The Ancient Airplanes of Egypt and South America

Two separate claims seem to suggest the same astonishing conclusion: ancient peoples of Egypt and South America both had flight technology thousands of years before modern humans developed it. In South America, the idea is based on jewelry produced by the Chimú culture that existed in what is now Colombia about 2,000 years ago. Some of the small pendants and ornaments appear to depict human-made aircraft, including delta wing shapes, tail fins and even a cockpit. Amazing! However, considering that all the jewelry produced by the Chimú takes the form of stylized birds and insects, Occam's Razor suggests that the ornament maker happened to carve a bird shape that looks sort of 

like an airplane to a modern human.The Egyptian airplane is a similar case. A wooden falcon found in Saqqara was later reported by Egyptian doctor Khalil Messiha to have exceptional flight properties. Messiha's claims were inflated and distorted over the years until the wooden toy was held as an example of perfect aerodynamic form, inexplicable for such an ancient culture. Digging a little deeper, however, reveals that the bird carving closely resembles wind vanes mounted on the masts of Egyptian riverboats, and that the design in fact violates many aerodynamic principles. Messiha's original claim that it could "sail in the air for a few yards when thrown by hand" is likely true. So will a brick.

MESSENGER Unlocks Mystery of Mercury's Ancient Magnetic Field

The mysteries of Mercury, the planet closest to the sun, are continuing to be unraveled even after the probe smashed into the planet last month.

Before it ran out of fuel and made its fatal plunge into Mercury, MESSENGER flew close to the planet and used its magnometer to collect information about the levels of magnetism in Mercury's surface rocks. 

That data yielded the surprising new finding that Mercury's magnetic field is at least 3.7 to 3.9 billion years old, making it much more ancient than was expected, according to a paper from the Planetary Science Institute published in the journal Science.

The discovery sheds new light on the planet's history and how it has evolved over time, including evidence of volcanic and tectonic activity billions of years ago that helped shaped the planet into what it is today.

Now a 16-meter wide crater on Mercury, MESSENGER made history during its time in space.

Launching in 2004, the probe traveled nearly 5 billion miles on a route that included 15 trips around the sun, whizzing past Earth once, Venus twice and Mercury three times.

Among MESSENGER's other discoveries about Mercury are hollows on its surface, evidence of volcanism and polar deposits of water ice.

Rare Earths, and Ancient Tech

Reg Events If you want to get ahead of the on-beach reading lists this year, you need to get down to our next series of Register Lectures.

We’ve lined up three lecture evenings that will leave you streets ahead of your colleagues. And as always, it’s you, the readers, who will be asking the questions of our top notch speaker lineup. All without you leaving the comfort of your seat and your nice cold pint.

Light and Dark on the Internet On May 21, Jamie Bartlett will take us on a journey along the dark underbelly of the internet. Jamie will talk us through the range of internet subcultures, from pro-anorexia sites, to webcam porn performers to cypher punks for his book The Dark Net. Talking of dark underbellies Jamie is director of the Center for Analysis of Social Media at the think tank Demos, so he can also explain just what effect tech is having on politics. Buy tickets here.

How the Economics of Rare Metals Really Add Up The Register’s favourite economist and rare metals miner Tim Worstall will highlight the absurd economics underlying the technology industry on June 4 by taking us on a journey around the world’s rare metal’s hotspots, We keep being told that we're about to run out of all these lovely tech metals and others. This is in fact incorrect. There's no metal or mineral we're going to run out of in any human timescale. The predictions of imminent Ecodammerung just aren't correct, and Tim will show you why. Buy tickets here.

From Cutting Edge to Museum Piece On June 24 we will be hosting The National Museum of Computing co-founder Kevin Murrell, who will be tell us how his team track down the UK’s vintage computers before returning them not just to museum condition, but full glorious noisy working order. Not only will you be hearing about living history, you’ll be able to see some exclusive video of the machines in action. Buy tickets here.

The doors will be open from 5.30pm, and we'll be kicking off the talk proper at 7.00. After 40 minutes we'll break for whatever refreshments take your fancy. We'll then have formal Q&A for another 40 minutes. It's your event and we'll head in direction the audience wants us to go.

With no more than 50 tickets available for each event, this is your chance to not just talk about the news, but to go head to head with one of the UK tech scene's key news makers.

After that, you're welcome to stick around and continue the conversation as long as you want - or at least till closing time.

The Mysterious Roman Technicolor Cup

The Lycurgus Cup is an Ancient Roman goblet kicking around at the Smithsonian. You might wonder what could possibly be so technologically advanced about a cup (does it shimmy over to the fridge and fill itself with beer?). Scientists didn't notice anything special about it either, until they held it up to the light. You see, it looks green when lit from the front :

 

But when lit from behind, it turns a demonic red:

In 1990, British researchers tried to unlock the mystery of the devil's beer stein. What they found was that the glass was full of gold and silver flecks 1,000 times thinner than a human hair. Basically, the Romans discovered nanotechnology -- the science of manipulating incredibly small particles -- and used it to make a bitchin' pimp cup.

To make the cup, they would have had to grind up gold and silver into grains many times smaller than sand and fuse it to the glass in specific proportions to produce subatomic effects that we're only just beginning to understand in recent decades.

For some reason, the scientists weren't allowed to take this millennia-old relic and fill it with Tang and tequila (That's a TnT, and we heartily recommend it) just to see what happened. So they did their best to replicate it and found that it would probably also have changed colors based on what kind of liquid was poured into it. It's a Hypercolor chalice! What's more, it's even more effective at detecting different kinds of substances in water than modern sensors are, which means that science is actually considering using a piece of technology from the time of Caesar to improve modern substance detectors. The Ancient Romans were so good at getting drunk that they broke the science of the future.