And Now For Something Completely Uplifting

Behold, the good and the interesting:

When Jack Steel’s Lego toy slipped out of his backpack on his morning walk to school, he was heartbroken.

“It was quite a special Lego man because I made him,” said Jack, 10, who had visited the Legoland Discovery Center in Manchester, England, over the summer, and modeled a Lego figure after himself. He named the toy “Mini Jack” and carried it with him wherever he went. “It did look quite a lot like me.”

After he arrived at school on Sept. 14, he excitedly went to grab Mini Jack from his backpack. He noticed that he hadn’t closed the zipper all the way, and quickly realized that his treasured toy was nowhere to be found. His heart sank.

“I was really sad,” said Jack, who lives in Ulverston, a town of about 11,000 people in Cumbria, England. “I thought about how I could get it back.”

One idea came to mind: a missing person poster.

Jack got to work with his crayons, crafting an elaborate illustration of the Lego toy. He labeled all the parts, including the eyebrows.

“Light brown quiff with matching eyebrows,” he wrote, describing the toy’s hairstyle. “Hawaiian shirt (blue with palm trees) and an orange stripe on the bottom,” plus “dark green pants.”

“He is very special to me,” he added at the bottom of the illustration.

At the top of the poster, Jack wrote a message in big letters: “Lost!!! Has anyone seen this Lego man?” He also offered a reward of two British pounds – about $2.50 – and included his home address.

“I thought I had lost him forever,” Jack said in a phone interview with The Washington Post, adding that he packed Mini Jack in his bag because he wanted to show him to his grandmother after school. ...

Jack’s missing person poster served its purpose. A girl who used to go to school with Jack and is a few years older found the Lego man during her own walk to school, and showed it to her mother. The mother stumbled upon Walker’s Facebook post that evening and connected the dots. She sent Walker a message saying she found a toy that perfectly matched Jack’s drawing and description. The story was first reported by The Mail, Ulverston’s local paper.

 

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This month marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Hachiko, the loyal dog who continued to wait for his deceased owner at Tokyo's Shibuya Station.

The statue of Hachiko in front of the station is known as a meeting place and also a popular spot for foreign tourists.

As to why Hachiko is still so beloved today, one expert says, "It may be because the dog resonates with people of all ages, genders and nationalities, and overlaps with the experience we all have of wanting to meet someone we love but can't."

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A pyramid buried in Indonesia could be the oldest such structure in the world — by many thousands of years.

To get a sense of the timeline, new radiocarbon dating suggests that the structure at Gunung Padang in West Java, Indonesia, was built during the last ice age, sometime between 25,000 and 14,000 BC. It was then abandoned for thousands of years, before being deliberately buried around 7000 BC.

The Great Pyramids in Egypt, and Britain’s Stonehenge, were each built at roughly the same time, about 3200 BC. That means that, if the dating holds, the pyramid at Gunung Padang were already far older than the Great Pyramids when the Great Pyramids were themselves built.

In fact, it may have been buried and lost for thousands of years before anyone on Egypt’s Giza Plateau or Britain’s Salisbury Plain even thought of creating a massive monument there. It would have stood thousands of years before Gobekli Tepe, a lesser known site in Turkey that has been tentatively dated to about 9000 BC.

In a research paper published in the journal Archaeological Prospection, geologist Danny Hilman of Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency writes that earlier researchers assumed the structure had been built “between several hundred and a couple of thousand BCE,” in line with similar structures elsewhere in Asia.

Hilman brought a variety of techniques to bear on the site, which was first discovered (or better to say rediscovered) in 1890. He has long espoused the site’s extreme age — an article in the Sydney Morning Herald from 10 years ago lays out his claims, and the counter-claims of detractors — but he says his latest measurements will stand up to any scrutiny.