Every summer solstice, tens of thousands of people throng to Stonehenge, creating a festival-like atmosphere at the 4,400-year-old stone monument. For the 2015 solstice, they will have a bit more room to spread out. A just-completed four-year project to map the vicinity of Stonehenge reveals a sprawling complex that includes 17 newly discovered monuments and signs of 1.5 kilometre-round “super henge”. Read more
Canadian archaeologists have found one of the Franklin Expedition’s ships — lost since the Arctic explorers famously disappeared in 1846 — off of King William Island in the Canadian Arctic. The ship is either the HMS Erebus or the HMS Terror, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced on 9 September. Read more
The stalemate continues over the question of when to destroy the last stocks of the virus that causes smallpox, a killer disease that was eradicated in 1980. One of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) two advisory committees on smallpox supports their destruction, while the other opposes this. Last weekend, health ministers of the WHO’s 194 member states again postponed a decision, and decided to set up a third WHO smallpox advisory committee in a bid to broker a consensus. Read more
Frederick Sanger, who won two Nobel Prizes for his work on DNA and protein sequencing, died yesterday, according to a spokesperson at the Laboratory for Molecular Biology at the University of Cambridge, UK. He was 95. Read more
Ötzi the Iceman, the 5,300 year-old mummified body discovered in 1991 in the Austrian Alps, may have numerous distant relatives living in the region today. Read more
Joe Farman, one of three British scientists who discovered a ‘hole’ in the ozone layer, died on 11 May (see obituaries in the Guardian and the Telegraph). Read more
At the moment of his death, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda had a prostate cancer in advanced state, with extended metastasis, according to the first analysis of his remains, carried on by the Chilean Legal Medical Service (SML). The results were delivered yesterday to Mario Carroza, the prosecution judge who is investigating the cause of the Nobel Laureate’s death in 1973. Read more
The house built by Alfred Russel Wallace after he returned from his exotic travels is about to come on the market. Read more
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