Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, academics discovered that the fairy stories passed down from generation to generation may have originated much earlier than previously believed, with some tales dating back to the Bronze Age.

Researchers at Durham University used techniques normally used by biologists to trace the stories back to prehistoric times. The academics examined the common elements from different stories to establish which roots had contributed to modern-day fairy stories.

Anthropologist Dr Jamie Tehrani worked with folklorist Sara Graca Da Silva from the New University of Lisbon, and both believe that the research has answered many questions about British cultural heritage.

Very much like today, the Old Babylonians—20th to 16th centuries BC—had the need to understand and use what is now called the Pythagoras' (or Pythagorean) theorem. They applied it in very practical problems such as to determine how the height of a cane leaning against a wall changes with its inclination. This sounds trivial, but it was one of the most important problems studied at the time.

A remarkable Old Babylonian clay tablet, commonly referred to as Plimpton 322, was found to store combinations of three positive integers that satisfy Pythagoras' theorem. Today we call them primitive Pythagorean triples where the term primitive implies that the side lengths share no common divisor.

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Peru has been facing a severe water crisis as chronic problems such as polluted water supplies and environmental change combine to undermine the water security of the entire country. However, the city of Lima is now using a series of ancient canals and irrigation channels built by pre-hispanic cultures around 2,000 years ago, and extended by the Wari and the Inca, in order to supply the inhabitants with clean, unpolluted water, and to maintain parks and other public green areas.

In April, 2015, a new plan was put forward by Lima's water utility company, Sedapal, to revive an ancient network of stone canals that were built by the Wari culture. EFE reports that pre-hispanic canals are now being utilized to serve the water needs of Lima.

Peru's highly populated arid Pacific coast depends on water from glacial melt to compensate for the region's lack of rainfall, but Peru's glaciers have been retreating at a rapid and increasing rate, leaving many areas without adequate access to water. Lima's failing public water system has been unable to address the problem, and privatization has been the preferred formula of the government for fixing the deficiencies - a move that is widely unpopular with the majority of the Peruvian people.

On 26 January, one of the saddest days in human history will be celebrated in Australia. It will be "a day for families", say the newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch. Flags will be dispensed at street corners and displayed on funny hats. People will say incessantly how proud they are.

For many, there is relief and gratitude. In my lifetime, non-indigenous Australia has changed from an Anglo-Irish society to one of the most ethnically diverse on earth. Those we used to call "New Australians" often choose 26 January, "Australia Day", to be sworn in as citizens. The ceremonies can be touching. Watch the faces from the Middle East and understand why they clench their new flag.

It was sunrise on 26 January so many years ago when I stood with Indigenous and non Indigenous Australians and threw wreaths into Sydney Harbour. We had climbed down to one of the perfect sandy coves where others had stood as silhouettes, watching as the ships of Britain's "First Fleet" dropped anchor on 26 January, 1788. This was the moment the only island continent on earth was taken from its inhabitants; the euphemism was "settled". It was, wrote Henry Reynolds, one of few honest Australian historians, one of the greatest land grabs in world history. He described the slaughter that followed as "a whispering in our hearts".

What do you call a male sibling? If you speak English, he is your "brother." Greek? Call him "phrater." Sanskrit, Latin, Old Irish? "Bhrater," "frater," or "brathir," respectively. Ever since the mid-17th century, scholars have noted such similarities among the so-called Indo-European languages, which span the world and number more than 400 if dialects are included. Researchers agree that they can probably all be traced back to one ancestral language, called Proto-Indo-European (PIE). But for nearly 20 years, scholars have debated vehemently when and where PIE arose.

Two long-awaited studies, one described online this week in a preprint and another scheduled for publication later this month, have now used different methods to support one leading hypothesis: that PIE was first spoken by pastoral herders who lived in the vast steppe lands north of the Black Sea beginning about 6000 years ago. One study points out that these steppe land herders have left their genetic mark on most Europeans living today.

When the Brothers Grimm collected fairy tales in the 19th century, Wilhelm suggested that many dated back thousands, rather than the accepted view of just hundreds, of years. Researchers believe they have now proved him right.

While two of the best-known tales, Beauty and the Beast and Rumplestiltskin, were written down in the 17th and 18th centuries, new research using mathematical modelling has traced them back 4,000 years and they are not even the oldest.

The Smith and the Devil is estimated to date back 6,000 years to the Bronze Age. It is the story of a blacksmith who strikes a deal for superhuman powers with a malevolent supernatural being, only to renege on his side of the bargain. Another popular favourite in Jack and the Beanstalk, from the genre of "the boy who stole ogre's treasure", is from around 5,000 years ago.

The report was put together by Sara Graca da Silva, a folklorist from the New University of Lisbon, and Jamshid Tehrani, from the department of anthropology at Durham University, and was published in Royal Society Open Science.

For the first time, researchers have been able to directly estimate the Anglo-Saxon ancestry of the British population from ancient skeletons, showing how Anglo-Saxon immigrants mixed with the native population.

Human remains excavated from burial sites near Cambridge provided the material for the first whole-genome sequences of ancient British DNA. Using a new analysis method to compare these ancient genomes with modern-day sequences, researchers have estimated that approximately a third of British ancestors were Anglo-Saxon immigrants.

What was the scale of the Anglo-Saxons migrations, how did they mix with the native population and how did they contribute to British ancestry? This has been a long-standing topic of debate amongst historians and archaeologists.

Recently excavated skeletons dating to the late Iron Age and from the Anglo-Saxon period gave researchers the opportunity to solve this question with genomics.

"By sequencing the DNA from ten skeletons from the late Iron Age and the Anglo-Saxon period, we obtained the first complete ancient genomes from Great Britain," said Dr Stephan Schiffels, first author from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Cambridgeshire and the Max Plank Institute in Germany. "Comparing these ancient genomes with sequences of hundreds of modern European genomes, we estimate that 38% of the ancestors of the English were Anglo-Saxons. This is the first direct estimate of the impact of immigration into Britain from the 5th to 7th Centuries AD and the traces left in modern England."

Previous DNA studies have relied entirely on modern DNA and suggested anything between 10% and 95% contribution to the population. One such study suggested that Anglo Saxons didn't mix with the native population, staying segregated. However, this newly published study uses ancient genetic information and disproves the earlier idea, showing just how integrated the people of Britain were. The ancient skeletons from Cambridgeshire were carbon dated, proving they were from the late Iron Age (approximately 50BC) and from the Anglo-Saxon era (around 500-700 AD). Complete genome sequences were then obtained for selected DNA samples to determine the genetic make-up of these Iron Age Britons and Anglo-Saxons.

About 60 drawings and hieroglyphic inscriptions, dating back around 5,000 years, have been discovered at a site called Wadi Ameyra in Egypt's Sinai Desert. Carved in stone they were created by mining expeditions sent out by early Egyptian pharaohs archaeologists say.

They reveal new information on the early pharaohs. For instance, one inscription the researchers found tells of a queen named Neith-Hotep who ruled Egypt 5,000 years ago as regent to a young pharaoh named Djer.

Archaeologists estimate that the earliest carvings at Wadi Ameyra date back around 5,200 years, while the most recent date to the reign of a pharaoh named Nebre, who ruled about 4,800 years ago. [See Photos of the Egyptian Drawings and Hieroglyphics]

The "inscriptions are probably a way to proclaim that the Egyptian state owned the area," team leader Pierre Tallet, a professor at Université Paris-Sorbonne, told Live Science.

He explained that south of Wadi Ameyra, the ancient expeditions would have mined turquoise and copper. Sometime after Nebre's rule, the route of the expeditions changed, bypassing Wadi Ameyra, he said.

Martin Luther King, Jr. is one of my personal heroes. Not just because of his outsized contribution to the civil rights movement, but because of his leadership capabilities and emphasis on non-violent civil disobedience.

It also goes without saying, that this wasn't just a great orator with enlightened tactics, he was also a highly intelligent man with a strong sense of history.

This is on full display in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," which I highlighted in the piece: Martin Luther King: "Everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was Legal."

Here are some of his timeless words.

Nearly 50 years since the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the FBI and Memphis Police Department have sparingly released information implicating themselves or members of their agencies in facilitating and directly causing the untimely death of Dr. King. Although the Justice Department officially claims James Earl Ray assassinated MLK, a civil suit later determined that a Memphis cop was involved in a conspiracy to murder the civil rights leader.

During a rainstorm on February 1, 1968, two black sanitation workers in Memphis lost their lives when the truck's compactor accidentally triggered. On that same day, 22 black sewer workers were sent home without pay while their white coworkers received compensation. Less than two weeks later, over a thousand black sanitation workers went on strike wearing placards reading, "I AM A MAN."