News Briefs 26-03-2007

Something for everyone.

• A special report on what happened to the people of Qurna who were moved because their village sat atop important archaeological sites near Luxor.
• A huge pillar in an ancient Roman villa at Pompeii was toppled by vandals. Could be the same gang responsible for the tower of Pisa.
• 4000-year-old perfumes found on Aphrodite's fabled island in the Mediterranean have gone on display. Lucky Paris didn't suffer hayfever.
• A collection of four jars said to have contained the embalmed organs of Rameses II only held cosmetics and ungents, embarrassing the Louvres. Da Vinci Code tourists pointing out the mistake to Louvres staff would really make them blush.
• Rare wooden statues were among the items found in a mud-brick tomb more than 4000-years-old near the pyramid of Saqqara.
• Before The Pharaohs: Egypt's Mysterious Prehistory by Edward Malkowski presents evidence that ancient Egypt was the remnant of an earlier, highly sophisticated civilisation, and comes recommended by John Anthony West and Christopher Dunn (Amazon US or UK).
• The eyes of Achaemenid statues found in the palace of King Darius at Bolaghi Gorge have been found by archaeologists. If only we could see what they saw.
• A bronze-cast ornament sculptured with the face of a death God was discovered in central Vietnam.
• What are the origins of the star-shaped Qiang towers of western China and Tibet?
• Thankfully, the enigmatic towers have been noticed by the World Monuments Fund, but is anything being done to protect them?
• Perhaps a conservation project proposal to UNESCO will save the towers from being lost forever?
• Excavations at Rakhigarhi, the largest Harappan site ever found, have pushed back the history of civilisation by 500 years, claims the direct of the Archaeological Survey of India, New Delhi.
• Ellen Lloyd ponders if the Gobi Desert was once a huge inland sea, where a lost civilisation once lived.
• Here's an intriguing view of the Antikythera Mechanism, thanks to new imaging technology.
• Korea's Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy is drafting a set of ethical guidelines - the Robot Ethics Charter - for robot producers, users, and the robots themselves. I saw that in Robocop.
• Futurists and other AI experts are working towards establishing equal rights for robots. If they can fire laser beams out of their butts like Astroboy, then robots can have anything they want. I still think we should work a little harder on something called "human rights" however.
• Robots are helping scientists to study the evolution of communication by living creatures.
• How will a sheep communicate if it has 15 per cent human cells? That's not a rhetorical question, scientists have really created such sheep. Considering certain governments and religious authorities, human beings are 85% sheep anyway.
• The Sheep Man is an enigmatic character from the novel, A Wild Sheep Chase, written by one of my favourite authors Haruki Murakami (Amazon US or UK), a metaphysical journey into the subconscious of a Japanese jazz enthusiast.
• And from Pravda, Russian scientists are supposedly close to unraveling the DNA of a tiny alien creature found in the Urals. At least they're not going to eat it.
• UFO Mystic has video of what a UFO enthusiast claims is camcorder footage he took of a possible alien craft hovering in the night sky.
• A man smoking on his balcony saw four UFOs flying at incredible speeds and changing formations over Warsaw, Poland.
• Nick Redfern discusses the possibility that certain UFO investigators are using the UFO subject as a cover for spying on official installations and bases for political and protest groups.
• Zoning laws have prevented Al Gore from installing solar panels on the roof of his multimillion dollar mansion.
• As the Arctic ice melts, governments and corporations scheme and connive to mine the rich mineral wealth exposed by Global Warming.
• A Chinese woman says Yahoo betrayed her husband, who was jailed for ten years for using Yahoo to write pro-democracy journals. "Yahoo must learn its lesson," she warns.
• UFO Digest has part II of an article about dream manipulation and mind control technology. Not even a tinfoil hat could keep me from the awesome dream of a hidden Tibetan city I experienced last week.
• A true story about a dog who became addicted to licking hallucinogenic toads.
• In Madagascar, a very creepy species of moth has been found to drink the tears of sleeping birds. The question no one has asked is, why are the birds crying?
• The tiny, and very cute, long-whiskered owlet has been spotted in the wild for the first time in Peru. Keep those moths away from him!

Quote of the Day:

Our democracy, our constitutional framework is really a kind of software for harnessing the creativity and political imagination for all of our people. The American democratic system was an early political version of Napster.

Al Gore