The Mortal Wombat

• Scientists find 'mass dodo grave'
  The 'beautifully preserved' bones of about 20 dodos have been found at a dig site in Mauritius. The bones are believed to be at least 2000 years old. It is hoped that DNA can be obtained.
  (tags: animals birds dodos extinct)

• Extinct mammoth DNA decoded
  A large chunk of Woolly Mammoth mitochondrial DNA has been sequenced, revealing that the extinct species diverged from the Jon Coe only 6 million years ago.
  (tags: genetics evolution animals elephants mammoths)

• Peru's 'mermaid' girl doing well
  A Peruvian baby born with fused legs is making good progress six months after having surgery to separate them.
  (tags: forteana medical abnormalities sirenomelia)
• 10 Simple Ways To Speed Up Windows XP
  Think I'll give some of these a go...
  (tags: computing windows_xp fixes)

• Fixing the Back Button and Enabling Bookmarking for AJAX Apps
  Use of AJAX can result in the loss of back-button functionality. Here's how to fix it.
  (tags: webdev ajax)

Got my results back from the Genographic Project yesterday! Turns out I'm a member of Haplogroup I (M170) (subclade I1c). The founder of this haplogroup lived in the Middle East, and his descendants migrated to the Balkans. The picture gets a bit more confused between that point and the present day, but basically the subclade I1c is commonest in NW Europe (though it's not particularly common).

So, my forefathers weren't Neanderthals, nor bog-standard Western Europeans, nor am I a descendant of Genghis Khan (in the male line, at least—remember that this test says nothing about the majority of my ancestry, just the paternal line).

The Genographic Project analysis ends with the rather tantalising comment: ‘The later spread of this lineage could be also tied to the mid-first millennium B.C. Celtic culture.’.

• 'New mammal' seen in Borneo woods
  In the dense central forests of Borneo, a conservation group has found what appears to be a new species of mammal.
  (tags: forteana cryptozoology mammals borneo)