Something I'd like to read more about

Did Vikings navigate with 'sunstone'?

Vikings could have navigated the oceans in inclement weather with the aid of a crystal that pinpointed the sun's location behind banks of clouds and fog, a new study suggests.

Such a tool, known as a sunstone, is known from legend, but until now experimental evidence that it could actually work as hypothesized was lacking.

Researchers led by Gábor Horváth of Hungary's Eötvös University decided to see if the legend has real world legs. Their results were published online on Monday in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

You can read the actual journal article for free at their website. The issue is actually devoted to new directions of biological studies on polarised light.

Here's the citation if you'd rather look it up in print:

Gábor Horváth, András Barta, István Pomozi, Bence Suhai, Ramón Hegedüs, Susanne Åkesson, Benno Meyer-Rochow, and Rüdiger Wehner. On the trail of Vikings with polarized skylight: experimental study of the atmospheric optical prerequisites allowing polarimetric navigation by Viking seafarers. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B March 12, 2011 366:772-782; doi:10.1098/rstb.2010.0194.

Aha! Perhaps it was the butler

Vikings acquitted in 100-year-old murder mystery

In all seriousness, the article states that the younger woman was not a maid killed ritually to be the companion for a queen in the afterlife as previously thought. Instead, she was a woman of high rank herself, having even used a metal toothpick, a rare luxury. The older woman, long supposed to be the grandmother of the first king of Norway, died of cancer, something that could be determined from her bones. She also had a syndrome that caused hair growth and a thickening of the body due to a hormonal imbalance. The young woman had a broken clavicle that had been healing, but there is no evidence that she was killed.