The Cha bush grows in various regions of China and Tartary, and produces copiously, but more so in one region than in another... Some tell of a drink made from it, which is taken hot, and habitually used not only by all the Chinese empire but also by India, Tartary, Tibet, the Mongol empire, and the inhabitants of the Eastern Ocean, not merely once a day, but as often as they like. It is a plant of great virtue, the likes of which, if I had not experienced it myself upon the invitation of some Fathers of our order, I would never have been led to credit, for joined to its diuretic faculty, it wonderfully relaxes every blockage of the kidneys and dissipates the heaviness of the head, so that literary men, or others who are compelled by the magnitude of their labors to stay up late at night, find no more noble or fitting remedy in all of nature, and although at first its taste is watery and somewhat bitter, in time it not only loses its unpleasantness, but soothes so well the itchings of the throat, that those who have taken up this drink find it hard to do without.

An exhibition of photographs of New York comparing street scenes in 1938 with sixty years later.
Also a collection of colour images of New York in1941 by Charles W. Cushman.

In 630 AD, Chinese pilgrim Xuan Zang wrote of Bamiyan in Afghanistan

"There is a stone image of a standing Buddha carved into the mountainside northeast of the palace. Shining in gold, and adorned with jewelry, the statue stands about 45 metres tall. To the east of the temple, stands another statue of a 30-metre-tall Buddha made with brass."

Of course he was describing the famous Bamiyan Buddhas which had been carved directly from the surrounding sandstone cliffs and which were tragically destroyed by braindead Taliban in 2001. The Buddhas were, in fact, 55 and 38 metres tall respectively but pretty good guesses nonetheless. It's with this sense of the commentator's accuracy that you need to assess the other thing he wrote:

"Inside a Buddhist temple located about 10 kilometres from the palace, there is a statue of Buddha in a state of passing into nirvana. The image of the supine Buddha is as long as 300 metres."

Reclining buddhas remain a common feature of Buddhist temples around the world but this one would have been extraordinarily long, the equivalent of the Eiffel tower placed on its side. It's shoulder would have been about 25 metres high.

Remarkably, this structure has never been found however Xuan Zang is considered such a reliable witness that most archaeologists accept that it must have really existed. Now a team of French archaeologists under the direction of Zemaryali Tarzi of Strasbourg University, who have been searching for it in earnest for two years, are claiming that they may have discovered part of the foot of the statue.

"Professor Tarzi has found a structure which has still to be properly identified but which could be part of the foot of the Sleeping Buddha, maybe the toe," said Masanori Nagaoka, UNESCO's Kabul-based culture consultant.

"Alternatively, the structure could be the platform on which the giant statue reclined," he added...

...experts believe the Sleeping Buddha was probably made of mud bricks rather than stone, and would have been highly susceptible to erosion and damage from nature and man.

The destruction would have accelerated after Buddhism faded from the Bamiyan Valley and was replaced by iconoclastic Islam.

"Following the Muslim invasion in A.D. 977, many of the bricks from the Sleeping Buddha could well have been used for building houses," Mr. Melzl said.

We'll just have to wait and see how this story develops.

The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, page 57

By now, you may have heard the news that "Ebu", the Homo floresiensis skeleton has been kidnapped by Professor Teuku Jacob, Indonesia's "King of Paleontology". Professor Jacob has recently expressed skepticism about whether the skeleton really is a hitherto unknown species or, infact, a pygmy sub-variant of modern human. The head of Ebu is abnormally small, he argues, because this individual was suffering from a congenital disorder called microcephaly.

To prove his case, Professor Jacob obtained the remains from Jakarta's Centre for Archaeology without the permission of its director, Tony Djubiantono who is apparently hopping mad about it. The good Professor has promised to return the skeleton by early January.

Meanwhile, the enterprising villagers of Boawae in Flores, in a determined effort to establish a crypto-zoological tourist industry in their area, are claiming to have captured a living female Ebu Gogo three weeks ago.

Chief Epiradus Dhoi Lewa has a strange tale to tell. Sitting in his bamboo and wooden home at the foot of an active volcano on the remote Indonesian island of Flores, he recalls how people from his village were able to capture a tiny woman with long, pendulous breasts three weeks ago.

"They said she was very little and very pretty," he says, holding his hand at waist height. "Some people saw her very close up."

The villagers of Boawae believe the strange woman came down from a cave on the steaming mountain where short, hairy people they call Ebu Gogo lived long ago.

"Maybe some Ebu Gogo are still there," the 70-year-old chief told the Herald through an interpreter in Boawae last week...

The chief adds that the mysterious little woman in Boawae somehow "escaped" her captors, and the local police said they knew nothing of her existence when he quizzed them.

After the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago by, um, well... whatever wiped them out, mammals (originally tiny mouse-like creatures) suddenly went through a dramatic explosion of speciation, rapidly diversifying in shape and size to fill the vast number of ecological niches that had been suddenly vacated.
Evidence of this explosion is written on the genes of every mammal alive today, all of whom share a surprisingly high amount of DNA from this extinct species and some remarkable recent research using a segment of DNA from 19 different mammalian species has been able to reconstruct what the equivalent sequence of the ancestor species' DNA would have looked like. The reconstruction is claimed to be more than 98% accurate.
While generating a sequence of a million base-pairs is still a far cry from reconstructing the DNA of an entire creature, the implications of this research are quite exciting because it has the potential of enabling us to work out the most likely trajectory of mutations our genome took as it rolled through mammalian history. This offers us opportunities to test the genetic capabilities of our ancestors, their metabolisms, their ability to see colour and so on which is something never thought possible before because fossilized DNA cannot be extracted from bones more than 50,000 years old. This new technique allows us to go back 80 million!
The New York Times has a good rundown on this research (free_-kin' registration required).

The Economist has a little more on the snatching of the female Homo floresiensis skeleton as well as the remains of six others by Indonesia'a "King of Paleontology", Professor Teuku Jacob of Gadjah Mada University in Jogjakarta.

Jacob, it seems, is a bit of a collector and Ebu Gogo and her companions should make a worthy edition to his trophy case which already holds the remains of dozens of Homo Erectus skulls and the skull cap of the 1.81-million-year-old "Mojokerto Child".

According to the Economist article, after he took the hobbit skull he came back and removed the rest of the material, "dramatically stuffing the bones into a leather case". As Carl Zimmer points out, this manner of handling the bones is probably not the most ideal way to preserve traces of ancient DNA.

A 5,000 year old backgammon board has been

recently unearthed from the ruins of the

Burnt City in southeastern Iran. The ebony board is rectangular and engraved with the pattern of a snake curling back and forth on itself twenty times, thus making twenty slots for the game. It was found along with a terracotta container which still held 60 playing pieces, including the dice* shown above. The modern game uses only 30 pieces.

Ebony was not native to the area and had to be imported from India but the playing pieces were made from locally quarried stone. This backgammon set predates a similar one found in Iraq by a few centuries

and the game may have actually been invented in the Burnt City region.

_{* - I know there are really only so many ways of marking numbers on a cube but I just think its really cool that dice haven't changed in the slightest in the last five thousand years - right down to the dished holes and the gently rounded edges.}



UPDATE: Jason Streed in the comments points out that judging from the photo there's a good chance that these ancient dice have opposite faces that add up to seven just like with modern dice. He also has much more to say about dice on his thoughtful blog: Finches' Wings.

Also this site contains some interesting stuff about dice in different countries.

Naturally, one's mind turns, from time to time, to wonder about what actually happened to the lost tribes of Israel. Similarly, one can't help pondering the fate of the lost Viking colonies of Greenland and North America.

It has long been known that the Earth is hollow and that there are, in fact, enormous openings at each of the poles.

OK, so I'm up to page 68 of Leonardo's Notebooks, only another 1497 to go.

Continuing on with the subject of the eye, vision and light, Leonardo in this note dated 1492, contrasts the notion that light falls upon the eye with another theory popular at the time that the eye projects rays outwards to the object that it is seeing:

It is impossible that the eye should project from itself, by visual rays, the visual virtue, since, as soon as it opens, that front portion [of the eye] which would give rise to this emanation would have to go forth to the object and this it could not do without time.

Purebred bull terrier snouts have changed dramatically over a short period. Photo shows specimens from 1931, 1950 and 1976 (by Fondon and M. Nussbaumer).

One problem with our current understanding about how evolution works is that the main mechanism we think of when it comes to genetic modification, the single-point mutation, is a comparatively rare and generally detrimental event. The changing of a single nucleotide only occurs at a rate of 1 in a 100 million nucleotides per generation so it is hard to see how species depending solely on this mechanism would be able to adapt very quickly to changes in their environments. And yet, as the fossil record demonstrates, new species emerge and diversify quite rapidly in geological terms and for species to be able adapt and evolve as quickly as they clearly do, other mechanisms for genetic modification must also be in play.

One such mechanism which has been suggested but only recently shown to be significant, at least in land animals, is a DNA copying error which causes tandem repeats. The term tandem repeat refers to a region of DNA which repeats a sequence over and over again. The repeat sequence might be a simple alternation of two nucleotides or it could be a pattern of dozens or even thousands of nucleotides repeated over and over. These mutations occur at a rate 100,000 times more frequently than single-point mutations do but, unlike the latter, their effect are generally be quite subtle and normally not detrimental the organism. Single-point mutations, on the other hand, are usually either neutral or fatal and only a tiny number of these mutations bestow any benefit at all on the organism.

Tandem repeats in DNA have recently been identified as the main mutation type responsible for astonishing variety of shapes and sizes in domesticated dogs. This variation in dogs, ranging from Chihuahuas to Great Danes, has emerged very rapidly - in the space of a only a few thousand years. Dog breeding is an extreme case when viewed in evolutionary terms because even dogs with particularly unfavourable mutations can be kept alive by their owners and this enables their genotypes to vary quite considerably in ways that would not be possible in the wild. Consequently, domesticated dogs have much higher incidences of tandem repeats in the genes that affect their shape and size than wild dog strains. In other words - and this should come as no surprise - they have been bred to be highly adaptable to human whim and fancy. Wild dogs, on the other hand, have had to face much stricter selection for fitness and this has, presumably, kept this kind of variability in check and ensured morphological stability for long periods of time.

It's interesting to ponder one of the implications of a tandem repeat driven theory of evolution, that our genomes may be considerably more adaptable and in a state of flux to a greater extent than we have previously recognised.

It's showing, I'm sure. It's been a little more than just a slow news week around here, frankly I'm running out of steam. Time to take one of those breaks again. I'm off to Malaysia and, although I'll be taking a laptop with me, blogging is likely to be very light indeed.

It might even end up being totally non-existent.

Apologies to my new friends who have just discovered this blog and allow me to allay the fears of longer term readers (who will tell you that I'm a bit prone to disappear for months on end), blogging will be back to normal in a month or so.

An event of note that will be missed by this blog, unfortunately, will be the Huygens space probe descent. Alas, I'll be way too busy eating roti and curry to worry much about it so I'm relying on you to keep an eye on that one.

Finally, in the spirit of the season, I hope you all have good one and, while I have you're all gathered and cozy around the warmth of the barbecue, let me leave you with this heart-warming tale about the true meaning of Christmas.

Okay, I did kind of imply that I would still be posting from time to time.

The Planetary Society has a great article up on its site about the current state of knowledge about Titan and what it means for the Huygens space probe descent into its atmosphere. I thought this method of ascertaining the structure of Titan's atmospher by looking at star light shining though it was rather neat.

But the most important result to come out of the second Titan encounter was the result of two occultation experiments performed by the UVIS team. An occultation experiment involves staring at a bright light source -- in this case, the bright stars Spica and Shaula -- and watching how the intensity of their light varies as they appear to cross behind a semitransparent target. Occultation experiments will be performed throughout the mission on the atmospheres of Titan and Saturn, as well as on Saturn's rings. UVIS is sensitive to ultraviolet wavelengths, so it probes the uppermost atmosphere, the region in which Huygens will be relying upon the friction between her heat shield and the atmosphere to brake.

Once the data came down from the spacecraft on Monday afternoon, Pacific time, the UVIS team worked around the clock in order to analyze what the flashes of light from Spica and Shaula meant for the vertical structure of the atmosphere. Early Thursday morning was a critical event for the Huygens mission, a "GO / NO-GO" meeting for the Probe Targeting Maneuver, a burst of Cassini's engines that will set the spacecraft on a collision course for Titan. If the atmospheric models proved wrong, the mission would be forced to scuttle the plans for a January descent for Huygens.

Fortunately, the calculated values for the density of Titan's atmosphere -- the most critical number -- came "within three percent of predictions," reported UVIS Principal Investigator Larry Esposito. Because of the near-perfect match between predictions and observations, "We got the green light to proceed for the next step," said Jean-Pierre Lebreton, Project Scientist for Huygens. "The UVIS team did a great job in analyzing the data within 24 hours. In a sense it's almost disappointing -- we did not have to change anything."

It seems as though the computer models have got Titan's atmosphere just about right so the big mystery reamins: Where are those big sloshing hydrocarbon oceans that should have been raining down on Titan's surface? Something definitely has been raining down because Titan appears to be geologically new but currently there is no sign of anything actually wet down there.

The LA Times is currently running the best popular account of the Pioneer Anomaly that I have read so far.

The Anomaly refers to a strange force which is apparently being experienced by the three-decade-old Pioneer space-probes which has been causing them to slow down in a way contrary to what would be predicted by Newton's theory of gravitation (or Einstein's modification).

A survivor who works as a masseuse on a beach in Penang looked up and saw the wave. He wasn't certain what it was he was looking at but his customer, a Japanese tourist looked up and shouted "Tsunami! Run! Run for your life!"
The Malay language now has a new word. Well, not really, of course the word has been part of the international lexicon for many years but, at least with regard to the Malay peninsula, nobody had an actual use for it until now.