http://m.usatoday.com/article/news/2126421

by Dan Vergano, USA TODAY

Published: 05/01/2013 06:00pm

WASHINGTON — Jamestown’s colonists resorted to cannibalism during the “starving time” winter of 1609-10, archaeologists confirmed Wednesday.

In a briefing at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, archaeologist Doug Owsley presented the reconstructed skull of a 14-year-old English girl, named “Jane” by the researchers, discovered at the site of the fort and bearing the marks of butchery.

“The skull was split in half, most likely with a lightweight ax or quite possibly, a cleaver,” Owsley said at the briefing. Cut marks crisscrossing the skull and jaw of the girl indicate her flesh, tongue and brains were removed from the skull, Owsley said. Those were traditional cuts for animal butchery of the time, “all parts of the cuisine of the 17th century,” he said.

Jamestown was founded in 1607 by English colonists. The starving time was a period two years later in which 80% of the colonists died. Besieged by Powhatan Indians in their wooden fort, the settlers had been joined by new colonists late that summer, among them women and children, whose main supply ship had disappeared in a storm, leaving them without food. Only 60 of 300 people survived the winter.

“They were so emaciated when they were rescued that they were described as resembling skeletons,” says historian James Horn of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, who spoke at the briefing. Records kept by the colony’s governor, George Percy, make clear references to cannibalism during the winter, Horn says. “The English would have only resorted to cannibalism under the most severe circumstances,” he added.

Owsley reported on the forensic analysis of 17th century human remains and a reconstruction of her appearance made by forensic scientists. The remains had been excavated by Jamestown archaeologists led by William Kelso of the Jamestown Recovery Project in 2012 as part of a 20-year excavation of the James Fort site. “We don’t believe Jane was a lone case,” Kelso said.

“This is amazingly interesting, but it also confirms stories of cannibalism from the settlers themselves,” says Charles Mann, author of 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. “Things were indeed terrible during those early years,” Mann says, by email.

While not all colonial-era historians agreed that cannibalism took place at Jamestown, most modern ones generally credited the accounts (one man was executed for eating his wife) as reliable. Horn and Owsley argued the butchery marks on Jane provide stronger evidence for the practice. “No one can say with authoritative certainty exactly why this young lady was cut up, but given the context, it looks like butcher’s marks,” Owsley said.

In the briefing, he identified a number of features on the skull and a shin bone that indicated that Jane was cannibalized. Four shallow chops to the forehead were attempted in a first, failed attempt to open the skull. The back of the head was then split open. The final blow split the cranium open.

“The person doing this was not a very good, or experienced butcher,” Owsley said. Chop marks on the shin bone resemble more conventional butchers’ marks seen on animal bones from the time, indicating that more than one person may have been involved in cannibalizing the girl. She was doubtless one of the newly arrived settlers, though still not definitively identified. An exhibition devoted to the discovery will open this Friday at the Historic Jamestowne site, and her reconstructed face will be displayed at the Smithsonian museum.

Copyright 2013 USATODAY.com

Mr.V

http://allthingsd.com/20130430/meet-ibms-boy-and-his-atom-stars-of-the-smallest-movie-ever-made/

Meet IBM’s “Boy And His Atom,” Stars of the Smallest Movie Ever Made – AllThingsD

The image above shows two animated characters in what’s been certified by the Guinness Book of World Records as the smallest movie ever made. It’s called “A Boy And His Atom,” and the medium of animation is, you guessed it, atoms.

It lasts all of 60 seconds, and depicts a boy — made up of individual atoms himself — encountering a single atom that he befriends and throws like a ball. He then bounces up and down on a tiny trampoline made up of atoms, then throws the original atom into the sky, where it erupts into a tiny commercial for the company that produced it: IBM.

What’s going on here is this: Scientists at IBM’s Almaden Research Lab in San Jose, Calif., have figured out a way to precisely move and manipulate individual atoms. To do it they’re using a big piece of equipment called a about it.)

Using a computer, researchers used a tiny needle that moved along a surface of a postage-stamp sized bit of copper. The needle would draw within one nanometer (a billionth of a meter) of the individual atoms and thus “feel” them so it could then move them into place and shift them around frame by frame in order to make the stop-motion action happen. The film you’re about to see is made up of 242 such frames using not one but two of those scanning tunneling microscopes. The atoms have been magnified about 100 million times from their original size.

Before they tried animation, and in the tradition of humorous art that sometimes appears on the surface of individual computer chips, the folks at IBM experimented with illustrations made of atoms. Among them was a rendering of the Starship Enterprise from “Star Trek” that’s not much more than a single nanometer tall. (Pictured at right; click the image to make it bigger.) Before that, way back in 1989, the big brains at Big Blue were able to spell out the company name using 35 individual atoms of xenon.

So why is IBM using atoms to make crude animations? As has long been the case, everything inside computers is getting smaller all the time. According to Moore’s Law — named for Intel co-founder Gordon Moore — individual transistors on chips tend to shrink every 18 to 24 months. So does the amount of space needed to store individual bits of data. Right now, IBM says, it takes about a million atoms to do that, but it can see a trajectory leading to a point in the future to where that number can be reduced to 12 atoms. At that scale, the media to store information will be so compact that every movie ever made, including “A Boy And His Atom,” could be stored on a device the size of your iPhone. That means the ability to move and manipulate individual atoms with great precision will eventually come in handy.

it’s not, but here for the first time on public display, is IBM’s “A Boy And His Atom.”

And here is the obligatory “Making Of…” video that explains how and why the movie was made, including an interesting detail: What moving individual atoms sounds like.

Mr.V

Mr.V
mr.v@worldhistoryreview.org

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/universe-is-created-according-to-kepler?et_cid=53761088&et_rid=950877813&linkid=http%3a%2f%2fwww.history.com%2fthis-day-in-history%2funiverse-is-created-according-to-kepler
On this day in 4977 B.C., the universe is created, according to German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler, considered a founder of modern science. Kepler is best known for his theories explaining the motion of planets.

Kepler was born on December 27, 1571, in Weil der Stadt, Germany. As a university student, he studied the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus’ theories of planetary ordering. Copernicus (1473-1543) believed that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the solar system, a theory that contradicted the prevailing view of the era that the sun revolved around the earth.

In 1600, Kepler went to Prague to work for Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, the imperial mathematician to Rudolf II, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. Kepler’s main project was to investigate the orbit of Mars. When Brahe died the following year, Kepler took over his job and inherited Brahe’s extensive collection of astronomy data, which had been painstakingly observed by the naked eye. Over the next decade, Kepler learned about the work of Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), who had invented a telescope with which he discovered lunar mountains and craters, the largest four satellites of Jupiter and the phases of Venus, among other things. Kepler corresponded with Galileo and eventually obtained a telescope of his own and improved upon the design. In 1609, Kepler published the first two of his three laws of planetary motion, which held that planets move around the sun in ellipses, not circles (as had been widely believed up to that time), and that planets speed up as they approach the sun and slow down as they move away. In 1619, he produced his third law, which used mathematic principles to relate the time a planet takes to orbit the sun to the average distance of the planet from the sun.

Kepler’s research was slow to gain widespread traction during his lifetime, but it later served as a key influence on the English mathematician Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727) and his law of gravitational force. Additionally, Kepler did important work in the fields of optics, including demonstrating how the human eye works, and math. He died on November 15, 1630, in Regensberg, Germany. As for Kepler’s calculation about the universe’s birthday, scientists in the 20th century developed the Big Bang theory, which showed that his calculations were off by about 13.7 billion years.

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If you have not visited Grant’s Tomb on the Westside of Manhattan, it would be an invigorating experience for any true patriot. It’ll be like a shot of pride. This man was absolutely pivotal in the Union victory. To paraphrase a description of General Grant by President Lincoln, “He is like a bull dog. He bites [the enemy] and refuses to let go”.

As for me, I send a heart-felt “Happy Birthday” to the general.

Mr.V
mr.v@worldhistoryreview.org

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/president-grant-is-born?et_cid=53761088&et_rid=950877813&linkid=http%3a%2f%2fwww.history.com%2fthis-day-in-history%2fpresident-grant-is-born

President Grant is born

Ulysses S. Grant, Civil War leader and 18th president of the United States, is born on this day in 1822.

The son of a tanner, Grant showed little enthusiasm for joining his father’s business, so the elder Grant enrolled his son at West Point in 1839. Though Grant later admitted in his memoirs he had no interest in the military apart from honing his equestrian skills, he graduated in 1843 and went on to serve in the Mexican-American War, though he opposed it on moral grounds. He then left his beloved wife and children again to fulfill a tour of duty in California and Oregon. The loneliness and sheer boredom of duty in the West drove Grant to binge drinking. By 1854, Grant’s alcohol consumption so alarmed his superiors that he was asked to resign from the army. He did, and returned to Ohio to try his hand at farming and land speculation. Although he kicked the alcohol habit, he failed miserably at both vocations and was forced to take a job as a clerk in his father’s tanning business.

If it were not for the Civil War, Grant might have slipped quickly into obscurity. Instead, he re-enlisted in the army in 1861 and embarked on a stellar military career, although his tendency to binge-drink re-emerged and he developed another unhealthy habit: chain cigar-smoking. He struggled throughout the Civil War to control the addictions. In 1862, he led troops in the captures of Forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee, and forced the Confederate Army to retreat back into Mississippi after the Battle of Shiloh. (After the Donelson campaign, Grant received over 10,000 boxes of congratulatory cigars from a grateful citizenry.)

In 1863, after leading a Union Army to victory at Vicksburg, Grant caught President Lincoln’s attention. The Union Army had suffered under the service of a series of incompetent generals and Lincoln was in the market for a new Union supreme commander. In March 1864, Lincoln revived the rank of lieutenant general—a rank that had previously been held only by George Washington in 1798–and gave it to Grant. As supreme commander of Union forces, Grant led a series of epic and bloody battles against the Confederate General Robert E. Lee. On April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia. The victory solidified Grant’s status as national hero and, in 1868, he was elected to the first of two terms as president.

Grant’s talent as a political leader paled woefully in comparison to his military prowess. He was unable to stem the rampant corruption of his administration and failed to combat a severe economic depression in 1873. There were bright spots in Grant’s tenure, however, including the passage of the Enforcement Act in 1870, which temporarily curtailed the political influence of the Ku Klux Klan in the post-Civil War South, and the 1875 Civil Rights Act, which attempted to desegregate public places such as restrooms, inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement. In addition, Grant helped heal U.S. and British diplomatic relations, despite the fact that Britain had offered to supply the Confederate Army with the tools to break the Union naval blockade during the Civil War. He also managed to stay sober during his two terms in office.

Upon leaving office, Grant’s fortunes again declined. He and his wife Julia traveled to Europe between 1877 and 1879 amid great fanfare, but the couple came home to bankruptcy caused by Grant’s unwise investment in a scandal-prone banking firm. Grant spent the last few years of his life writing a detailed account of the Civil War and, after he died of throat cancer in 1885, Julia managed to scrape by on the royalties earned from his memoirs.

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