Go, Little Pony! Go!
Wildly popular ’80s toy has another shot to overcome long-running snub
My Little Pony has again made the list of finalists for the National Toy Hall of Fame
My Little Pony has again made the list of finalists for the National Toy Hall of Fame. Maybe the seventh time will be a charm.
The pastel toy horse with the silky mane is among this year’s 12 contenders, said the announcement Wednesday from the Strong National Museum of Play, in Rochester, N.Y.
Introduced in the early 1980s, My Little Pony became an immediate hit, for a time outselling Barbie and spawning movies and TV shows. The 2010 animated series “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic” led to the baffling trend of “bronies,” a fandom of grown men.
Despite the popularity, My Little Pony has always fallen short in the annual balloting for the Toy Hall of Fame — taking a backseat to not only Barbie, American Girl and Cabbage Patch Kids but a stick and a cardboard box.
Rectal Respiration
Scientists who discovered mammals can breathe through their anuses receive Ig Nobel prize
By Issy Ronald
The world still holds many unanswered questions. But thanks to the efforts of the research teams awarded the IG Nobel Prize on Thursday, some of these questions – which you might not even have thought existed – now have answers.
We now know that many mammals can breathe through their anuses, that there isn’t an equal probability that a coin will land on head or tails, that some real plants somehow imitate the shapes of neighboring fake plastic plants, that fake medicine which causes painful side-effects can be more effective than fake medicine without side-effects, and that many of the people famous for reaching lofty old ages lived in places that had bad record-keeping.
Among those collecting their prizes was a Japanese research team led by Ryo Okabe and Takanori Takebe who discovered that mammals can breathe through their anuses. They say in their paper that this potentially offers an alternative way of getting oxygen into critically ill patients if ventilator and artificial lung supplies run low, like they did during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Outfuckingstanding
James Earl Jones Gone
James Earl Jones, iconic actor and memorable voice of Darth Vader and Mufasa, dead at 93
By Brandon Griggs and Alli Rosenbloom
You can’t think of James Earl Jones without hearing his voice.
That booming basso profundo, conveying instant dignity or menace, was Jones’ signature instrument. It brought power to all his stage and movie roles, most indelibly as Darth Vader in “Star Wars,” Mufasa in “The Lion King” and as the voice of CNN.
That remarkable voice is just one of many things the world will miss about the beloved actor, who died Monday, according to his agent. He was 93.
Ellison’s Paramount
Larry Ellison Will Control Paramount After Deal, Filing Says
Story by Christopher Palmeri
(Bloomberg) — Paramount Global, the parent of CBS, will be controlled by software billionaire Larry Ellison after a group led by his son David completes its purchase of the Redstone family’s interest in the film and TV company, according to a regulatory filing.
Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle Corp., is backing his son’s proposal to buy the Redstone’s National Amusements Inc. and take control of Paramount for more than $8 billion. According to a filing with the US Federal Communications Commission, the older Ellison will own 77.5% of National Amusements through a trust and series of corporations.
Across The Worst
Hemingway’s Worst Novel Gets Worse: ‘Across the River’ Is a Dull, Pointless Misfire
Liev Schreiber and Venice can’t save this lifeless adaptation of Hemingway’s least beloved work.
By Rex Reed
Does anyone know how to make a movie these days that makes sense, with enough plot, narrative coherence and character development to keep a viewer from falling asleep? Hope springs eternal, but the answer, from almost everything I’ve seen lately, is no.
The newest time-waster is Across the River and Into the Trees, a dismal disappointment based on the last full-length novel written by Ernest Hemingway and published to abysmal reviews in 1950 (later came The Old Man and the Sea, but that was a short novella, not a novel). Now, more than 70 years later and for reasons unexplained, along comes a dull, pointless movie version of Across the River, proving Hemingway’s worst book has not improved with age. Director Paula Ortiz, obviously obsessed with the source material but understandably realizing how resistant it has always been to film, has changed practically everything about the book, including the plot, the characters and even the postwar years in which it takes place. Nothing, I regret to say, helps. It’s lifeless as a stump, and destined for box-office doom.
Revisiting The Silk Road
China Reaches Back in Time to Challenge the West. Way, Way Back.
The country’s archaeologists are striking out along the Silk Road to trace the reach of ancient Chinese civilization, disputing long-held beliefs
By Sha Hua
HINOR, UZBEKISTAN—China’s leader, Xi Jinping, says he is striving to make sure Chinese civilization wields global influence far into the future. One little-noticed part of that vision: an effort to expand its reach into the very distant past.
After decades of digging in their own backyard, Chinese archaeologists are now fanning out across the world, trying to unearth connections between Chinese civilization and pivotal moments in global history.
On the plains of southern Uzbekistan, a team of Chinese scientists is working to excavate burial sites they discovered in 2019. The tombs offer potential clues about the fate of a mysterious nomadic tribe with roots in what is now considered China that could rewrite the history of the Silk Road, the network of trade routes that connected the East and West over two millennia.
Dark Oxygen
‘Dark Oxygen’ in depths of Pacific Ocean prompts new theories on life’s origins
Scientists have discovered that metallic nodules on the seafloor produce their own oxygen in the dark depths of the Pacific Ocean. These polymetallic nodules, generating electricity like AA batteries, challenge the belief that only photosynthetic organisms create oxygen, potentially altering our understanding of how life began on Earth.
By: NEWS WIRES
In the total darkness of the depths of the Pacific Ocean, scientists have discovered oxygen being produced not by living organisms but by strange potato-shaped metallic lumps that give off almost as much electricity as AA batteries.
The surprise finding has many potential implications and could even require rethinking how life first began on Earth, the researchers behind a new study said on Monday.
It had been thought that only living things such as plants and algae were capable of producing oxygen via photosynthesis — which requires sunlight.
But four kilometres (2.5 miles) below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, where no sunlight can reach, small mineral deposits called polymetallic nodules have been recorded making so-called dark oxygen for the first time.
AI Eats Electricity
AI’s Energy Demands Are Out of Control. Welcome to the Internet’s Hyper-Consumption Era
Generative artificial intelligence tools, now part of the everyday user experience online, are causing stress on local power grids and mass water evaporation.
by REECE ROGERS
RIGHT NOW, GENERATIVE artificial intelligence is impossible to ignore online. An AI-generated summary may randomly appear at the top of the results whenever you do a Google search. Or you might be prompted to try Meta’s AI tool while browsing Facebook. And that ever-present sparkle emoji continues to haunt my dreams.
This rush to add AI to as many online interactions as possible can be traced back to OpenAI’s boundary-pushing release of ChatGPT late in 2022. Silicon Valley soon became obsessed with generative AI, and nearly two years later, AI tools powered by large language models permeate the online user experience.
One unfortunate side effect of this proliferation is that the computing processes required to run generative AI systems are much more resource intensive. This has led to the arrival of the internet’s hyper-consumption era, a period defined by the spread of a new kind of computing that demands excessive amounts of electricity and water to build as well as operate.
Neandertal Neighbors
‘A history of contact’: Geneticists are rewriting the narrative of Neanderthals and other ancient humans
Ever since the first Neanderthal bones were discovered in 1856, people have wondered about these ancient hominins. How are they different from us? How much are they like us? Did our ancestors get along with them? Fight them? Love them? The recent discovery of a group called Denisovans, a Neanderthal-like group who populated Asia and South Asia, added its own set of questions.
Now, an international team of geneticists and AI experts are adding whole new chapters to our shared hominin history. Under the leadership of Joshua Akey, a professor in Princeton’s Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, the researchers have found a history of genetic intermingling and exchange that suggests a much more intimate connection between these early human groups than previously believed.
“This is the first time that geneticists have identified multiple waves of modern human-Neanderthal admixture,” said Liming Li, a professor in the Department of Medical Genetics and Developmental Biology at Southeast University in Nanjing, China, who performed this work as an associate research scholar in Akey’s lab.
Read The Classics!
WHAT THE FRESHMAN CLASS NEEDS TO READ
It is no small part of a liberal education to show students the broad range of meaningful lives they might aspire to lead.
By Niall Ferguson and Jacob Howland
You’re in. You’ve been admitted. And soon your parents will drop you off at your new university. It’s thrilling. It’s daunting. But what will you actually be studying in your freshman year?
All universities claim to provide some kind of intellectual foundation for their students. Sadly, the reality of what freshmen and sophomores are required to study usually belies the admissions-office propaganda.
In our view, liberal education requires that students, like rowers, face backward in order to move forward. If they are to become active and reflective individuals, they must learn to regard the past not merely as the crime scene of bygone ages, but as the record of human possibilities—an always unfinished tapestry of admirable and shameful lives, noble and base deeds. They must develop an ear for the English language and the language of ancestral wisdom as well as the various languages of intellectual inquiry, including mathematics. They need a good grasp of modern statistical methods. But they must also allow themselves to be inwardly formed and cultivated by the classics—what the English critic Matthew Arnold called “the best which has been thought and said.”
A classic is an exemplary instance, a work with imperishable cultural vitality. The Hebrew Bible is a classic, as is Homer’s Iliad. They are taproots of the great branching oak of Western civilization. A liberal education must begin at the beginning, where strange, beguiling voices of the distant past speak with authority of what it means to be human.
Oops!
After 4-year-old accidentally smashes ancient jar, museum invites him back.
The 3,500-year-old artifact, on display in a museum in Haifa, Israel, predated the Biblical kings Solomon and David.
By Charlotte Kwan
A 4-year-old accidentally knocked over and shattered a 3,500-year-old Bronze Age jar during a visit to the Hecht Museum at the University of Haifa in Israel on Friday.
The museum said the artifact, which is dated from 2200 to 1500 B.C.E., was designed to store and transport goods, such as olive oil and wine, and was characteristic of the ancient Canaan region. The jar, the museum said in a statement, predated the Biblical kingsSolomon and David.
Though similar jars have been discovered in archaeological excavations, many are found in pieces or incomplete, making this jar rare for having been unearthed intact, and for its size.
Laura Dern Dissed
Laura Dern was forced to quit college over ‘Blue Velvet’: “You are no longer welcome”
“Pisses me off”
Laura Dern has revealed she was forced to drop out of college after landing the role of Sandy Williams in David Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Velvet.
Appearing on a recent episode of Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson’s Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast, Dern remembered being told she would no longer be welcome at UCLA film school if she took the part.
“I was 17, so excited to get into UCLA,” Dern said. “I was there for two days, and I had auditioned and got offered the role in Blue Velvet.”
Dean said she was “ecstatic” about landing the role as she “worshiped” Lynch, who had already won an Oscar for directing 1980’s The Elephant Man. However, when she went to ask to head of her college department about getting a leave of absence, she was told “absolutely not”.
Rawdogging
Young Men Have Invented a New Way to Defeat Themselves
Rawdogging is a search for purity that cannot be achieved.
By Ian Bogost
It was time to buckle up and face the void. I was going to “rawdog” this flight, a new trend in extreme air travel. Rawdoggers, according to the dubious lore of social-media virality, overcome the longest of long-haul flights (New York to Hong Kong, say, or London to Sydney) by means of nihilism. They claim to spend the entire journey, perhaps as many as 18 hours, doing nothing other than staring at the flight map on the seat-back screen—no movies, no books, and, for the rawdoggiest, not even any meals.
My flight was an embarrassingly modest 78 minutes long, but I didn’t last even 15. A purebred rawdogger might call me weak—unable to endure even the length of one Perfect Strangers before leaning on the artificial crutch of Spotify downloads, Fast & Furious films streamed via in-flight entertainment, young-adult fiction inhaled from an e-book reader, the lure of laptop work, or the foaming head of a Diet Coke poured from the rolling cart. Such is the sorry state of contemporary culture, they might lament, that these temptations of the flesh cannot be relinquished even temporarily.
Avoid Bad People
World’s oldest person, Maria Branyas Morera, dies at 117 in Spain
Story by Adela Suliman
She was dubbed a “supercentenarian” and the world’s oldest person. She celebrated her 117th birthday earlier this year with a small cake with candles, and credited “staying away from toxic people” among the reasons she lived so long.
María Branyas Morera an American-born Spaniard, died in her sleep this week, her family said in a post on X. Having lived to be 117 years and 168 days, she was the eighth-oldest person in history, the Guinness World Records said. The cause of her death was not made public; Guinness said that beyond hearing and mobility issues, she had no major health issues.
Branyas attributed her longevity to “luck and good genetics,” according to Guinness. She also cited “order, tranquility, good connection with family and friends, contact with nature, emotional stability, no worries, no regrets, lots of positivity, and staying away from toxic people.”
Why Dad Jokes Are Cool
Funny parents raise happier kids
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Perhaps “dad jokes” are more powerful (and important) than we’ve realized all along. An exciting new study for parents concludes that humor could be the missing ingredient in the recipe for effective child-rearing.
Picture this: It’s a typical weekday morning. You’re trying to get your kids ready for school, but your five-year-old is adamant about wearing her princess costume to kindergarten, while your seven-year-old has suddenly decided he’s allergic to breakfast. As the clock ticks and your blood pressure rises, you have two choices: lose your cool or find the funny. According to this groundbreaking research, choosing the latter might not only save your sanity but could also build stronger, more positive relationships with your children.
The study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, reveals that a whopping 71.8% of participants agreed that humor can be an effective parenting tool. However, it’s not just about cracking jokes or pulling silly faces. The research suggests that parental humor could be a secret ingredient in fostering cognitive flexibility, relieving stress, and promoting creative problem-solving and resilience in both parents and children.
[ from StudyFinds ]
It’s All Going To End Someday
MAJOR EARTH SYSTEMS ON TRACK FOR COLLAPSE, SCIENTISTS FIND
THAT’S GONNA LEAVE A MARK.
Imagine this dire scenario: the Atlantic Ocean’s sea currents which bring warm water to Europe collapses, making large swaths of the continent as cold as the Arctic Circle.
In a grim turn, that’s just the scenario that a team of European scientists are warning about in a new study in the journal Nature Communications: that this catastrophic collapse — along with the ruination of the Amazon rainforest and the melting of polar ice — is on track to actually happen if we continue along our current path.
Specifically, the scientists say these major Earth systems, important for keeping the global climate stable for human civilization, face a 45 percent or greater chance of collapsing in the next 300 years, even if we temporarily bring back global warming below the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold. Worse, the collapse may be irreversible.
[ from Futurism ]
No Cel Phones (and the kids don’t mind)
East Jackson High School students ‘relieved’ after cell phone ban
Superintendent initially expected the phone ban to result in a ‘battle,’ but found that wasn’t the case
At East Jackson High School, “engagement is up, and drama is down – exponentially” after school officials last year banned cell phones in class, according to Principal Joel Cook.
“When you take away the compulsion to address Snapchat and TikTok, kids find themselves having to concentrate and participate in some of these debates in the classroom,” he told MLive. “Students, staff and parents have appreciated it.”
The district’s PowerSchool data center shows that since school officials required students to stash their phones in their lockers during class beginning last school year, behavioral referrals have declined by 40%.
Damn these berries are good!
Why America’s Berries Have Never Tasted So Good
Driscoll’s had to figure out how to breed, produce and sell its most flavorful strawberries and raspberries. Now the strategy is starting to bear fruit.
By Ben Cohen
WATSONVILLE, Calif.—The strawberries of America’s future are as rich and juicy as the story of how they came to be.
They look resplendent. They taste like candy and fruit punch. They’re just firm enough to hold their shape when you bite into one and soft enough that it will melt in your mouth. They’re also related to a blueberry halfway across the world that was nearly lost to history.
It’s a typically cool morning in Northern California, before the fog makes way for yet another sunny day, when Soren Bjorn grabs, twists and snaps a perfectly ripe strawberry right off the plant. As the chief executive of Driscoll’s, the world’s largest berry company, he knows everything about the luscious hunk of fruit in his hands—and he knows that it’s something of a miracle.
Every year, the company develops and studies 125,000 strawberry varieties in search of the handful that Driscoll’s will sell across the country and around the world. But until recently, one type of strawberry never actually made it to the grocery store.
“We threw out the absolute sweetest, best-tasting berries that we had in our whole gene pool,” Bjorn said.
Cooling Old Style
This Ancient Technology Is Helping Millions Stay Cool
Cheap, low-energy evaporative cooling devices are keeping water, food, people, and even whole buildings cool across India.
by NADEEM SARWAR & SHREYA FOTEDAR
This summer, India has endured possibly its worst ever heatwave. The capital, Delhi, logged a record high of 52.9 degrees Celsius (127 degrees Fahrenheit) on May 29, while India’s northern states have baked at sustained temperatures of more than 42 degrees during the daytime. Only now, as the rainy season starts, are temperatures cooling. But in the coming years, things will only get worse.
For many, respite from the relentless heat has come from an improbable source: the earth. Special pots made from clay, when combined with water, can be used to chill drinking water and the surrounding air. They are helping millions of households that don’t have air conditioning and refrigerators stay cool. Companies are also creating earthen building materials that are better at keeping out heat than bricks and mortar, drawing on knowledge that has helped keep people cool for thousands of years.
“We have lost track of traditional systems that have worked for us in the past,” says Monish Siripurapu, the founder of CoolAnt. His company is working to revive these preindustrial cooling techniques at scale, creating clay-based cladding and cooling units that can be installed in both homes and businesses.
The Original Macro
The Puzzle of How Large-Scale Order Emerges in Complex Systems
With a new framework, researchers believe they could be close to explaining how regularities emerge on macro scales out of systems made up of uncountable constituent parts.
by Philip Ball
THE ORIGINAL VERSION of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.
A few centuries ago, the swirling polychromatic chaos of Jupiter’s atmosphere spawned the immense vortex that we call the Great Red Spot.
From the frantic firing of billions of neurons in your brain comes your unique and coherent experience of reading these words.
As pedestrians each try to weave their path on a crowded sidewalk, they begin to follow one another, forming streams that no one ordained or consciously chose.
The world is full of such emergent phenomena: large-scale patterns and organization arising from innumerable interactions between component parts. And yet there is no agreed scientific theory to explain emergence. Loosely, the behavior of a complex system might be considered emergent if it can’t be predicted from the properties of the parts alone. But when will such large-scale structures and patterns arise, and what’s the criterion for when a phenomenon is emergent and when it isn’t? Confusion has reigned. “It’s just a muddle,” said Jim Crutchfield, a physicist at the University of California, Davis.
“Philosophers have long been arguing about emergence, and going round in circles,” said Anil Seth, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex in England. The problem, according to Seth, is that we haven’t had the right tools—“not only the tools for analysis, but the tools for thinking. Having measures and theories of emergence would not only be something we can throw at data but would also be tools that can help us think about these systems in a richer way.”
Dr. Ruth Gone
Ruth Westheimer, the Sex Guru Known as Dr. Ruth, Dies at 96
Ruth Westheimer, the grandmotherly psychologist who as “Dr. Ruth” became America’s best-known sex counselor with her frank, funny radio and television programs, died on Friday at her home in New York City. She was 96.
Dr. Westheimer was in her 50s when she first went on the air in 1980, answering listeners’ mailed-in questions about sex and relationships on the radio station WYNY in New York. The show, called “Sexually Speaking,” was only a 15-minute segment heard after midnight on Sundays. But it was such a hit that she quickly became a national media celebrity and a one-woman business conglomerate.
At her most popular, in the 1980s, she had syndicated live call-in shows on radio and television, wrote a column for Playgirl magazine, lent her name to a board game and its computer version, and began rolling out guidebooks on sexuality that covered the field from educating the young to recharging the old. College students loved her; campus speaking appearances alone brought in a substantial income. She appeared in ads for cars, soft drinks, shampoo, typewriters and condoms.
Mystery Sleepidemic
An epidemic caused people to fall asleep for months – we still don’t know why
One hundred years ago, across the world, people were falling asleep uncontrollably.
Not from a hard day’s work or a late night, but a disease known as ‘sleepy sickness’.
Victims fell into a slumber so deep that those who caught it often didn’t wake for weeks, or even months, at a time. It was also deadly, killing 30 to 40% of those affected, usually from respiratory failure.
An epidemic, it emerged from northern France in 1916, spreading first across Europe, and then to North America, Central America and India, before disappearing almost entirely by 1930.
Dietrich’s Throw
Shelley Duvall At Peace
Shelley Duvall, star of ‘The Shining,’ ‘Nashville,’ dies at 75
She starred in several Robert Altman films, including “Thieves Like Us,” “Nashville, “Popeye,” “Three Women” and “McCabe & Ms. Miller”
By Jake Coyle | Associated Press
Shelley Duvall, the intrepid, Texas-born movie star whose wide-eyed, winsome presence was a mainstay in the films of Robert Altman and who co-starred in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” has died. She was 75.
Duvall died Thursday in her sleep at her home in Blanco, Texas, her longtime partner, Dan Gilroy, announced. The cause was complications of diabetes, said her friend, the publicist Gary Springer.
“My dear, sweet, wonderful life, partner, and friend left us last night,” Gilroy said in a statement. “Too much suffering lately, now she’s free. Fly away beautiful Shelley.”
Duvall was attending junior college in Texas when Altman’s crew members, preparing to film “Brewster McCloud,” encountered her as at a party in Houston in 1970. They introduced her to the director, who cast her “Brewster McCloud” and made her his protege.
Duvall would go on to appear in Altman films including “Thieves Like Us,” “Nashville, “Popeye,” “Three Women” and “McCabe & Ms. Miller.”
“He offers me damn good roles,” Duvall told The New York Times in 1977. “None of them have been alike. He has a great confidence in me, and a trust and respect for me, and he doesn’t put any restrictions on me or intimidate me, and I love him. I remember the first advice he ever gave me: ‘Don’t take yourself seriously.’”
Dead Alive Again
How Dead & Company found new life at the Las Vegas Sphere
By Mikael Wood, Pop Music Critic
LAS VEGAS —
Four hours or so before they’re due beneath the massive wraparound video screen at Sphere, Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and John Mayer amble into a backstage production office like three guys showing up — again — for the work of blowing 17,000 minds.
“Nice to meet you,” Mayer says, grinning as he extends a hand. “John Mayer, Mayer Industries.”
As original members of the Grateful Dead, guitarist Weir, 76, and percussionist Hart, 80, are jam-band royalty; Mayer, 46, is the singer and guitarist known for pop hits like “Gravity” and “Your Body Is a Wonderland.” Together they represent the nucleus of Dead & Company, which on this recent afternoon has just passed the halfway mark of a 30-date summer residency at Sphere, the state-of-the-art dome-shaped venue behind the Venetian resort on the Las Vegas Strip.
Astronaut Robots Coming
A New Age of Materials Is Dawning, for Everything From Smartphones to Missiles
Labor-intensive manufacturing has limited the use of lighter, stronger composites but that may change with emerging techniques
There have been only a handful of ages of new materials in the history of humankind—ceramics, steel and plastics come to mind—and we are now on the cusp of the next one: composites.
When we talk of composites, we’re speaking about such things as the carbon-fiber ones in wind turbines, race cars and the Boeing 787. Such materials have the advantage of being far lighter than the metal parts they typically replace, while being just as strong, and requiring fewer resources to make.
Materials scientists have had limited success making composites affordable and accessible for decades, or possibly millennia—technically, they were invented by the Mesopotamians. The labor-intensive nature of their manufacturing has made them expensive, which has limited their application to a handful of areas where their advantages outweigh their costs, such as the aerospace industry.
Now, thanks to new manufacturing techniques that can churn out composite parts quickly and cheaply, all of that is changing, and the results could be both profound and exciting.
Our Slowing Core
Earth’s core has slowed so much it’s moving backward, scientists confirm. Here’s what it could mean
By Mindy Weisberger, CNN
Deep inside Earth is a solid metal ball that rotates independently of our spinning planet, like a top whirling around inside a bigger top, shrouded in mystery.
This inner core has intrigued researchers since its discovery by Danish seismologist Inge Lehmann in 1936, and how it moves — its rotation speed and direction — has been at the center of a decades-long debate. A growing body of evidence suggests the core’s spin has changed dramatically in recent years, but scientists have remained divided over what exactly is happening — and what it means.
Part of the trouble is that Earth’s deep interior is impossible to observe or sample directly. Seismologists have gleaned information about the inner core’s motion by examining how waves from large earthquakes that ping this area behave. Variations between waves of similar strengths that passed through the core at different times enabled scientists to measure changes in the inner core’s position and calculate its spin.
First Draw
World’s oldest cave painting is at least 51,200 years old, scientists say
The cave painting in Indonesia is also the world’s oldest known evidence of storytelling in art, according to an international team of researchers who used a new dating technique.
A cave painting in Indonesia is the oldest such artwork in the world, dating back at least 51,200 years, according to an international team of researchers who say its narrative scene also makes it the world’s oldest known evidence of storytelling in art.
While it is unclear exactly what the painting depicts, it most likely shows three small human-bird hybrids surrounding a massive wild pig, “which they were probably hunting,” said Renaud Joannes-Boyau, a co-author of the study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
It’s that storytelling that has captivated scientists.
“That is something new, something very important, something that happened much older than we thought,” said Joannes-Boyau, who is also a professor at Southern Cross University in Lismore, Australia.
L’Excalibur est parti!
French ‘Excalibur’ sword vanishes after 1,300 years as the sword in the stone — literally
By Patrick Reilly
An ancient sword known as the French version of King Arthur’s legendary “Excalibur” has mysteriously vanished from the town where, according to local lore, it had remained lodged in a rock for 1,300 years.
The Durandal sword appears to have been taken by a thief from its stone in the tiny medieval town of Rocamadour, where it was one of the town’s main attractions, The Telegraph reported.
For centuries it’s been believed the sword once belonged to Roland, a semi-legendary knight who bravely fought for Charlemagne in the eighth century.
Officials in Rocamadour have launched an investigation into the disappearance of the sword, which was yanked from its spot in a cliff wall some 100 feet off the ground.