Roger Scruton – Why Beauty Matters

Archaeologists uncover amphitheatre used to train gladiators near Vienna

The ruins are a ‘sensational discovery’ with a structure to rival the Colosseum in Rome, archaeologists say.

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Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo

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The Ekpyrotic Scenario

From the wikipedia article:
The ekpyrotic universe, or ekpyrotic scenario, is a cosmological model of the origin and shape of the universe. The name comes from a Stoic term for “out of fire”.[1] The ekpyrotic model of the universe is an alternative to the standard cosmic inflation paradigm, both of which accept that the standard big bang Lambda-CDM model of our universe is an appropriate description up to very early times. The ekpyrotic model is a precursor to, and part of the cyclic model.

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The Particle Adventure

The Fundamentals of Matter and Force

An award winning interactive tour of quarks, neutrinos, antimatter, extra dimensions, dark matte, accelerators and particle detectors from the Particle Data Group of Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory.

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More info here.

The Consequences of the Sexual Revolution

From the dailymail.co.uk article entitled “My generation created the sexual revolution – and it has been wrecking the lives of women ever since”:

When the novelist Martin Amis said recently that it was the sexual revolution of the Sixties and Seventies that destroyed his ‘pathologically promiscuous’ sister Sally, an alcoholic who died in 2000 aged 46, he provoked a wave of controversy. His views were ridiculed by his critics, who claimed that his sister ‘was out of control. It was her doing, not the culture.’

Well, I was part of that culture too. As a university student between 1966 and 1969, I experienced first-hand the impact of the sexual revolution, and the sweeping changes it wrought between men and women.

To suggest any individual was immune from that tidal wave of change, or from the pressures that came with it, for women in particular, is frankly wrong.

Yet Amis has hit a nerve, with liberals in particular, who rightly read his comments as a criticism of everything they believed in and fought for through the massive social upheavals of those decades. It was not ‘the free love culture’ which caused her death, they insist, but her own self-indulgence. After all, we all have choices, don’t we?

To me, this is one of the most fascinating issues of our time – raising so many questions about freewill, and cause and effect.

I’m always amazed at the way the liberal Left is eager to make excuses for any dubious results of their progressive ideas.

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Plastics ingredients could make a boy’s play less masculine

From the sciencenews.org:
Exposures in the womb to a ubiquitous family of industrial chemicals can subtly perturb preferences of boys for certain types of child’s play thought to be hardwired in the brain, a new study suggests. Phthalates are widely used solvents and plastics softeners. In this study, the greater a boy’s fetal exposure to certain phthalates, the less often he tended to engage in typically masculine play.

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See this other related story about the The Disappearing Male.

Mini-Colosseum Excavated in Rome

From the discovery.com article:
Beneath Rome’s Fiumicino airport lies a “mini-Colosseum” that may have played host to Roman emperors, according to British archaeologists.

The foundations of the amphitheater, which are oval-shaped like the much larger arena in the heart of Rome, have been unearthed at the site of Portus, a 2nd century A.D. harbor near Ostia’s port on the Tiber River.

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A skull that rewrites the history of man

From the independent.co.uk article:

It has long been agreed that Africa was the sole cradle of human evolution. Then these bones were found in Georgia…

The conventional view of human evolution and how early man colonised the world has been thrown into doubt by a series of stunning palaeontological discoveries suggesting that Africa was not the sole cradle of humankind. Scientists have found a handful of ancient human skulls at an archaeological site two hours from the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, that suggest a Eurasian chapter in the long evolutionary story of man.

The skulls, jawbones and fragments of limb bones suggest that our ancient human ancestors migrated out of Africa far earlier than previously thought and spent a long evolutionary interlude in Eurasia – before moving back into Africa to complete the story of man.

Experts believe fossilised bones unearthed at the medieval village of Dmanisi in the foothills of the Caucuses, and dated to about 1.8 million years ago, are the oldest indisputable remains of humans discovered outside of Africa.
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The Strangest Things Pulled Out of Peat Bogs

From the wired.com article:
A few thousand years ago, someone living in what is now Ireland made some butter, stuck it into an oak barrel, wandered out into a bog about 25 miles west of Dublin, and buried it.

Somehow, that someone lost track of it, which two lucky archaeologists discovered when they dug up the stashed loot earlier this year in the Gilltown bog, between the Irish towns of Timahoe and Staplestown.

But that wasn’t the first keg of butter that’s been preserved by the strange chemistry of the bog. Or the 10th. More than 270 kegs of bog butter have been retrieved from the wetlands, along with dozens of ancient bodies, swords, and ornaments. Here, we run down some of the strangest things that scientists and citizens have pulled from the peat.

Read the article here.