Two hundred years ago, Ascension Island was a barren volcanic edifice.

Today, its peaks are covered by lush tropical cloud forest.

What happened in the interim is the amazing story of how the architect of evolution, Kew Gardens and the Royal Navy conspired to build a fully functioning, but totally artificial ecosystem. [continue]

A new book by leading linguists has bolstered a controversial theory that the language of Canada’s Dene Nation is rooted in an ancient Asian tongue spoken today by only a few hundred people in Western Siberia.

The landmark discovery, initially proposed two years ago by U.S. researcher Edward Vajda, represents the only known link between any Old World language and the hundreds of speech systems among First Nations in the Western Hemisphere.

The collection of articles by Vajda and other experts details a multitude of clear connections — nouns, verbs and key grammatical structures — between the language spoken by the Ket people of Russia’s Yenisei River region and dozens of languages used by North American aboriginal groups. [continue]

Anyway, this is grand: the other day the Associated Press quoted text from the woot! blog, and woot! responded this way:

So, The AP, here we are. Just to be fair about this, we’ve used your very own pricing scheme to calculate how much you owe us. By looking through the link above, and comparing your post with our original letter, we’ve figured you owe us roughly $17.50 for the content you borrowed from our blog post, which, by the way, we worked very very hard to create. [continue]

Perfect. Applause to you, Woot!

I think of Norman Lewis as the best travel writer of our times, and in 1995, when a travel magazine asked me to go to England to interview him, I didn’t lose any time getting on the plane. Lewis was then 87 and had just come home from a journey through three of the most hostile regions of Indonesia that concluded with a stay in a Stone Age village in the mountains of New Guinea. I wanted to catch him before he took off again. [continue]

In the 1970s, a group of deaf Nicaraguan schoolchildren invented a new language. The kids were the first to enrol in Nicaragua’s new wave of special education schools. At first, they struggled with the schools’ focus on Spanish and lip-reading, but they found companionship in each other. It was the first time that deaf people from all over the country could gather in large numbers and through their interactions – in the schoolyard and the bus – Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) spontaneously came into being.

NSL is not a direct translation of Spanish – it is a language in its own right, complete with its own grammar and vocabulary. Its child inventors created it naturally by combining and adding to gestures that they had used at home. Gradually, the language became more regular, more complex and faster. Ever since, NSL has been a goldmine for scientists, providing an unparalleled opportunity to study the emergence of a new language. And in a new study led by Jennie Pyers from Wellesley College, it even tells us how language shapes our thought.

By studying children who learned NSL at various stages of its development, Pyers has shown that the vocabulary they pick up affects the way they think. Specifically, those who learned NSL before it developed specific gestures for left and right perform more poorly on a spatial awareness test than children who grew up knowing how to sign those terms.[continue]

(If science in school had been about cake, I would have been a very good student indeed!)

In other news, staying up all night makes you tired.

As Canada prepares to mark the bicentennial of the War of 1812, a historian is urging long-overdue recognition for a virtually unknown hero whose stunning exploits during the pivotal Battle of Stoney Creek, he says, should rank Sgt. Alexander Fraser alongside Isaac Brock and Laura Secord as a saviour of the nation.

James Elliott, an author and journalist from Hamilton, recently published the most comprehensive account so far of the June 1813 battle on the Niagara Peninsula that unexpectedly thwarted the American army’s advance through Upper Canada.

And the crucial moment in Canada’s successful defence, he argues, was a daring charge through the darkness on June 6 — 197 years ago this Sunday — by the bayonet-wielding Fraser. [continue]

(Found here at the Hermeneutic of Continuity.)

Millions of documents stored at the World War II code-breaking centre, Bletchley Park, are set to be digitised and made available online.[continue]

When Jasper Lawrence heard of a radical cure for his allergies, he decided to give it a go: he went to Africa and infected himself with a blood-sucking parasite. Now he’s cured, and he believes hookworm can help people with asthma, diabetes and MS. Only one problem – he’s on the run from the law.[continue]

The compendium of ill thought out web addresses, largely from companies who naively slurred their innocent-sounding names into a single word without noticing the resulting double entendres, lists more than 150 slurls, or slur URLs.

One example of what can go wrong when choosing web addresses is Big Al’s bowling alley in Vancouver, which presumably did not notice when naming its site that I love Big Al’s with spaces removed could equally be read as I love bi gals.

Also included in the list is the Mole Station Nursery, a business in Australia selling gardening goods which adopted the web name molestationnursery before changing it to molerivernursery.

Andy Geldman, author of Slurls: They Called Their Website What? said: In a world without spaces we mentally insert out own. And you might not stick yours where I stick mine.

Among the 150 web pages featuring in the book are [continue]

We’ve all seen it: the photo of a teary-eyed African child, dressed in rags, smothered in flies, with a look of desperation that the caption all too readily points out. Some organization has made a poster that tells you about the realities of poverty, what they are doing about it, and how your donation will change things.

I reacted very strongly to these kinds of photos when I returned from Africa in 2008. I compared these photos to my own memories of Malawian friends and felt lied to. How had these photos failed so spectacularly to capture the intelligence, the laughter, the resilience, and the capabilities of so many incredible people? [continue, see photos]

In the late 1950s, psychologist Milton Rokeach was gripped by an eccentric plan. He gathered three psychiatric patients, each with the delusion that they were Jesus Christ, to live together for two years in Ypsilanti State Hospital to see if their beliefs would change. The early meetings were stormy. You oughta worship me, I’ll tell you that! one of the Christs yelled. I will not worship you! You’re a creature! You better live your own life and wake up to the facts! another snapped back. No two men are Jesus Christs. … I am the Good Lord! the third interjected, barely concealing his anger. [continue]