| 96 | Vespasian, a Roman army leader, is hailed as a Roman emperor by the Egyptian legions. | |
| 1543 | England and Scotland sign the Peace of Greenwich. | |
| 1596 | An English fleet under the Earl of Essex, Lord Howard of Effingham and Francis Vere capture and sack Cadiz, Spain. | |
| 1690 | Led by Marshall Luxembourg, the French defeat the forces of the Grand Alliance at Fleurus in the Netherlands. | |
| 1777 | British troops depart from their base at the Bouquet river to head toward Ticonderoga, New York. | |
| 1798 | Napoleon Bonaparte takes Alexandria, Egypt. | |
| 1838 | Charles Darwin presents a paper on his theory of evolution to the Linnean Society in London. | |
| 1862 | Union artillery stops a Confederate attack at Malvern Hill, Virginia. | |
| 1863 | In the first day's fighting at Gettysburg, Federal forces retreat through the town and dig in at Cemetery Ridge and Cemetery Hill. | |
| 1867 | Canada, by the terms of the British North America Act, becomes an independent dominion. | |
| 1876 | Montenegro declares war on the Turks. | |
| 1898 | American troops take San Juan Hill and El Caney, Cuba, from the Spaniards. | |
| 1942 | German troops capture Sevestapol, Crimea, in the Soviet Union. | |
| 1945 | The New York State Commission Against Discrimination is established–the first such agency in the United States. | |
| 1950 | American ground troops arrive in South Korea to halt the advancing North Korean army. | |
| 1961 | British troops land in Kuwait to aid against Iraqi threats. | |
| 1963 | The U.S. postmaster introduces the zip code. | |
| 1966 | The U.S. Marines launch Operation Holt in an attempt to finish off a Vietcong battalion in Thua Thien Province in Vietnam. |
The Constitution also failed to specify the powers and status of vice presidents who assumed the top office. In fact, the second job was such an afterthought that no provision was made for replacing VPs who died or departed before finishing their terms. As a result, the office has been vacant for almost 38 years in the nation’s history.
Until recently, no one much cared. When William R.D. King died in 1853, just 25 days after his swearing-in (last words: “Take the pillow from under my head”), President Pierce gave a speech addressing other matters before concluding “with a brief allusion” to the vice president’s death. Other number-twos were alive but absentee, preferring their own homes or pursuits to an inconsequential role in Washington, where most VPs lived in boardinghouses (they had no official residence until the 1970s). Thomas Jefferson regarded his vice presidency as a “tranquil and unoffending station,” and spent much of it at Monticello. George Dallas (who called his wife “Mrs. Vice”) maintained a lucrative law practice, writing of his official post: “Where is he to go? What has he to do?—no where, nothing.” Daniel Tompkins, a drunken embezzler described as a “degraded sot,” paid so little heed to his duties that Congress docked his salary.
Meet
Ian Kinnaird, 72, who turned out to be the grandfather of everyone in
Britain. Genetically speaking, that is:Ian Kinnaird, 72, has a genetic marker inherited from his mother that traces his ancestry to an African lineage that has not been found before in Western Europe.Auslan Cramb of The Telegraph has more here.
Researchers from Britain’s DNA, who carried out the tests, said the result meant that in genetic terms he was a “thoroughbred”, and could be described as the “grandson of Eve, or the grandfather of everyone in Britain”.
Pottery fragments found in a south China cave have been confirmed to be 20,000 years old, making them the oldest known pottery in the world, archaeologists say.
The findings, which will appear in the journal Science on Friday, add to recent efforts that have dated pottery piles in east Asia to more than 15,000 years ago, refuting conventional theories that the invention of pottery correlates to the period about 10,000 years ago when humans moved from being hunter-gathers to farmers.
The research by a team of Chinese and American scientists also pushes the emergence of pottery back to the last ice age, which might provide new explanations for the creation of pottery, said Gideon Shelach, chair of the Louis Frieberg Center for East Asian Studies at The Hebrew University in Israel.
For anyone who ever has been stuck in traffic, it's a tempting
fantasy: If only you were driving a tank and could roll over everything
in your path.
The Salisbury Post reported that Deputy Jagger Naves was awakened by four calls to his cell phone around 4 a.m.A Norwegian man has received terrorist training from al-Qaida's offshoot in Yemen and is awaiting orders to carry out an attack on the West, officials from three European security agencies told The Associated Press on Monday.Next step: curtailment of the civil liberties of persons with white skin; this will complement the profiling currently underway on persons of color, and pretty much complete the dermatological spectrum.
Western intelligence officials have long feared such a scenario — a convert to Islam who is trained in terrorist methods and can blend in easily in Europe and the United States, traveling without visa restrictions.
Officials from three European security agencies confirmed Monday the man is "operational," meaning he has completed his training and is about to receive a target...
The technology -- known as laser-induced plasma channel -- is designed to seek out targets that conduct electricity better than the air or ground that surrounds them.
The sledgehammer's existence first came to light in 1980, when a group of inspecting officers from the General Staff visiting Strategic Missile Forces headquarters asked General Georgy Novikov what he would do if he received a missile launch order but the safe containing the launch codes failed to open.
Novikov said he would “knock off the safe’s lock with the sledgehammer” he kept nearby, the spokesman said.
Tree ring data indicates that sometime around 774 or 775 A.D., an intense burst of radiation
hit the Earth. What was its source? Scientists were uncertain, but it
was probably a supernova. Unfortunately, there were no records of such
event. His search found the eighth-century entries in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle at the Avalon Project, an online library of historical and legal documents hosted by Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Scrolling down to the year ad 774, Allen found a reference to a “red crucifix” that appeared in the heavens “after sunset”. [...]
“It made me think it’s some sort of stellar event,” Allen says. Furthermore, he notes, the redness might indicate that the source was hidden behind a dust cloud dense enough to scatter all but a small amount of red light. Such a cloud might also prevent any remnants of the proposed supernova being seen by modern astronomers.
If you're out of batteries, don't fret: one day you can grab some spray-paint and graffiti your own power supply.
There was a positive association between BPA concentrations in urine and diagnosis of meningioma.
The patients with higher concentrations of BPA in their urine – the three groups with greater than 0.53 ng/ml – were more likely to have the brain cancer compared to those with the lower concentrations – less than 0.53 ng/mL. Specifically, those with higher concentrations were 1.4 to 1.6 times more likely to be diagnosed than patients in the group with the lowest urine concentrations.
The results also support what other studies have shown. The personal factors of gender, BMI and use of HRT influence the risk of the disease. However, when considering the link with BPA, the personal factors did not alter the results.
This means the association was consistent regardless of BMI status. There was a positive association between BPA levels in urine and meningioma among normal weight, overweight and obese participants.
2. Tea
It's
no secret that supermarket tomatoes are grown for their looks and not
for their taste, but how where exactly did growers go wrong in developing
taste tomatoes?Sometime before 1930, somewhere in America, a tomato grower noticed a plant that was producing distinctive fruit. These fruit turned red from stem to tip in a uniform way. They didn't have any of those bothersome green shoulders.Dan Charles of NPR's All Things Considered has the story: here.
It was a new mutation, and plant breeders saw it as the next big thing.
They called it the "uniform ripening" trait. In 1930, the agricultural experiment station in Fargo, N.D., released a new tomato variety containing this mutation. The variety was called All Red. [...]
The researchers discovered that this natural tomato gene, when it works properly, produces those green shoulders on tomatoes. The darker green color comes from the chlorophyll in plant structures called chloroplasts, which is what converts sunlight into sugars for the plant. In fact, those dark green shoulders were making those old tomatoes sweeter and creating more flavor.
The uniform-ripening mutation disabled this gene.
If elephants can wound like us, they can heal like us as well, perhaps more readily. With humans acting as stand-ins for their mothers, along with the help of the other nursery elephants, the majority of the orphans that survive recover to become fully functional wild elephants again. To date, Sheldrick's nursery has successfully raised more than a hundred orphan elephants. They have returned to the wild in wary, halting, half measures at first, having become "homo-pachyderms," caught between a deep devotion to their human caregivers and the irresistible call of their true selves.
Washington Post science writer Brian Vastag reports on the story
of the last four chimps that remain at a controversial research
facility in Maryland. Bioqual has been experimenting on chimpanzees for
30 years. Soon, that era will end, as part of "a historic shift away
from using apes in medical experiments."
On Monday morning, a truck hauled six chimps from Bioqual. Last week, five others were removed. The last four, including Tiffany and Torian, will depart later this summer. They are returning to where they were born — the much larger New Iberia Research Center, part of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette — where they will be available for more research before they’re retired — someday — to a sanctuary.Read the rest here. And, watch this May PBS NewsHour piece on the ethics of chimp research, and the facility where the "retiring" Bioqual chimps will go to live out their remaining days.
“This is another indication that chimpanzee research is on the decline,” said Kathleen Conlee of the Humane Society of the United States, which has painted Bioqual’s chimp research as unethical.
While about 1,000 research chimps live in the United States — down from 1,500 in 1997 — a landmark report from the influential Institute of Medicine (IOM) last December labeled nearly all chimpanzee research as scientifically unjustified.
