In other news, GOP Representative Jeff Fortenberry has been indicted on federal charges for repeatedly lying about illegal contributions to his campaign.
Meanwhile, Facebook is reportedly planning to change the company's name in an effort to rebrand away from being one of the worst brands in the world.
Finally, researchers say Vikings actually landed in North America 470 years before Columbus; making them the first Europeans to arrive here. The way they discovered this is very interesting.
Vikings from Greenland — the first Europeans to arrive in the Americas — lived in a village in Canada’s Newfoundland exactly 1,000 years ago, according to research published Wednesday.
Scientists have known for many years that Vikings — a name given to the Norse by the English they raided — built a village at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland around the turn of the millennium. But a study published in Nature is the first to pinpoint the date of the Norse occupation. [...]
Previous studies have established there was a ray event in the year 993 that for a few months caused greater than usual levels of radioactive carbon-14 in the carbon dioxide of the atmosphere.
Trees “breathe” carbon dioxide as they grow, and so the researchers used that radioactive carbon signature to determine which of the annual growth rings seen in cross-sections of the wood was from 993, Kuitems said.
They then used a microscope to count the later growth rings until the bark of the wood, which gave them the exact year the tree had stopped growing — in other words, when it had been felled by the Norse.
There are other, more important reasons why "Columbus Day" is a farce, but here's another: he wasn't the first.