Rediscovered

Documentary filmmaker Carla Gutierrez still remembers the moment her obsession with Mexican artist Frida Kahlo began more than two decades ago. “I hadn’t seen her art until I was a freshman in college,” says Gutierrez, a film editor who makes her directorial debut with the new documentary “Frida.” “Then I found one piece, one painting in a book in the library. “It was of her standing between the United States and Mexico,” she says. “You can see her full body – we actually use that painting in the film. And I was a pretty…

Location of sites visited by archaeologists from University of Leicester Archaeological Services. Credit: ULAS, University of Leicester More than forty archaeological sites in Cyprus dating potentially as far back as the Bronze Age that were thought lost to history have been relocated by University of Leicester scientists working for the Ministry of Defence. …

A legendary mod for Fallout: New Vegas that adds Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst to the game has been rediscovered, years after it was supposedly lost. The original but unofficial Limp Bizkit mod was released in 2015 and saw a Fred Durst lookalike take on the role of Fallout: New Vegas companion but would only talk in song lyrics. However, less than a year after it was released, it was seemingly wiped from Nexus Mods forever. The only clip of it to survive the purge was this 40-second Youtube video, “My Fred Durst Mod For…

December 7, 20235 min readThe iridescent, blind De Winton’s golden mole was last seen in 1937 and later declared officially lost. But scientists have since rediscovered it by tracking its environmental DNABy The Conversation US & Samantha MynhardtDe Winton’s golden mole was rediscovered in November 2023 through environmental DNA tracking after not being sighted since 1937. The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.The De Winton’s golden…

Thanos, more than a decade past his first MCU introduction, remains the cinematic franchise’s greatest villain. While there are contenders to take his crown — in the form of Secret Invasion‘s brutal Gravik and the hopefully leveled-up Kang — no villain has what it takes to unseat the might of Thanos. He eliminated half of all life in the universe, after all, and permanently killed off several iconic, beloved heroes. As it turns out, his cruelty goes far deeper than many of us ever realized, as revealed by 2016’s Thanos…

UC Berkeley entomologist Kipling Will discovered a specimen of Bembidion brownorum while sampling for insects near Freshwater Creek on former Gov. Jerry Brown’s ranch. The species had not been observed by scientists in more than 55 years. Credit: David MaddisonDuring the insect sampling expedition at Jerry Brown’s ranch, a researcher from UC Berkeley stumbled upon a beetle <span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div…

A vase of hydrangeas sits among a crop of the latest releases, including What Writers Read and Blake Morrison’s Two Sisters. There is a cosy rug and a bright window display. It looks like a lovely bookshop. What there aren’t, however, are any customers. “Winter is killing us, it’s soo quiet,” tweeted Sapphire Bates, the co-owner of Book Bodega in Ramsgate, Kent, on Saturday afternoon. “We need to make £800 by Tuesday to pay our bills.”Her tweet has since been viewed 6m times and retweeted nearly 12,000 times. She has had…

A collection of newly rediscovered short stories by Terry Pratchett, originally written under a pseudonym, are to be published later this year.The 20 tales in A Stroke of the Pen: The Lost Stories were written by Pratchett in the 1970s and 1980s for a regional newspaper, mostly under the pseudonym Patrick Kearns. They have never been previously attributed to Pratchett, who died in 2015 aged 66, eight years after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.The collection was bought by Pratchett’s longtime publisher Transworld…

In her new book, classical archaeologist Naoíse Mac Sweeney sets out to challenge and reinterpret the notion of “western civilisation” over the past 2,500 years, through the lives and writings of 14 women and men – ranging from Herodotus, the great Greek historian of the fifth century BC, to Carrie Lam, the 21st-century chief executive of Hong Kong, who presided over its recent slide into authoritarian rule.Does that sound interesting to you? Frankly, I was dubious. We all know that publishers love this kind of…

Nathaniel Dett was a Canadian-born composer who was descended from slaves and dedicated himself to promoting African American music, merging spirituals with western classical styles in his own works. Now, almost 80 years after his death, the BBC Philharmonic will give the world premiere of a newly discovered orchestral composition, described as “an absolute throwback to music of west African slaves”.The manuscript was unearthed in a US archive by Dwight Pile-Gray, a British conductor and academic, who told the Guardian of…