Month: December 2023

Enlarge / The site at casas del Turuñuelo, with 1 marking the courtyard. (credit: Iborra Eres, et al.)

Whether it was to appease a deity or honor the dead, ritual animal sacrifice was widespread in the ancient world. But there is a region where it appears that hardly any of these rituals occurred for an extended period of time.

Until now, the archaeological record was almost devoid of any evidence of significant animal sacrifices in the Mediterranean region during the Iron Age. Hardly any written sources describing the practice have been found. While the exact reason that we don’t see any evidence remains unknown, archaeologists have now unearthed more details on one of the only sites sacrifices were known to happen in the Iron Age Mediterranean, a location in western Spain.

The bones of Casas del Turuñuelo now tell us more from beyond the grave than they ever have. “The 52 animals deposited in the courtyard of Casas de Turuñuelo represent a series of episodes of slaughter,” a team of archaeologists said in a study recently published in PLOS ONE.

Enlarge (credit: Google)

In October, Google Fiber announced a ridiculously fast new tier of its Internet service: 20Gbps symmetrical. While that's 1,000 times faster than what some Internet providers offer (especially going by upload speeds), what we didn't know was the cost. A new blog post reveals who can get this new service, and they'll be paying $250 a month for it.

Google says, "We’re starting in Kansas City, North Carolina’s Triangle Region, Arizona, and Iowa." (Google tells me the "Triangle Region" means Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill). Google Fiber is built on Nokia's upgradable "Quillion" Fiber platform, and upgrading to the new 25G PON (passive optical network) technology allows it to push more data over existing fiber lines. Once it does more upgrades, Google says it can bring 20-gig service to more cities. Back in October, Google Fiber's head of product, Nick Saporito, told Fierce Telecom that the plan is to bring 20-gig service to "in most, if not all, of our markets."

20-gig will slot in as a new pricing tier at $250 a month, and other fiber pricing will stay the same. That means $70 for 1 gig, $100 for 2 gig, $125 for 5 gig, and $150 for 8 gig; 20-gig installations will start in Q1 of 2024.