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From the days of the sword through the advent of the guillotine, Charles-Henri Sanson killed some 3,000 people during his bloody career. On Jan. 5, 1757, King Louis XV of France departed the Palace of Versailles. While he was walking toward his carriage, a strange man suddenly shoved past the palace guards, striking the king in the chest with a penknife. The assailant was arrested and the king was ushered inside, bleeding from what turned out to be a minor chest wound. No longer fearing for his life, King Louis’ concern shifted from his own bodily injury to the kind...

Following the discovery of the 19.2-mile wide Hiawatha impact crater beneath the northwest margin of the Greenland Ice Sheet, Dr. Joe MacGregor of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and colleagues explored satellite and aerogeophysical data in search of additional such craters and found a possible second impact crater that is 22.7 miles wide and 114 miles southeast of the Hiawatha crater. The discovery is described in a paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. ..." Following the finding of that first crater, Dr. MacGregor and co-authors checked topographic maps of the rock beneath Greenland’s ice for signs of other craters....

Ben Laurie, 21, encountered the bizarre creature while diving near Cape Brett on New Zealand's North Island. ..." Ben, who has years of experience in the water and is an ambassador for the WildBlue dive shop, said he had seen nothing like it. He added: "I didn't know what it was at the time, so it was quite a confusing thing. "We get these little like plankton build-ups – they're like small stringy things but they're only like 20 cm. (7.8 inches) long – so I thought it was just a large one of them. "But one of the guys...

An international research team, coordinated by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH) and the Eurasia Department of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) in Berlin, is the first to carry out systematic genetic investigations in the Caucasus region... based on analyses of genome-wide data from 45 individuals in the steppe and mountainous areas of the North Caucasus. The skeletal remains, which are between 6,500 and 3,500 years old, show that the groups living throughout the Caucasus region were genetically similar, despite the harsh mountain terrain, but that there was a sharp genetic boundary to the adjacent...

The Bering land bridge was exposed at various times over an almost three million year period, when wide scale glaciation lowered sea levels by as much as 150 metres. The land bridge was part of "Beringia," which refers to the stretch of land between present day Siberia and Yukon Territory. It's been home to woolly mammoths, steppe bison and humans. Jeff Bond, a geologist with Yukon Geological Survey in Whitehorse, has produced a map showing what Beringia looked like 18,000 years ago. At that time, much of the earth was glaciated, but Beringia remained predominantly ice-free due to its arid...

About eight hundred years ago, a ship sank in the Java Sea off the coast of the islands of Java and Sumatra in Indonesia. There are no written records saying where the ship was going or where it came from -- the only clues are the mostly-disintegrated structure of the vessel and its cargo, which was discovered on the seabed in the 1980s. Since the wreck's recovery in the 1990s, researchers have been piecing together the world that the Java Sea Shipwreck was part of. In a new study in the Journal of Archaeological Science, archaeologists have demonstrated a new...

YALE UNIVERSITY—Long before human ancestors began hunting large mammals for meat, a fatty diet provided them with the nutrition to develop bigger brains, posits a new paper* in Current Anthropology. The paper argues that our early ancestors acquired a taste for fat by eating marrow scavenged from the skeletal remains of large animals that had been killed and eaten by other predators. The argument challenges the widely held view among anthropologists that eating meat was the critical factor in setting the stage for the evolution of humans. Our ancestors likely began acquiring a taste for fat 4 million years ago,...

A letter on God and the Constitution written by George Washington is up for sale after spending decades in a private collection. The letter to Richard Peters, speaker of the Pennsylvania Constitution, is signed Sept. 7, 1788, and praises God for the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Written a week after Washington told Alexander Hamilton that he would likely accept calls to assume the presidency, the letter came at a time when the Constitution was under attack. Some states wanted to hold a second Convention that may have undermined the Constitution. “It would seem from the public Gazettes that the...

A letter on God and the Constitution written by George Washington is up for sale after spending decades in a private collection. The letter to Richard Peters, speaker of the Pennsylvania Constitution, is signed Sept. 7, 1788, and praises God for the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Written a week after Washington told Alexander Hamilton that he would likely accept calls to assume the presidency, the letter came at a time when the Constitution was under attack. Some states wanted to hold a second Convention that may have undermined the Constitution. “It would seem from the public Gazettes that the...

The team broke through thick pack ice on Sunday to reach the vessel's last known position in the Weddell Sea. Robotic submersibles will now spend the next few days scouring the ocean floor for the maritime icon. Shackleton and his crew had to abandon Endurance in 1915 when it was crushed by sea ice and sank in 3,000m of water. Shackleton's skipper, Frank Worsely, was a very skilled navigator and used a sextant and chronometer to calculate the precise co-ordinates of the Endurance sinking - 68°39'30.0" South and 52°26'30.0" West.

No need for software if you can learn from nature, at least that's what my ancestors did. Take the ancient Temple of Borobudur for example. Borobudur - Wikipedia If this colossal structure were to be build today the amount of computation and simulation required to complete it would be very great. But because there were no computers in the 9th century what my ancestors did to complete this beautiful edifice was quite interesting in it self. The learn from observation and harnessing everything that nature has given them in order to complete this temple. Borobudur is located on the South...

A 52-million-year fossil of a "perching bird" has been found in Wyoming with its feathers still attached, a discovery that "no one's ever seen before." Also known as passerines, the perching bird was discovered in Fossil Lake, WY. Passerines are well-known for eating seeds, as most modern-day birds do and account for approximately 65 percent of the 10,000 different species of birds alive today. "This is one of the earliest known perching birds. It's fascinating because passerines today make up most of all bird species, but they were extremely rare back then. This particular piece is just exquisite," said Field...

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At some point during human evolution, a handful of genetic changes triggered a dramatic threefold expansion of the brain's neocortex, the wrinkly outermost layer of brain tissue responsible for everything from language to self-awareness to abstract thought. Identifying what drove this evolutionary shift is fundamental to understanding what makes us human, but has been particularly challenging for scientists because of ethical prohibitions against studying the developing brains of our closest living relative, the chimpanzee, in the lab. "By birth, the human cortex is already twice as large as in the chimpanzee, so we need to go back much earlier into...

Photos posted on Instagram showed one of the two deep-sea dwellers — which reportedly measured 10.5 and 13 feet, respectively. One was found on the shore of Toyama Bay and the other got caught in a fishing net near the port of Imizu. According to Japanese legend, the fish will purposely rise to the surface and beach themselves whenever they believe trouble’s on the way. Residents have reported their presence before the arrivals of tsunamis and earthquakes in the past — including the 2011 Fukushima quake. However, experts have said not to worry. “The link to reports of seismic activity...

If math is the language of the universe, bees may have just uttered their first words. New research suggests these busybodies of the insect world are capable of addition and subtraction—using colors in the place of plus and minus symbols. In the animal kingdom, the ability to count—or at least distinguish between differing quantities—isn’t unusual: It has been seen in frogs, spiders, and even fish. But solving equations using symbols is rare air, so far only achieved by famously brainy animals such as chimpanzees and African grey parrots. Enter the honey bee (Apis mellifera). Building on prior research that says...

A collection of rare photographs of the Royal Martyrs was discovered recently by workers repairing the roof at the Federal Treasury building in Essentuki in the Stavropol Krai in Russia, reports Pobeda and the Ministry of Tourism and Health Resorts of the Stavropol Krai. The pictures were found in an envelope under an old I-beam. Most of the photos show a high Cossack among colleagues with Tsar Nicholas II and the Royal Family. None of the photos have been published before. The news agency Rublev reports that 7 photos and 2 postcards were found. The postcards even bear the...

A new dinosaur species, notable for a row of two-foot spines protruding from its neck, has been discovered by scientists in Argentina. Scientists have dubbed the new dinosaur, “Bajadasaurus,” an herbivore that lived 140 million years ago, according to the scientific journal Nature, which first revealed the findings. Its name is an amalgam of Spanish, Greek, and Latin, meaning “lizard from Bajada with forward-bending spines.” The dinosaur's unusual "spines" have fueled a wave of speculation about what purpose they may have served. Pablo Gallina, a paleontologist who first came across a set of its teeth in 2010, said the “long and sharp...

Early film from Movietone sound cameras of life in Havana including horse racing, thirsty American tourists at the world famous Sloppy Joe's bar having a legal drink, various scenes of entertainment and night life, religious pilgrims, the Pan American Conference of 1928, the state visit of US President Calvin Coolidge, some scenes of local landmarks and the visit by Charles Lindbergh. (B&W with sound appx 45 minutes)

Throughout history, there have been groups who have struck fear into the hearts of those who heard their name… and those who saw them coming. The Vikings were one of those peoples, renowned in their own time for their brutality and the devastation their longboats brought.They first landed on British shores in 789, and according to the BBC, the people of Wessex first extended the hand of cautious peace. They sent a reeve — a local magistrate — to meet them, and he was immediately killed. That pretty much set the tone for the decades of Viking incursions that would...