history

I watch a few documentaries a week, but it's rare for me to come across a series that I need to take notes on to keep up with. The first season of the BBC series "Connections" is one of those. It will blow your mind. James Burke walks us through the history of innovation from a touch stone (used to test the purity gold) right up to the atomic bomb, and explains how these two distant inventions are related. If you can see through the 1970s disco outfits and smoking on airplanes, you will be shocked that documentaries this good were being made 30 years ago.

Science has come a long way in the last century. Advances in communication, changes in who funds scientific research and how, and who actually conducts the research have all changed the scientific community. Shifts in views and an increasing acceptance of people from various cultures and demographics have also propelled science into a new era.

The oldest known human brain from the Old World—comprised of Europe, Asia, Africa and contiguous islands—has been discovered in Armenia, announced UCLA researcher Gregory Areshian at an annual archeological conference Sunday.

The brain dates back to the Copper age, which ran approximately 5,500 to 6,500 years ago in Eastern Europe and the Near East. Archeologists discovered the brain, believed to be that of a young girl, while excavating for relics in the past two years inside and outside of Armenia's 600-square-meter Areni-1 cave across the border from Iran.