* In the hills of a spot called "Cradle of Humankind," a UNESCO World Heritage site in Gauteng, South Africa, 9-year-old Matthew Berger was out running in the grass with his dog, Tau, when he stumbled upon a major anthropological discovery: bones belonging to a member of a species of hominid not previously known to current scientists, and now thought to have lived about two million years ago, around the dawn of the first recognizably human ancestors. The bones are thought to have belonged to a boy who was about 4'2" and just a few years older than Matthew. Matthew's father, Dr. Lee R. Berger, is an American paleontologist and had been hunting for fossils in the area for about 20 years. From The New York Times: "Fossil hunters have profitably scoured these rolling grasslands north of Johannesburg since the 1930s."
* On the morning of September 28, 2009, in Conakry, the capital of Guinea, tens of thousands of people marched into a soccer stadium in a demonstration against the nation’s ruling military junta--particularly against Moussa Dadis Camara, a formerly obscure army captain who had seized power in Guinea nine months earlier and was intent on creating a military dictatorship. Dadis, prone to violent mood swings, surrounded himself with a posse of armed men called the Red Berets. The rally at the stadium turned violent--Dadis’s men hacked, shot, and beat to death at least 156 people. They also gang-raped more than 100 women. Images from the massacre spread quickly via cell-phone videos, photos, and eyewitness testimony, and provoked international outcry against the Dadis regime. Guinea, which has a population of about 10.5 million people, is one of Africa’s least developed nations but is rich in minerals. Dadis was later shot by his aide-de-camp, Lt. Aboubacar (Toumba) Diakete, and flown to Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, where Dadis signed a document agreeing to stay in Burkina Faso while General Sekouba Konaté acted as interim leader until elections could be held. On January 26, Jean-Marie Doré, a member of the opposition and one of the protesters at the stadium rally, was sworn in as the new prime minister.
* A team of Russian and American scientists discovered a new element thought to be a missing link among the heaviest bits of atomic matter ever produced. Discovery of the element, still nameless, could be a step toward finding a group of even more massive elements with chemical properties that are not yet predictable. The team produced six atoms of the element by smashing together isotopes of calcium and a radioactive element called berkelium in a particle accelerator; they did this north of Moscow on the Volga River, and wrote up their findings in a paper accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters.
* Otto Penzler, owner of the idiosyncratic Mysterious Bookshop, in New York City, is auctioning off his collection of British espionage and thriller fiction. The auction will take place at Swann Galleries and includes a near-perfect-condition, first-edition copy of "Casino Royale" by Ian Fleming, the first-ever James Bond novel. "British spy novels are among the greatest of all works in the mystery genre," Penzler said in the introduction to the auction catalog. "This is the first auction ever devoted entirely to this important literary genre."
* Ernest Vincent Wright wrote the novel "Gadsby" in 1939 without using the letter "e" once. The novel contains 50,000 words. Instead of "The End," it ends with "Finis."