fishmongers of Europe. Stereotypically, these Norsemen are usually pictured wearing a horned helmet but in a new study, Jørgen Dissing and colleagues from the University of Copenhagen, investigated what went [...]
Posted in history & archaeology on May 29th, 2008
From National Geographic: Stonehenge stood as giant tombstones to the dead for centuries, new radiocarbon dating suggests.
The site appears to have been intended as a cemetery from the very start, around 5,000 years ago—centuries before the giant sandstone blocks were erected—the new study says.
New analysis of ancient human remains show that people were buried at [...]
Posted in history & archaeology on May 29th, 2008
From the Jerusalem Post: Will Judean Desert find shed light on Shroud of Turin?.
Can a 6,000-year-old shroud uncovered in the Judean Desert in 1993 help illuminate the centuries-old debate over the Shroud of Turin?
That is the question posed by Olga Negnevitsky, a conservator at the Israel Museum who was involved in the conservation of the [...]
Posted in history & archaeology on May 29th, 2008
From Aftenposten: Ancient coin found near Oslo.
An Islamic coin from 805 AD, found on the Hurum peninsula just west of Oslo, is causing a stir among Norwegian archaeologists.
The silver dirhem, minted in Iran, is one of the earliest examples of coins to turn up in the Nordic countries.
Several other hordes in the area have contained [...]
Posted in DNA, computer stuff on May 29th, 2008
From discovery.com: Bacteria-Run Computer Solves Math Puzzle.
A new living computer, bred from E. coli bacteria instead of stamped from silica, has for the first time successfully solved a classic mathematical puzzle known as the Burnt Pancake Problem.
While this bacteria-based computer is more proof of concept than practical, a living computer might one day solve complex [...]
Posted in food on May 29th, 2008
From the New York Times: A Tiny Fruit That Tricks the Tongue.
Carrie Dashow dropped a large dollop of lemon sorbet into a glass of Guinness, stirred, drank and proclaimed that it tasted like a "chocolate shake."
Nearby, Yuka Yoneda tilted her head back as her boyfriend, Albert Yuen, drizzled Tabasco sauce onto her tongue. She [...]
Posted in environment on May 27th, 2008
From the International Herald Tribune: Sweden turning sewage into a gasoline substitute.
GOTEBORG, Sweden: Taking a road trip? Remember to visit the toilet first. This city is among dozens of municipalities in Sweden with facilities that transform sewage waste into enough biogas to run thousands of cars and buses.
Cars using biogas created a stir when they [...]
Posted in health on May 27th, 2008
From the Washington Post: Scientists test brain pacemakers for depression.
It’s a new frontier for psychiatric illness: Brain pacemakers that promise to act as antidepressants by changing how patients’ nerve circuitry fires.
Scientists already know the power of these devices to block the tremors of Parkinson’s disease and related illnesses; more than 40,000 such patients worldwide have [...]
Posted in history & archaeology on May 27th, 2008
From the Russia InfoCentre: Archeologists Discover Unique Things in Veliki Novgorod.
A group of archeologists carrying out diggings in Veliki Novgorod have found several ancient feeding bottles for babies.
The finds were discovered at the digging site in Mikhailova Street. Here the archeologists found wooden feeding devices made of cow horns. The Slavs used to attach leather [...]
Posted in internet on May 26th, 2008
I don’t look at my web stats very often. Or perhaps it’s better to say I go through phases: forgetting to look at stats for many months at a time, then checking every few days or so, then back to months of ignoring it all. It is interesting to see what the stats software tells [...]
Posted in history & archaeology on May 26th, 2008
From The Independent: Stonehenge builders had geometry skills to rival Pythagoras.
Stone Age Britons had a sophisticated knowledge of geometry to rival Pythagoras — 2,000 years before the Greek "father of numbers" was born, according to a new study of Stonehenge.
Five years of detailed research, carried out by the Oxford University landscape archaeologist Anthony Johnson, claims [...]
Posted in history & archaeology on May 26th, 2008
From Reuters: Briton to recreate first African circumnavigation.
British sailor Philip Beale aims to rewrite a bit of African history by sailing round the continent in a boat built with the same materials he believes the Phoenicians used 2,500 years ago to make the same trip.
Built of Aleppo pine and using wooden dowels to hold it [...]
Posted in science on May 26th, 2008
From ABC News: Five Things Humans No Longer Need.
Vestigial organs are parts of the body that once had a function but are now more-or-less useless. Probably the most famous example is the appendix, though it is now an open question whether the appendix is really vestigial. The idea that we are carrying around useless relics [...]
Posted in history & archaeology on May 26th, 2008
From the Jerusalem Post: Paradeisos found.
It is, as Josephus said, a "paradeisos." The first-century Jewish historian describes it in detail in his Antiquities of the Jews, Book 12, and he gets most of it right. As you leave the sprawling western suburbs of Amman, you enter a desert of few trees and shrubs, and after [...]
Posted in DNA, history & archaeology on May 26th, 2008
From Science Daily: A statistical approach to studying genetic variation promises to shed new light on the history of human migration..
Scientists from the University of Oxford and University College Cork have developed a technique that analyses shared parts of chromosomes across the entire human genome. It can give much finer detail than other methods and [...]
Posted in animals, birds, insects, etc, health on May 26th, 2008
From the New York Times: Comfort Food, for Monkeys.
The ladies who lunch do not obsess about their weight in the rhesus monkey compound at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta. Food is freely available, and the high-status females do not pride themselves on passing it up. (…)
In fact, the dominant females ordinarily eat [...]
Posted in religion, strange stuff on May 26th, 2008
From the BBC: Spanish village holds baby jump.
Grown men have been leaping over rows of babies in the north Spanish village of Castrillo de Murcia in an annual rite meant to ward off the Devil.
Jumpers dressed as the Colacho, a character representing the Devil, bounded over clusters of bemused infants laid out on mattresses. [continue, [...]
Posted in books & lit, history & archaeology, religion on May 24th, 2008
Last December you read about the controversy regarding the translation of the gospel of Judas. Were there serious errors in the translation? Here’s more on that story from The Chronicle: The Betrayal of Judas: Did a ‘dream team’ of biblical scholars mislead millions?
When the Gospel of Judas was unveiled at a news conference in April [...]