Neanderthal Park?

Researchers in Germany said Thursday that they planned to collaborate with an American company in an effort to reconstruct the genome of Neanderthals, the archaic human species that occupied Europe from 300,000 years ago to 30,000 years ago until being displaced by modern humans.

Long a forlorn hope, the sequencing, or decoding, of Neanderthal DNA suddenly seems possible because of a combination of analytic work on ancient DNA by Svante Paabo, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and a new method of DNA sequencing developed by a Connecticut company, 454 Life Sciences.

This still isn't going to be easy. Read about it in the NY Times.

Precious aluminum

From the A Little Knowledge department:

Many collectors and dealers are well aware that aluminum is a relatively new metal, and that when first produced, it was considered precious -- more precious, even, than gold. Many fewer, however, are clear on exactly when aluminum became cheap and plentiful -- leading to rather drastic misinterpretations of the original value and nature of early 20th-century aluminum objects.

A bit of digging turned up some good basic aluminum history (links here and here), which incidentally also provide a bit of background on why US usage is "aluminum" while most of the rest of the world prefers "aluminium".

Perhaps the most useful references I found, however, had to do with the famous aluminum capstone of the Washington Monument, in particular George J. Binczewski's "The Point of a Monument: A History of the Aluminum Cap of the Washington Monument", and especially the sidebar entitled "Aluminum's Status in the Mid-1880s". Also of interest is this article on the use of corundum crystals for the capstone, other forms of naturally-occurring aluminum being of insufficient purity.

One of the best short summaries comes from the USGS, in .pdf form; the key excerpt runs as follows:

As late as the early 1880’s, it was considered to be a semiprecious metal and was sold in troy-ounce quantities; the retail price of aluminum metal was reported to be higher than that of silver. A commercially viable large-scale production method had yet to be developed. Domestic production levels during this period were in the 1,000- to 3,000-troy-ounce range, and many uses were considered to be experimental (Mining Engineering, 1987).

In 1886, formal patent applications were filed for the electrolytic reduction process for aluminum. This process, which came to be known as the Hall-Heroult process, led to the mass commercial production of aluminum metal. As the process was developed and refined, production levels increased rapidly. By 1895, domestic production levels had reached 1 million pounds. As production levels continued to increase, domestic producers kept the price of aluminum low to encourage its use by consumers. In the early 1900’s, they held aluminum metal prices at a low steady level to compete against copper in the electrical industry (U.S. Department of Commerce, 1956, p. II.1-II.4).

Some further bits and pieces turned up along the way:

The widespread tale that Pliny describes something suspiciously aluminum-like in antiquity is a fraud: in the words of Laputan Logic,

. . . a carefully constructed myth that was promulgated by Napoleon's very own aluminium guy, Henri-Étienne Sainte-Claire Deville, the man founded the world's first commercial aluminium process with the generous support of the Emperor.

For more reliable aluminum history, I am in the process of getting my hands on a copy of the exhibition catalog, Aluminum by Design: Jewelry to Jets; a couple of the essays appear to be reprinted online here and here.

"Racist" Anglo-Saxons

Do we really need this kind of needlessly inflammatory presentation? It would seem to say as much about the researchers' prejudices as their results:

'Apartheid' slashed Celtic genes in early England

A system of racial segregation imposed by early Anglo-Saxon invaders in England may have massively boosted the breeding of the Germanic interlopers, much to the detriment of the native Celtic race, researchers claim in a new study.

This from New Scientist; elsewhere it is even worse:

Anglo Saxons were the first apartheid racists who enforced ethnic segregation and discrimination and which eventually caused the disappearance of native Britons, new scientific research reveals.

The study in question would appear to be a theory spun in order to explain the genetic makeup of present-day England -- a theory based more on genetics than on historical evidence, and by no means the only possible explanation of why the Anglo-Saxons outbred the native Britons. As the New Scientist article notes:

In Kenya, for example, researchers have found a four-fold difference in birth rate between high and low-status nomadic Gabbra pastoralists.

As usual, take a look at Dienekes' Anthropology Blog for a more measured view -- don't skip the comments.

Exhuming a castrato

Scientists have exhumed the body of the legendary 18th-century opera singer Farinelli to learn more about the castrati, male singers neutered in childhood to preserve their high-pitched voices.

Farinelli was the most popular and best-paid opera singer in Europe before his death in 1782. His remains were exhumed Wednesday from the historic Certosa cemetery in Bologna, said musicologist Carlo Vitali, a founder of the Farinelli Studies Center.

Read the rest here.

Smith & Wesson museum opens to public

It's been open for a bit over a year to groups, by appointment only. Now it's open to all -- press release here.

Fireship excavation

A team of divers from the University of Bristol is to investigate the wreck of a fireship which sank off the Isles of Scilly nearly 300 years ago. . .

The tragedy, which cost the lives of 1,500 Royal Navy seamen, sparked the competition for the 'discovery of longitude' and resulted in the design of the Harrison chronometer.

From the BBC.

Mortality rates among the tyrannosaurs

"Survivorship stabilized at between two and four percent per year, until midlife, at which point they went through an honest-to-God midlife crisis," Gregory M. Erickson, who teaches comparative anatomy at Florida State University, said in a telephone interview.

Crisis in this case entailing not angst but annihilation.

His team studied the remains of several species of North American tyrannosaur, including Albertosaurus, Tyrannosaurus, Gorgosaurus and Daspletosaurus. The researchers used growth rings in bones to calculate the mortality rates for the animals over their lifetimes.

Erickson concluded that mortality could be high for youngsters, because some didn't have much resistance to disease and because of predators. . .

But after about age two, some 70 percent survived to reach sexual maturity — between 13 and 16, when mortality increased to 23 percent a year. Tyrannosaur lifespans reached to the late 20s and early 30s.

Read the rest at Discovery News.

Conflicts of interest at the Tate

Buying artworks by and from members of its board of trustees? Seems pretty obviously problematical. Director Nicholas Serota calls it "a general oversight". More at the BBC.

FURTHER writeups in the NY Times and the Times of London. The NYT article notes that "the Tate had been acquiring works from artist-trustees since 1959 and had been unaware of the requirement to seek permission for doing so until last year" -- which leaves one wondering if the blindness is just the Tate's, or something endemic to the art world.

Museum admission fees

Posting has slowed with the heat of summer, but I would be remiss in not mentioning the flap over the Metropolitan Museum of Art's decision to raise its suggested admission fee to $20. At least this will still remain suggested, however -- unlike some other NYC museums' admission charges.

Further reading and links on the issue here and here.