Word: java
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Captain Samuel Barrett Edes met his "mermaid" in Java or Batavia. Thoroughly convinced that it was a veritable mermaid, Captain Edes stole $6,000 of his ship's money, purchased the creature and left for London, where he planned to exhibit his acquisition for pecuniary returns. His ploy failed and he returned to Boston to die, with no possessions save his mermaid, which he believed in until the end. His son sold the creature to Moses Kimball, who exhibited it to P.T. Barnum...
...true spirit of the Internet, Sun plans on publically distributing the HotJava Web browser (along with complete documentation for the object-oriented Java language used to develop HotJava Web pages...
...response to your report "How Man Began" ((SCIENCE, March 14)), I would note that the nearly 2 million-year age, reported as the key breakthrough in dating hominids in Java, used to be found in textbooks of the 1970s and early '80s. But later years of investigation by teams from Japan, the Netherlands and Indonesia reset the age of these hominids to little more than 1 million years. A true revolution in our thinking about a complex of multiple human lineages, each with a proper extinction, stays intact with either the older- or younger-date theory. Geographic expansion...
...most direct evidence of the time H. erectus arrived in Asia is obviously the ages of the fossils found there. But accurate dates are elusive, especially in Java. In contrast to East Africa's Rift Valley, where the underground record of geological history has been lifted up and laid bare by faulting and erosion, most Javan deposits are buried under rice paddies. Since the subterranean layers of rock are not so easy to study, scientists have traditionally dated Javan hominids by determining the age of fossilized extinct mammals that crop up nearby. The two fossils cited in the new Science...
...dating technique to bits of volcanic pumice from the fossil-bearing sediments at Mojokerto. Curtis' conclusion: the Mojokerto child was not a million years old but closer to 2 million. Nobody took much notice, however, because the technique is prone to errors in the kind of pumice found in Java. Curtis' dates would remain uncertain for more than two decades, until he and Swisher could re-evaluate the pumice with a new, far more accurate method...