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Indigenous Australians most ancient civilisation on Earth, DNA study confirms – (theguardian.com)
Scientists have found through DNA tracking that the indigenous people of Australia are the oldest surviving civilization, dating back about 50,000 years.
Scientists were able to trace the remarkable journey made by intrepid ancient humans by sifting through clues left in the DNA of modern populations in Australia and Papua New Guinea. The analysis shows that their ancestors were probably the first humans to cross an ocean, and reveals evidence of prehistoric liaisons with an unknown hominin cousin. Prof Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary geneticist who led the work at the University of Copenhagen, said: “This story has been missing for a long time in science. Now we know their relatives are the guys who were the first real human explorers. Our ancestors were sitting being kind of scared of the world while they set out on this exceptional journey across Asia and across the sea.”
Modern Technology Unlocks Secrets of a Damaged Biblical Scroll – (Nytimes.com)
Using new computer technology, researchers at the University of Kentucky have been able to take 3D pictures of the Dead Sea scrolls and decipher them without risking damage to the fragile documents.
It turns out to hold a fragment identical to the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible and, at nearly 2,000 years old, is the earliest instance of the text. The writing retrieved by the computer from the digital image of the unopened scroll is amazingly clear and legible, in contrast to the scroll’s blackened and beaten-up exterior. “Never in our wildest dreams did we think anything would come of it,” said Pnina Shor, the head of the Dead Sea Scrolls Project at the Israel Antiquities Authority. Scholars say this remarkable new technique may make it possible to read other scrolls too brittle to be unrolled.
This device can literally pull clean drinking water out of thin air – (buisnessinsider.com)
It looks sort of like a giant dehumidifier and it works off the same principles. Water-Gen produces clean, drinkable water from thin air.
An Israeli company called Water-Gen does not think of that condensation as a byproduct; instead, it has built machines specifically designed to create and harvest as much condensation as possible. Using a system that uses a set of plastic “leaves” to funnel air in various directions, the team has developed water generators that appear to create pure drinking water out of nothing. “The target is to extract water from the air with minimum energy,” founder and co-CEO Arye Kohavi tells Business Insider. “We think our solution can solve the problem on the level of countries. It’s an immediate solution — governments don’t need to spend decades to make a big project.”
And today we celebrate...