Ancient rock art in Western Australia has maintained its colors because it is alive, researchers have determined.   Obviously most art fades in a few hundred years but the "Bradshaw art" has looked good for 40,000.

Bacteria and fungi have made homes in there, preserving the color, though making it difficult to accurately date.   A black fungus like Chaetothyriales cannibalizes its ancestors, making a 'biofilm' that can muddy the waters for research.

It's not going to be a surprise to anyone that Julian Assange has become a classic paranoid, especially given the business he has chosen for himself.    You don't publish stolen secret documents without worrying a little - or a lot.

Now he is worried that if the UK extradites him to the US for espionage he will be 

killed "Jack Ruby-style" - a reference to the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald before he could stand trial for the murder of President John F Kennedy.

The Kennedy assassination and then-murder of his shooter has been fodder for conspiracy theorists since it happened in 1963.

It turns out I am not the only person suspicious of "URL shorteners" designed to make very long links into shorter, manageable ones.    On a service like Twitter, where communications are limited to 140 characters, shorteners are absolutely necessary and utilities like TweetDeck build them in for you automatically.

For people you know, shorteners are obviously fine, because there is an element of trust.   For strangers, though, I never click on shortened URLs because the URL can usually tell me something about the link.

Really, no one needs to add anything to the title to make it funnier but the fact that the CIA, with its vast store of intellectual talent, didn't figure its WikiLeaks Task Force and acronym WTF would get chuckles in the Internet age makes it that much more humorous.

The WikiLeaks Task Force is no laughing matter, of course - it was created to ferret out the source of 250,000 leaked U.S. diplomatic cables and determine their impact, and it was also partly created because WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is an annoying prat.

A widely publicized report that cosmic microwave background, the glow left over from the explosive start of the universe believed to have occurred 13.7 billion years ago, contains echoes of previous cycles of cosmic birth and death, has been disputed by new analyses.

Three teams state that circular patterns do exist but are entirely consistent with the leading model for the birth of the universe, known as inflation, and do not require an alternative, pre–Big Bang theory. According to inflation, the universe began as a subatomic entity that ballooned in size during the first tiny fraction of a second of its existence.

Although people may not feel particularly overheated after this week’s Midwestern snowstorm, data from NASA show that the 12-month period from November 2009 to November 2010 was the warmest on record since 1880.

Science bloggers may regard Republicans as anti-science but it is hard not to see them as pro-technology.   While the FCC, with the support of the Obama administration, has repeatedly attempted to make Internet regulation the domain of government, Republican Senators are standing in the way of the one thing still working in the US economy.

In a letter they write

Unlike the American Revolution, the French version is best forgotten, especially to those on the short end of it - and it wasn't just the current monarchy that got punished by the philosophy of the day.   In 1793, revolutionaries also desecrated the tombs of previous monarchs, including  assassinated King Henry IV - it had been a hard time to be a Protestant king in France in 1610, it seems, so Henry was murdered, and then 180 years later the French stuck it to him again.   After executing Louis XVI, the current monarch, they went after the old ones.

It may be poignant that the "Hamburglar", one of the many characters McDonald's created in the early 1970s to rip off the "H.R. Pufnstuf" children's television show (fear not, McDonald's was sued and lost) is used in Reuters / Fox News headlines about hackers who hack filched data from the McDonald's servers in classic “Robble robble” fashion.