We were out at the Rocky Hill Ranch mountain bike race last weekend and who did we see there racing but Lance Armstrong himself. It was a bit of a surreal experience as we've watched him on TV often over the many years he competed in and won the Tour de France. My wife and I are both cyclists; my wife has raced mountain bikes for many years. I've mostly been a spectator, though I've been getting into the competition side of things a bit more lately. We ride both dirt and road, and if you follow me on Twitter you'll likely see a ride update here and there in my updates.
However, all that aside, it's been a good week thus far for writing and for finding some cool links. Here they are:
Humans Built Fires 500 Thousand Years Before They Could Speak
Though the ability to make fires is considered one of the great breakthroughs in human civilization, it may have been a more primitive activity than we thought. A new archaeological study has revealed that homo sapiens' ancestors were regularly making fires about 790 thousand years ago.
The Opals that the Martian Sea Left in its Wake
The question at this point isn't whether Mars was once covered in liquid water — it's just a question of how long that water was there before it evaporated. This image provides new evidence that water washed the Martian shores for a tremendously long time. Long enough to reshape the rocks in that crater and to leave behind whole beaches of pearly, hydrated silica commonly known as opal.
Researchers may have found King Solomon's mines
Archaeologists believe a desert site in Jordan may contain the ruins of the elusive King Solomon's Mines.
5,000-Year-Old Mummy DNA Part of New Human Extinction Mystery
The so-called Tyrolean Iceman, a 5,000-year-old mummy found in an Alpine glacier roughly two decades ago, lived in an era when people were smelting copper and living in cities. But a recent study of his mitochondrial DNA — circlets of genetic material passed on solely through mothers — revealed something astonishing about this recent human ancestor. He is from a distinct genetic group that mysteriously disappeared. Perhaps no one sharing his genetic lineage survived into the present day. Or perhaps humans are evolving so quickly that even our close ancestors are genetically distinct from us in significant ways.
Rejection
Author Henry Miller summed it up best when he wrote that, to become an artist, you must "be crushed … have your conflicting points of view annihilated." He wrote that you must be "wiped out" as a human being "in order to be born again an individual." He used words like "carbonized" and "mineralized" to describe what a writer must endure before he or she can "work upwards from the last common denominator of the self."
The Deep-Water Disaster That May Kill Us All
The images you see above are of a deep lake in Camaroom called Nyos — before and after it killed almost 2,000 people with a burst of poison gas. No, this wasn't caused by pollution or global warming. It's a natural phenomenon called a "limnic eruption," and scientists believe that a big one deep beneath the ocean might be enough to cause a mass extinction event.