Yang Zhou is no cyberdissident, but recent curbs on his Web surfing habits by China's censors have him fomenting discontent about China's "Great Firewall".
Yang's fury erupted a few days ago when he found he could not browse his friend's holiday snaps on Flickr.com, due to access restrictions by censors after images of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre were posted on the photo-sharing Web site."
"Once you've complained all you can to your friends, what more can you do? What else is there but anger and disillusionment?" Yang said after venting his anger with friends at a hot-pot restaurant in Beijing.
Lewis Smith
The TimesTue, 19 Jun 2007 12:54 UTC
A fossilised skull of the earliest giant panda has been discovered and reveals that two million years ago the animal was a pygmy.
It is the first skull of the extinct species to be found and provides a clear idea of what the ancient creature would have looked like.
It dates back at least two million years and the remains show that, at 3ft (1m) long, it was little more than half the size of the modern giant panda, which is 5ft long.
Apart from size, however, it was much the same as the modern species anatomically. The structure of the teeth shows that it had already developed a taste for bamboo.
Forest scientists at Oregon State University have used genetic modification to successfully manipulate the growth in height of trees, showing that it's possible to create miniature trees that look similar to normal trees -- but after several years of growth may range anywhere from 50 feet tall to a few inches.
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| ©Oregon State University
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| All of these genetically modified trees are from the same poplar variety, were planted at the same time, and are two years old but clearly are growing to very different heights, shapes and colors.
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After glancing at the nearby caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were stored, I walked through the entrance to the main building at Qumran, checked out the scriptorium with its ink wells and oil lamps and the pottery-making workshop, and then up to the four-story tower for spotting approaching Roman legions.
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| ©SDNHM
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| A still from the Qumran Visualization Project
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Ofri Ilani
HaaretzSun, 17 Jun 2007 17:59 UTC
At the top of the ancient, densely written English manuscript a verse in Hebrew stands out: "Blessed is the name of His glorious kingdom for ever." Other pages contain sketches of the Temple and calculations of the end of the world, based on verses from the Book of Daniel. The author of these mysterious ruminations was not a sorcerer nor a religious fanatic but none other than Isaac Newton, the 17th-century mathematician and physicist considered the most influential scientist of all time.
Four local men employed by archaeologists unearth two human skeletons from a tomb Tuesday in Fengyang, China.
The excavated tomb, which dates to before the Qin dynasty (221 to 206 B.C.), contained nine people believed to have been buried alive in a tomb that had already been filled with corpses, the state-run China Daily news service reported. The tomb also contained bronze cooking vessels and chimes.
The skeletons of two dozen children killed in an ancient mass sacrifice have been found in a tomb at a construction site in Mexico.
The find reveals new details about the ancient Toltec civilization and adds to an ongoing debate over ritualistic killing in historic Mesoamerica.
Construction crews unearthed the burial chamber this spring near the town of Tula, the ancient Toltec capital, 50 miles (80 kilometers) north of Mexico City.
The chamber contained 24 skeletons of children believed to have been sacrificed between A.D. 950 and 1150, according to Luis Gamboa, an archaeologist at Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History.
All but one of the children were between 5 to 15 years of age, and they were likely killed as an offering to the Toltec rain god Tlaloc, Gamboa said.
The long-running controversy about the origins of the Etruscan people appears to be very close to being settled once and for all, a geneticist will tell the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics today. Professor Alberto Piazza, from the University of Turin, Italy, will say that there is overwhelming evidence that the Etruscans, whose brilliant civilisation flourished 3000 years ago in what is now Tuscany, were settlers from old Anatolia (now in southern Turkey).
Etruscan culture was very advanced and quite different from other known Italian cultures that flourished at the same time, and highly influential in the development of Roman civilisation. Its origins have been debated by archaeologists, historians and linguists since time immemorial. Three main theories have emerged: that the Etruscans came from Anatolia, Southern Turkey, as propounded by the Greek historian Herotodus; that they were indigenous to the region and developed from the Iron Age Villanovan society, as suggested by another Greek historian, Dionysius of Halicarnassus; or that they originated from Northern Europe.
Now modern genetic techniques have given scientists the tools to answer this puzzle. Professor Piazza and his colleagues set out to study genetic samples from three present-day Italian populations living in Murlo, Volterra, and Casentino in Tuscany, central Italy. "We already knew that people living in this area were genetically different from those in the surrounding regions", he says. "Murlo and Volterra are among the most archaeologically important Etruscan sites in a region of Tuscany also known for having Etruscan-derived place names and local dialects. The Casentino valley sample was taken from an area bordering the area where Etruscan influence has been preserved."
