Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Chinese writing '8,000 years old
Chinese archaeologists studying ancient rock carvings say they have evidence that modern Chinese script is thousands of years older than previously thought.State media say researchers identified more than 2,000 pictorial symbols dating back 8,000 years, on cliff faces in the north-west of the country.
They say many of these symbols bear a strong resemblance to later forms of ancient Chinese characters.
Scholars had thought Chinese symbols came into use about 4,500 years ago.
The Damaidi carvings, first discovered in the 1980s, cover 15 sq km (5.8 square miles) and feature more than 8,000 individual figures including the sun, moon, stars, gods and scenes of hunting or grazing."We have found some symbols shaped like both pictures and characters," Li Xiangshi, a cliff carving expert at the North University of Nationalities in Ningxia Hui autonomous region, told Xinhua news agency.
"The pictographs are similar to the ancient hieroglyphs of Chinese characters and many can be identified as ancient characters."
Until the discovery, the earliest characters included 4,500-year-old inscriptions on pottery from Henan province in central China.
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Friday, May 18, 2007
Google overhauls main search page
Google is overhauling its search system so it returns "universal" results not just those from webpages.The change means users will also get results from news sites, blogs, video services and other relevant places.
Before now the different categories have been separate which meant searches had to be repeated to pick up all possible results.
The expanded results will be available via a series of tabs that will appear on the results page.
Drilling down
"It's breaking down the silos of information that have been built up," said Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search and user experience."It's a broad, long-term vision that will unfold over the next few years," she said.
Initially the changes only affect searches done on Google.com in English.
The change means when users carry out a search, it will also be run in the background on all the other categories of information that Google indexes.
A series of tabs will appear between the search box and the results that let users navigate to other categories.
Clicking on a tab will let people drill down into a specific category of results such as patents or products.
Results returned in other categories, such as blogs or video, will not just be from companies that Google owns.
As well as the changes to searches, the firm is introducing drop-down lists that let users quickly switch to other Google properties, such as GMail, and search for results there.
By making the move Google is following other search sites such as Amazon's A9 and Ask which let users navigate quickly to other categories of information or relevant results.
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