Beer is as old as civilization itself and Dogfish Head Craft Brewery is giving you a chance to try some of the oldest known brews.  Scientific American gives us this story on three ancient reconstituted recipes by Dogfish Head.  The unexpected fruit of molecular anthropology, these beer recipes come from chemical analyses of ancient pottery.

If you’ve a taste for vintage, there’s also a beer made with 45 million year old yeast that was harvested from a weevil trapped in fossilized amber!

The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking

presents Frank Gavin on “Five Ways to Use History Well”

Monday July 12, 02010 at 7:30 pm at the Cowell Theater in San Francisco

Long Now Members can reserve 2 seats, join today!

or you can purchase tickets for $10 each.

About this Seminar:
Historian Francis J. Gavin uses lessons from our recent history to suggest strategic policy decisions that counter-balance alarmist speculation about international security issues, such as nuclear proliferation.

Gavin is the Director of the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law and the first Tom Slick Professor of International Affairs at Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.

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“Long Shorts” – short films that exemplify long-term thinking.  Please submit yours in the comments section…

This video is part of the Mammoths and Mastodons exhibit at The Field Museum in Chicago, and was the Long Short for our Seminar with Nils Gilman.

It’s a reverse time lapse put together by Greg Mercer and Emily Ward (editing), and David Quednau (animation). Unwinding 20,000 years of a modern American city and frontier outposts, Native American settlements and the last ice age, we arrive in their world and resurrect them in film.

Perhaps most interesting is that this film is not the only place mammoths can now come alive, but also as Stewart points out, it is now possible to take the DNA of mammoths, blend them with elephants and usher in their return.

And I just noticed there was a segment on just this at 60 Minutes this last weekend, Resurrecting The Extinct.

Final note: If you are in Chicago between now and September 6, 02010, take time to also visit the new 3D film of their T. Rex, lovingly named Sue.  Apparently she escaped a little while ago and the museum documented the ordeal.

Heliotron magnetic field fusion containment device

Is There Good News About Energy?

In the face of the BP disaster, it would be all too easy to lose hope about our energy future. But it’s possible there might be a silver lining in that oily cloud: if we’re lucky, the spill may prompt a deeper conversation about the need to find new, global, scalable solutions to meet our energy needs.

As part of that conversation, we’d like to invite you to join our Energy News Hunt, with social news site NewsTrust.net.

From June 7 to 20, 02010, The Long Now Foundation and its Long News initiative are partnering with NewsTrust to find good journalism about the future of energy — with a particular focus on low carbon technologies and innovative solutions that can scale quickly into terawatts. For a sense of the scale required, see Saul Griffith’s talk on Climate Change, Recalculated.

We invite you to join forces with us and NewsTrust, so that together we can find some of the best (and worst) coverage of this important topic. NewsTrust is a community of citizens and journalists who rate the news based on quality, not just popularity — by reviewing articles for accuracy, fairness, context and other journalistic qualities.

Joining the Energy News Hunt is easy and informative — and you can contribute your expertise in just minutes. Simply review stories listed in our Energy topic page — or post other interesting articles you have come across on this topic. As you review these stories, you will learn more about important energy issues, and you will become more aware about the quality of the news you consume.

To get started, sign up on NewsTrust’s special welcome page for The Long Now Foundation. This will let you review stories on NewsTrust and get the full benefit of their free service.

On June 16th, 02010, The Long Now Foundation is hosting a talk about fusion energy by Ed Moses of the National Ignition Facility. If you live in the Bay Area, this is a great opportunity to learn about his groundbreaking work on laser fusion. This News Hunt is intended as a companion for this talk, to help share quality news and information about this complex topic.

Throughout the Energy News Hunt, News Trust will update its blog to feature some of each day’s best finds: featured stories recommended by our hosts and editors.

Join the Energy News Hunt – and get more informed!  You can see some of the most recently added articles below:

Fossilization normally takes millions of years, but artist Austin Houldsworth has created a machine that he hopes will accelerate that process enough to take only a few months.  The piece is called Two Million & 1AD and it’s located in Tatton Park in Cheshire, England.

The machine replicates the natural process of Petrification, which is a form of fossilisation where organic matter is replaced with minerals. It does this by saturating the water with an extremely high quantity of minerals in the form of Calcium and Magnesium. A small quantity of sulphuric acid has been added to the tank containing the limestone; this replicates the natural acidity of rain water which reacts with the alkaline limestone and forms Calcium Sulphate (commonly known as gypsum), which is a very water soluble mineral (compared with Calcium carbonate).

Members of the public pump the water from the two tanks at the bottom to the header tank located at the top of the machine. This water then slowly trickles through the containers which house the pineapple and Partridge – and during the Biennial (hopefully) will transform the organic objects into stone.

- (Austin Houldsworth, we make money not art)

In order to demonstrate digital impermanence, scientists from the European Planets Project deposited a time capsule containing five of today’s most common types of digital objects into the Swiss Fort Knox data center. The time capsule contains a JPEG photograph, a message in Java source code, a short film in .MOV format, a web-page in HTML and a brochure in PDF.

According to the Planets website, the deposited box also included..

…conversion tools that were used to migrate the objects as well as software to open and view/use these objects and supporting software all the way down to an operating system; descriptions of the file formats, of the file systems and encodings used on the storage media; and description of all these objects and their relationship to supporting technology and recognised standards.

The TimeCapsule will be available to researchers in the future to investigate how much of its content will still be or can be made accessible and usable with the information provided.  An online version will make it possible to see the contents of the TimeCapsule and experiment with technology to preserve them. Replicas will be available to libraries, archives, science museums and others for research and public exhibit.

The Planets TimeCapsule will demonstrate in ten, 20, 30, 50 and hundreds of years the fragility of digital data and the ability of technology to overcome it.