I remember reading in Roman History class back in college that during the reign of Emperor Trajan (r. 98-117 AD), the Roman Empire sent an emissary to China. This information was found not in Roman records, but Chinese. Now there's some archaeological evidence to support the historical claim of direct Roman-Chinese contact. The remains of a man with East Asian genes from 2,000 years ago has turned up in southern Italy:

Researchers found his body on an imperial Roman estate and took dental samples. Why examine teeth? Well, the water you drink at birth leaves a distinct signature in your teeth. That water signature is in the form of oxygen isotopes, atoms of oxygen with different numbers of neutrons. Isotopes say something about the latitude and elevation of your birthplace—which in the case of our mystery man definitely wasn’t southern Italy.

Then the researchers tested his mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down through your maternal lineage. And this fellow had east Asian genes.

Link | Photo: Indiana University

Over 700 paired species of fig trees and wasps have symbiotic relationships. The fig tree host wasp eggs, and the wasps pollinate the fig trees in return. But according to a new study, if the wasps don't pollinate the host plants, the fig trees retaliate:

If the wasps don't do their duty, the trees respond by enacting a sanction — aborting their fruit, killing off the teeming mass of baby wasps. A new study of this killer tree phenomenon, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B comes from Cornell University and The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, shows that negative reinforcement may be an important part of symbiotic relationships.

Pollination by wasp comes in two varieties: passive and active. With passive pollination the wasps carry pollen that happens to stick to their bodies; where with active pollination they collect pollen in special pouches to deliver to the flowers.

With the passive pairings, the fig trees abort their fruit far less often than with active pairs. In the actively pollinating groups, the tree species that tend to enforce sanctions less often have a higher occurrence of freeloader wasps, who take advantage of the figs without doing any of the work. Inversely, by using the sanction option more frequently, some fig species have a lower incidence of non-pollinating insects.

Link | Scientific Paper | Photo: University of British Columbia

The man behind the blog Kitty Hell ("one man's life with cute overload") has brought to our attention this marvelous/disgusting instrument of household utility. He writes:

While Hello Kitty fanatics may see something like this as cute (you have to seriously feel for the lumberjack significant other that has to carry this around at work), for the rest of us it pretty much exemplifies what any horror movie villain (or the evil feline herself) would undoubtedly use to dismember victims. In fact, The Hello Kitty Chainsaw Massacre is probably already in production and is guaranteed to be the most horrifying movie that you have ever seen.

Link via Albotas

Parents, be careful what you name your children. A case in point is Pakistan's ambassador to Saudi Arabia, whose name is, shall we say, boastful of his manhood. The Saudi government found the gentleman's name unacceptable for public mention, and rejected his credentials. This is his second appointment, as his previous posting to Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates was deemed unacceptable to those governments, and for the same reason.

Link via Ace of Spades HQ | Photo: HandMade Films

A man is accused of a crime. Is he guilty? Stick his hand in a pot of boiling water. If he is unharmed, God has proclaimed his innocence and protected him. If the suspect is burned, he's guilty and can be punished (further). This is the basic premise of the legal tradition of trial by ordeal, discredited since the Enlightenment. But was it an effective determinant of guilt? University of Chicago economist Peter T. Leeson says "yes":

How might these trials have worked, without divine intervention? The key insight is that ordeals weren’t just widely practiced. They were widely believed in. It’s this belief - literally, the fear of God - that could have allowed the ordeals to function effectively.

First, consider the reasoning of the defendants. Guilty believers expected God to reveal their guilt by harming them in the ordeal. They anticipated being boiled and convicted. Innocent believers, meanwhile, expected God to protect them in the ordeal. They anticipated escaping unscathed, and being exonerated.

The only defendants who would have been willing to go through with the ordeal were therefore the innocent ones. Guilty defendants would have preferred to avoid the ordeal - by confessing their crimes, settling with their accusers, or fleeing the realm.

The next thing to understand is that clerics administrated ordeals and adjudged their outcomes - and did so under elaborate sets of rules that gave them wide latitude to manipulate the process. Priests knew that only innocent defendants would be willing to plunge their hands in boiling water. So priests could simply rig trials to exonerate defendants who were willing to go through with the ordeal. The rituals around the ordeals gave them plenty of cover to ensure the water wasn’t boiling, or the iron wasn’t burning, and so on. If rigging failed, a priest could interpret the ordeal’s outcome to exculpate the defendant nonetheless (“His arm is healing well!”).

Link via Volokh Conspiracy | Journal Article | Photo: Sony Pictures

Natalie Dee of the webcomic Married to the Sea organized and categorized elemental smells into a periodic table. Sure, you can probably think of other smells, but they're really just compounds of these, right?

Link via Geekologie | Natalie Dee's Website

Scientists have discovered carbon crystals inside a meteorite that crashed in Finland that are harder than naturally-occurring diamonds. The re-entry impact and heat are probably responsible for this unusual formation:

The researchers were polishing a slice of the carbon-rich Havero meteorite that fell to Earth in Finland in 1971. When they then studied the polished surface they discovered carbon-loaded spots that were raised well above the rest of the surface –- suggesting that these areas were harder than the diamonds used in the polishing paste.

"That in itself is not surprising," said diamond researcher Changfeng Chen of the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. He explained that sometimes during the shock of impact graphite can create jumbled "amorphous" zones that can resist diamonds, at least those coming at them from one direction.

But what apparently happened in the Havero meteorite is that graphite layers were shocked and heated enough to create bonds between the layers -- which is exactly how humans manufacture diamonds, Chen explained.

Ferroir's team took the next step and put the diamond-resistant crystals under the scrutiny of some very rigorous mineralogical analyzing instruments to learn how its atoms are lined up. That allowed them to confirm that they had, indeed, found a new "phase" or polymorph of crystalline carbon as well as a type of diamond that had been predicted to exist decades ago, but had never been found in nature until now.

Link via Popular Science | Photo: Apollo Diamond by flickr user jurvetson, used under Creative Commons license

Last year, organizers at the Rocks Aroma Festival in Sydney, Australia, made an enormous image of the Mona Lisa using thousands of cups of coffee lightened with milk (to varying quantities) in order to create different shades:

The different colours were created by adding no, little or lots of milk to each cup of black coffee.

It measures an impressive 20 feet high and 13 feet wide and took a team of eight people three hours to complete.

Link via Digg | Photo: EpicFTW | Previously on Neatorama: Mona Lisa in Coffee (as a Paint)

Giant squid have appeared in massive numbers off the coast of California in the past few days devouring swimmers leading to bountiful catches by fishermen:

"Most of the fish we catch are better to eat, but they don't give you much of a fight."

He said the squid were "trying to crawl around and blow ink all over everybody."

Mr Woodbury said that 400 of the creatures had been caught since Friday night.

The animals weigh between 20 and 40 pounds, but a few fishermen have reeled in 60-pound squid.

The Humboldt squid is also called the jumbo squid or jumbo flying squid and squirts ink to protect itself.

They can grow up to 100 pounds in weight and six feet long and follow food sources.

Link via Digg | Image: NASA

(YouTube Link)

Monica Anderson made this robot, which she calls the Icosatetraped. It walks on twenty-four legs made of soft tubing that extend under pneumatic pressure. The robot moves about one meter per minute. The video shows a brief demonstration of the robot in motion, and then provides a photo slideshow of the design and construction process.

via Make | Maker's Blog

The 2009 Ricky Gervais movie The Invention of Lying imagined a world in which everyone always told the truth and lying (for good or ill) had never existed. Jon Wolf of College Humor has created a series of graphics illustrating an Internet in which everyone always told the truth, including the hot girl on Facebook who you've never seen before, but wants to be your friend.

http://www.collegehumor.com/article:1800153 via Gizmodo

Artist Stephen Pfeil depicted the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the styles and poses of the artists for whom they were named. And then he added some more artists from history into the mix. He writes:

But seriously, while going through Art History class I had a hard time NOT thinking of the Ninja Turtles. They may or may not have been doodled into the margins next to Brunelleschi’s perspective business.

Larger image at the link.

Link via Popped Culture

(YouTube Link)

This video is circulating the Internet today. It shows an unnamed artist making a portrait of Conan O'Brien out of cheetos. Allegedly, he (she?) used about 2,000 cheetos from 50 bags for the work, but the provenance on that information is iffy.

via The Agitator

UPDATE: In the comments, mikerbaker provides a link that informs us that this was created by artist Jason Baalman, and that it measures 5 by 4 feet. Thanks, Mike!

Henrietta Lacks, an impoverished tobacco farmer in Virginia, contracted cervical cancer in 1951. Her doctor gave a sample of her tumor to a medical researcher, who then used it to grow a cell culture. What's amazing is that in almost sixty years, those cells are still alive, making them the longest-living human cells grown in a laboratory. Journalist Rebecca Skloot has written a book about Lacks and her cells, and submitted to an interview with Smithsonian:

Henrietta’s cells were the first immortal human cells ever grown in culture. They were essential to developing the polio vaccine. They went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to cells in zero gravity. Many scientific landmarks since then have used her cells, including cloning, gene mapping and in vitro fertilization.

Skloot writes about how scientists are using these unusual cells to study human immunity. But her book is also about how the scientific world collided with a largely illiterate family and how the human body has become a commodity.

Link | Photo: Lacks family, via Smithsonian

(YouTube Link)

This clever music video of the song "Bad Apple" peformed by Nomico consists of stop-motion animation. Each frame is printed, as you can see from the image file numbers ticking away.

via DudeCraft