ABCNEWS.com : Scientists Reconstruct Feast of King Midas

By analyzing residues in the cauldrons, bowls and urns found inside what is believed to be King Midas’ tomb, scientists have figured out what mourners ate and drank at the funeral feast.

Birds may be singing in their sleep, ENN Daily News -- 12/21/98The article may be over a year old, but it's too cool not to post. Birds dream about singing while they are asleep, say researchers from the University of Chicago. In fact, dreaming helps the birds "rehearse" what they learned during the day, the scientists say.

Millennium Bug Found By Australian Entomologists

It's the moment the world has been waiting for. Taxonomists at CSIRO Entomology have announced the discovery of the "real" Millennium Bug. Head of the Australian National Insect Collection, Dr Ebbe Nielsen, reports that the bug, a small water strider, is harmless to computers. "It feeds on flies and other small insects, not files," he says. The bug's actual scientific name cannot be made public until international procedures for scientific naming are complete, but both its scientific and common names will be the "Millennium Bug".

Hubble Heritage Project: Galaxy NGC 4214

Newly released images obtained with NASA'S Hubble Space Telescope in July 1997 reveal episodes of star formation that are occurring across the face of the nearby galaxy NGC 4214. Located some 13 million light-years from Earth, NGC 4214 is currently forming clusters of new stars from its interstellar gas and dust. In the Hubble image, we can see a sequence of steps in the formation and evolution of stars and star clusters. The picture was created from exposures taken in several color filters with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. NGC 4214 contains a multitude of faint stars covering most of the frame, but the picture is dominated by filigreed clouds of glowing gas surrounding bright stellar clusters.

Sci.Electronics.Repair FAQ

This site features Samuel M. Goldwasser's latest and greatest "Notes on the Troubleshooting and Repair of..." series of comprehensive repair guides for consumer electronics equipment and other household devices. There is also a great deal of other information of interest to the electronics hobbyist, experimenter, technician, engineer, and possibly even the dentist and poet. Included are the now quite comprehensive and massive "Sam's Laser FAQ", many new schematics, and links to over 1,000 technology related sites. In addition, there are a variety of documents from other sources on electronics troubleshooting, repair, and other related topics.

StatAddict - Past Results If you could have one Star Trek technology in your life, what would it be?

bComparing OOP Languages: Java, C , Object Pascal

Java is a popular Internet language, C++ used to be the most common OOP language, and Object Pascal is the language Borland uses inside Delphi. Although this is not immediately evident, these three languages have many things in common. The aim of this presentation is to delve into technical aspects of the three languages, comparing them. I'm not trying to assess which is the best language, because this largely depends on what you want to use it for.

Chicken friedA search for steak

Talking chicken fried steaks is like talking about somebody's mother - everybody has the best. It's not a difficult recipe, really, just tenderized steak, breaded and fried. But everyone has chicken fried secrets. Is the breading cracker crumbs or flour? Brown or cream gravy? Does the gravy go under the steak or on top? The history of chicken fries is tough to find, too. For centuries, humanity has breaded and fried some foods, such as fish. But just when steak went chicken fried is difficult to determine. Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House books, writes about breaded and fried "salt pork" in the 1860s on the Western frontier.

Babelfish and Babylon are two free web based translation services. Babelfish can translate phrases and even an entire web page. It also offers a downloadable plug-in that creates a "Translation" button. Babylon is a dwnloadable translation tool. Babylon offers more supported languages than Babelfish.

SETI Upgrades ET Search

The search for little green men will get a boost next week when the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project releases SETI@Home 2.0, an overhaul to its screensaver that scans radio signals from space for signs of alien life.

New Scientist Feature: Tune in, turn off

From the stratospheric IQ of Hawking to the amazing talent of the autistic savant....JAMES CAN TELL YOU the precise time--to the second--without looking at a clock. Jennifer can measure anything to within a fraction of an inch just by glancing at it. And Christopher can speak 24 languages--including a couple of his own devising. Amazing? Definitely. But unusual? Not necessarily. According to a controversial new theory you too can do these things. Or at least you could--if only you could just stop being so clever for a moment.

A brief history of the future

Will we colonise the universe? Are aliens out there? Can computers outsmart us? In a unique interview, Professor Stephen Hawking, who has spent a lifetime applying his formidable intellect to the big questions, gives Nigel Farndale his predictions for the human race

The definitive Top 10 gadget list of all time By Gary Krakow, MSNBC. One man’s opinion of devices that have changed our lives... and the world. Dec. 31 — Here it is. Just what everyone needs. Yet another Y2K, end-of-the-millennium list. But, I feel I’m entitled to do one. Especially since I’ve spent a good amount of time whittling the list of every gadget ever made down to a somewhat manageable Top 10.

News: Lucky2000 Visual Basic Virus Computer Associates International Inc. [NYSE:CA] today warned computer users of yet another virus that's been released into the wild in time for Y2K. The virus has been named "Lucky2000" and it overwrites Visual Basic scripts. Then it redirects the user's browser home page to the Lucky2000 web site in Russia.

News: Privacy Complaint Against Amazon An Internet security expert has filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against Amazon.com, alleging that its Internet software subsidiary Alexa violates existing privacy laws. The Alexa software keeps track of which sites a consumer visits and searches for similar patterns in those of other shoppers, compiling information in the aggregate to gauge shopping behavior and offering subscribers information on other sites they might like to visit.

Digital Theatre: Disney refuses to step down Rebuffed by operators of the only Imax theater in central Los Angeles, Disney is taking the extraordinary step of building a temporary theater to showcase "Fantasia/2000." The new theater, a steel and fiberglass tent constructed at a cost approaching $4 million, opened on New Year's Day in West Los Angeles, off the 405 Freeway near Howard Hughes Parkway.

Y2K gives some admins a security education The threat of online assaults had IT staffs on guard, but midnight came and went without any serious security problems cropping up, according to experts monitoring systems.

Prank or Profit? Web Name Auctioned Off for $10 Mln -- Peter de Jager was called a lot of things over the last six years while evagelizing about the dangers of the "millennium bug", many of them only four letters and not to nice. If this deal, auctioning off the domain name year2000.com, goes through he'll be called another four letter word -- RICH.

Ancient Writing Links China and MesoamericaMany symbols from Mesoamerica's Olmec culture resemble Shang dynasty characters. This may be evidence of an encounter between the two peoples.

The Chinese may have arrived in the New World more than 3,000 years ago, argues Professor Mike Xu, who has spent the past five years studying similarities between Chinese characters and symbols from an ancient Mesoamerican culture known as the Olmec. The symbols for Temple; Building, Mound; Grave; Hillock, and Container are among those that are uncannily similar between the two cultures.

The 1999 Darwin Awards

In the spirit of Charles Darwin, the Darwin Awards celebrate evolution in action by commemorating the remains of individuals who most contributed to the improvement of our gene pool. Winners minimized their own genetic contribution by suffering idiotic and fatal misadventures, thereby dousing our gene pool with chlorine.

Microworlds - Exploring the Structure of Materials MicroWorlds is an interactive tour of current research in the materials sciences at Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source. It's intended for science education in grades 9-12. Read about the Advanced Light Source, an X-ray machine the size of a soccer field!

Virtual Friends from Haptek are really interesting - the next step beyond animated web greeting cards. They feature three D talking heads. A small download for your browser is all that's required.

kdem is a program for displaying United States Geological Survey (USGS) Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) in the KDE.

From TBTF

What comes after 99? In New Zealand, the Aukland International Airport's Web site posted a news flash after local midnight to assure everyone that the airport was open and operating normally. It is timestamped 02:58 1 Jan 100. (In case they fix it soon and you miss it, see this mirror TBTF captured.)

Hubat: The Automatic Directory Builder is now in beta test. It's organised much like Yahoo and other human intensive directories but is created and maintained automatically by software. Check it out.

DaveNet: As time goes by

Simple. A most excellent New Year wish from Dave Winer.

Recipe Finder -- Looking for that "just right" recipe for your millennium celebration. You just might find it here.

A List of Internet Accessible Machines maintained by Bennet Yee at University of Calif. San Diego. Some of the links seem to be dead and some are very slow but there's still some interesting stuff here. It's mostly webcams but there are links to robots, coke machines, model railroads and many other internet accessible devices.