M.J. Rose

This may sound like science fiction, but scientists really are resurrecting lost species.

The Mammoth Cometh

Bringing extinct animals back to life is really happening — and it’s going to be very, very cool. Unless it ends up being very, very bad.

By NATHANIEL RICH (New York Times)

“The first time Ben Novak saw a passenger pigeon, he fell to his knees and remained in that position, speechless, for 20 minutes. He was 16. At 13, Novak vowed to devote his life to resurrecting extinct animals. At 14, he saw a photograph of a passenger pigeon in an Audubon Society book and “fell in love.” But he didn’t know that the Science Museum of Minnesota, which he was then visiting with a summer program for North Dakotan high-school students, had them in their collection. He was shocked when he came across a cabinet containing two stuffed pigeons, a male and a female, mounted in lifelike poses. He was overcome by awe, sadness and the birds’ physical beauty: their bright auburn breasts, slate-gray backs and the dusting of iridescence around their napes that, depending on the light and angle, appeared purple, fuchsia or green. Before his chaperones dragged him out of the room, Novak snapped a photograph with his disposable camera. The flash was too strong, however, and when the film was processed several weeks later, he was haunted to discover that the photograph hadn’t developed. It was blank, just a flash of white light.

In the decade since, Novak has visited 339 passenger pigeons — at the Burke Museum in Seattle, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, the American Museum of Natural History in New York and Harvard’s Ornithology Department, which has 145 specimens, including eight pigeon corpses preserved in jars of ethanol, 31 eggs and a partly albino pigeon. There are 1,532 passenger-pigeon specimens left on Earth. On Sept. 1, 1914, Martha, the last captive passenger pigeon, died at the Cincinnati Zoo…”

For the complete article (it’s really quite wonderful) click here to go to the New York Times Magazine.

According to the news in Portugal, a huge pyramid has been discovered off the coast –

“The pyramid is perfectly shaped and apparently oriented by the cardinal points,” Silva told Diário Insular, the local newspaper.

Furthermore, “the Portuguese Association of Archaeological Research (APIA) have identified archaeological evidence on Pico island that supports their belief that human occupation of the Azores predates the arrival of the Portuguese by many thousands of years.”

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Click here for the complete article from the Portuguese American Journal.

The Voynich manuscript continues to be one of the most fascinating and mysterious objects on earth. No one has ever been able to decipher it, but it looks as if there may be some new theories about its origins.

Mexican plants could break code on Voynich manuscript

by Lisa Grossman (New Scientist)

“A mysterious manuscript that appears to be written in gibberish may actually be in an extinct dialect of the Mexican language Nahuatl. Illustrations of plants in the manuscript have been linked to plants native to Central America for the first time, suggesting a new origin for the text. But some still say it could be a hoax.

The Voynich manuscript has puzzled researchers since book dealer Wilfrid Voynich found it in an Italian monastery in 1912.

Among hundreds of pages of so-far undecipherable text, it includes illustrations of naked nymphs, astrological diagrams and drawings of plants that no one has been able to identify.

An academic war has raged for years between those who think the manuscript contains a real language that could eventually be decoded, and those who think it was a clever forgery designed to dupe book collectors.

“It’s a battle with two sides,” says Alain Touwaide, a historian of botany at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC. …”

For the rest, click here.