After 145 years, Western Union has quietly stopped sending telegrams. On the company’s web site, if you click on Telegrams in the left-side navigation bar, you’re taken to a page that ends a technological era with about as little fanfare as possible: Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage
— via digg
It seems likely that the world and all its continents were discovered by a Chinese admiral named Zheng He, whose fleets roamed the oceans between 1405 and 1435. His exploits, which are well documented in Chinese historical records, were written about in a book which appeared in China around 1418 called The Marvellous Visions of the Star Raft
— via Warren Ellis
The UK government has been accused of compiling a national DNA database by stealth as police reported a rapid increase in genetic profiling
The French Parliament voted into law an amendment to the DADVSI bill that allows free sharing of music and movies over the internet, considering the downloaded files as a private copy. This decision goes against the French government and the music industry’s recommendations, who argue the deputies only wanted to show their independence from the government. The initial bill’s detractors who pushed for this amendment want a tax for author rights to be paid by everyone on the ISP fees
Andreas Pavel invented the device known today as the Walkman. But it took more than 25 years of battling Sony and others in courts and patent offices around the world before he finally won the right to say it: Andreas Pavel invented the portable personal stereo player
In a world first, German scientists, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, say they have reconstructed a key sequence in the genome of the woolly mammoth that shows the extinct beast’s closest modern relative is the Asian elephant
Ancient tools found in Britain show that humans lived in northern Europe 200,000 years earlier than was previously known, at a time when England’s climate was warm enough to be the home of lions, elephants and saber-tooth tigers
Forbes has a free service that lets you send an e-mail to yourself and have it arrive in 1, 3, 5, 10 or 20 years. FutureMe has a similiar service, but does it better — via Boing Boing
Excavations at a hill site above the town of Visoko, just north of Sarajevo, have been going on for several months and initial analyses have confirmed the original claim that this is Europe’s first pyramid and a monumental building, similar in dimensions to the Egyptian pyramids
— via Unjournaled
A working reconstruction of an ancient Greek computer, the Antikythera mechanism, which was found at the bottom of the ocean in 1900 has been unveiled and is on display at the Technopolis museum, in Athens. The device is believed to have been used to calculate the positions of various celestial bodies including the sun and the moon on any given date. While some guesswork was required in the reconstruction, the bulk of the design is based on updated X-ray photographs of the device
The remains of the world’s oldest noodles have been unearthed in China. The 50cm-long, yellow strands were found in a pot that had probably been buried during a catastrophic flood. Radiocarbon dating of the material taken from the Lajia archaeological site on the Yellow River indicates the food was about 4,000 years old. The discovery goes a long way to settling the old argument over who first created the string-like food
The British Library has made available 14 great books on its web site. One of them is a 1508 notebook by Leonardo Da Vinci containing short treatises, notes and drawings of a wide range of subjects from mechanics to the moon. The site allows you to view the original manuscript written in Leonardo’s own handwriting
A decades-long mystery surrounding the rumoured existence of a Maya city has reportedly ended with the discovery of the city in the jungles of Guatemala
A major international trial has confirmed the effectiveness of a cervical cancer vaccine developed in Australia. The vaccine was created by Professor Ian Frazer, who is from Brisbane’s Centre for Immunology and Cancer Research. Trials on 12,000 women from 13 countries, which have been sponsored by US drug company Merck, show the treatment is 100 per cent effective in preventing the most common form of cervical cancer. It would be much more impressive if the research hadn’t been tainted by the stench of PharmaCorp involvement
British palaeontologist, Dr David Penney from the University of Manchester, has revealed he has discovered a prehistoric spider preserved in amber, possibly meaning its DNA could be extracted — just as in the film Jurassic Park. The spider, four centimetres long by two centimetres wide, was trapped in resin 20 million years ago but has been perfectly preserved. It is believed to be the first time spider blood has been discovered in amber and could lead to its DNA being extracted
Using satellite images from Google Maps and Google Earth, an Italian computer programmer has stumbled upon the remains of an ancient villa. Luca Mori was studying maps of the region around his town of Sorbolo, near Parma, when he noticed a prominent, oval, shaded form more than 500m long. It was the meander of an ancient river
A flying reptile that lived 100 million years ago and had an 18m wingspan has entered the record books as the largest-known animal to have taken to the air. Scientists discovered the fossilised bones of the dinosaur-like creature at a site in Mexico and have calculated that its wingspan was nearly twice the length of a Spitfire’s
The tibetan sky burial involves the body being fed to vultures. Once the spirit leaves the body there is no longer any need for the body. The body (wrapped in white cloth) is placed on a platform of stones (in a fenced off area designated as a burial site). It is then unwrapped and sliced up with huge cleavers by a butcher (the Tomden), to expose flesh and bone. The butchers are often monks who specialise in the task of butchery. The butchers work methodically and professionally. Vultures are attracted by juniper smoke and the exposed flesh and begin to eat the body. The Tomden then returns to the body cutting off arms and legs and feeding it to the vultures.
The Tomden may work with other Tomden and throw pieces of flesh to the vultures. He also smashes and pulverises bones (with rock or sledgehammer), including the skull, feeding the brain (after it has been mixed with flour) and marrow to the crows and other birds, until nothing is left. The Tomden may also create skull bowls or thigh bone trumpets from the remains.
Eventually, nothing is left of the body. This act of giving one’s body is the last generous act of the deceased to living beings — via Paul Mellen
The Irish Republican Army has formally ended more than 30 years of armed struggle in Northern Ireland, pledging to lay down its weapons and fight British rule through purely peaceful means
Archaeologists have unearthed 2,400-year-old treasure in a Thracian tomb in eastern Bulgaria. Professor Daniela Agre, who led the team of 15 from the Bulgarian Archaeological Institute, said the finds, made on Saturday, provided enormous clues to understanding one of Europe’s most mysterious ancient people
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