Oddities, curiousities and strangness in history

The oldest known samples of pottery have been unearthed in southern China.
The US archaeologists involved have determined that fragments from a large bowl found in Xianrendong Cave, Jiangxi Province, are 20,000 years old.
The discovery, published in the journal Science, is the latest in recent years that have pushed back the invention of pottery by 10,000 years.
It is thought that the bowl was a cauldron to cook food, or possibly to brew alcohol.
"It used to be thought that the beginning of pottery was associated with agriculture and sedentary lifestyle," he added, "Yet here we find it 8,000 years or more before this transition. This is a very puzzling situation."
-BBC

this would have been the headline of The Sun newspaper, 'Bacteria eats Starship Enterprise'.
from RT, Question More 23rd April 2012 (Russian Times)


Seventy-six types of unregulated micro-organisms have been detected on the International Space Station (ISS). Though many are harmless, some are already capable of causing severe damage. And no one knows how they will mutate in space.
­“We had these problems on the old MIR space station, now we have them on the ISS. The microflora is attacking the station. These organisms corrode metals and polymers and can cause equipment to fail,” Anatoly Grigoryev, the vice-president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told Interfax news agency.
Despite extensive precautions, most of the microbes are accidentally brought to the space station with various cargoes.
One of the early Russian crews also carelessly released a fungus that was later allowed to spread.
Of particular concern is the Zarya – the first ISS module launched into space in 1998.
But the crew is also in potential peril.
“Uncontrolled multiplication of bacteria can cause infectious diseases among the crew,” said Grigoryev.

Surprisingly common problem
As stations grow older, microbe contaminations get worse.
On the predecessor of the ISS, the Russian MIR (Peace), there were 90 different micro-organisms in 1990, four years after its launch. By the time it was decommissioned in 2001, the number had risen to 140.
In the relatively sterile and temperature-controlled environs of the station, bacteria were allowed to spread easily.
Micro-organisms also evolved and became highly aggressive. Cosmonauts reported corroded illuminator glass, holes in the metallic casing of the control panel, and exposed leads, the insulation of which had been eaten away.
The ISS is expected to be in operation at least until 2020.
Russian scientists also believe that particularly resilient bacteria can survive for years in extreme conditions on the outside of the station, as several experiments have proved.
Whether their mutations could be dangerous if these are allowed to escape is not clear.
Currently, Russian cosmonauts are wiping down surfaces in their modules with anti-bacterial liquids, but it is not possible to reach all contaminated areas by hand. Russian scientists are planning to deliver a powerful anti-bacterial UV lamp in one of the next shipments to combat the growing problem.

This is both amazing and bit weird (well makes me feel a bit weird anyway)- not new, but amazing.

Tollund Man -found in a bog in Denmark and incredibly well preserved head and face. Meet someone whose eyes looked out over the world 2000 years ago.

I watched a show last week on bog men, very interesting.
I think the guy in the picture was hanged before they dumped him.
Some sort of pagan ritual i think.

A huge area of land which was swallowed up into the North Sea thousands of years ago has been recreated and put on display by scientists.
Doggerland was an area between Northern Scotland, Denmark and the Channel Islands.
It was believed to have been home to tens of thousands of people before it disappeared underwater.
The story behind Doggerland, a land that was slowly submerged by water between 18,000 BC and 5,500 BC, has been organised by Dr Richard Bates at St Andrews University.
Dr Bates, a geophysicist, said "Doggerland was the real heartland of Europe until sea levels rose to give us the UK coastline of today. We have now been able to model its flora and fauna, build up a picture of the ancient people that lived there and begin to understand some of the dramatic events that subsequently changed the land, including the sea rising and a devastating tsunami."
Ancient tree stumps, flint used by humans and the fossilised remains of a mammoth helped form a picture of how the landscape may have looked.
Researchers also used geophysical modelling of data from oil and gas companies.
Findings suggest a picture of a land with hills and valleys, large swamps and lakes with major rivers dissecting a convoluted coastline.
As the sea rose the hills would have become an isolated archipelago of low islands.
The research team is currently investigating more evidence of human behaviour, including possible human burial sites, intriguing standing stones and a mass mammoth grave.'- BBC

is all this new stuff under the sea?

Yup- a long way under it now. Not sure how deep the North Sea is at present, but pretty deep.
So weird to think that what we call the UK was once the tops of the mountains- and England which I always think of as being mainly flat was a huge plateau on top of a mountain!
All those peoples graves, buried in the earth, mourners by the graveside- now are in the seabed. All those homes, grasslands, all the animals, the mammoths and the the like in huge herds wandering the plains, all drowned long ago and covered deep in sea. Makes you wonder.

its kind of sad and awe inspiring and lonely and strange all at once.

Its very Tolkien- maybe his reoccuring dream was a regression to a past life!
Wonder if there are the remains of the Ent-wives under there!

Nobody tell Treebeard.

World's First Virtual Shopping Store opens in Korea. All the Shelves are in fact LCD Screens. Users Choose their desired items by touching the LCD screen and checkout at the counter in the end to have all their ordered stuff packed in Bags.

Can't see that working in Scotland. First time people realise the buckie is virtual there will be a riot. (The prefered method of precuring buckie from a supermarket here is theft).
Still, I forsee some very funny cctv robbery footage in the future.

thats amazing. I would love to go to Japan as well, I bet their techno stuff blows your mind.

At first I thought that was just an amusing technological novelty but Petty's post raises an interesting point. I could see something like this being used to prevent theft, although any wide-scale adoption would be years if not decades away, I'm sure. It would require hiring more people to fetch things off the shelf, but with loss prevention being less of an issue maybe there'd be more employees available to do that.

Probably still just a novelty but it got me thinking.

Wouldn't want to take the kids with you, if everything you touch you buy.

Good point. I wonder if you can edit your virtual shopping cart through a smartphone app or something. Would be nice if you changed your mind about something, too.

you probably have a bar-code gun thingy, and only mum would have to use it. its all very Bladerunnery.

btw the Hubble telescope has found a new moon round Pluto.

I remember when Pluto only had one moon (Charon), now it's five, isn't it? Kind of exciting, though it drives home how little we know about our own backyard in space.

What is Pluto these days anyway? Moon? Planet? Asteroid? Sattelitte?

Still a dwarf planet, I think. It's not the first "planet" to be demoted to that rank after we realized it's size was relatively unremarkable and that they were near many similar objects (the Kuiper Belt, in Pluto's case), just the most recent by far.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_planet

So they are sure its a moon this time then and not jut another big, but not too big, chunk of floating rock out the Kuiper Belt?

I'm pretty sure all the recently-discovered moons of Pluto have been pretty small and if they're describing it as a moon it's most likely because it's orbiting Pluto.

Yeah but our moon orbits the earth and its not really a moon its a sattelitte.

Maybe I'm a bit rusty on my space science, but I'm pretty sure that moons in general are considered natural satellites ... so I'm not seeing the distinction.