World's oldest dildo

A prehistoric sex toy was found in Germany, but you can see plenty of ancient dildos right here in Miami.

The toy is being studied at a German university

"We have objects from Roman and Greek times that are over 3,000 years old, and intricate jade dildos from Japan that are over 1,000 years old," said David Tarmago, the museum's art director. 
Though media coverage of the discovery in Germany has dubbed the find as a "sex toy," Tarmago said that terminology may not be exactly right.
"Most of these were revered items, placed in the home to promote fertility rather than for self-stimulation or intercourse," Tarmago said. "The emphasis in these cultures was to produce large families that could continue the family line and cultural traditions, passing them from fathers to sons."
It wasn't until much more recent times that the things we think of as sex toys—vibrators, penatrative dildos and the like—came into play.
"The first vibrators came out in the late 1800s as a treatment for female dementia, which was then believed to be related to female orgasm," Tarmago said. "Women would visit doctors, who would use vibrating tools to stimulate orgasm."


 28,000 years old and 'highly polished'

 German scientists are tickled pink after unearthing one of the world's oldest sculpted phalluses - 20cm of polished siltstone lovingly created around 28,000 years ago.
The stone schlong was discovered in Hohle Fels Cave near Ulm, Swabia, by a Tübingen University team. Professor Nicholas Conard, from the university's snappily-named department of Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology, explained the excitment to the BBC thus: "Female representations with highly accentuated sexual attributes are very well documented at many sites, but male representations are very, very rare."

Indeed, although other examples of male genitalia - from France and Morocco - predate the Ulm member, to have "any representation of male genitalia from this time period is highly unusual".

There may be a good reason for this - the German sausage bears the scars of having been used to knap flints, and was reassembled from 14 fragments. Despite this abuse, and in a delicious leap of imagination, Conard speculates that the life-size member may have been used as a prehistoric sex toy. As he suggestively notes: "It's highly polished."
Those interested in the sex lives of our distant ancestors will be able to cop an eyeful of the Hohle Fels phallus when it goes on show at a Blaubeuren prehistoric museum exhibition entitled "Ice Art - Clearly Male

Is this what an alien looks like? Nasa scientist claims to have found out-of-this-world bacteria in meteorite

A Nasa scientist believes he has discovered an alien life form which may explain how life on earth started and has called on any scientist worldwide to try and prove him wrong.
The extraordinary claim by Dr Richard Hoover, an astrobiologist with Nasa’s Marshall Space Flight Center, comes after ten years of studying tiny bacteria in meteorites that have fallen in remote areas across the globe.
He explains that travelling to Antarctica, Siberia and Alaska he has studied an extremely rare form of meteorites - CI1 carbonaceous chondrites – of which only nine are known to exist on earth.

Is this what an alien looks like? Research claims fossilised bacteria from meteors appear similar to bacteria found on earth - like Titanospirillum velox, above. That suggests life is more widespread

Looking at these meteorites under microscopes he said he has found numerous different fossils of bacteria – some which are similar to ones on earth and others which are complete, um, alien.
He suggests that meteors spread organisms around the universe and that life on earth could have been planted by bacteria in an asteroid hitting the planet in its infancy.
In one case he found on a meteorite an organism similar in size and overall structure to the giant bacterium Titanospirillum velox, an organism found here on planet Earth.
He suggests this proves life is more widespread than we first thought.

Discovery: Dr. Richard B. Hoover has challenged anyone to prove to him his findings are wrong

He told Fox News: ‘I interpret it as indicating that life is more broadly distributed than restricted strictly to the planet earth.
‘This field of study has just barely been touched -- because quite frankly, a great many scientists would say that this is impossible.
‘The exciting thing is that they [the bacteria] are in many cases recognisable and can be associated very closely with the generic species here on earth.
He added: ‘There are some that are just very strange and don’t look like anything that I’ve been able to identify, and I’ve shown them to many other experts that have also come up stumped.’
Dr Hoover would collect each meteorite stones and break them in laboratory conditions, scanning for fossilised remains.
It was then he made his discovery, identifying one biological remain as having no nitrogen – something that, until now, is found in all living organisms.

The scientist said: ‘If someone can explain how it is possible to have a biological remain that has no nitrogen, or nitrogen below the detect ability limits that I have, in a time period as short as 150 years, then I would be very interested in hearing that.
‘I’ve talked with many scientists about this and no one has been able to explain.’
The findings are published in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology, which has already invited the science community to analyse the results for themselves and write critical responses.

Bleak: Dr Hoover spent ten years studying rare meteorites that had fallen in the world's most remote areas including the Antarctic, pictured

Editor-in-Chief Dr Rudy Schild explained: ‘Given the controversial nature of his discovery, we have invited 100 experts and have issued a general invitation to over 5,000 scientists from the scientific community to review the paper and to offer their critical analysis’
Dr. Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, said there is a lot of hesitancy to believe such finding.
He said, if true, the implications would be far-reaching throughout the fields of science and astronomy. ‘Maybe life was seeded on earth – it developed on comets for example, and just landed here when these things were hitting the very early Earth.’
‘It would suggest  life didn’t really begin on the Earth, it began as the solar system was forming.’
The findings will need to undergo independent testing before they can be classified as ‘a confirmed signature of life.’
Scientists, he said, will now take the research to the next level of scrutiny, which includes an independent confirmation of the results by another lab, before the findings can be classified ‘a confirmed signature of life.’





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Face of incredibly preserved 700-year-old mummy found by chance by Chinese road workers

• Eyebrows still intact highlighting amazing level of preservation
• Mummy believed to be a high-ranking member of the Ming Dynasty
• Wearing silk and cotton, she's the first major discovery in years in the area

Amazing discovery: The 700-year-old mummy was found in the city of Taizhou, in Jiangsu Province

These incredible pictures show a 700-year-old mummy, which was discovered by chance - by road workers - in excellent condition in eastern China.
The corpse of the high-ranking woman believed to be from the Ming Dynasty - the ruling power in China between 1368 and 1644 - was stumbled across by a team who were looking to expand a street.
And the mummy, which was found in the city of Taizhou, in the Jiangsu Province, along with two other wooden tombs, offers a fascinating insight into life as it was back then.
Discovered two metres below the road surface, the woman's features - from her head to her shoes - have retained their original condition, and have hardly deteriorated.
When the discovery was made by the road workers, late last month, Chinese archaeologists, from the nearby Museum of Taizhou, were called into excavate the area, the state agency Xinhua News reported.
They were surprised by the remarkably good condition of the woman's skin, hair, eyelashes and face. It was as though she had only recently died.

 

Oh mother! The woman, discovered two metres below the surface in a wooden tomb, was wearing a  Ming Dynasty dress and is thought to have been at a high-ranking level

Immersed: The mummy was found by road workers, and had been preserved in a brown liquid

Bejewelled: The right hand of the 700-year-old mummy shows her preserved skin, and a ring adorns her finger

MING DYNASTY FACTS

The Ming Dynasty was the ruling dynasty of China from 1368 to 1644

It was 'one of the greatest eras of orderly government and social stability in human history' according to venerated tome A history of East Asian civilization

Ming rule saw the construction of a vast navy and a standing army of one million troops

There were enormous construction projects, including the restoration of the Grand Canal and the Great Wall and the establishment of the Forbidden City in Beijing (pictured) during the first quarter of the 15th century

Estimates for the late-Ming population vary from 160 to 200 million

Her body, which measures 1.5 metres high, was found at the construction site immersed in a brown liquid inside the coffin.
And the coffin was opened earlier this week, on March 1, much to the excitement of the local city - and further afield. And the right hand of the 700-year-old mummy showed her preserved skin, and a ring.
The mummy was wearing traditional Ming dynasty costume, and also in the coffin were bones, ceramics, ancient writings and other relics.
This is the latest discovery after a lull of three years in the area. Indeed, between 1979 and 2008 five mummies were found, all in very good condition.
Those findings raising the interest in learning the techniques of preservation funeral of this dynasty and customs in time to bury the dead.

Director of the Museum of Taizhou, Wang Weiyin, told Xinhua that the mummy's clothes are made mostly of silk, with a little cotton.

He said usually silk and cotton are very hard to preserve and excavations found that this mummifying technology was used only at very high-profile funerals.

The first finding of the Ming Dynasty in Taizhou dates from May 1979 and led the opening of the museum.

At that time the bodies were also found intact, but due to lack of experience of archaeologists only clothing, belts and clamps could be preserved.

The Ming Dynasty, who built the Forbidden City and restored the Great Wall, was the last in China and marked an era of economic growth and cultural splendour which produced the first commercial contacts with the West.

Wonderfully preserved: This close up of the mummy's shoes shows how well preserved her corpse it

Raised: The group of archaeologists, from the Museum of Taizhou, are shown lifting the corpse out of the coffins to examine their find

Exciting find: A map of the Ming Dynasty (left) - two other wooden coffins were also discovered