Two major news outlets seem to be suggesting we may need to quickly hone our hunter-gather skills.
- Archaeologists have revived the debate over whether the spectacular Bronze Age Nebra disc from Germany is one of the earliest known calendars.
- Archaeologists find 3,000-year-old mummy of a high priest to the god Amun in Luxor.
- Found in Iran: The body of a 3rd-century man preserved in salt.
- Ice Age extinction claimed highly carnivorous Alaskan wolves.
- Without hot rock, much of North America would be underwater.
- Swedish sediments reveal how the Arctic Ocean was born.
- Britain’s amateur fossil hunters are using power tools and dynamite to collect valuable specimens, destroying some of the UK’s most important sites.
- Possible impact crater for the 1908 Tunguska Event found. Topographic maps and photos on the left.
- Machu Picchu artifacts at Center of Dispute Between Yale and Peru.
- Palaeovirology sheds light on why we’re vulnerable to HIV.
- HIV infection theory challenged.
- The death of Maori medicine?
- Astronomer David Whitehouse explores the perils of searching for extraterrestrials.
- Thunderbolts says it’s time to get serious about Sirius. The star, that is, not Harry’s godfather.
- “Nothing there,” is what physicists concluded about black holes after spending a year working on complex formulas to calculate the formation of new black holes.
- Exotic cause of ‘Pioneer anomaly’ in doubt.
- Otis T Carr and the Tesla Saucers.
- Energy inventions: Suppression cases.
- Out of this World: 60 years of Flying Saucers.
- Two ‘mile-wide UFOs’ spotted by British airline pilot, crew and passengers.
- A two-year-old girl has become the youngest ever female member of British Mensa.
- NASA to unleash ‘mind meld’ intelligent machines. “The goal is nothing short of machine self-dependency.”
- Enviro-cateclysm of the week: Rising sea levels could divide and conquer Antarctic ice.
- Antarctic icebergs discovered to be ‘ecological hotspots’.
- Study finds that the breakdown products of the three most widely used pesticides are acutely lethal to amphibians.
- Scientists discover how to turn simple plant sugar into fuel as powerful as petrol.
- Study shows genes play an unexpected role in their own activation.
- Researchers light up for Nicotine, the wonder drug.
- Computer game helps autistic children recognize emotions.
- Ecstacy linked to significant memory loss.
- Clinical study shows Omega-3 supplements can, in certain cases, help combat the depression and agitation associated with Alzheimer’s.
- Net Radio webcasters plan to turn off the music on June 26 to protest huge royalty rate hikes.
- The end of cheap food: For the first time in generations agricultural commodity prices are surging with what analysts warn will be unpredictable consequences. More. (Read, save, or pay-per-view later.)
- US food prices spike upward. They say a 7.5% increase this year, but their examples are already up by 33% to 50%.
- The Independent urges, ‘Get outside and start foraging for food.’ (Read, save, or pay-per-view later.)
- Freegans aren’t buying it: In a four-page article, the New York Times touts foraging for everything.
- Hackers have penetrated the Pentagon’s email system and computers at the Department of Homeland Security – the agency charged with providing security against cyber attack.
- That hot new neoconservative philosopher named Plato: an interview with Simon Blackburn about his new book Plato’s Republic (Amazon US & UK).
- Flight 77 black box data shows major flaws in the official story.
Quote of the Day:
We are chronologically illiterate and cannot easily conceive of the very distant past. Like the Piraha of north-west Amazonia, whose only numerical concepts are said to be “one”, “two” and “many”, most of us can only really deal with “now” and “ages ago”. As a result, it is rather difficult to imagine your way past the last Ice Age. You can take a set of relatively steady steps back through time until you bump up against Stonehenge and Avebury. Tentatively, you might then move out into the fragmentary, half-articulate moment of the mesolithic, with their piles of limpets and hazelstick shelters. But after that what? At about 10,000 or 12,000 years ago, the imagination comes to a stop, the great curtain of ice descends, and the more distant past seems almost nothing to do with us. Very cold, presumably, with mammoths; a sort of Rannoch Moor with tusks. And as for before the Ice Age, it seems more inaccessible than Mars.
Adam Nicolson, writing in The Telegraph, in a review of Homo Britannicus.
