Archaeologists in northwest China's Shaanxi province have revealed that they have found a primitive "icebox" dating back at least 2,000 years in the ruins of an emperor's residence.

Tian Yaqi, a researcher with the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology said on May 26, that the "icebox", unearthed in Qianyang county, contained several clay rings 1.1 meters in diameter and 0.33 meters tall, reports Xinhua.

"The loops were put together to form a shaft about 1.6 meters tall," Tian said.

The shaft was unearthed about 3 meters underground within the ruins of an ancient building which experts believed was a temporary imperial residence during the Qin Dynasty (221 - 207 BC).

"The shaft led to a river valley, but it could not have been a well," Tian revealed.

"Nor would it have been possible to build a well inside the house," he said.

Tian and his colleagues believe the shaft was an ice cellar, known in ancient China as "ling yin", a cool place to store food during the summer.

"If ice cellars were popular more than 2,000 years ago, it certainly sounds reasonable that the emperor and court officials would have one in their residence," Tian added.

A 505-million-year-old fossil may be a two-tentacled predecessor of today's squids, octopi and other cephalopods, paleontologists reported Wednesday.

In the journal Nature, the University of Toronto's Martin Smith and the Royal Ontario Museum's Jean-Bernard Caron, describe Nectocaris pteryx, a puzzling soft-bodied creature found in the Burgess Shale, a renowned fossil site in Canada.

Long thought perhaps a shrimp ancestor, a newly-found fossil reveals the creature was instead an ancestral cephalopod, albeit with two-tentacles instead of eight seen in modern octopi. The find, "extends the cephalopods' fossil record by over 30 million years, and indicates that primitive cephalopods lacked a mineralized shell, were hyperbenthic (seabed-dwelling), and were presumably carnivorous," says the study.

Introduction

In "Digital Maosim", an original essay written for Edge, computer scientist and digital visionary finds fault with what he terms the new online collectivism. He cites as an example the Wikipedia, noting that "reading a Wikipedia entry is like reading the bible closely. There are faint traces of the voices of various anonymous authors and editors, though it is impossible to be sure".

His problem is not with the unfolding experiment of the Wikipedia itself, but "the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous".

And he notes that "the Wikipedia is far from being the only online fetish site for foolish collectivism. There's a frantic race taking place online to become the most "Meta" site, to be the highest level aggregator, subsuming the identity of all other sites".

Where is this leading? Lanier calls attention to the "so-called 'Artificial Intelligence' and the race to erase personality and be most Meta. In each case, there's a presumption that something like a distinct kin to individual human intelligence is either about to appear any minute, or has already appeared. The problem with that presumption is that people are all too willing to lower standards in order to make the purported newcomer appear smart. Just as people are willing to bend over backwards and make themselves stupid in order to make an AI interface appear smart (as happens when someone can interact with the notorious Microsoft paper clip,) so are they willing to become uncritical and dim in order to make Meta-aggregator sites appear to be coherent."

Read on as Jaron Lanier throws a lit Molotov cocktail down towards Palo Alto from up in the Berkeley Hills...

- JB

Dr Gasson admits that the trial is a proof of principle

A British scientist says he is the first man in the world to become infected with a computer virus.

Dr Mark Gasson from the University of Reading contaminated a computer chip which was then inserted into his hand.

Exposure to specific bacteria in the environment, already believed to have antidepressant qualities, could increase learning behavior, according to research presented at the 110th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in San Diego.

NASA 's Phoenix Mars Lander has ended operations after repeated attempts to contact the spacecraft were unsuccessful. A new image transmitted by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows signs of severe ice damage to the lander's solar panels.

"The Phoenix spacecraft succeeded in its investigations and exceeded its planned lifetime," said Fuk Li, manager of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Although its work is finished, analysis of information from Phoenix's science activities will continue for some time to come."

A magnetic filament on the sun erupted yesterday, May 24th, and the blast hurled a coronal mass ejection (CME) in the general direction of Earth. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the action around the blast site in 10xHDTV resolution:

Shortly after the eruption, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spotted a billion-ton CME racing away from the sun: movie. NOAA forecasters say there is a 35% chance of geomagnetic activity on May 27th when the cloud delivers a glancing blow to Earth's magnetic field. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras.

NASA's space shuttle program may be winding down, but the US Air Force's is just getting started. On April 22nd, the USAF launched an unmanned mini-shuttle from Cape Canaveral on a secret mission widely thought to involve reconnaissance. The X-37B can now be seen gliding through the night sky shining about as brightly as the stars of the Big Dipper. On Sunday night, Gary O. photographed it streaking over the treetops of his home in Fort Davis, Texas:

"This was my first chance to photograph the X-37B," says Gary. "It was easy to see. I estimate its magnitude at about +2.8."

The whereabouts of the X-37B were unknown until May 20th when amateur satellite watchers Greg Roberts of Cape Town, South Africa, and Kevin Fetter of Brockville, Canada, independently spotted it. Another satellite sleuth, Ted Molczan of Toronto, Canada, combined their observations to determine the space plane's orbit. With this information in hand, Fetter was able to find the X-37B again the next night; here it is on May 21st passing the 3rd-magnitude star Sadalsuud in Aquarius.

Engineers successfully reset a computer onboard Voyager 2 that caused an unexpected data pattern shift, and the spacecraft resumed sending properly formatted science data back to Earth on Sunday, May 23. Mission managers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., had been operating the spacecraft in engineering mode since May 6.

The wispy tendrils of gas and dust that make up the heart of the distant Soul Nebula stand out in a recent photograph from a NASA space telescope.

At 150 light-years across, the Soul Nebula is vast cloud of dust and gas that surrounds a cluster of stars about 6,500 light-years from Earth in constellation Cassiopeia. NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), an infrared space telescope, took the new Soul Nebula photo earlier this year and it was released in April.