Messi renews contract with Barcelona

Lionel Messi agreed on a new contract with Barcelona on Tuesday through 2018. 

Messi, the three—time world player of the year, has 90 goals in 2012, surpassing Gerd Mueller’s 40—year—old milestone of 85 in a calendar year. 

Xavi Hernandez and Carles Puyol also agreed to new deals with the Spanish giant. 

In a statement released by the club, Messi, whose contract was due to expire on June 30, 2016, extended his commitment to the club to June 30, 2018. 

Puyol and Xavi extended theirs to June 2016. 

“This news means that FC Barcelona has secured its ties with three of its most important players,” the statement said, adding that the contracts would be signed “over the course of the next few weeks.”

Google expands Gmail attachment size upto 10 GB

For some time now, the cap on the size of email attachments have been hugely outdated across email services. The more tech-savvy among us have already moved to cloud-based file hosting services such as Dropbox, Microsoft’s Skydrive and latest entrant Google Drive. 

But this week, Google Inc announced in a blogpost that it was upping its game. A new feature, which is being rolled out over this week, allows users to attach files up to 10 GB. Compared to the measly 25 MB that was being offered early, making it impossible to send anything but text files or resized pictures, the 10GB offer is something that will open up new possibilities in sharing content. 

However, this new feature is available for those who have signed up for Gmail’s new ‘email compose experience’ (that uses a floating screen giving email a messaging-like look and feel), which was launched in October. This is still in its testing stages and offered only to a section of email users.

In essence, what you’re really sending is a link to a file hosted in Google Drive, much like what you would do when you use any of the cloud-based file sharing services. The only advantage here is that you don’t have to sign up for or move out into another service; you can do it from the comfort of your email inbox. 

According to Google’s blogpost, now with Drive, a user can insert files up to 10GB that is 400 times larger than what you can send as a traditional attachment, from Drive directly into an email. An added advantage is that as the file you are sharing is stored in the cloud, recipients will have access to any changes that you may make in the file even after you have sent the file. 

Given that the service is not yet accessible for all, there’s a lot of excitement and impatience on online forums to use this new service. But given bandwidth issues and poor network speeds that continue to dog our experience, there is room for a dash of scepticism. A small test attempt to attach a movie file (around 4GB) to email on a fairly basic Internet network (which promises the usual 100 MBPS speed) failed after 10 minutes. 

Trilok Nathan, a software engineer who tried to use the service from the home network, says that while the move was indeed exciting, and opened up a world of opportunity, without high-speed networks, “it's a bit of a waste.”

Alien-like skulls found at 1,000 year old cemetery in Mexico

A number of alien-like skulls have been discovered in a 1,000 year old cemetery in Mexico.

The finding initially stunned the researchers, however, upon closer inspection the skulls were found to be human skulls warped into strange, alien-like shapes.

Scientists said the practise of deforming skulls of children as they grew was common in Central America, and these findings suggest the tradition spread farther north than had been thought.

The cemetery was discovered by residents of the small Mexican village of Onavas in 1999 as they were building an irrigation canal, ‘LiveScience’ reported.

The site, referred to as El Cementerio, contained the remains of 25 human burials. Thirteen of them had deformed skulls, which were elongate and pointy at the back, and five had mutilated teeth.

Dental mutilation involves filing or grinding teeth into odd shapes, while cranial deformation involves distorting the normal growth of a child’s skull by applying force.

“Cranial deformation has been used by different societies in the world as a ritual practise, or for distinction of status within a group or to distinguish between social groups,” said researcher Cristina Garcia Moreno, an archaeologist at Arizona State University.

“The reason why these individuals at El Cementerio deformed their skulls is still unknown,” said Garcia.

“The most common comment I have read from people that see the pictures of cranial deformation has been that they think that those people were ‘aliens’

I could say that some say that as a joke, but the interesting thing is that some do think so. Obviously we are talking about human beings, not of aliens,” Garcia added.

Of the 25 burials, 17 were children between 5 months and 16 years of age. The high number of children seen at the site could suggest inept cranial deformation killed them due to excessive force against the skull.

Researchers suggest the people at El Cementerio had been influenced by recent migrants from the south.

However, it remains uncertain why some of these people were buried with ornaments while others were not, or — another mystery — why only one of the 25 skeletons was woman.