The last "witch" executed in Western Europe

The last execution for witchcraft took place little more than 200 years ago but campaigners in Switzerland claim it may be time to clear Anna Goeldi's name. . .

Mr Hauser calls Anna's trial and execution "judicial murder". "Educated people here did not believe in witchcraft in 1782," he insists. "Anna Goeldi was a threat to powerful people. They wanted her out of the way, accusing her of being a witch. It was a legal way to kill her."

Anna Goeldi's ordeal remains, in meticulous detail, in the Glarus archives.

From the BBC. This was also written up back in February in the Telegraph.

Denmark's Golden Horns stolen

One of Denmark's national treasures, a set of two horns made in the 1800s, was stolen in the early hours of Monday, Danish police said.

Called "Guldhornene" in Danish, or the Golden Horns, the pieces are silver replicas of two original gold horns made in 400 A.D. which were stolen in 1802 and destroyed.

The replicas, with a thin gold coating, were on loan from the National Museum of Denmark for an exhibit in Jelling, near the central Danish town of Vejle, when they were stolen by thieves who smashed a display case.

Full story here. Fortunately, the horns were quickly recovered, though details of the recovery are still scarce. Wikipedia article on the Guldhornene here (in Danish) and here (in English).

Australopithecus, go home!

New York may love Lucy, but don't expect a visit anytime soon.

The 3.2 million-year-old skeleton had never been seen outside Ethiopia until last month in a Houston Museum of Natural Science exhibit, and the museum had hoped to take her on a national tour.

But museums nationwide have turned a paleontological cold shoulder. "We simply . . . would not . . . become involved," said Randall Kremer, a spokesman for the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian in Washington.

Kudos to all the museums who have not caved into sacrificing responsible science for the quick buck. I wish art museums showed the same level of responsibility.

Houston museum officials have vowed to take every precaution against damage and theft, but other experts say sending Lucy's loose bones halfway around the world was reckless to begin with.

"[She's] too fragile to travel," Kremer said.

And what's the point of this sideshow, anyway? It all strikes me as a secular equivalent to viewing holy relics -- though the Church doesn't do much sending around of saints' bones any more, and with especially fragile relics, they are often publicly exhibited only at extremely long intervals.

Saliera back, Kunsthistorisches Museum director out

Culture Minister Claudia Schmied said in a statement that Wilfried Seipel's contract would not be extended when it expires on Dec. 31, 2008. She said the search for a successor would begin in October or November.

Although Schmied praised Seipel for his 17-year leadership of Austria's most renowned gallery — known in German as the Kunsthistoriches Museum — he has been fiercely criticized for lax security that authorities say the thief easily exploited.

Full article here. Ignore the embarrassingly mistaken description of the Saliera as "a figurine" and as "gold plated".

Revenge of the terracotta warriors

Another case of no good discovery going unpunished:

Before his lonely suicide . . . Wang's life was far from unremarkable. He was one of a seven-strong team of workers who, while digging a well on their communal farm in 1974, stumbled across the most priceless archaeological discovery of modern times - the 2,200 year-old Terracotta Warriors.

It is a discovery that has brought tens of millions of foreign tourists to Xian in north-western China and made many businessmen and, it is claimed, local officials extremely rich. But for the farmers who found the buried army and the ancient village they grew up in, the warriors have proved more a curse than a blessing.

As the biggest ever overseas exhibition of the Terracotta Warriors began at the British Museum last week, we tracked down the surviving men who discovered the stone soldiers and found them bewildered at the greed and destruction the warriors brought to the surface with them.

Their farmland has been claimed by the government, stripping them of their livelihoods, their homes and those of their neighbours were demolished with little or no compensation to make way for exhibition halls, parking lots and gift shops - and their village with its 2,000 year history has all but disappeared.

From the Bangkok Post.

How was the weather?

"Jan. 11 was so frightfully cold that all of the communion wine froze," says an entry from 1684 by Brother Josef Dietrich, governor and "weatherman" of the once-powerful Einsiedeln Monastery. "Since I've been an ordained priest, the sacrament has never frozen in the chalice."

"But on Jan. 13 it got even worse and one could say it has never been so cold in human memory," he adds.

Diaries of day-to-day weather details from the age before 19th-century standardized thermometers are proving of great value to scientists who study today's climate. Historical accounts were once largely ignored, as they were thought to be fraught with inaccuracy or were simply inaccessible or illegible. But the booming interest in climate change has transformed the study of ancient weather records from what was once a "wallflower science," says Christian Pfister, a climate historian at the University of Bern.

From Discovery News. Tracking climate change is of course the prime motivator here, but what is also interesting is the changing variability of the weather:

Brother Konrad Hinder, the current weatherman at Einsiedeln and an avid reader of Dietrich's diaries, says his predecessor's precise accounts of everything from yellow fog to avalanches provide historical context.

"We know from Josef Dietrich that the extremes were very big during his time. There were very cold winters and very mild winters, very wet summers and very dry summers," he says, adding that the range of weather extremes has been smaller in the 40 years he has recorded data for the Swiss national weather service.

Look ma, no palette

Leonardo da Vinci did not mix colors on a palette, but directly on the canvas he was painting, Italian researchers have found.

The discovery occurred when one of the Renaissance master's artworks was bombarded with a narrow beam of high-energy ions.

Presented at Ecaart 2007, an international conference running in Florence, Italy, until September 7, the study decodes for the first time Leonardo's painting technique.

From Discovery News, whose editors didn't catch that the painting analyzed, the Madonna of the Yarnwinder, is on panel, not canvas, and that it is not clear which of the versions extant is autograph. In fact, the best-known version is still missing, having been stolen in 2003 in Scotland.

Bilingualism vs dementia? Ein Augenblick, bitte

For years, studies have attempted to demonstrate that "use it or lose it" is a factor in forestalling senile dementia -- most, to my knowledge, with little success. Now we read this:

Being fluent in two languages may help to keep the brain sharper for longer, a study suggests.

Researchers from York University in Canada carried out tests on 104 people between the ages of 30 and 88. They found that those who were fluent in two languages rather than just one were sharper mentally.

Writing in the journal of Psychology and Ageing, they said being bilingual may protect against mental decline in old age.

Nice try, but read this:

Half of the volunteers came from Canada and spoke only English. The other half came from India and were fluent in both English and Tamil.

So they used two very different groups, completely invalidating the comparison. You'd think a Canadian team would have made better use of the fine pool of bilingual volunteers closer to home.

The volunteers had similar backgrounds in the sense that they were all educated to degree level and were all middle class.

Similar? Look up the percentage of the population educated to degree level in Canada and in India, as well as the percentage qualifying as "middle class". Individuals meeting those standards in Canada are average; in India, anything but. The study is obviously meaningless, but will undoubtedly be taken up as gospel by those who don't read past the headlines.

Not made in China

Anyone immersed in the world of kids in recent years cannot but have remarked on how everything, everywhere, seems to come from China. Vacationing in Europe, you visit local toy stores to bring back something a bit different, and it's all the same products, all from you-know-where. The exceptions are few enough that they really stand out -- three notables being Playmobil, Lego, and Ravensburger, profiled in a New York Times article today. But surprise, surprise: Playmobil's products are not lead-free:

Playmobil's medieval knights and Roman warriors are coated with shiny paint -- brilliant reds, jaunty yellows and such -- which Ms. Schauer said contained lead, albeit well below levels hazardous to children. To ensure the safety of its coating process, she said, Playmobil kept close watch over its manufacturing process.

And is this the case elsewhere, too?

Ms. Schauer said Playmobil, a family-owned company in Zirndorf, Germany, faced intense pressure to move production to China. Most of the industry was moving there, she said, and German banks did not want to lend money to companies to build toy factories at home.

What the companies discovered, though, was while China's unit labor costs were a fraction of those in the West -- the equivalent of $1.50 an hour compared with $30 an hour in western Germany -- the distance between China and the companies' biggest markets eroded some of that cost advantage.

It takes some pretty major inefficiencies to offset such a vast wage differential -- but those inefficiencies, which clearly go beyond the distances involved, are exactly what allow the quality control problems that have landed made in China products in the spotlight recently.

Exploding toads

Toads in an area of northern Germany are being killed off by a mysterious disease - they are exploding.

Thousands of the amphibians have died in recent days in a pond in Hamburg's Altona district, with their bodies swelling to bursting point.

The toads' entrails are propelled for up to a metre (3.2ft), in scenes that have been likened to science fiction.

From the BBC.

Rostropovich auction bought outright

A Russian billionaire has paid more than £20m for an art collection owned by late cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, days before it was due to be auctioned.

Alisher Usmanov, a mining and metals magnate and Arsenal Football Club investor, said he stepped in to keep the 450 artworks together in Russia.

Sotheby's has cancelled its London auction, where the items were due to be sold individually later this week.

From the BBC.

Yale yields to Peru

Yale University has agreed to return to Peru thousands of Inca relics that were excavated at Machu Picchu from 1911-15 by a history professor, Hiram Bingham.

Peru demanded the artefacts back last year, saying it agreed to their removal on condition they would be returned.

More than 4,000 pieces, including mummies, ceramics and bones were taken to the US university.

Under the agreement Yale and Peru will co-sponsor the first travelling expedition of the collection.

From the BBC.

Further news on Peruvian archeology here:

Douglas Eugene "Gene" Savoy, an explorer who discovered more than 40 lost cities in Peru and led long-distance sailing adventures to learn more about ancient cultures, has died. He was 80.

Savoy died of natural causes Tuesday at his Reno home, his family said Saturday.

Dubbed the "real Indiana Jones" by People magazine, Savoy was credited with finding four of Peru's most important archaeological sites, including Vilcabamba, the last refuge of the Incas from the Spanish Conquistadors.