In 1815 William Smith drew a map of the United Kingdom which transformed the scientific landscape: It laid the foundations for modern geology, and identified natural resources which would beget the Industrial Revolution. But up until last year, this first-edition copy was considered to be lost forever. Read more…
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This Lost Map Changed How We Saw the World
astroengine writes A team of Canadian and Russian researchers investigating an early Neolithic cemetery in Siberia have identified the world’s oldest set of human twins, buried with their young mother. The skeleton of the woman was exhumed in 1997 from a hunter-gatherer cemetery in south-eastern Siberia. Found with 15 marmot teeth — decorative accessories which were probably attached to clothing — the remains were photographed and labelled, but were not investigated by anthropologists. Now Angela Lieverse, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, and colleagues Andrzej Weber from the University of Alberta, Canada, and Vladimir Bazaliiskii from Irkutsk University, Russia, have examined the skeleton and found remains of twin fetuses nestled between the pelvis and upper legs. The twins, about 36 to 40 weeks old, probably suffocated during their mother’s troubled labor nearly 8, 000 years ago. “This is not only one of the oldest archaeologically documented cases of death during childbirth, but also the earliest confirmed set of human twins in the world, ” Lieverse said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Oldest Twin Remains Found In Siberia
In 1329, an Italian nobleman and dear friend of Dante suffered a particularly horrid bout of diarrhea that—it being the 14th century and all—promptly killed him at the tender age of 38. But now, thanks to Cagrande della Scala’s exhumed, mummified corpse and the 700-year-old poop found therein, we know this wasn’t your normal, everyday bout of fatal feces. This was murder. Read more…
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700-Year-Old Cold Case Clue Found in Mummy Poop
Other than ingesting alcohol and narcotics in sufficient doses to induce a state of analgesia, for most of its history, people in the West got through surgery with the aid of little more than forcible restraint and grit. Read more…
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What Did People Use to Mask Surgical Pain Before Modern Anesthesia?
astroengine writes Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has been exploring the Martian surface for over a decade — that’s an amazing ten years longer than the 3-month primary mission it began in January 2004. But with its great successes, inevitable age-related issues have surfaced and mission engineers are being challenged by an increasingly troubling bout of “amnesia” triggered by the rover’s flash memory. “The problems started off fairly benign, but now they’ve become more serious — much like an illness, the symptoms were mild, but now with the progression of time things have become more serious, ” Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager John Callas, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told Discovery News. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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10 Years In, Mars Rover Opportunity Suffers From Flash Memory Degradation
An anonymous reader writes It’s the oldest rock on Earth–and it’s from Mars. A 4.4-billion-year-old martian meteorite, found in a dozen pieces in the western Sahara, has ignited a frenzy among collectors and scientists; prices have reached $10, 000 a gram, and museums and universities are vying for slivers of it. It is the only known martian meteorite made of sediment, a conglomerate of pebbles and other clumps of minerals from when the planet was warm, wet, and possibly habitable. The story of the discovery of the rock and its significance is fascinating, as well as the details presented about the economics of rare space materials. Apropos, this older story about missing moon rocks. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Conglomerate Rock From Mars: (Much) More Precious Than Gold
When most of us think of “rare blood, ” we think of Type O-negative. But it turns out there are far, far rarer types than that. In Filton, England, there’s a lab that handles blood donations from across the UK—and identifies this super-rare blood. Read more…
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Inside the Blood Factory That Keeps Track of the World’s Rare Donors
jenningsthecat writes: DARPA’s Terahertz Electronics program has created “the fastest solid-state amplifier integrated circuit ever measured.” The Terahertz Monolithic Integrated Circuit (TMIC), boasts a gain of 9dB — previously unheard of for a monolithic device in this frequency range. Plus, the status of “fastest” has been certified by Guinness — seriously! (‘Cause you might not trust DARPA, but you gotta trust Guinness — right?). In related news, DARPA has also created a micro-machined vacuum power amplifier operating at 850 GHz, or 0.85 THz. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Integrated Circuit Amplifier Breaches Terahertz Barrier
dibdublin (981416) writes with a report from The Register: October is stacking up to be a bumper Patch Tuesday update with nine bulletins lined up for delivery — three rated critical. Cloud security firm Qualys estimates two of the lesser “important” bulletins are just as bad however, as they would also allow malicious code injection onto vulnerable systems. Top of the critical list is an update for Internet Explorer that affects all currently supported versions 6 to 11, on all operating system including Windows RT. Vulnerabilities discovered in most versions of Windows Server, Windows 7 and 8, and the .NET framework are covered in the other pair of critical bulletins. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Windows Users, Get Ready For a BIgger-Than-Usual Patch Tuesday
The Russian press agency ITAR-TASS is reporting something so surprising that I’m having a hard time believing it: Cosmonauts have found microorganisms on the exterior of the International Space Station. Russian scientists are shocked by this discovery and can’t really explain how it is possible. Read more…
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Space station cosmonauts find life in the vacuum of space