The Knights Templar are demanding that the Vatican give them back their good name and, possibly, billions in assets into the bargain, 700 years after the order was brutally suppressed by a joint venture between the Pope and the King of France. If the Holy See doesn’t comply, the warrior knights, renowned for liberating the Holy Land, will deploy that most fearsome of weapons: a laborious court case through the creaking Spanish legal system
A 2,100-year-old computer
found in a Roman shipwreck may have acted as a calendar for the Olympic Games. The Antikythera Mechanism has puzzled experts since its discovery by Greek sponge divers in 1901. Researchers have long suspected the ancient clockwork device was used to display astronomical cycles. A team has now found that one of the dials records the dates of the ancient Olympiad. This could have been to provide a benchmark for the passage of time. The device is made up of bronze gearwheels and dials, and scientists know of nothing like it until at least 1,000 years later
The historic site of Britain’s crucial code-breaking programme during the second world war is so shabby it has become a national disgrace
. Bletchley Park, which helped launch the modern computer, is in a terrible state of disrepair
because of a lack of investment, say professors and heads of science from universities across the country in a letter to the Times
It may be time to rethink the stereotype of grunting, wordless Neandertals. The prehistoric humans may have been quite chatty — at least if the ear canals of their ancestors are any indication. The findings suggest human speech may have originated earlier than some researchers contend
A statue symbolising the mythical origins and power of Rome, long thought to have been made around 500BC, has been found to date from the 1200s. The statue depicts a she-wolf suckling Remus and his twin brother Romulus — who is said to have founded Rome. The statue of the wolf was carbon-dated last year, but the test results have only now been made public. The figures of Romulus and Remus have already been shown to be 15th Century additions to the statue
Bletchley Park — otherwise known as Station X to keep its location secret from the Germans — now houses many exhibits and other memorabilia reminding visitors of the outstanding work of trying to crack the Enigma code. It also houses recently rebuilt replicas of the two main codebreaking machines: the Colossus and the Bombe. But despite its obvious historical importance, the Bletchley Park Trust had been unable to win significant funding. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation turned down its request, while the National Lottery, now the Heritage Lottery Fund, said it was ineligible. But, following a change in funding criteria by the Heritage Lottery Fund, there is suddenly light on the horizon
In his talks about the history of Apple, Steve Wozniak has often recounted how the 1971 Esquire article Secrets of the Little Blue Box
set him on the road to phone phreaking. Now someone has obtained the FBI file of one of the phreaks, Joe Engressia (who later changed his name to Joybubbles), via Freedom of Information requests. The file reveals that Engressia was illegally wiretapped by the FBI and the phone company back in 1969. J Edgar Hoover considered the blind college student a national security risk and wrote a memo about him to John Ehrlichman — via Slashdot
It is a national icon, one of the world’s greatest tourist attractions — and an appalling advertisement for Italian builders. But now, 18 years after it was closed to the public for fears that it might topple over, the Leaning Tower of Pisa has been stabilised and has been declared safe for at least another three centuries
They set sail for the other side of the world in search of fortune and freedom. For the millions of free settlers, Australia was a country of hope and promise — a chance to escape class systems, poverty and overcrowding. This week, more than 150 years on, their stories will be available online for the first time, giving their descendants the chance to trace their journeys. The collection will allow people to search 8.9 million names of passengers and crew who arrived in New South Wales as free settlers between 1826 and 1922. It follows the launch of the records of 160,000 convicts on the site last year. Ancestry.com.au spokesman Brad Argent said about seven million Australians were related to early settlers, giving the average Aussie a one-in-three chance of having a free-settler ancestor
An ancient gold cup mysteriously acquired by a British scrap metal dealer is to be sold at auction with an estimate of nearly $1 million, after languishing for years in a shoe box under its current owner’s bed
In a world first, scientists have extracted a gene from the extinct Tasmanian tiger and successfully inserted it into a mouse embryo. It is the first time a gene from any extinct animal has been brought back to life inside another living creature. However, the researchers, from the University of Melbourne and the University of Texas, say the technology will not lead to the cloning of an entire Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine
Historians have postulated that, without Bletchley Park, the Allies may never have won the war. But, despite an impressive contribution to the war effort, the Bletchley Park site, now a museum, faces a bleak future unless it can secure funding to keep its doors open and its numerous exhibits from rotting away. The Bletchley Park Trust receives no external funding. It has been deemed ineligible for funding by the National Lottery, and turned down by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation because the Microsoft founder will only fund internet-based technology projects
Inevitably, the Ministry of Defence papers, released to the public for the first time, will be known as Britain’s X-Files. Over the next three or four years, 160 files will be handed over to the National Archives. Covering 1978 to 1987, the first group of eight files, one of which is more than 450 pages long, is available via its website today. Some of the incidents are truly bizarre, but although some UFO sightings remain unexplained there is no evidence in the files for alien contact. There simply is no saucer-in-a-hangar smoking gun,
said Nick Pope, a former civil servant who worked at the MoD for 21 years, spending three years on its UFO desk
Being inside a pinball machine factory sounds exactly as you think it would. Across a 40,000-square-foot warehouse here, a cheery cacophony of flippers flip, bells ding, bumpers bump and balls click in an endless, echoing loop. The quarter never runs out. But this place, Stern Pinball, is the last of its kind in the world. A range of companies once mass produced pinball machines, especially in the Chicago area, the one-time capital of the business. Now there is only Stern. And even the dinging and flipping here has slowed: Stern, which used to crank out 27,000 pinball machines each year, is down to around 10,000
Ancient humans started down the path of evolving into two separate species before merging back into a single population. The genetic split in Africa resulted in distinct populations that lived in isolation for as much as 100,000 years. This could have been caused by arid conditions driving a wedge between humans in eastern and southern Africa
The first draft of a book which changed the world’s attitude to evolution is available for the first time online. Papers which led to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution were previously only available to scholars at Cambridge University’s library. The draft notes are among 20,000 archive items created by the 19th Century naturalist during his lifetime
Talk about a long silence — no one has heard their voices for 30,000 years. Now the long-extinct Neanderthals are speaking up — or at least a computer synthesiser is doing so on their behalf. Robert McCarthy, an anthropologist at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton has used new reconstructions of Neanderthal vocal tracts to simulate the voice. He says the ancient human’s speech lacked the quantal vowel
sounds that underlie modern speech
A 2,000-year-old mechanical computer salvaged from a Roman shipwreck has astounded scientists who have finally unravelled the secrets of how the sophisticated device works
Documents dating from the Civil War and others to and from Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt are among hundreds of stolen documents sold online that eBay is agreeing to buy back and return to New York’s archives. The online auction giant has no liability in the sale of the stolen artifacts, but agreed voluntarily to offer buyers the amount that they paid, according to the official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because not all details of the investigation have been announced
Polaroid is dropping the technology it pioneered long before digital photography rendered instant film obsolete to all but a few nostalgia buffs. Polaroid is closing factories in Massachusetts, Mexico and the Netherlands and cutting 450 jobs as the brand synonymous with instant images focuses on ventures such as a portable printer for images from mobile phones and Polaroid-branded digital cameras, televisions and DVD players
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