Making up for the news being late last Monday…
- How humans invented language, the easy way.
- Ancient Babylonian language heard for the first time in 2000 years.
- Did Australian Aborigines reach America first?
- World’s oldest known high-altitude human settlements, dating back up to 49,000 years, have been found sealed in volcanic ash in Papua New Guinea mountains
- Ancient sanctuary dedicated to Mithras discovered in France.
- Stonehenge a monumental attraction since prehistory.
- A Viking Mystery: Beneath Oxford University, archaeologists have uncovered a medieval city that altered the course of English history.
- Dublin’s long-lost Viking sister city finally rediscovered.
- Charles Babbage’s ‘Analytical Engine’ is one of the great inventions that never was — until now?
- Ten peacetime inventions that inadvertently transformed warfare.
- Mankind must turn over a new leaf to save the plants that give the planet life.
- $5 trillion: The cost eact year of vanishing rainforest.
- Microscopic life crucial to the marine food chain is dying out: Global warming blamed for 40 per cent decline in the ocean’s phytoplankton.
- You may not know this, but you can thank phytoplankton for the oxygen in every second breath you take.
- Vanishing world of the Arctic hunters.
- The BP-Spill Baby-Turtle Brigade: How a vast and well-organized group of amateur enthusiasts orchestrated the migration of an entire generation of sea turtles.
- Oceans could contain 750,000 undiscovered species.
- The bubble that separates our sun from the galaxy is surprisingly active.
- Spaced out: Backyard inventors go head-to-head in Google’s $20million competition to fly to the moon.
- Mission launched to search for alien life on the outer fringes of the Earth’s atmosphere.
- Is solar wind the next renewable energy resource?
- Sound can leap across a vacuum after all — in some circumstances.
- Monkeys recognize their own reflections in a mirror, opening a barrel of questions. Video.
- Love (or as my long-lost DM, Eugene, used to call it, inf**ktuation) has a profound effect on the brain.
- Researcher who has found strong evidence that autism is caused by mercury poisoning has been refused access to data that could point to emissions from coal-fired power stations.
- Neurologist proves there is no such thing as a unified mind by thinking entirely with the left hemisphere of his brain.
- Human unconscious transferred to virtual characters.
- Completely restored footage of the 1969 Moon landing to be screened this week. Buzz Aldrin to be the guest of honour.
- Gauging high-speed spin inside a Lilliputian world.
- Cosmic Log: Scrunched-up dimensions untangled.
- One of theses amazing inventions will win the International Dyson Award this week.
- Indian man immune to electrocution.
- Benjamin Franklin: the first paranormal investigator?
- Remember that UFO spotted over Cavendish Mall? News reports now say it’s ‘probably explainable’ — via info in one unverified, anonymous comment about someone flying a kite. Astronomer and UFO studies buff Chris Rutkowski provides a run-down on the rest of Canada’s UFO sightings.
- 2009 Yowie sighting in Canberra – and more – in newly-published Something Is Out There. Oddly enough, this review never mentions the names of the authors.
- Georgia couple and the Hall County Sheriff’s Dept. mystified by twenty cattle mutilations in the past year.
- And the Ig Nobel goes to….
- Data was right: String theorists and particle physicists play a mean hand of poker — a game that’s rife with probabilities and grueling mental calculations.
Thanks, Greg!
Quote of the Day:
Chess is like classical mechanics. Poker is like quantum mechanics. In chess, there is only one right move. In poker, there is a probability distribution of right moves.
String theorist Jeff Harvey
