Free Republic

A shuttle bus carrying Apple employees from San Francisco to Cupertino caught fire this morning in unincorporated San Mateo County near Menlo Park, a California Highway Patrol spokesman said. The fire was reported at 6:40 a.m. on southbound Interstate Highway 280 at Sand Hill Road, CHP Officer Art Montiel said. The rear left side of the bus caught fire. Montiel did not know what caused the fire. No one was injured. Two lanes of the highway were closed for more than an hour and reopened at about 8 a.m. No other vehicle was involved in the incident, Montiel said. The...

In what has been described as a breakthrough, Vietnamese and Russian archaeologists have found valuable artifacts in the Central Highlands province of Gia Lai that they say belonged to ancient humans around 800,000 years ago. The traces of homo erectus or "upright man," including fossils and more than 200 stone tools, were discovered at 12 locations around An Khe Town, according to the findings announced by the scientists on Friday. It was "the biggest and most important" archeological discovery not only for Vietnam but Asia, Dr. Nguyen Giang Hai, chief of Vietnam's Institute of Archeology, told Tuoi Tre newspaper. The...

Sam Patch is one of those local legends that's just there, part of our early childhood storytelling world, like Paul Bunyan or Johnny Appleseed... A couple of months ago, we heard a talk about Sam at the neighborhood library branch, setting the stories in historical reality. The circus-like character with the swashbuckling costume and the pet bear and the showy leaps, the character he presented on posters to advertise his famous jumps over waterfalls, was only the performance persona... He began jumping over waterfalls as part of a community of daredevil workers, young men showing off and letting off steam....

There’s a lot to consider when buying a new car, but headlights are rarely on anyone's top checklist; now a new study says it’s something drivers should seriously consider. The first ever headlight test was conducted by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety this week and researchers say the results are ‘dismal’. Only one new car model received a good rating. The 2016 Toyota Prius with led headlights received the best rating in the study, while some higher-end cars were in the bottom tier. The study says headlights should illuminate at least 300 feet ahead, but many of the new...

A remarkable 3,400-year-old necropolis has been discovered at an Egyptian quarry site, the Ministry of Antiquities announced on Wednesday. Consisting of dozens of rock-cut tombs, the New Kingdom necropolis was found at Gebel el Sisila, a site north of Aswan known for its stone quarries on both sides of the Nile. Blocks used in building almost all of ancient Egypt’s great temples were cut from there... The shrine is a small rock-cut sanctuary featuring two open chambers facing the river and an inner doorway crowned with the winged solar disc. The burials, meanwhile, consist of one to two undecorated rock-cut...

The first largescale study of ancient DNA from early American people has confirmed the devastating impact of European colonisation on the Indigenous American populations of the time. Led by the University of Adelaide's Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD), the researchers have reconstructed a genetic history of Indigenous American populations by looking directly into the DNA of 92 pre-Columbian mummies and skeletons, between 500 and 8600 years old. Published today in Science Advances, the study reveals a striking absence of the pre-Columbian genetic lineages in modern Indigenous Americans; showing extinction of these lineages with the arrival of the Spaniards. "Surprisingly,...

Archaeologists have recently begun revealing the features of an ancient prehistoric stone structure on the Mediterranean island of Menorca in the Balearic Islands, an archipelago near the eastern coast of Spain. Beginning in 2015, under the direction of archaeologists Montserrat Anglada, Irene Riudavets, and Cristina Bravo, an archaeological team began excavating a newly opened structure at the site, known as Sa Cudia Cremada, a site that is composed of distinctive Iron Age (part of Spain's prehistoric period) stone structures such as talayots -- truncated tower-shaped constructions. The builders were members of the mysterious Talayotic culture, a people who left no...

Excavations at Idalion, Cyprus: Crossing Cultures in the Eastern Mediterranean 8 p.m. JCCGW Theatre 6125 Montrose Road Rockville, MD Ann-Marie Knoblauch | Virginia Tech University Co-Sponsored by the Hellenic Society Prometheas Cyprus was an important trade center and cultural ‘crossroad’ in antiquity, controlled and influenced in different periods by the Mycenaean civilization, the sea-faring Phoenicians and Philistines of the Bible, Archaic Greece, the Persians in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Roman Empire, and even Christian Byzantium. The ancient site of Idalion is fortuitously situated near the copper-rich mountains of Cyprus and the harbors of the coast.  This prime location led to the...

Construction on a bike highway — hoped to connect communities to make high-speed, emissions-free commuting possible — is underway in Germany. But with funding in question, will this bikers’ dream still come true? […] The cost-benefit relation presented by the RVR is optimistic: Benefits equal nearly five times more than costs. Figures indicate the bike autobahn would save €11.5 million yearly on medical expenses due to the health benefits of greater physical activity and reduced pollution, while it would also save €6.3 million through prevented accidents. But money is lacking to complete the project, estimated at €184 million. For the...

Fujimori, the 40-year-old daughter of imprisoned ex-president Alberto Fujimori, now has the backing of 32 percent of voters but is not expected to garner the absolute majority needed to win outright. Thousands of Peruvians marched in downtown Lima on Friday to demand the electoral board bar Fujimori from the race.

Entire rail lines in Washington's Metrorail subway system could be shut down for months at a time to conduct repairs, the transit system's leaders acknowledged Wednesday. Board of directors Chairman Jack Evans raised the possibility during a Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments conference, saying there is not enough time to complete work during nights and weekends, according to The Washington Post.

How did Salem, Massachusetts become a Halloween destination? For centuries, the New England town avoided any association with its infamous Puritan ancestors, who executed 19 people under suspicion of practicing witchcraft. The surprising answer, author Stacy Schiff writes for The New York Times, has a lot to do with the sitcom "Bewitched." These days, Salem is rife with kitschy witches and Halloween attractions. But before the late 20th century, town citizens rarely acknowledged the Puritan trials. When playwright Arthur Miller visited Salem to research "The Crucible" in 1952, locals refused to help him. "You couldn't get anyone to say anything...

The carcass of one of a pair of extinct big cat cubs will be scrutinised this autumn with the realistic possibility that a liquid found in the remains of the animal is milk from the mother. Separately, it was recently revealed that samples of the prehistoric infant are being examined by South Korean to clone an animal that once occupied Eurasia from modern day Great Britain to the extreme east of Russia. A source close to the case told The Siberian Times that there is 'hope' the frozen remains of a cave lion cub will show evidence of its mother's...

An ancient species of pint-sized humans discovered in the tropics of Indonesia may have met their demise earlier than once believed, according to an international team of scientists who reinvestigated the original finding. Published in the journal Nature this week, the group challenges reports that these inhabitants of remote Flores island co-existed with modern humans for tens of thousands of years. They found that the youngest age for Homo floresiensis, dubbed the 'Hobbit', is around 50,000 years ago not between 13,000 and 11,000 years as initially claimed. Led by Indonesian scientists and involving researchers from Griffith University's Research Centre of...

Italian archaeologists have found a site near Naples where the precursors of non-stick pans were produced more than 2,000 years ago. The finding confirms that non-stick frying pans, an essential tool in any modern kitchen, were used in the Roman Empire. The cookware was known as "Cumanae testae" or "Cumanae patellae," (pans from the city of Cumae) and was mentioned in the first-century Roman cookbook De Re Coquinaria as the most suitable pans for making chicken stews. However, the pans from Cumae remained a mystery until 1975, when Giuseppe Pucci, archaeologist and professor of history of Greek and Roman art,...

The reign of Ramesses III, the second pharaoh in Egypt’s 20th dynasty, was not the most stable chapter in the empire's history. There were endless wars with the “Sea Peoples”... which drained the treasury, bad weather that interrupted food supplies, along with political unrest... In 2012, eminent Egyptologist Zahi Hawass and Cairo University radiologist Sahar Saleem scanned Ramesses III mummy and revealed that an assassin cut through his esophagus and trachea, killing him almost instantly. But a new book by the pair... makes the story a little more complicated, suggesting that the pharaoh was likely murdered by multiple assailants. The...

Editor’s Note: Natalie Morales’ Op-Ed was written before President Obama announced his intention to travel to Cuba and is not in any way intended to be a response to the president’s remarks. Just last week, I was at my friend Michaela’s house dropping off a bag of stuff I’m sending to my family in Cuba. Her husband, Fred, is visiting Havana and was kind enough to be my courier. Among the things I sent with Fred were two packages of Cuban coffee. Yes, that’s right: I’m sending Cuban coffee to Cuba. It’s absurd and hilarious and I got a real...

In the mid-seventh century, Egypt was conquered by Muslim armies. The pressure of the invading army, advancing south along the Nile Valley, stopped the Christian kingdom of Makuria. The relics of this civilization have been discovered by Poznań archaeologists in the area of the Letti Basin, about 350 km north of Khartoum. Makuria was a powerful kingdom, which existed from the sixth to the fourteenth century between II and V cataracts of the Nile. For several centuries its power reached even farther north almost to the modern Aswan... Now archaeologists confirmed the presence of previously known sites, but also discovered...

A 1,900-year-old building that would have served as an apartment within the estate of Roman Emperor Hadrian has been discovered in Tivoli, Italy. The building is full of lavish artwork, archaeologists said. "The exceptionally well-preserved decoration of the rooms includes mosaic floors with both vegetal and abstract patterns, marble revetments [panels], wall paintings, and an almost entire ceiling fresco," the archaeologists wrote in the summary of a paper recently presented at the Archaeological Institute of America's annual meeting in San Francisco. Much of the art is now in pieces, and the process of excavating and conserving it is a difficult...

Not even four miles south of Athens lies Phaleron — a site unknown to most tourists. A port of Athens in classical times, Phaleron also boasts one of the largest cemeteries ever excavated in Greece, containing more than 1,500 skeletons. Dating to the 8th-5th centuries BC, Phaleron is significant for our understanding of the rise of the Greek city-state. And, in particular, for understanding the violence and subjugation that went with it. Two mass burials at Phaleron include people who were tossed face-down into a pit, their hands shackled behind their backs. To learn more about these deviant burials and...