Italian researchers believe they have found the remains of a female "vampire" in Venice, buried with a brick jammed between her jaws to prevent her from feeding on victims of a plague which swept the city in the 16th century.
Matteo Borrini, an anthropologist from the University of Florence, said the discovery on the island of Lazzaretto Nuovo in the Venice lagoon supported the mediaeval belief that vampires were behind the spread of plagues like the Black Death. The skeleton was unearthed in a mass grave from the Venetian plague of 1576.
During a succession of plagues which ravaged Europe between 1300 and 1700 gravediggers reopening mass graves would sometimes come across bodies bloated by gas, with hair still growing, and blood seeping from their mouths, and believe them to be still alive. This fostered the belief in vampires.
The "undead" were believed to spread pestilence in order to suck the remaining life from corpses until they acquired the strength to return to the streets again.
TV bill is 450 years late
A German mathematician who died 450 years ago has been sent a letter demanding that he pay long-overdue television licence fees.
Germany's GEZ broadcast fee collection office sent the bill to the last home address of Adam Ries, an algebra expert who bought the house in 1525. A club in his honour was set up at the property four centuries later.
Annegret Muench, who now heads the club, returned the letter to the GEZ with a note explaining the request had come too late because Mr Ries had died in 1559, centuries before the invention of television and radio. She nonetheless received a reminder a few weeks later.
This was not the first time the GEZ had sent a bill to those in the afterlife. Last year, a school named after poet Friedrich Schiller received a reminder asking him to declare all radios and televisions in his home and pay the corresponding fees.
Palin's daughter splits from fiancé
Bristol Palin, the 18-year-old daughter of Alaska's governor and last year's Republican vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, has split from her fiance Levi Johnston, celebrity magazine People has reported.
Bristol, whose pregnancy briefly occupied the headlines during her mother's vice presidential campaign last year, gave birth to a son named Tripp in December, fathered by Mr Johnston.
The teenage pregnancy was an awkward moment for the vice presidential candidate, whose campaign supported sex education in public schools that encourages abstinence.
Free funeral for construction work
A New York funeral director is offering a free funeral to someone who will undertake a construction job at his Manhattan home in exchange.
"It may sound like a laughable barter transaction, but consider the average cost of paying for a funeral," wrote funeral director Peter Dohanich, 51, on the online classified service Craigslist.com last week.
Mr Dohanich said he is looking for a builder or contractor to do some remodelling for a new patio but did not have the cash on hand for the project. "Someone told me, if you're looking for services, look on barter," Mr Dohanich said.
The idea makes sense because the estimated cost of the construction work, at $6,000 to $10,000, is similar to the cost of a funeral, he said.
'Peking man' older than thought
A new and more accurate dating method shows Peking Man may be 200,000 years older than what experts previously thought.
The bones of "Sinanthropus pekinensis", a Homo erectus commonly known as Peking Man, were discovered in the 1920s during cave excavations in Zhoukoudian, near Beijing and are believed to be 750,000 years old.
The new date may help experts understand when migration into Asia took place, Guanjun Shen of China's Nanjing Normal University said. Mr Shen used a relatively new method that examines the radioactive decay of aluminium and beryllium in quartz grains, which enabled his team to get a more precise age for the fossils.
"The analysis dated the finds to around 750,000 years old, some 200,000 years older than previous estimates," the researchers wrote.