A new exposé of Mother Teresa shows that she - and the Vatican - were even worse than we thought
First Christopher Hitchens took her down, then we learned that her faith wasn't as strong as we thought, and now a new study from the Université de Montréal is poised to completely destroy what shreds are left of Mother Teresa's reputation. She was the winner of the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize, was beatified and is well on her way to becoming a saint, and she's universally admired. As Wikipedia notes:

[She was] named 18 times in the yearly Gallup's most admired man and woman poll as one of the ten women around the world that Americans admired most. In 1999, a poll of Americans ranked her first in Gallup's List of Most Widely Admired People of the 20th Century. In that survey, she out-polled all other volunteered answers by a wide margin, and was in first place in all major demographic categories except the very young.

The criticisms of Agnes Gonxha, as she was christened, have been growing for a long time. I wasn't aware of them until I read Christopher Hitchens's cleverly titled book, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, which I found deeply disturbing. The book is polemic at Hitchens's best, and though the facts were surprising, he was never sued and his accusations were never refuted - nor even rebutted. (You can read excerpts here and here, but I urge you to read the book.) In light of that, I accepted Mother Teresa as a deeply flawed person.

Angkor, the ancient capital of the Khmer Empire, has been mapped for the first time using laser light.

The technique called LIDAR, which uses billions of reflected light beams to map the topography below a thick forest canopy, revealed that the city was even more massive than previously thought.

The new analysis "shows there were hundreds, if not thousands of settlements, mounds, ponds, roads and urban blocks which actually organized a quite dense city," said study co-author Christophe Pottier, an archaeologist and co-director of the Greater Angkor Project. "This area of dense occupation was much bigger than what we were expecting." [See Images of Angkor Wat, New Temple City]

The findings were published today (July 8) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Over 200 years ago, Haiti was rocked by a terrible earthquake, and then by something worse. Over 15,000 people died from a mysterious plague that no one could quite figure out. It was a hundred years before people discovered the cause of the disease.

On June 3, 1770, the earthquake struck Haiti, centering on the city of Port-au-Prince. Few buildings were engineered up for a seismic event, and there was widespread architectural devastation. The earthquake shook up the social and political institutions of the time as well. In the chaos, many slaves took the opportunity to escape into the countryside. Their escape proved exactly how much Haiti had depended on their labor for stability. An entire group of people responsible for harvesting and cooking the food had gone, and people everywhere faced starvation. The slaves hiding in the countryside also reduced the amount of wild food available for gathering by city-dwellers. Haitians were facing starvation.

Which might explain why people bought shipments of meat that were otherwise unsaleable from Spanish merchants. The meat had come from cattle that had been sick, and soon afterwards, people began dying in droves. The sickness, which started with weakness and fever and ended with painful, blackened lesions and death, spread through the cities and the countryside. No one could figure out what exactly the sickness was, or how to avoid it.

Amsterdam - On Jan. 1, 1738, the Leusden, a Dutch West India Company slave ship carrying nearly 700 African men, women and children through what is now Suriname, became caught in a terrible storm. Fearing that the captives would scramble for the vessel's few lifeboats, the captain ordered the crew to shut the hold and lock the Africans below deck.

Six hundred and sixty-four people suffocated or drowned while the boat sank in the Maroni River, and the crew escaped: the greatest tragedy of its kind in the Atlantic slave trade, according to the historian Leo Balai. The death toll was almost five times that of the next-largest tragedy: the 1781 massacre of 132 slaves on the Zong, a British-owned ship that was transporting slaves from Africa to Jamaica. They were thrown overboard for insurance money.

"The story of the Leusden was never told in Holland," Mr. Balai said. "It was the largest murder case in the history of the slave trade, but no one ever talked about it."

It's now the subject of an exhibition at the Scheepvaart Museum, the maritime history museum here. The interactive show, created by a theater set designer, strives to give visitors the experience of being inside the ship. The exhibition begins below deck, later taking museumgoers above to meet the captain and others who benefited from the slave trade.

While in the dark hold, visitors hear fearful voices asking where they are headed and why they are being held captive. Paper tags hang from the ceiling, scribbled with the names, ages and dates of capture of the Africans on board - information from the West India Company archives. In the final room those name tags appear as gravestones, with pictures of real people in place of the data, to convey the true human toll.

Agriculture may have arisen simultaneously in many places throughout the Fertile Crescent, new research suggests.

Ancient mortars and grinding tools unearthed in a large mound in the Zagros Mountains of Iran reveal that people were grinding wheat and barley about 11,000 years ago.

The findings, detailed Thursday (July 4) in the journal Science, are part of a growing body of evidence suggesting that agriculture arose at multiple places throughout the Fertile Crescent, the region of the Middle East believed to be the cradle of civilization.

"The thing that's most astounding is that it extends the Fertile Crescent much farther east for the early agricultural sites, which are dated to 11,500 to 11,000 years ago," said George Willcox, an archaeologist at the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research) in France, who was not involved in the study.

Archaeologists have discovered two ancient Egyptian skeletons, dating back more than 3,300 years, which were each buried with a toe ring made of copper alloy, the first time such rings have been found in ancient Egypt.

The toe rings were likely worn while the individuals were still alive, and the discovery leaves open the question of whether they were worn for fashion or magical reasons.

Supporting the magical interpretation, one of the rings was found on the right toe of a male, age 35-40, whose foot had suffered a fracture along with a broken femur above it. [See Images of Skeletons & Toe Rings]

For decades archaeologists have been searching for the origins of agriculture. Their findings indicated that early plant domestication took place in the western and northern Fertile Crescent. In the July 5 edition of the journal Science, researchers from the University of Tübingen, the Tübingen Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment, and the Iranian Center for Archaeological Research demonstrate that the foothills of the Zagros Mountains of Iran in the eastern Fertile Crescent also served as a key center for early domestication.

Archaeologists Nicholas Conard and Mohsen Zeidi from Tübingen led excavations at the aceramic tell site of Chogha Golan in 2009 and 2010. They documented an 8 meter thick sequence of exclusively aceramic Neolithic deposits dating from 11,700 to 9,800 years ago. These excavations produced a wealth of architectural remains, stone tools, depictions of humans and animals, bone tools, animal bones, and -- perhaps most importantly -- the richest deposits of charred plant remains ever recovered from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of the Near East.

The blood in Irish veins is Celtic, right? Well, not exactly. Although the history many Irish people were taught at school is the history of the Irish as a Celtic race, the truth is much more complicated, and much more interesting than that ...

Research done into the DNA of Irish males has shown that the old Anthropological attempts to define 'Irish' have been misguided. As late as the 1950s researchers were busy collecting data among Irish people such as hair colour and height, in order to categorise them as a 'race' and define them as different to the British. In fact British and Irish people are closely related in their ancestry.

Research into Irish DNA and ancestry has revealed close links with Scotland stretching back to before the Ulster Planation of the early 1600s. But the closest relatives to the Irish in DNA terms are actually from somewhere else entirely!

A true character taught about liberty in the 1990s, Andrew J. Galambos. Harry Browne wrote about him:

[H]e had a profound effect on thousands of individuals who took his courses - who in turn affected others. Undoubtedly the ripples from the stones he dropped eventually touched some of today's leading libertarians.

He was a fascinating mixture of contrasts. He combined a brilliant mind with an ungracious personality. He was an astrophysicist who taught social science. He preached the importance of respect for intellectual property, but freely lifted the ideas of others without giving them credit. He was dishonest, but he inspired others to be more honest. He disdained the word "libertarian" while turning thousands of people into libertarians. He was an insensitive teacher, and yet he apparently changed the lives of most of the people he taught.

The entire obituary of Galambos written by Browne is must reading. Browne says a lot of negative things about Galambos, but at the end of reading the obituary, the thought lingers: Who was this guy? And the next thought is: Boy, I wish I could have sat in on one of his courses. They aren't any notes of his class. Browne reports, Galambos was very protective of his ideas and never put anything in writing. Indeed, Browne tells us:

He required every student entering one of his courses to sign a contract agreeing not to divulge any of the course ideas without permission from Galambos - and not even to use the ideas, in business or elsewhere, without permission.

Ancient people who lived in in Northern America about 5,000 years ago have living descendants today, new research suggests.

Researchers reached that conclusion after comparing DNA from both fossil remains found on the northern coast of British Columbia, Canada, and from living people who belong to several First Nations tribes in the area.

The new results, published today (July 3) in the journal PLOS ONE, are consistent with nearby archaeological evidence suggesting a fairly continuous occupation of the region for the last 5,000 years.

"We're finding links that tie maternal lineages from as far back as the mid-Holocene 5,000 years ago to living descendants living today in Native American communities," said study co-author Ripan Malhi, a molecular anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.