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Researchers

have found that children hear more complex language from parents when they read a storybook with only pictures compared to a picture-vocabulary book

often, parents dismiss picture storybooks, especially when they are wordless, as not real reading or just for fun

last known largely unexcavated Maya megacity, archaeologists have uncovered the only known mural adorning an ancient Maya house

still vibrant scene of a king and his retinue

walls are rife with calculations that helped ancient scribes track vast amounts of time

Surgery book

In 1575, printing of Ambroise Paré's book Oeuvres Complètes (Complete Works) was finished, but its publication was opposed by establishment physicians. His previous texts on surgery had popularized a new way to treat gunshot wounds without cauterisation, reintroduced the ligature in amputation, and improved midwifery techniques. These many writings were gathered together in this one new volume, which spread his teachings throughout the world. It remained in print for a century and ran to thirteen editions. He wrote in French instead of Latin with practical, common sense so that many barber-surgeons, who (like Paré) were unable to interpret Latin, had access to medical knowledge otherwise unavailable from Latin texts

Babies begin to learn about the connection between pictures and real objects by the time they are nine-months-old

The research found that babies can learn about a toy from a photograph of it well before their first birthday

"The study should interest any parent or caregiver who has ever read a picture book with an infant,"

First printed book

In 868, the first known dated printed book was the Diamond Sutra, a Buddhist scripture. It was made as a 16-ft scroll with six sheets of text printed from wood blocks and one sheet with a woodcut showing the Buddha with disciples and a pair of cats. The sheets measured 12" by 30" and were pasted together. The date is known from a colophon at the end stating it was "printed on 11 May 868, by Wang Chieh, for free general distribution" and that it was dedicated to his parents. The scroll was one of about 1,130 bundles of manuscripts found a thousand years later, walled up in one of the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas in Turkestan. It is now one of the great treasures in the British Library

A new species of crow-size pterosaur has been named in honor of the nine-year-old fossil hunter who discovered it

While exploring the U.K.'s Isle of Wight (map) in 2008, the then-five-year-old Morris came across blackened "bones sticking out of the sand

The Morris family brought the fossil to paleontologist Martin Simpson at the University of Southampton, who, with the help of colleagues, identified it as a new species

A new study raises the intriguing possibility that drugs prescribed to lower cholesterol may be effective against macular degeneration, a blinding eye disease.

Researchers

have found that age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of vision loss in Americans over 50, shares a common link with atherosclerosis

The Race to the Moon book’s description is probably a little better

The way back, the spacecraft started drifting off its trajectory, and now they had to make their midcourse corrections to get back

turns out that, too, we had practiced in some simulation somewhere. It’s not very accurate, but it doesn’t have to be

new gigantic nine-gigapixel image from the VISTA infrared survey telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory of the central portion of the Milky Way Galaxy

resolution of this image is so great, that if it was printed out in the resolution of a typical book, it would be 9 meters long and 7 meters tall

The huge dataset contains more than ten times more stars than previous studies

This monumental finding supports the fact that the Maya used cyclical calendars.

But it wasn't these mathematical notations that first caught the archeologists' eye

an archaeologist from Boston University, was mapping the ancient Maya city of Xultun in northeast Guatemala in 2010 when one of his undergraduate students peered into an old trench dug by looters and reported seeing traces of ancient paint.

Jimi Crawford, who had been engineering director for the Google Books project since 2009, has signed on with Moon Express

will serve as chief technology officer and software architect for the Silicon Valley firm, which is competing in the Google Lunar X Prize, a $30 million private race to the moon.

25 teams participating in the Google Lunar X Prize, an international challenge to land a robot on the lunar surface, have it travel at least 1,650 feet (500 meters) and send data and images back to Earth.

a suite of apps that turn a conventional phone running Android into a new way to use the phone

Instead of the usual mass of icons, the Georgie, as the company calls it, comes with a simple menu that offers auditory feedback and features that are important and useful to those who cannot see.

real world useful applications such as telling the user which direction they are facing, or where the nearest bus stop is

Ceres observation interruption

In 1801, Giuseppe Piazzi made a 24th observation of the position of Ceres, the asteroid he discovered between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, on 1 Jan 1801. It was the first and largest of the dwarf planets now known. After this, it moved into the light of the Sun, and was lost to view for most of the rest of the year. To mathematically relocate Ceres, Carl Gauss, age 24, took up the challenge to calculate its orbital path, based on the limited number of observations available. His method was tedious, requiring 100 hours of calculation. He began with a rough approximation for the unknown orbit, and then used it to produce a refinement, which became the subject of another improvement.. And so on. Astronomers using them found his results in close agreement as they located Ceres again 25 Nov-31 Dec 1801.«

In 2004, the discovery of what was believed to be the world's oldest seat of learning, the Library of Alexandria, was announced by Zahi Hawass, president of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities during a conference at the University of California. A Polish-Egyptian team had uncovered 13 lecture halls featuring an elevated podium for the lecturer. Such a complex of lecture halls had never before been found on any Mediterranean Greco-Roman site. Alexandria may be regarded as the birthplace of western science, where Euclid discovered the rules of geometry, Eratosthenes measured the diameter of the Earth and Ptolemy wrote the Almagest, the most influential scientific book about the nature of the Universe for 1,500 years

Oldest university unearthed

In 1936, the Dvorak typewriter keyboard was patented in the U.S. by Dvorak and Dealey (Patent No. 2,040,248). The efficiency experts August Dvorak (a cousin of the composer) and William Dealey studied the typewriter to determine that they could arrange the keys in a new way which would speed up the operators of the typewriter. They designed a keyboard to maximize efficiency by placing common letters on the home row, and make the stronger fingers of the hands do most of the work. By contrast, the original QWERTY layout was designed for the earlier, less efficient typewriters. Previously, speed would result in two type bars hitting each other in their travel, so the original keyboard was laid out to reduce collisions

First woman in space

In 1963, Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova returned to Earth after spending nearly three days as the first woman in space. She had been interested in parachute jumping when she was young, and that expertise was one of the reasons she was picked for the cosmonaut program. She became the first person to be recruited without experience as a test pilot. On 16 Jun 1963, Tereshkova was launched into space aboard Vostok 6, and became the first woman to travel in space. Her radio name was "Chaika," Russian for "seagull." Her flight made 48 orbits of Earth. Tereshkova never made a second trip into space. She became an important member of the Communist Party and a representative of the Soviet government.

Eratosthenes

Earliest Record Solar Eclipse

In 709 BC, the earliest record of a confirmed total solar eclipse was written in China. From: Ch'un-ch'iu, book I: "Duke Huan, 3rd year, 7th month, day jen-ch'en, the first day (of the month). The Sun was eclipsed and it was total." This is the earliest direct allusion to a complete obscuration of the Sun in any civilisation. The recorded date, when reduced to the Julian calendar, agrees exactly with that of a computed solar eclipse. Reference to the same eclipse appears in the Han-shu ('History of the Former Han Dynasty') (Chinese, 1st century AD): "...the eclipse threaded centrally through the Sun; above and below it was yellow." Earlier Chinese writings that refer to an eclipse do so without noting totality.

Students at Brigham Young University recently launched the "Signglasses"

project in an attempt to develop a better system of sign language for narration through several types of glasses, including Google Glass.

Two of professor