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Last week, the UK's Ministry of Defence and National Archives released a huge portion of their UFO files online. The 6000 page collection contains reports and investigations from 1994 to 2000.

Several pages are filled with evidence, commentary and correspondence pertaining to the "Rendlesham Forest Incident", Britain's answer to Roswell, including original written testimony from USAF security policemen who reported a UFO landing outside the perimenter fence at RAF Woodbridge, Suffolk, in December 1980.

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Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday, celebrated this year on February 16, is a Christian tradition so fervently embraced by the city of New Orleans in the southern United States, that the two have become almost synonymous.

Mardi Gras arrived in the region in the late 17th century with the Le Moyne brothers, Pierre and Jean-Baptiste, when King Louis XIV dispatched them to defend France's claim on the territory of Louisiane, which included what are now the states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

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Back in ancient Rome, when February fell later in the year, around the time of the beginning of Spring in the northern hemisphere, Valentine's Day was a very different affair from the Hallmark Holiday it is today. In his Life of Caesar, Plutarch describes a festival of purification and fertility called Lupercalia which was celebrated on February 15: "At this time many of the noble youths and of the magistrates run up and down through the city naked, for sport and laughter striking those they meet with shaggy thongs. And many women of rank also purposely get in their way, and like children at school present their hands to be struck, believing that the pregnant will thus be helped in delivery, and the barren to pregnancy."

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When Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias set out on an expedition in 1487 to sail around the southern end of Africa, his primary instruction was to find a trade route to India. Dias was also charged with searching for the lands described by Prester John, a fabled Christian priest and African prince, who was said to be a descendent of the Magi.

In the 12th century, a letter written by Prester John, describing a Christian kingdom marooned in a sea of Muslim infidels, surfaced in Europe and inspired geographic exploration across Asia and Africa.

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The photographers of Britain are up in arms. Last Saturday they staged a protest in London's Trafalgar Square to tell the nanny state exactly what they think of the upswing in unwarranted  harrassment of photographers by the nation's bobbies, who of late have taken on a decidedly menacing persona.

Under Section 44 of the Prevention of Terrorism Act, senior officers are allowed to designate entire areas of their police force regions as stop-and-search zones, based on their likelihood of being targets for terrorists.

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Visit the US Library of Medicine's Dream Anatomy website and it is clear that  anatomy has not always been an exact science. Dream Anatomy points to the invention of the printing press in 15th century as the inspiration for what it calls the "new spectacular visions of the body" that were preserved in print and can be viewed here.

Among the works featured on the website are those of 16th century Dutch botanist and anatomist extraordinaire Frederik Ruysch. Although none of the original dioramas that Ruysch constructed have survived, they were faithfully reproduced by the artist Cornelius Huyberts.

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I first heard about the curious case of Phineas P. Gage in a Psychology I lecture back in the eighties.

25-year-old Gage was foreman of a work gang blasting rock in preparation for the roadbed for the Rutland & Burlington railroad outside the town of Cavendish, Vermont. Gage was charged with compacting the blasting powder, fuse and sand inserted into holes drilled into bedrock, using an instrument called a tamping iron, a long rod tapered at the end to a fine point like a javelin. At about half-past-four on the afternoon of September 13, 1848, as reported in the Boston Post on September 21, 1848: "the powder exploded, carrying an instrument through his head an inch and a fourth in diameter, and three feet and seven inches in length, which he was using at the time. The iron entered on the side of his face, shattering the upper jaw, and passing back of the left eye, and out at the top of the head." The rod exited his head and landed 25 metres away.

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In January 1839, French artist and chemist Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre changed the world. On the 9th day of that month he announced to the French Academy of Sciences that he had all but perfected a process for permanently capturing a moment in time. Daguerre had worked for years alongside fellow pioneer Nicéphore Niépce, whose bitumen-based heliography contributed to the development of the daguerreotype. In 1835, after Niépce's death in 1833, Daguerre discovered  a method of developing images that had been exposed for 20 - 30 minutes, when he accidentally broke a mercury thermometer. Later, he discovered that he was able to fix the image by using a solution of salts.

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The story of how Benjamin Franklin flew a kite during an electric thunderstorm to determine whether or not lightning was an electric phenomenon, is a well-known one. One might expect that Franklin, as a founding father of the United States and signatory to the Declaration of Independence would have been a sensible man. It seems the opposite is true.

While doubts have been cast as to whether Franklin actually went through with the kite experiment – according to his writings he was well aware of the dangers of exposing himself to lightning and it has been proven that if he had performed the experiment in the manner prescribed in his proposal, he would most certainly have been killed – he did have, according to head of the Royal Society’s library and archives, Keith Moore "a penchant for showmanship and dangerous experiments."

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When Norwegian artist Edvard Munch wrote in a journal entry dated 22 January, 1892 of the inspiration for his painting  The Scream, he described an experience. "I was walking along the road with two friends – then the sun set – all at once the sky became blood red – and I felt overcome with melancholy. I stood still and leaned against the railing, dead tired – clouds like blood and tongues of fire hung above the blue-black fjord and the city. My friends went on and I stood alone, trembling with anxiety. I felt a great, unending scream piercing through nature."

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December 8 marked the 29th anniversary of the death of John Lennon. As a  tribute, Yoko Ono and Imagine Peace are crowd-sourcing translations of the famous John & Yoko "WAR IS OVER!" poster for people to print and share over the holiday season as cards or posters. If your language has been left out, submit a translation at imaginepeace.com.

PICTURE:
War is over if you want it. Posters to download at Flickr.com. Clockwise from left: Farsi, Hawaiian, Klingon, Sesotho, French.

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A plaque commemorating the epochal events of December 2, 1942 is mounted on a wall near the site where  a team of scientists led by Enrico Fermi achieved what was to ensure America's lead in the race to develop an atomic bomb. It was in the racquet courts beneath Stagg Field, a football field on the campus of the University of Chicago, that Chicago Pile-1, the first nuclear reactor, went critical for the first time.

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Just weeks before the Great Storm struck the south of England, on November 24, 1703, Henry Winstanley, the creator of the Eddystone lighthouse is reported to have said that he wished he could be on the reef in the greatest storm that ever blew under the face of heaven so he would see what effect it would have on his building.

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According to yo-yo.com, the yo-yo has been around for a very long time. The oldest surviving yo-yo dates as far back as 500 BC, when the Greeks fashioned them from terracotta discs. One theory is that they were used as offerings in rites of passage to signify a child's crossing over to adulthood.

It is the name yo-yo that stuck, but the toy was also known to the English by the French bandalore and quiz. The French called it incroyable, de Coblenz, l'emigrette and joujou de Normandie. Joujou means 'little toy' in French and is a possible origin of the word yo-yo, although an entry in Webster's Collegiate Dictionary states that its origins lie in the northern Philippine Ilokano language, and Panati's Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things says that the word means 'come-come' in Tagalog, an Austronesian language spoken in the Philippines, where the yo-yo was used as a weapon.

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Eugene Schieffelin thought he was doing his fellow New Yorkers a favour when he released 60 European starlings in Central Park on March 16, 1890. Schieffelin, a German immigrant whose family had distinguished itself in the field of pharmacology, was a member of the American Acclimatization Society which sought, according to its charter, to introduce "such foreign varieties of the animal and vegetable kingdom as may be useful or interesting." He was, it is said, a little eccentric; the inspiration behind his acquisition of the Sturnus vulgaris specimens was to provide Americans with physical examples of every bird mentioned in the plays of William Shakespeare.

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Robert Hooke, contemporary of Isaac Newton and Christopher Wren, has been described in several biographies in less than flattering adjectives. His first biographer, Robert Waller, called him "despicable, melancholy, mistrustful, and jealous", and a slew of subsequent biographers followed suit with "positively unscrupulous, cantankerous, envious and vengeful". The bad press, combined with the fallout from a dispute which he had with Newton over work he carried out on gravitation, did nothing to help his reputation. Hooke and his work fell into relative obscurity in the centuries following his death in 1703. It is said that Newton, who became president of the Royal Society after Hooke's death, so despised him that he did everything in his power to ensure that his work did not come to light and went as far as destroying the only portrait of the man. Several attempts have been made to construct an image using verbal descriptions of Hooke.

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It is an unfortunate reality that an invention is seldom named for the person who invented it. Most often, credit goes to the person who has turned the invention into an innovation.  As someone (sorry somebody, I couldn't find you anywhere) once put it : "Invention is turning money into ideas. Innovation is turning ideas into money."

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It was after reading, in a 1794 edition of London-based The Gentleman's Magazine: or, Trader's monthly intelligencer, an account of an Indian nose job penned by army Surgeon General Lucas, that Joseph Constantine Carpue first began to meditate on the possibilities of performing a similar procedure in his modern surgery at Duke of York's hospital. Carpue is credited with performing the first "modern" rhinoplasty 20 years later. 

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On Monday this week, former French president Jacques Chirac, joined by a number of African leaders and international dignitaries, launched an initiative in Benin to ban the sale of counterfeit malaria and tuberculosis drugs. The World Health Organisation  estimates that up to 30% of drugs sold in parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America are fake and that counterfeit drugs are responsible for up to 20 percent of the one million malaria deaths worldwide each year.

Boingboing (boingboing.net) pointed me to an article on the Smithsonian website (smithsonianmag.com) called The Fatal Consequences of Counterfeit Drugs, which reports on the efforts by forensic investigators in Southeast Asia to uncover this deadly industry.

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Bampfylde Moore Carew, one-time King of the Gypsies, was born into relative affluence, the son of the Rector of Bickley, near Tiverton, Devon,  in 1693. His biographer (it is not quite certain who this is, but Liam Quin, of fromoldbooks.org says authorship of The Life and Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew, [a full, scanned version is available on Google Books] probably belongs to the wife of printer and compiler Robert Goadby, to whom Carew dictated his memoirs, describes him as "tall and majestic; his limbs strong and well-proportioned, his features regular, his countenance open and ingenious, bearing all those characteristical marks to which physiognomists denote an honest and good-natured mind".