Bob Lanier, an expert at the annual convention of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, said a rise in asthma cases may be linked, in part, to cleanliness and abundance
A medieval fresco featuring a rodent with an uncanny resemblance to Mickey Mouse has been uncovered in an Austrian church. Disney has refused to comment
Dublin’s Trinity College Library administrator, Robin Adams, would like to discuss an uncanny resemblance between the 18th-century Long Room Library at Trinity, and the Jedi Archives
in the latest episode of the Star Wars
epic
German prosecutors were investigating a complaint on Saturday that the brain of urban guerrilla Ulrike Meinhof was removed after her death in 1976 and examined to find a reason for her violent behaviour
Egypt officially reopened one of the first and most celebrated centres of learning in human history — Bibliotheca Alexandrina — the library of Alexandria whose ancient roots stretch back more than 2000 years
A robot will be sent to explore Cheops, Egypt’s largest pyramid, to investigate a mystery behind a stone door
The middle-class entrepreneurs of the Victorian era were so successful because they invested their own money and were ruthless
A charred guitar, once owned by Jimi Hendrix and now owned by Dweezil Zappa could become the most expensive guitar ever sold when it goes under the hammer in London next month
Steady
Ed Headrick, the California inventor who figured out a way to make the Frisbee fly fast and straight, has died at the age of 78. His family said his ashes will be made into Frisbees
An intrepid bunch of rabbits have emulated Indiana Jones, turning into archaeologists to unearth a rare and ancient glass window in central England
A long-lost painting by Rubens, whose owner disliked it so much that she loaned it to a monastery, has fetched a world record auction price for an old master — almost £50 million
The truth about Ruby Bryant, the woman who received secret payments from TE Lawrence, prompting suggestions that the pair had enjoyed a clandestine love affair, can now be revealed. Far from being the First World War hero’s lover, she was instead a timid orphan who was saved from destitution by his simple act of philanthropy
What do a 17th-century Swedish warship, an opulent Chicago theatre and a Kansas City hotel skyway
have in common? All met catastrophic ends — and they have important lessons to teach today’s innovators
Three cast-iron Scottish cannons believed to date back to the late 1700s have been found by workers at Sydney’s Taronga Zoo
In an effort to preserve and expose scholars around the world to rapidly plundered historical texts, a joint project between the University of California and the Max Planck Institute have photographed and digitised around 60,000 tablets. Ironically enough, the digitised versions will probably not go anywhere near to outlasting the original clay tablets — via Slashdot
Fred Jerome of the Gene Media Forum has recently written a book called The Einstein File: J Edgar Hoover’s Secret War Against the World’s Most Famous Scientist
. The book talks about how the FBI spied on Einstein and identifies some of the people who said he was a spy. Jerome sued the government to obtain access to the 1,427 page file — via Slashdot
NASA needs parts no one makes any more. So to keep the shuttles flying, the space agency has begun trolling the Internet — including Yahoo and eBay — to find replacement parts for electronic gear that would strike a home computer user as primitive. Officials say the agency recently bought a load of outdated medical equipment so it could scavenge Intel 8086 chips — a variant of those chips powered IBM’s first personal computer, in 1981
Archaeologists have stumbled on a 4,500-year-old pyramid in Egypt containing the tomb of a queen whose identity remains a mystery. The latest discovery was made by a Swiss team excavating the tomb of the 4th dynasty pharaoh Redjedef, son and successor of Cheops who was also known as Khufu
A clock-work chess-playing machine
named The Turk wowed Europe and the US in the 18th and 19th century, beating Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon, among others. Although it turned out to be a cleverly designed trick, the device is credited with inspiring Charles Babbage — the father of the computer — who played and lost to the automaton in 1820, with the idea that a mechanical engine could be programmed to perform tasks
Thousands of pages of historically valuable documents that served as the basis for published research concerning intelligence in the early Cold War years have been withdrawn from public access over the past several years, to the dismay of intelligence historians and scholars who found them missing from the National Archives in College Park, Maryland
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