Zombies: another gift from ancient Egypt?

Is Hierankonpolis the site of the world's oldest recorded zombie attack? Read all about it in Archaeology (think Halloween on the first of April).

Ultimate time capsule

Engineers have begun the two-month process of cooling down a "doomsday vault", which will house seeds from all known varieties of key food crops.

The temperature inside the Svalbard Global Seed Vault will drop to -18C (0F) in order to preserve the seeds.

Built deep inside a mountain, it aims to safeguard the world's crops from future disasters, such as nuclear wars, asteroids or dangerous climate change.

The first seeds are scheduled to arrive at the Arctic site in mid-February.

The Norwegian government is paying the $9m (£4.5m) construction costs of the vault, which will have enough space to house 4.5 million seed samples.

Seems like cheap insurance indeed. Full story here.

Ancient browser

No, not Netscape:

It has been 60 years since French paleontologists found the dinosaur's bones in Saharan Africa, and 10 years since Paul C. Sereno of the University of Chicago began assembling a more complete skeleton. Only now has his team recognized the plant eater's peculiar anatomy and foraging behavior.

The researchers reported yesterday that the dinosaur, named Nigersaurus taqueti, had a short neck, delicate bones and a habitual head posture pointed directly toward the ground. This was a ground-level browser like modern cows.

No cud-chewing, though:

The muzzle itself was odd. In contrast to other plant-eating dinosaurs, this one had more than 50 columns of teeth, all lined up along the jaws' front edges, forming, in effect, foot-long scissors.

The CT scans of the jawbones showed up to nine replacement teeth stacked behind each cutting tooth. When one wore out, another immediately took its place, at a rate, perhaps, of one a month in each column.

From the NY Times. Looks like there will be a much fuller writeup in the December National Geographic.

Traces of the early Spanish explorers found in Georgia?

What a high school girl found in 6 inches of South Georgia dirt last year may help rewrite the history of Europeans' earliest forays into the great, green New World that greeted them half a millennium ago.

The discovery is a glass bead no larger than a pencil eraser. It and four other beads, plus two ancient slivers of iron, may prompt historians to reconsider the presence of Spaniards in Georgia five centuries ago.

Blanton, the museum's curator of Native American archaeology, went looking for the remains of a long-lost Spanish mission near a spot not far from the place where the Ocmulgee and Oconee rivers join in a roil of brown water. He found something a century older.

He wonders if the artifacts may be evidence left by Hernando de Soto, who entered Georgia in 1540 on a three-year trek. Or could they hint of a doomed settlement that has never been found?

Of course, it could just be that these small items ended up there through trade. We'll see what else turns up. Full article here.

More reasons to stay at home

I still love to travel. But getting there? It seems to get worse and worse:

France faces a second day of travel chaos as transport unions continue a strike in protest against President Nicolas Sarkozy's pension reforms. . .

Rail and bus services were crippled on Wednesday, and more than 50,000 people rallied in Paris against the plans. . .

Germany also faces rail disruption in its worst ever transport strike, with only two-thirds of trains running on main lines.

And worse yet:

Video footage has been released in Canada showing the last moments of an immigrant who died after being stunned with a Taser by police.

Robert Dziekanski, 40, of Pieszyce, Poland, was restrained by police after becoming agitated at Vancouver International Airport on 14 October. . .

Mr Dziekanski, a construction worker, was emigrating to Canada to join his mother, who lived in the western province of British Colombia.

And is this really a surprise?

Investigators smuggled liquid explosives and other materials to make improvised bombs past 19 U.S. airport checkpoints in a congressional study that exposed a vulnerability of airlines to terrorist attacks.

The Government Accountability Office, the watchdog arm of Congress, reported that guards employed by the U.S. Transportation Security Administration didn't appear in most cases to violate security procedures when they failed to detect explosives. The procedures were implemented after U.K. authorities foiled a 2006 terrorist plot to smuggle liquid explosives aboard trans-Atlantic airlines bound for the U.S.

Colossus returns

For the first time in more than 60 years a Colossus computer will be cracking codes at Bletchley Park.

The machine is being put through its paces to mark the end of a project to rebuild the pioneering computer.

It will be used to crack messages enciphered using the same system employed by the German high command during World War II.

The Colossus will be pitted against modern PC technology which will also try to read the scrambled messages.

Interestingly enough, the race may be close:

Tony Sale, who led the 14-year Colossus re-build project, said it was not clear whether the wartime technology or a modern PC would be faster at cracking the codes.

"A virtual Colossus written to run on a Pentium 2 laptop takes about the same time to break a cipher as Colossus does," he said.

It was so fast, he said, because it was a single purpose processor rather than one put to many general purposes like modern desktop computers.

From the BBC. More at the Bletchley Park website.

UPDATE: Race results here.

Beer and chocolate

People have been enjoying chocolate for more than 3,000 years—about 500 years earlier than previously believed, according to a new study.

Researchers also think that chocolate was discovered by accident—when Central American Indians making beer from the pulp of cacao seedpods found a new use for a byproduct of that process.

The new findings about chocolate's origins were gleaned from traces of cacao found on pottery fragments dating from about 1100 B.C. to 800 B.C.

Full story in National Geographic.