Free Republic

The discovery of the world's oldest genitals proves that little has changed over the last 400 million years - at least for daddy-long-legs. Fossils of harvestmen arachnids (Opiliones) have been found by palaeontologists in an ancient rock at Rhynie near Aberdeen in Scotland. Preserved within a male is a penis two-thirds the length of his body, and on a female there is a long egg-laying organ known as an ovipositor. The organs are remarkably similar to those in modern-day species of harvestmen. Dubbed daddy-long-legs along with crane flies, harvestmen are not formally classified as spiders because they do not spin...

<p>TOKYO, Japan (AP) -- A Japanese woman believed to be the oldest person in the world has turned 116.</p> <p>Born in 1887, when Japan was still in the throes of its conversion from samurai rule to modern democracy, Kamato Hongo was recognized as the world's oldest living person by the Guinness Book of Records after an American woman -- Maude Farris-Luse -- died last March at the age of 115.</p>

Malaysia has bought the rights from a Japanese firm to the world's smallest microchip that can be embedded in everything from currencies to human bodies. Announcing this on Thursday, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Muhammad said the microchip would boost the global “anti-terror” war. Mahathir said the revolutionary miniature chip, developed by Japan's FEC Inc., could be combined with current technology to "greatly prevent the possibilities of terrorist acts" as well as banknote and document counterfeiting. FEC (M) Sdn. Bhd. chief executive Kunioki Ichioka told reporters that the chip can also be inserted into the human body, animals, bullets, credit cards...

HAVANA (AP) -- A Cuban cigar maker has shattered his own record for the world's longest cigar by rolling a 45-foot-long stogie, the Guinness Book of World Records said. It took Jose Castelar Cairo five days to manufacture the cigar - a feat that far surpassed his 35-foot cigar that set the record in 2000. The latest and greatest cigar was rolled in November, but only recently certified by Guinness. Castelar proudly displayed both Guinness certificates on Thursday. Castelar's first milestone was a 9-foot cigar he and his buddies rolled in 1999 as a way to attract passing tourists. "We...

<p>And you thought "American Idol" fans were excitable. They've got nothing on the millions of Syrians, Lebanese and Jordanians backing their national favorites on "Superstar," the show's knockoff in the Arab world.</p> <p>Competition went smoothly until last week, when front-runner Melhem Zein, of Lebanon, was eliminated in the semifinals. Angry fans in the audience pelted each other with chairs or anything else they could find, and the two remaining contestants fainted. The live broadcast came to a halt.</p>

World's oldest wheel found in Slovenia, claim archaeologists Archaeologists claim to have unearthed the world's oldest wheel in Slovenia. Experts estimate that the wheel is between 5,100 and 5,350 years old. That makes it just 100 years older than the previous record-holders from Switzerland and southern Germany. The wheel, which is made of ash and oak, has a radius of 70 centimetres and is five centimetres thick. It was found buried beneath an ancient marsh settlement near the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana. Dr Anton Veluscek, from the Archeological Institute at the Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences, was part of...

World's dogs are descended from Asian wolves Scientists have found that almost all dogs share a common gene pool after analysing the DNA of hundreds of dogs from Europe, Asia, Africa and North America. They have concluded domesticated dogs originated from wolves in East Asia nearly 15,000 years ago. The animals travelled with humans through Europe and Asia and across the Bering Strait with the first settlers in America. Swedish and Chinese scientists studied the genes of 654 dogs and found a higher genetic diversity among East Asian dogs suggested that people there were the first to domesticate dogs from...

Source: University Of Arizona (http://www.arizona.edu) Date: Posted 9/16/2002 Scientists Discover That 40 Percent Of The World's Gold Is 3 Billion Years Old Scientists have for the first time directly dated gold from South Africa's Witwatersrand gold deposits, source of more than 40 percent of all gold so far mined on Earth. An international team of geologists led by the University of Arizona has discovered that the gold is around 3 billion years old -- older than its surrounding conglomerate rock by a quarter of a billion years. More, their state-of-the-art dating technique shows that the gold deposits formed along with...

World's Oldest Boat Found in Desert By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News Pieces of the Boat June 17 — The world's oldest known boat, built 7,000 years ago out of tarry, bitumen-covered slabs, has been found in an unlikely place: the Kuwaiti desert. If the assessment of British and Kuwaiti archaeologists is correct, the slabs, found covered on one side with barnacles and warehoused in a stone building at a site called As-Sabiyah, would push back the date for the oldest known boat by more than 2,000 years. According to an upcoming paper in the Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian...