The world's first bicycle was developed by a Japanese feudal lord in 1732, a model recently created on the basis of a Edo-Period drawing has suggested.

Toshio Kajiwara, 60, a former bicycle company technical adviser, analyzed the drawing of a "newly-developed, boat-style ground vehicle," and Kenjiro Kawakami, professor of industrial archeology at Tama University of Arts, created a 1/5 scale model.

"Our discovery that a bicycle with pedals existed in Japan in the 1730s has drastically changed the history of bicycles," Kajiwara said.

It has been widely believed that the first bicycle was invented in France in 1861.

Contributing yet another strand to the patchwork of overseas Chinese speech and customs were the Hakkas, latecomers to the southernmost provinces, moving into Fukien and Kwngtung in two separate migrations: during the tenth century and the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Hakkas whose name means `guest families' have been described as the gypsies of China, people who live side by side with speakers of different dialects in enclaves scattered across six southern provinces, without a homeland of their own. They were a rugged lot, and even their women had to be hardy. Little wonder that the Hakkas were the only Chinese to refrain altogether from binding their daughters' feet into the `golden lilies' that were de rigueur

everywhere else. One thing Hakka women were not was dainty.

Astronomers looking for planetary systems that resemble our own solar system have found the most similar formation so far. British astronomers, working with Australian and American colleagues, have discovered a planet like Jupiter in orbit round a nearby star that is very like our own Sun. Among the hundred found so far, this system is the one most similar to our Solar System. The planet's orbit is like that of Jupiter in our own Solar System, especially as it is nearly circular and there are no bigger planets closer in to its star.

Police officials said they had found the ossuary, said to be worth as much as $2-million (U.S.), sitting on a toilet in a shed on the roof of Golan's modest Tel Aviv apartment. They also claimed to have found forging tools on the premises and several semi-completed forgeries. [Forgery mystery creates a Pandora's Box]

Linguistic nativism or the innateness hypothesis is the claim, advanced by Chomsky (1986) and Pinker (1994) amongst others, that human beings are endowed with an innately, presumably genetically, specified domain specific knowledge of language. This knowledge is tacit, that is to say not accessible to conscious thought, and it specifies in some detail the nature of possible human languages, including a set of syntactic categories, a set of possible phrase structure rules, constraints on admissible transformations and so on. The primary argument for this bold hypothesis is the so-called Argument from the Poverty of the Stimulus (APS), that the linguistic input or evidence available to the infant child is so impoverished and degenerate that no general, domain-independent learning algorithm could possibly learn a plausible grammar without assistance. An obvious refutation of this argument is to demonstrate the existence of an algorithm that can learn a reasonable grammar, from that amount of data. It is that issue that this thesis is intended to study. Nonetheless the algorithms presented here are I hope of general interest as pieces of computational linguistics or machine learning research.

[more (PDF)]

Almost 2,000 years ago, at a temple in Roman London, someone with slender fingers took a small tin box, scooped a blob of white paste into the lid, and used that as a palette to smear the paste on to ... a face? Hands? An image of a god? The archaeologists jostling for position yesterday, as the box was opened for the first time in almost 2,000 years, had no idea.

The beautifully made box was easier to open than a new jar of Marmite. There was a gasp as conservator Liz Barham gently twisted off the lid to reveal perfectly preserved fingerprints, so small they may have been those of a woman or even a child. There was a second gasp as the smell hit the company.

"Asses' milk?" wondered Francis Grew, the curator of archaeology at the Museum of London. "Asses' yoghurt," retorted Hedley Swaine, the keeper of early London archaeology.

"A somewhat sulphurous smell, highly characteristic of waterlogged deposits from that site," Ms Barham said carefully. "And cheesy," she added, unable to stop her nose from wrinkling as the paste warmed under the camera lights.

[2,000-year-old pot opened]

An archaeological site in Siberia -- long thought to be the original jumping-off point for crossing the Bering land bridge into North America -- is actually much younger than previously believed, shaking the theory that the first Americans migrated overland during the final cold snap of the last great ice age.

Using radiocarbon dating, scientists found that the Ushki site, the remains of a community of hunters clustered around Ushki Lake in northeastern Russia, appears to be only about 13,000 years old -- 4,000 years younger than originally thought.

And here's a little snippet about the language spoken by Adam and Eve (well, not exactly, but...). It probably won't surprise anyone to learn that Adam was, in fact, a Basque.

Gene research is helping clear up the mystery of the origins of the Basque people, a culture that apparently came out of East Africa 50,000 years ago and passed through the Middle East on the way to Western Europe, a University of Nevada researcher says.

That's one of the reasons when reviewing documents written in the ancient Sumerian language, "you would swear you are reading Basque," said Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe, adjunct professor for the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno.

For three generations, they have compiled and argued, agonized and transcribed — toiling in monastic tedium to turn an intricate, 44-letter language into six volumes, so far, of word after long-forgotten word. They have delved into the grammatical roots of "antahpravesakama" and debated the pun hidden in "anangada." They've done a brain-numbingly complete dissection of "anekakrta."

Now, 55 years after a group of scholars began composing the authoritative dictionary of Sanskrit, the long-dead language of India's ancient glory, they are almost done — with the first letter.

"Sanskrit," sighed Vinayaka Bhatta, chief editor of Deccan College's dictionary project, "is not easy to translate."

[After 55 years of toil, Sanskrit dictionary not even close]

"Give me enough parallel data, and you can have a translation system for any two languages in a matter of hours," said Dr. Och, a computer scientist in the USC School of Engineering's Information Sciences Institute."