The Greek poet Homer was first to make written reference to a “sardonic smile,” and in the millennia since the phrase has been used to denote a bitter or cynical grin. Now, researchers in Italy say they’ve discovered a poisonous herb that gave rise to Homer’s coinage: a plant called hemlock water-dropwort that grows wild across the island of Sardinia and was used in the ancient Sardinians’ death rituals. The plant was used in pre-Roman times for the ritual killing of old people who had become a burden to society. “According to ancient historians, elderly people unable to support themselves were intoxicated with the herb and then killed by being dropped from a high rock or by being beaten to death,” the research team wrote [Telegraph]. The plant’s toxins can cause facial muscles to contract, researchers note, leaving an eerie smile frozen on the face of the corpse.
The poet Homer first used the word ’sardonic’ as an adverb when describing Odysseus’ smile. The Greek hero “smiled sardonically” as he dodged an ox jaw thrown by one of his wife’s former suitors. According to some scholars, Homer coined the word after learning that the Punic people who settled Sardinia gave condemned people the smile-inducing potion [Discovery News].
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The online bookseller Amazon is expected to unveil a larger model of its Kindle e-reader at a press conference today, and the company hopes that the device will revolutionize several old-media industries: textbook publishing and the newspaper and magazine business. Photos show that the new reader will be about the size of a sheet of paper and will have a 9.7-inch screen, which will be more conducive to displaying content from textbooks, newspapers, and magazines.
The new product will be unveiled at Pace University, one of six colleges that will use the Kindle to distribute course material to students next fall in a technological test run. Experts say that bringing college textbooks to a light and portable e-reader makes loads of sense. Anyone who’s been to a U.S. college in the past few decades could tell you that textbooks are very highly–some would say obscenely–priced. They’re also bulky, and often difficult to get rid of once purchased: Selling the third edition of an introductory biology textbook on the used-book market is pretty difficult when the fourth edition comes out a year later. Theoretically, this should be the perfect market for an electronic reader like the Kindle…. “I do think the textbook market will be the killer app for e-readers,” said Sarah Epps, a media analyst at Forrester Research [CNET]. However, Epps added that it would probably take several years for the technology to catch on, and for publishers to reach acceptable profit-sharing agreements.
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Objections are increasing to Google Book Search, Google’s massive effort to scan millions of books and present their contents online. The company reached an agreement last year with the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers to pursue the project. It is awaiting a judge’s approval…. The settlement is unusual is that it essentially structures the digitized book search market while that market is in its infancy, said Bert Foer, president of the American Antitrust Institute [Reuters]. But Google is facing new obstacles in winning that judicial approval, as concerns continue to mount over how much power will be concentrated in the company’s hands.
The settlement would establish a revenue-sharing system and would allow Google to present the partial contents of books in the public domain, books that that are still under copyright but are out of print, and current books whose publishers have negotiated agreements with Google. But critics worry that Google is building a new kind of monopoly based on access to information, and that the company could therefore set prices as high as it wanted. In a new legal filing by library groups, critics of the settlement wrote that “the cost of creating such a library and Google’s significant lead-time advantage suggest that no other entity will create a competing digital library for the foreseeable future” [CNET]. The Justice Department’s antitrust division is also reportedly investigating the deal.
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When medieval literature scholar Timothy Stinson studies an illuminated manuscript, he doesn’t just examine the text and rich illustrations for clues to the manuscript’s origins. He also wonders what he can learn from the parchment itself, which is made from animal skins. Now, Stinson has demonstrated that the DNA from those old animal skins can be extracted and studied to reveal what kind of animal it came from, which could help in determining manuscripts’ provenance and age. Until recently, scholars relied on visual analysis (such as handwriting samples) to trace the origin of most ancient texts. But Stinson says that more precise genetic analyses are possible because the preferred “paper” of the day was thin parchment made from the skin of local cattle, sheep or goats. “DNA offers much more specific information, but no one’s mapped it yet,” he says [Scientific American].
Stinson is proposing a genetic database of medieval manuscripts. If researchers first record data from monastery paperwork which has a known origin and age, he says, they can then check undated and mysterious manuscripts against that database to try to find matches. “This could help us understand not just things, not just books, not just medieval cows, but people,” said Stinson…. He gave the example of an undated poem he’s currently translating, about the Roman destruction of Jerusalem. The poem, said Stinson, reflects anti-Semitic tendencies common in parts of medieval England. “Who was circulating these — what time, and when? Was it country gentlemen? Monks? Where are these being produced?” [Wired News].
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Two different studies separated by more than 1,700 miles hammer home the same point: evidence of global warming is everywhere. In Yellowstone National Park, researchers found that amphibian populations have declined dramatically over the past 15 years as some of their pond habitats have dried up and disappeared. Meanwhile, in Massachusetts’ Walden Pond, botanists discovered that more than a quarter of the plant species observed by Henry David Thoreau have disappeared since the author went to the woods to “live deliberately” in the 1850s.
The two studies, which both appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [subscription required], show that changes to the planet’s flora and fauna are already well underway. The Yellowstone study compared data from an amphibian survey done in 1992 and 1993 to data from a new survey conducted over the last three summers; researchers looked at the park’s “kettle” ponds, which are re-filled in spring by groundwater and snow melt running down from the hills [BBC News]. The researchers found that the number of permanently dry ponds had quadrupled, and even in the ponds that remained, amphibian populations had plummeted.
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On April 16, 1178 B.C. a total eclipse blotted out the sun at high noon; astronomers know that much for certain. The other events of that day are considerably less definite, but researchers say the date may also figure large in Homer’s Odyssey, the epic tale of Odysseus’s journey home to Ithaca after the Trojan War. Using astronomical clues from the text, researchers say that Homer may have indicated that the day of the eclipse was also the day that Odysseus finally reached home–arriving just in time to slaughter his wife’s persistent suitors.
While the researchers believe they’ve arrived at the proper date for Odysseus’s homecoming in the Odyssey, they don’t claim to have proven that all the events in the epic are real; it is, after all, packed with gods, monsters, and magic. But researcher Marcelo Magnasco says his findings could at least demonstrate Homer’s astronomical erudition. “Under the assumption that our work turns out to be correct, it adds to the evidence that he knew what he was talking about,” Magnasco said. “It still does not prove the historicity of the return of Odysseus,” he said. “It only proves that Homer knew about certain astronomical phenomena that happened much before his time” [AP].
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