Archive for the 'Ancient Wonders' Category

The Senegambian stone circles…

I bet you haven’t heard of the Senegambian stone circles.

 

So, what are they?

 

The Senegambian Stone Circles are various stone circles that are spread over thousands of miles in both Senegal and the Gambia.

 

It seems that every continent has its ancient secrets. No one is sure exactly how old these things are…

 

Senegambian stone circles

 

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

 

“The stones were erected around the eighth century on top of earlier graves. The ten to twenty-four stones in each circle vary in size up to ten-ton stones, from 1 to 2.5 metres high and are generally of laterite. The stones mark burials and were erected before the twelfth century. There are around 1,000 stone circles, the biggest concentration being more than 1,000 stones in fifty-two circles at Djalloumbéré and those around the village of Wassu, which has a museum devoted to them. One notable circle is actually a V formation. Traditionally, for unknown reasons, people leave small rocks on the stones. The use to which the stones were put is not clear but recent excavation work (2006), reported by the National Geographic Society, suggests a funerary purpose given the large number of human remains found at the sites. Archaeologists at the site are pursuing the theory that different parts of a body were buried at different sites and at different times…” (The rest is here.)

 

For more info on these mysterious circles, click here.

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Immortality – If jellyfish can do it…

Dear Science,

 

 

Please hurry up and replicate this phenomenon for use in humans!

 

 

Or, wait, it would probably be nightmarish beyond words if we were all immortal? What would we all eat, where would we all live?…

 

 

 

The Curious Case of the Immortal Jellyfish (Discover magazine)

 

 

 

“It’s official: the only thing certain in this world is taxes. That’s because death, for a tiny sea creature, is not inevitable.Turritopsis nutricul, a jellyfish-like hydrazoan, is the only animal known to be potentially immortal.

 

 

Once it reaches sexual maturity, Turritopsis looks like a tiny, transparent, many-tentacled parachute (only about 5mm in diameter) that floats freely in warm ocean waters. But when times get tough, Turritopsis can turn into a blob, anchor itself to a surface, and undergo a sort of reverse methamorphosisback to its youthful form as a stalk-like polyp. That’s like a butterfly turning back into a caterpillar. Scientists, who firstdescribed this phenomenon [pdf] in the 1990s, believeTurritopsis can repeat its life cycle indefinitely.”

 

 

 

For the complete article, click here.

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The Secret History of the Dixie Cup

What was it like before we had single serving receptacles at our disposal as simple as the common paper cup? Such objects are taken for granted to the point where they seem invisible, and yet the significance of such objects is legion…

 

The Unnatural History of the Dixie Cup

 

 

 

The Dixie Cup, the Kleenex of paper cups, the ubiquitous, single-serving, individual drinking vessel, was never meant to be shared. The paper cups were not built to last. Drink. Toss. Repeat.

 

Their story starts with a Boston inventor named Lawrence Luellen, who crafted a two-piece cup made out of a blank of paper. He joined the American Water Supply Company, the brainchild of a Kansas-born Harvard dropout named Hugh Moore. The two began dispensing individual servings of water for a penny—one cent for a five-ounce cup from a tall, clumsy porcelain water cooler.

 

Soon they were the Individual Drinking Cup Company of New York and had renamed their sole product the Health Kup, a life-saving drinking technology that could help prevent the transmission of communicable disease and aid the campaign to do away with free water offered at communal cups, “tin dippers,” found in public buildings and railway stations. Make no mistake, because of this scourge, one biologist reported in a 1908 article, there was “Death in School Drinking Cups.”…

 

For the complete article click here to go to Smithsonian.com.

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