M.J. Rose

How could it be that we lose more than a pound of weight at night while we sleep? One atom at a time dear Watson…

Every Night You Lose More Than A Pound While You’re Asleep (For The Oddest Reason)

by ROBERT KRULWICH

The Voynich manuscript. Is it an ancient and brilliant hoax of crypto genius? Is it the lost journal of a shipwrecked space alien? The ravings of a linguistically gifted lunatic? No one has ever been able to decipher it one way or the other. Until now. A new statistical analysis of the medieval book that has “frustrated the world’s best code breakers for a century” is likely to contain “a genuine message”.

Study: mysterious Voynich Manuscript carries ‘genuine message’

by IAN STEADMAN

“A statistical analysis of a medieval book that has frustrated the world’s best code breakers for a century is likely to contain “a genuine message”.

The Voynich Manuscript is perhaps the greatest, most mysterious undeciphered medieval text. Dated from the 15th or 16th centuries in Italy, its 246 pages contain illustrations of seemingly imaginary plants and text that is, as far as anyone can tell, written in an entirely unknown made-up language.

Without any kind of Rosetta stone, cracking the Voynich manuscript has proven impossible — but many of the world’s best cryptography experts have remained convinced that there is a legitimate message in there. Its “alphabet” contains between 19 and 29 symbols, and its words and sentences conform to the lengths expected from other European languages…”

Click here for the complete article.

What’s a museum caretaker to do when a statue that was an offering to the ancient Egyptian god of death starts inexplicably rotating in its display case? Click here for a time-lapse video of the 4000-year-old relic of Neb-Senu as it inexplicably moves on its own…

From the comments in the original article, here are two interesting pictures:

Why is this Egyptian listening to a record player and holding a remote control? Is this merely a lotus and an ankh?

And what’s this? A laptop and a stylus?

Makes one wonder… 🙂