In the middle of a terrifying desert north of Tibet, Chinese archaeologists have excavated an extraordinary cemetery. Its inhabitants died almost 4,000 years ago, yet their bodies have been well preserved by the dry air.From the NY Times.The cemetery lies in what is now China’s northwest autonomous region of Xinjiang, yet the people have European features, with brown hair and long noses. Their remains, though lying in one of the world’s largest deserts, are buried in upside-down boats. And where tombstones might stand, declaring pious hope for some god’s mercy in the afterlife, their cemetery sports instead a vigorous forest of phallic symbols, signaling an intense interest in the pleasures or utility of procreation.
Posted March 17, 2010 9:11 AM | Link here
A vase thought to have belonged to an 18th Century Chinese emperor turned up an auction in rural Ireland earlier this month and sold for more than 70 times its asking price.And if the item is right, it will likely be resold at auction in Hong Kong for several times what it went for in Ireland. Full article here.The 12-inch tall blue and white porcelain vase had an asking price of just $200, but caught the attention of two top international antique collectors from China and England. Both saw it online and, recognizing it as an authentic vase from Imperial China, flew in especially for the auction in Durrow, a small town in the Irish midlands with a population of just over 1,000 people.
After an opening bid of just $70, dealers Rong Chen and Richard Peters got into a bidding war to the astonishment of those present. Bids jumped in an intense frenzy of hundreds and thousands of euro at a time. Peters, who was seated, bid by nodding discreetly, while Chen stood as she took instructions on a mobile phone from her husband.
Peters, above, won the auction at a final price of $150,000 over Chen, who later said she had been told by her husband to drop out at $135,000. Afterwards, 48-year-old Peters insisted: “I got a bargain.”
Posted March 14, 2010 10:48 PM | Link here
For nearly a year, a middle-aged woman from suburban Philadelphia used her computer to fashion a new, frightening identity, federal court documents say.Let's get this straight: in less than a year, this woman, with no special background, training, or qualifications, (allegedly) managed to convince real terrorists that she was one of them -- all from the comfort (and anonymity) of her own suburban home.The stream of Internet messages in which she sought assistance to wage violent jihad in Asia and Europe literally transformed her, the documents allege, from 46-year-old Colleen LaRose to "Jihad Jane."
I sincerely hope our counterterrorism agents are no less efficient and intrepid.
From USA Today.
Posted March 11, 2010 1:20 PM | Link here
The Italian government has signed a deal with Google to put the contents of two national libraries on the internet.From the BBC.Up to one million antiquarian books - including works by Dante, Machiavelli and Galileo - will be scanned and made available free on Google Books.
There is no copyright issue as all the works were published before 1868.
The Italian authorities welcomed the scheme as budget pressures have cut the amount that can be spent on preserving the collections in Rome and Florence.
Posted March 10, 2010 9:31 PM | Link here
Researchers have produced a mobile phone that could be a boon for prying bosses wanting to keep tabs on the movements of their staff.Not clear if it's the phone or the software that's the key technology here. Some form of this could work with any phone with iPhone-type motion sensors -- though it sounds as if something even more intrusive is intended:Japanese phone giant KDDI Corporation has developed technology that tracks even the tiniest movement of the user and beams the information back to HQ.
It works by analysing the movement of accelerometers, found in many handsets.
Activities such as walking, climbing stairs or even cleaning can be identified, the researchers say.
. . . the KDDI mobile phone strapped to a cleaning worker's waist can tell the difference between actions performed such as scrubbing, sweeping, walking an even emptying a rubbish binBut assuming that the company monitoring its employees so closely would then have to require them to wear the phones, why bother with the phone at all, and just have done with it and have them wear electronic slave collars?
It is not the first time remote spying technology has been enlisted by employers to keep an eye on their workforce in Japan or elsewhere.Full article here.Lorry drivers are regularly monitored through mobile phones in Japan, while salespeople have been regularly tracked by their employers using GPS since it was introduced to Japanese mobiles in 2002.
Posted March 10, 2010 10:03 AM | Link here
A dozen centuries-old shipwrecks — some of them unusually well-preserved — have been found in the Baltic Sea by a gas company building an underwater pipeline between Russia and Germany.From the Associated Press. Also noted:The oldest wreck probably dates back to medieval times and could be up to 800 years old, while the others are likely from the 17th to 19th centuries, Peter Norman of Sweden's National Heritage Board said Tuesday.
"They could be interesting, but we have only seen pictures of their exterior. Many of them are considered to be fully intact. They look very well-preserved," Norman told The Associated Press.
Thousands of wrecks — from medieval ships to warships sunk during the world wars of the 20th century — have been found in the Baltic Sea, which doesn't have the ship worm that destroys wooden wrecks in saltier oceans.
The Nord Stream project, in which Russia's OAO Gazprom holds a 51 percent stake, has uncovered scores of other objects during seabed searches of the route, including about 80 sea mines and a washing machine, she said.
Posted March 10, 2010 9:48 AM | Link here
Researchers have found that eggshells of extinct bird species are a rich source of preserved DNA.From the BBC.An international team isolated the delicate DNA molecules of species including the massive "elephant birds" of the genus Aepyorni. . .
"Researchers have tried unsuccessfully to isolate DNA from a fossil eggshell for years," said Charlotte Oskam at Murdoch University in Western Australia, who authored the research.
"It just turned out that they were using a method designed for bone that was not suitable for a fossil eggshell."
Posted March 10, 2010 9:24 AM | Link here
Summer 1937. What could be more fitting in the cool afternoon of an English country lane than a group of cycling tourists steadily pedalling their way from one historic site to another, stopping to camp overnight in fields along the way.Full article here.The only problem was, that summer, some of those groups of teenage boys were Hitler Youth.
In an era without satellite photography, when detailed ordnance survey maps could be hard to come by and when tension in Europe was rising, MI5 were worried that this innocent cyclo-tourism was a cover for spying.
Posted March 8, 2010 11:17 AM | Link here
It was bad enough in phone-banking days when banks and credit card companies asked for one's mother's maiden name as a so-called security measure, but why re-embrace such easily-guessed queries nowadays -- where a simple genealogical search can find most people's family members in an instant, and Facebook is likely to reveal many of the other "secrets" the online gatekeepers are relying upon?
The BBC has an article today on yet another study demonstrating this obvious security hole, the focus in this case on webmail:
A study has shown how easy it is to guess the answer to common questions, such as someone's mother's maiden name.A good strong password should be all you need. The problem is in providing a convenient backdoor for those who forget their passwords. What ticks me off is that this backdoor has been so generally adopted, and with no opt-out option. So instead of having to store one strong password (securely, mind you -- using the absolutely free Password Safe, and keeping encrypted backups), I effectively have to manage four: one for each inane "secret" -- first pet, favorite teacher, school mascot -- each of which is necessarily a long, random string of letters (and numbers and characters, where accepted).It found attackers will be able to break into 1 in 80 accounts if they get three chances to guess answers. . .
In the case of many e-mail providers, they can be used to overwrite an existing password without knowing what it is. . .
One study by researchers from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon looked at how easy it was for friends and family members to guess answers to security questions. They found that 17% of the answers could be guessed by those who knew a target.
Posted March 8, 2010 10:52 AM | Link here
If not Giant Squid, at least very big squid:
In what could be the ultimate marine smack-down, great white sharks off the California coast may be migrating 1,600 miles west to do battle with creatures that rival their star power: giant squids.Full article here.A series of studies tracking this mysterious migration has scientists rethinking not just what the big shark does with its time but also what sort of creature it is. . .
For more reserved scientists, the possible link between sharks and squid, suggested by marine ecologist Michael Domeier of the Marine Conservation Science Institute in Fallbrook, is just one part of emerging research that has altered their understanding of the great whites. . .
Domeier said he believes the animals "are not a coastal shark that comes out to the middle of the ocean. They are an ocean shark that comes to the coast. It is a complete flip-flop."
Picture them not as a dorsal fin off the beach but rather as an unseen leviathan swimming through black depths where the oxygen thins and fish glow in the dark, and maybe pouncing on a 30-foot squid.
Posted March 7, 2010 8:12 AM | Link here
It was the Great Train Robbery of French intellectual life: thousands of treasured documents that vanished from the Institut de France in the mid-1800s, stolen by an Italian mathematician. Among them were 72 letters by René Descartes, the founding genius of modern philosophy and analytic geometry.An honorable but, sadly, exceptional response.Now one of those purloined letters has turned up at a small private college in eastern Pennsylvania, providing scholars with another keyhole into one of the Western world’s greatest minds. . .
As soon as Haverford’s president, Stephen G. Emerson, understood the letter’s history, he contacted the Institut de France (coincidentally on Feb. 11, the anniversary of Descartes’ death in 1650) and offered to return the item. “I was frankly shocked because I didn’t know we had the letter at all,” said Mr. Emerson, who was a philosophy major in college. “But it’s really not ours.”
Gabriel de Broglie, chancellor of the Institut de France . . . awarded Haverford a prize of 15,000 euros (slightly more than $20,000), writing to Mr. Emerson that the offer “honors you and exemplifies the depth of moral values that you instill in your students.”From the NY Times.France has recovered only 45 of the 72 stolen Descartes letters, Mr. de Broglie explained. One was offered at an auction in Switzerland in 2006 and 2009. “After I protested vociferously and publicly on both occasions in the name of the Institut, the letter didn’t find a buyer,” Mr. de Broglie wrote, “but it proved impossible for us to raise the very large sum that the seller demanded, and even though it can’t be sold, this 1638 letter remains in private hands.”
Posted March 6, 2010 9:57 PM | Link here
This has been written up before, but here's yet another article:
In many ways, the Lemba tribe of Zimbabwe and South Africa are just like their neighbours.From the BBC.But in other ways their customs are remarkably similar to Jewish ones.
They do not eat pork, they practise male circumcision, they ritually slaughter their animals, some of their men wear skull caps and they put the Star of David on their gravestones.
Their oral traditions claim that their ancestors were Jews who fled the Holy Land about 2,500 years ago.
It may sound like another myth of a lost tribe of Israel, but British scientists have carried out DNA tests which confirm their Semitic origin.
Posted March 6, 2010 9:57 AM | Link here
Scientists have discovered a dinosaur-like creature 10 million years older than the earliest known dinosaurs.From the BBC.Asilisaurus kongwe is a newly discovered herbivore that lived during the middle Triassic period - about 245 million years ago.
The scientists say that its age suggests that dinosaurs were also on the Earth earlier than previously thought.
Posted March 3, 2010 9:40 PM | Link here
Scientists say they have identified the fossilised remains of a snake that dined on dinosaur eggs.Full article here.The 67-million-year-old skeleton was found in a dinosaur nest.
The study, published in the journal Plos One, is said to show the first direct evidence of feeding behaviour in a fossilised primitive snake.
This 3.5m fossil snake is believed to have fed on the hatchlings of sauropods, as it was found wrapped around a baby titanosaur.
Posted March 2, 2010 9:13 PM | Link here
A comic showing the debut of superhero Batman has been sold for more than $1m (£655,000) at an auction in Dallas.The seller apparently bought the record-breaking copy for $100 in the 1960s. From the BBC.The rare 1939 copy of Detective Comic No 27 was bought by an anonymous bidder from a seller who also wished to keep their identity secret.
The sale comes just days after an early edition of a Superman comic sold for $1m - only to be outdone by Batman.
Posted February 26, 2010 10:32 AM | Link here
The fossilised remains of a gigantic 10m-long predatory shark have been unearthed in Kansas, US.Full article here.Scientists dug up a gigantic jawbone, teeth and scales belonging to the shark which lived 89 million years ago.
The bottom-dwelling predator had huge tooth plates, which it likely used to crush large shelled animals such as giant clams.
Palaeontologists already knew about the shark, but the new specimen suggests it was far bigger than previously thought.
The scientists who made the discovery, published in the journal Cretaceous Research, last week also released details of other newly discovered giant plankton-eating fish that swam in prehistoric seas for more than 100 million years.
Posted February 24, 2010 9:12 PM | Link here
A horrifying episode from Prohibition, yet virtually forgotten:
Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.From Slate.Although mostly forgotten today, the "chemist's war of Prohibition" remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was "our national experiment in extermination."
As a side note, I was recently studying up on denatured alcohol. Interestingly enough, the "denaturing" process is quite different in the USA and other countries, such as the UK. In the USA, color isn't added, which would seem to increase the danger of unintended ingestion. Nor, apparently, anything that gives the stuff an awful taste -- another safety measure. What I was actually looking for, however, was any exemption for industrial or workshop applications where the addition of the usual denaturing ingredients -- methanol, in particular -- might be problematical. Couldn't find any, so it appears any craftsman wanting to use pure ethanol has to pay the Federal booze excise tax on the stuff (and I do know several fine woodworkers who do just that).
Posted February 22, 2010 11:01 AM | Link here
A new book about the atomic destruction of Hiroshima has won critical acclaim with its heartbreaking portrayals of the bomb’s survivors and is set to be made into a movie by James Cameron.Corrections have been promised, yet once bad history is widely broadcast, it can take years to undo the damage. At least here action is being taken promptly; the author appears to be conscientious, and genuinely taken aback. Another illustration of the maxim that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proofs. From the NY Times.“The Last Train from Hiroshima,” published in January by Henry Holt, also claims to reveal a secret accident with the atom bomb that killed one American and irradiated others and greatly reduced the weapon’s destructive power.
There is just one problem. That section of the book and other technical details of the mission are based on the recollections of Joseph Fuoco, who is described as a last-minute substitute on one of the two observation planes that escorted the Enola Gay.
But Mr. Fuoco, who died in 2008 at age 84 and lived in Westbury, N.Y., never flew on the bombing run, and he never substituted for James R. Corliss, the plane’s regular flight engineer, Mr. Corliss’s family says. They, along with angry ranks of scientists, historians and veterans, are denouncing the book and calling Mr. Fuoco an impostor.
Facing a national outcry and the Corliss family’s evidence, the author, Charles Pellegrino, now concedes that he was probably duped.
Posted February 22, 2010 8:58 AM | Link here
On the day of the collision last month, visibility was good. The sidewalk was not under repair. As she walked, Tiffany Briggs, 25, was talking to her grandmother on her cellphone, lost in conversation.From the NY Times.Very lost.
“I ran into a truck,” Ms. Briggs said.
It was parked in a driveway.
Distracted driving has gained much attention lately because of the inflated crash risk posed by drivers using cellphones to talk and text.
But there is another growing problem caused by lower-stakes multitasking — distracted walking — which combines a pedestrian, an electronic device and an unseen crack in the sidewalk, the pole of a stop sign, a toy left on the living room floor or a parked (or sometimes moving) car.
Posted February 21, 2010 9:45 PM | Link here
Early humans, possibly even prehuman ancestors, appear to have been going to sea much longer than anyone had ever suspected.From the NY Times. What is not entirely clear here, however, is if there is definitive evidence of ongoing travel between Crete and the mainland, or if it is possible that the finds can be explained by a one-time settlement by castaways carried to Crete by some storm.That is the startling implication of discoveries made the last two summers on the Greek island of Crete. Stone tools found there, archaeologists say, are at least 130,000 years old, which is considered strong evidence for the earliest known seafaring in the Mediterranean and cause for rethinking the maritime capabilities of prehuman cultures.
Posted February 21, 2010 9:40 PM | Link here
It seems so simple -- can the results be replicated on a large scale?
The largest ever trial to find a treatment for potentially fatal peanut allergies is to give sufferers tiny amounts daily to build up tolerance.From the BBC.Cambridge University researchers will give increasing doses of peanut flour to 104 British children, up to the equivalent of five nuts a day.
Twenty out of 23 sufferers in an earlier study became able to eat more than 30 peanuts safely.
Posted February 21, 2010 9:38 PM | Link here
At least 41 people have been killed and 80 more injured after a minaret collapsed at a mosque in northern Morocco.From Aljazeera.net. News reports indicate the minaret was around 400 years old.The Lalla Khenata mosque minaret in the Bab el Bardiyine neighbourhood of Meknes collapsed during Friday's prayers, burying most of the 300 worshippers gathered there.
Interior ministry officials blamed the incident on heavy rain that had weakened the minaret. . .
Angry residents accused authorities of ignoring warnings about the dilapidated state of the mosque.
"We told them many times before that there were widening cracks on the walls and that its minaret had begun tipping over but they ignored the warning," one man, who gave his name only as Mohammed, was quoted by the Reuters news agency as saying.
Posted February 20, 2010 11:06 AM | Link here
Scientists have analysed the DNA of ancient giant European wild cattle that died out almost 400 years ago.From the BBC. Wikipedia entry on aurochs here, with more on attempts to bring back the aurochs here.They have determined the first mitochondrial genome sequence from aurochs (Bos primigenius) from bone found in a cave in England. . .
Dr Edwards said a project was now under way to sequence and assemble a complete aurochs nuclear genome by the end of the year. . .
The species became extinct when a female animal died in a forest in Poland in 1627.
Posted February 17, 2010 10:46 AM | Link here
Scientists in China say they have discovered more than 3,000 dinosaur footprints, all facing the same way.From the BBC.The footprints - thought to belong to at least six dinosaur types - were found in eastern Shandong province, state news agency Xinhua reports.
Experts believe the prints are more than 100 million years old and say they could represent a migration or a panicked attempt to escape predators.
Posted February 6, 2010 8:39 PM | Link here
In their quest for concision, writers of newspaper headlines are, like Robert Browning, inveterate sweepers away of little words, and the dust they kick up can lead to some amusing ambiguities. Legendary headlines from years past (some of which verge on the mythical) include “Giant Waves Down Queen Mary’s Funnel,” “MacArthur Flies Back to Front” and “Eighth Army Push Bottles Up Germans.” The Columbia Journalism Review even published two anthologies of ambiguous headlinese in the 1980s, with the classic titles “Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim” and “Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge.”From the NY Times. Gotta get those anthologies, but it looks as if they are out of print and not cheap!
Two other classics from the article: “McDonald’s Fries the Holy Grail for Potato Farmers" and "British Left Waffles on Falklands".
Posted February 6, 2010 10:29 AM | Link here
The CNN writeup is more balanced, but the BBC's better highlights the outrageousness of the underlying issues:
The Australian band Men at Work are facing a big legal bill after a court ruled it had plagiarised a Girl Guides' song in its 1983 hit, Down Under."Stolen" and "plagiarized" clearly do not apply here. What has the world come to, when you are not allowed to make a quick bow to an iconic and now-traditional Australian melody in a song about being Australian? This was just a quick riff, an allusion and tribute of the sort that has enriched music since time immemorial. But now that tip of the hat is being repaid with lawsuits, leaving everyone the poorer.Larrikin Music had claimed the flute riff from was stolen from Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree, written by Marion Sinclair in 1934.
The federal court in Sydney ordered compensation to be paid.The decision is bad enough, but 60% would be an outrage. This isn't a case involving the central melody, or any lyrics.That amount has yet to be determined but Larrikin's lawyer said it could reach 60% of income from the song.
"It's a big win for the underdog," said Larrikin's lawyer Adam Simpson after the judgment.That's pretty rich.
Sinclair, who died in 1988, wrote the song for performance at a Girl Guides Jamboree in 1935.And American, as well. Wonder if they'll be trying to collect royalties from the kids next.Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree has since been sung by generations of Australian schoolchildren.
Posted February 4, 2010 9:13 AM | Link here
A life-size bronze sculpture of a man by Alberto Giacometti has been sold at auction in London for the world record price of £65,001,250.From the BBC.It took just eight minutes for bidders to reach the hammer price after L'Homme Qui Marche I opened at £12m at Sotheby's auction house.
Sotheby's said it was the most expensive work ever sold at auction. . .
Gustav Klimt's Kirche in Cassone went for £26,921,250, above the £12m to £18m estimate.
Posted February 4, 2010 8:53 AM | Link here
Inspired by Hollywood cowboy films, researchers have delved into the science of gun fights.This is not at all surprising. When reacting, it is easy to focus entirely on reacting, and an external "go" signal provides a clean, sharply defined trigger. By comparison, initiating an action on ones own is mushy: having to decide for oneself when to move means waiting for an internal decision that is usually more of a process than a clear-cut yes/no.Scientists discovered that people move faster when reacting to something than when they perform "planned actions".
Those who reacted to their opponent were on average 21 milliseconds faster than those who initiated the movement.Although some feeds misstate the fact, action still beats reaction:
Dr Welchman explained that it took around 200 milliseconds to respond to what an opponent was doing, so, in a gunfight, the 21 millisecond reactionary advantage would be unlikely to save you.A problem with the study as pertains to combat, however, is the use of untrained subjects. Boxers, fencers, martial artists, all train (or should train) to be able to initiate attacking movements swiftly and crisply. It's not an easy skill to develop: as noted above, the natural tendency is to mushiness -- telegraphing one's intentions by an initial tensioning or "creep" before the main motion is launched, that initial tension not only delaying but also slowing the main motion. When you get it, though, initiation of motion becomes almost unconscious -- and at that point, I bet that 21 milliseconds will be gone. Full BBC article here."The person who draws second is going to die. They'll die happy that they are the faster person to move but it's not much consolation in this context," said Dr Welchman.
Posted February 3, 2010 10:01 AM | Link here
The first of 250 British and Australian soldiers whose remains were recovered from a World War I battlefield in northern France has been reburied.Full article here.The unidentified soldier, who died in the 1916 Battle of Fromelles, was reburied with full military honours in a special service near the site.
It is the first new cemetery built for World War I or II soldiers in 50 years.
The bodies, which were buried by German forces, were excavated from six mass graves in 2008.
The cemetery, which has been built by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, is currently only 70% complete but due to be finished by July.
Posted January 30, 2010 12:56 PM | Link here
The long-sought source of the aqueduct that brought clean fresh water to ancient Rome lies beneath a pig pasture and a ruined chapel, according to a pair of British filmmakers who claim to have discovered the headwaters of Aqua Traiana, a 1,900-year-old aqueduct built by the Emperor Trajan in 109 A.D. . .From Discovery News.Edward O'Neill and his father Michael were searching for the Aqua Alsietina, Rome's lost aqueduct, when local people suggested investigating a long abandoned church known as the Madonna of the Flower.
Exploring the chapel, the documentary makers found a concealed door which led to a subterranean chamber. . .
Quilici confirmed that the building was Roman, rather than medieval, as had long been believed. . .
Beyond the subterranean chamber, a 125-meter-long (410-foot-long) gallery led to the beginning of the aqueduct. But what struck the researchers was the chamber's decorations, made with a rare and costly type of paint known as Egyptian blue (calcium copper silicate).
"This was an extraordinary monument, a vaulted, three-chambered semicircular nymphaeum . . .
At the center there was a small temple dedicated the the spring god, while on both sides there were two basins"
Posted January 30, 2010 10:18 AM | Link here
A clever bit of detective work by US scholars and scientists has proven that one of the jewels of the University of Chicago’s manuscript collection is, in fact, a skilled late 19th- or early 20th-century forgery.Full article here. The original University of Chicago press release came out in early December.Although speculation as to the authenticity of the Archaic Mark codex has been rife for more than 60 years, prior to this definitive research many believed it was an early record (possibly as early as the 14th century) of the Gospel of Mark and the closest of any extant manuscript to the world’s oldest Greek Bible—the fourth-century Codex Vaticanus.
Posted January 30, 2010 10:14 AM | Link here
Some of Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi's ashes, kept for decades by a family friend, have been scattered off the South African coast.Full article here.The ashes were sprinkled on to the Indian Ocean in a Hindu ceremony attended by about 200 people to mark the 62nd anniversary of Gandhi's death.
They were handed over to the family last year after the family friend died.
After Gandhi's assassination, his body was cremated and the ashes distributed among family, friends and followers.
Posted January 30, 2010 10:10 AM | Link here
It didn't take long for the abuses to begin after police were first allowed a cut of property seized from criminals. Yet now over 25 years have passed, and despite one notable attempt at reform, things look worse than ever:
Over the past three decades, it has become routine in the United States for state, local, and federal governments to seize the property of people who were never even charged with, much less convicted of, a crime. Nearly every year, according to Justice Department statistics, the federal government sets new records for asset forfeiture. And under many state laws, the situation is even worse. . .Full article here.Forfeiture may also undermine actual enforcement of the law. In a 1994 study reported in Justice Quarterly, criminologists J. Mitchell Miller and Lance H. Selva observed several police agencies that identified drug supplies but delayed making busts to maximize the cash they could seize, since seized cash is more lucrative for police departments than seized drugs. This strategy allowed untold amounts of illicit drugs to be sold and moved into the streets, contrary to the official aims of drug enforcement.
Posted January 29, 2010 6:08 PM | Link here
For those looking for some great old footage of San Francisco, a friend recently brought this YouTube video to my attention, which features a streetcar's-eye view of the ride down Market to the Ferry Building. The footage was apparently shot very shortly before the 1906 earthquake.
This got me looking for more of the similar, which turned up Rick Prelinger's work. There's a lot there, starting here and continuing here. Don't be put off by the initial screens -- the complete footage is of two forums in which Prelinger presented his material, so the first segments are devoted to preliminary remarks, introductions, etc. You can just scroll down the initial page, skipping right to where the individual films are listed.
Posted January 29, 2010 5:31 PM | Link here
The discoveries keep on flooding out of China. What a time to be a palaeontologist!
A newly discovered fossil has shed light on why a group of dinosaurs looks like birds, say scientists.From the BBC.Haplocheirus sollers may not be as charismatic as T. rex or as agile as a pterodactyl but it's thought to solve a long standing puzzle.
Researchers believe its short arms and large claw show how bird-like dinosaurs evolved independently of birds.
Posted January 29, 2010 5:23 PM | Link here
Still no telling about skin and scales, but feathers are another matter, now:
Confuciusornis' feathers were preserved in extraordinarily complete fossils that were recently discovered in northern China.Read the full article at the BBC.Using a powerful electron microscope to look inside the feathers, researchers were able to see microscopic structures called melanosomes, which, in life, contain the pigment melanin. . .
Professor Benton explained that differently shaped melanosomes produced different colours, with blacks or greys produced by "sausage-shaped" melanosomes, and reddish or "russet" shades found in spherical ones.
Posted January 27, 2010 10:58 PM | Link here
Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered a 2,000-year-old temple in Alexandria dedicated to a cat goddess.From the BBC.The temple is the first trace of the royal quarters of the Ptolemaic dynasty to be revealed in Alexandria.
The find confirms the Greek dynasty of Egyptians continued the worship of ancient animal deities.
Many more ruins of the ancient capital of Hellenic Egypt lie preserved under the modern city, yet to be unearthed, archaeologists say.
Posted January 19, 2010 9:02 PM | Link here
Undercover Israeli officers foiled an attempt by two Palestinian men to sell an ancient, valuable papyrus document on the black market, police said Wednesday. The men were arrested at a Jerusalem hotel Tuesday after a sting operation lasting several weeks, police said. The 1,900-year-old Hebrew document, previously unknown and valued at millions of dollars, was rescued, and police showed it to reporters.Full article here. Am a bit dubious about the valuation, considering it appears to be a rather unexciting legal contract -- no lost gospels or the like.It was unclear where the two men obtained it, police and archaeologists said. Similar documents have been found in caves in the Judean Desert near the Dead Sea, where they have been preserved over the centuries by the dry climate, they said.
Posted January 14, 2010 11:34 PM | Link here
The borna virus is at once obscure and grotesque. It can infect mammals and birds, but scientists know little about its effects on its victims. In some species it seems to be harmless, but it can drive horses into wild fits. . .But this estimate may be far too conservative. And most interesting is the notion that the incorporation of viruses may play an important role in evolution:Some scientists have even claimed that borna viruses alter human behavior, playing a role in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. . .
The virus now turns out to have an intimate bond with every person on Earth. In the latest issue of Nature, a team of Japanese and American scientists report that the human genome contains borna virus genes. The virus infected our monkey-like ancestors 40 million years ago, and its genes have been passed down ever since.
Borna viruses are not the only viruses lurking in our genome. Scientists have found about 100,000 elements of human DNA that probably came from viruses. . .
Scientists who hunt for these viruses think of themselves as paleontologists searching for fossils. Just as animals get buried in rock, these viruses become trapped in the genomes of their hosts. While their free-living relatives continue to evolve, fossil viruses are effectively frozen in time. . .
Fossil viruses are also illuminating human evolution. Scientists estimate that 8.3 percent of the human genome can be traced back to retrovirus infections.
Dr. Tomonaga and his colleagues suspect that borna viruses didn’t actually invade mammal genomes. Instead, the genomes kidnapped them. . .From the NY Times.Two of the four copies of the borna virus gene carry crippling mutations. It’s impossible for our cells to make proteins from them. But the other two genes look remarkably intact, perhaps suggesting that our bodies use them for our own benefit. Exactly what they do isn’t clear though.
Studies on other captive viruses have revealed that some help ward off viral invasions. One virus protein, syncytin, is essential for our being born at all.
Posted January 13, 2010 8:41 AM | Link here
Miep Gies, the last surviving member of the group who helped protect Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis, has died in the Netherlands aged 100.From the BBC.She and other employees of Anne Frank's father Otto supplied food to the family as they hid in a secret annex above the business premises in Amsterdam.
Anne's diary of their life in hiding, which ended in betrayal, is one of the most famous records of the Holocaust.
It was rescued by Mrs Gies, who kept it safe until after the war.
Posted January 12, 2010 6:51 PM | Link here
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