Aviation Week reports on a television special from the National Geographic Channel on what may have been the world’s first true stealth fighter, the Horten Ho 229, a wooden design that was to include a layer of carbon material sandwiched in the leading edge to defeat radar. Northrop Grumman, experts at stealth technology from their Tacit Blue and B-2 programs, have built a full-size replica of the airframe and tested it at their desert facilities where they determined that the design was indeed stealthy, and would have been practically invisible to Britain’s Chain Home radar system of WWII — via Slashdot
In a small town just across the border from Germany, a small group of Dutch scientists and one irrepressible Austrian salesman have dedicated themselves to the task of reinventing one of the great inventions of the 20th century — Polaroid’s instant film. Digital cameras are ubiquitous, cheap and easy to use — the reasons Polaroid stopped making the film last year — so what this group in Enschede is attempting may seem hopelessly retrograde. But to them, that is exactly the point. They want to recast an outdated production process in an abandoned Polaroid factory for an age that has fallen for digital pictures because they think people still have room in their hearts for retro photography that eschews airbrushing or Photoshop
Writing is one of the greatest inventions in human history. Perhaps the greatest, since it made history possible. Without writing, there could be no accumulation of knowledge, no historical record, no science — and of course no books, newspapers or internet. The first true writing we know of is Sumerian cuneiform — consisting mainly of wedge-shaped impressions on clay tablets — which was used more than 5000 years ago in Mesopotamia. Soon afterwards writing appeared in Egypt, and much later in Europe, China and Central America. Civilisations have invented hundreds of different writing systems. Some, such as the one you are reading now, have remained in use, but most have fallen into disuse. These dead scripts tantalise us. We can see that they are writing, but what do they say? That is the great challenge of decipherment: to reach deep into the past and hear the voices of the dead. When the Egyptian hieroglyphs were deciphered in 1823, they extended the span of recorded history by around 2000 years and allowed us to read the words of Ramses the Great. The decipherment of the Mayan glyphs revealed that the New World had a sophisticated, literate civilisation at the time of the Roman empire
One hundred million years ago a termite was wounded and its abdomen split open. The resin of a pine tree slowly enveloped its body and the contents of its gut. In what is now the Hukawng Valley in Myanmar, the resin fossilised and was buried until it was chipped out of an amber mine. The resin had seeped into the termite’s wound and preserved even the microscopic organisms in its gut. These microbes are the forebears of the microbes that live in the guts of today’s termites and help them digest wood. The fossil is the earliest example of a relationship between an animal and the microbes in its gut
The UK government has pushed back on requests that a historic site used by Britain’s top code-breakers during World War II should be elevated to the same status as the Imperial War Museum. Responding to a question from Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall, whose parents met while stationed at the Bletchley Park site during the war, the deputy chief whip of the House of Lords, Lord Davies of Oldham said that while the government was keen to support the site, there would be no moves to link the site to the Imperial War Museum
The discovery of giant trilobites in northern Portugal reveals the once ubiquitous marine creature mated en masse and used its numbers for protection. The new find, published in the current issue of the journal Geology describes giants that grew to 90 centimetres in length, the largest ever found
Most often when people think of the web they think of it as a place to get new information. Companies are told they must constantly update their website while customers and citizens look for the latest updates. But because the web is relatively new, it is strongly biased towards digitally displaying and archiving new
information. What happens when the web gets older? One possibility… it could change how we study history. Again, nothing is different per se — the same old research methods will be used — but what if it is 10 times easier to do, a 100 times faster and contains with a million time the quantity of information? With the archives of newspapers, blogs and other web sites readily available to be searched the types of research once reserved for only the most diligent and patient might be more broadly accessible
Astronomers have recorded the light of a gamma-ray burst, which they believe comes from the oldest, and most distant object ever observed in the universe. At 13 billion light-years away, the burst occurred when the universe was just five per cent of its current age, or 630 million years old. This provides the first evidence that the young universe, only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, was already home to exploding stars and black holes
The home secretary, Jacqui Smith, today ruled out building a single state super-database
to track everybody’s use of email, internet, text messages and social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Smith said creating a single database run by the state to hold such personal data would amount to an extreme solution representing an unwarranted intrusion of personal privacy. Instead the Home Office is looking at a £2bn solution that would involve requiring communications companies such as BT, Virgin Media, O2 and others to retain such personal data for up to 12 months
Yahoo is to close its personal web hosting site GeoCities later this year. In a statement, the firm says it will no longer be accepting new customers and will focus on helping customers build new relationships online
. Yahoo bought GeoCities for $3.57bn at the height of the dotcom boom in 1999. At its peak, GeoCities boasted millions of active accounts, but it has since fallen out of fashion, with users migrating to social networking sites
Since the government has finally declassified the program, the people who worked at Area 51 can now talk about A-12 OXCART, a Wicked Secret program to build an test a Mach 3 spyplane at Nevada’s Groom Lake. You may know it as the forerunner of the SR-71 Blackbird. The LA Times talks to survivors of the program — via Boing Boing
Papers unearthed by the BBC reveal that British and American commanders ensured that the liberation of Paris on 25 August 1944 was seen as a whites only
victory. Many who fought Nazi Germany during World War II did so to defeat the vicious racism that left millions of Jews dead. Yet the BBC’s Document programme has seen evidence that black colonial soldiers — who made up around two-thirds of Free French forces — were deliberately removed from the unit that led the Allied advance into the French capital
Microsoft is to exit its Encarta encyclopedia business later this year after losing ground over the years to freely available reference material on the Internet on web sites like Wikipedia. Encarta websites worldwide, except Encarta Japan, would be discontinued on 31 October and Encarta Japan will cease after 31 December
The 146-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper is to become the first major US paper to go solely online. The paper will print its final edition today after its owner failed to find a buyer. The web site will be run solely as a source of local news and opinion, rather than an internet incarnation of the former newspaper
The shrill bleeps from 80s home computers and the hammering clicks of ancient calculating machines are noises that many people would prefer to forget, but not chip-tune musician Matthew Applegate. He plans on assembling a virtual orchestra of 20 retired relics of computing at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park. The choice of venue will even allow Applegate to feature the famous Colossus Mark 2 computer in the event, which was used for code-breaking in World War II and was recently reconstructed at Bletchley Park in 2007
Three quiet and unknown Finnish engineers in their late thirties, Kim Nyberg, Kari Sydänmaanlakka, and Teemu Rantanen, have spent their working careers at the engineering software company Tekla in Finland. Their clients have used the software they created to model several well-known buildings, including Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, New York’s Hearst Tower, the famous Bird’s Nest
that is Beijing’s Olympic Stadium, and the world’s tallest building, Burj Dubai. But if matters had turned out a little differently, these men — and a former colleague named Kati Suominen (now Kati Borgers) who could not be present at the interview — might have become known as the Fathers and Mother of the World Wide Web browser
Long lost file formats could soon be resurrected by pan-European research. The 4.02m euro (£3.58m) project aims to create a universal emulator that can open and play obsolete file formats. Using the emulator, researchers hope to ensure that digital materials such as games, websites and multimedia documents are not lost for good. The emulator will also be regularly updated to ensure that formats that fall out of favour remain supported in the near and far future. Called Keeping Emulation Environments Portable (Keep), the project aims to create software that can recognise, play and open all types of computer file from the 1970s onwards. As well as basic text documents it will also let people load up and play old computer games that technology has left behind
The Pyrenean ibex, a form of wild mountain goat, was officially declared extinct in 2000 when the last-known animal of its kind was found dead in northern Spain. Shortly before its death, scientists preserved skin samples of the goat, a subspecies of the Spanish ibex that live in mountain ranges across the country, in liquid nitrogen. Using DNA taken from these skin samples, the scientists were able to replace the genetic material in eggs from domestic goats, to clone a female Pyrenean ibex, or bucardo as they are known. It is the first time an extinct animal has been cloned
Too many of us suffer from a condition that is going to leave our grandchildren bereft. I call it personal digital disorder. Think of those thousands of digital photographs that lie hidden on our computers. Few store them, so those who come after us will not be able to look at them. It’s tragic. Charlie Stross has a good write-up on how he’s tackled this issue over the years and ways to avoid it in the future
Hundreds of thousands of people took to the web this morning to hunt down ancestors and former occupants of their homes — or simply take a peek at other people’s lives almost a century ago — as the 1911 census records of more than 27 million people in England went online, three years earlier than planned. By lunchtime, the 1911census.co.uk website had seen 7.2m page views, with just under 700,000 separate searches made for people or house occupants, a spokeswoman for the National Archives said
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