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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

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover performed a "mini-drill" operation Tuesday, April 29, on the rock target under consideration for the mission's third sample-collection drilling

This preparatory activity produced a hole about eight-tenths of an inch (2 centimeters) deep, as planned

The rover used several tools to examine the candidate site

of a hiker’s heel releases enough energy to illuminate a light bulb

Matt Stanton, an engineer and avid backpacker, created a shoe insole that stores it as electricity

Instead of using piezoelectric and other inefficient, bulky methods of generating electricity, the pair shrunk down components similar to those found in hand-cranked flashlights.

The pocket-sized XStat

received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as a first-of-its-kind medical dressing

This means that the U.S. Army, which funded development of the sponge-filled syringe, can now purchase XStat to be carried by military medics

A team of researchers working at MIT has used data supplied by gamers on EyeWire to help explain how it is that the retina is able to process motion detection

the team describes how they worked with gamers at EyeWire and then used the resulting mapped neural networks to propose a new theory to describe how it is the eye is able to understand what happens when something moves in front of it.

Scientists have known for quite some time that light enters the eye and strikes the back of the eyeball where photoreceptors respond

This October, a comet will brush

giving scientists a chance to study how it possibly interacts with a planetary atmosphere

an impact of the comet on the surface of the Red Planet has long been ruled out

On October 23, 2013,  astronomers with the Catalina Sky Survey picked up a very faint asteroid with an unusual orbit more like a that of a comet than an asteroid

 At the time 2013 UQ4 was little  more than a stellar point with no evidence of a hazy coma or tail that would tag it as a comet

On May 7,

Paleontologists have discovered a fossil of a newly discovered organism from the Ediacara Biota

Plexus ricei was a broadly curving tube that resided on the seafloor

Individuals range in size from 5 to 80 cm long and 5 to 20 mm wide

The World Cup opening ceremony

June 12

a standout for athletes and their fans but yet another eye-opener may make the Sao Paulo stadium opener long remembered globally

Astronomers have identified

a star that was almost certainly born from the same cloud of gas and dust as our star.

The newly developed methods for locating the Sun's 'siblings' will help other astronomers find other "solar siblings," work that could lead to an understanding of how and where our Sun formed, and how our solar system became hospitable for life

Researchers have proposed putting a plant-growth experiment on NASA's next Mars rover

scheduled to launch in mid-2020 and land on the Red Planet in early 2021.

known as the Mars Plant Experiment (MPX),