February 28th, 2006
                        Â
The golden-mantled tree kangaroo is just one of dozens of species discovered in late 2005 by a team of Indonesian, Australian, and U.S. scientists on the island of New Guinea.
The animal is the rarest arboreal, jungle-dwelling kangaroo in the world, the researchers say. This was the first time the mammal was found in Indonesia, making it only the second site in the world where the species is known to exist.
The kangaroo was discovered on an expedition in the Foja Mountains of Indonesia.
The National Geographic Society, Conservation International, and the Biology Research Center of the Indonesian Institute of Sciences supported the expedition.Â
                         Â
The smoky honeyeater is the first new bird species to be discovered on the island of New Guinea since 1939.
                          
In late 2005 scientists on the island of New Guinea took this first ever photo of the golden-fronted bowerbird, a bird known to exist since the 1890s but whose precise home was unknown until the 1980s.
                    
This is the first photograph ever taken of what scientists are calling New Guinea’s “lost” bird of paradise.
The bird—known as Berlepsch’s six-wired bird of paradise—had been collected only once in the wild since its discovery more than a century ago. Its precise home range was unknown until now.
                    
This small frog is 1 of more than 20 new frog species discovered by scientists on an expedition in New Guinea in late 2005.
The tiny frog measures a mere 0.6 inch (14 millimeters) long and was detected only when it produced a soft call from among leaves on the steepest part of the forest floor.
Â
February 28th, 2006
  
January 18, 2006—Its owner says this map changes history. But skeptics say he’s way off course.
Antiquities collector Liu Gang unveiled the map in Beijing on Monday, saying it proves that Chinese seafarer Zheng He discovered America more than 70 years before Christopher Columbus set foot in the New World.
The map depicts all of the continents, including a small Australia, a roughed-out North America, and Antarctica.
An inscription identifies the map as a copy made in 1763 of an original drawn in 1418.
If verified, that date would coincide with the voyages of Zheng He, an admiral in the Ming dynasty’s imperial navy. Zheng is known to have sailed as far as Africa between 1405 and 1433. (See National Geographic magazine feature: “China’s Great Armada.”)
A lab in New Zealand is radiocarbon-dating a scrap of the map’s bamboo paper to determine its age.
Liu says he purchased the map from a dealer in Shanghai in 2001 but didn’t suspect its importance until he read 1421, a book that claims Zheng discovered America.
The book, written by retired British Navy officer Gavin Menzies, also asserts that Zheng was the first to circumnavigate the globe and that Chinese settlers established now-vanished colonies throughout the Americas.
Many scholars, including Chinese historians, have dismissed these claims.
“I sincerely believe that other maps exist and books exist [that support the claims], but no one has been paying attention to them,” Liu told the AFP news agency. “It is my purpose to try to wake these [scholars] up.”
—Blake de Pastino
February 28th, 2006
(MTV)Like a lot of smart popsters on the rebound, the reunited fab five broach their return by borrowing from the current hit makers. Even after a four-year hiatus, the flecks of new influence won’t matter a bit to the fans. The boys’ signature sugar-coated yearning softens every song to a melty consistency, and the lyrics haven’t lost any of their babe-magnet pull.
February 28th, 2006
All Things Considered, Chinese collectors and corporations are using their new wealth to buy back some of the thousands of China’s art treasures that have been lost overseas, plundered in war and stolen by tomb robbers. One company has made this its specialty: the Poly Corporation, which started as an arms trading branch of China’s military.
