Obvious blog fodder: scientists figure out how to play a sound recording from 1860, made by a French librarian who never did devise a way to play back his recordings but apparently thought them still worth making. From the point of view of a music listener, this isn't very impressive--the recording doesn't sound very good.
But from the point of view of a librarian, this is very cool. They've taken a document that isn't really useful except as a curiosity and extracted something interesting from it (judging from the way the article is creeping up the most popular list, anyway). Better yet, they taught a machine how to do it. More than the clip of "Au clair de la lune," it's the promise shown in their achievement that's important.
We should all want to get better at this kind of thing, because (a) we have tons of nondigital documents and artifacts that we may want to make easily accessible, but only a machine is going to have the time to process that amount of stuff and (b) we have a lot of information in crap formats that people in the future are going to have to figure out how to use.
Even if Edison came up with a better invention in the long run, isn't it cool that we can hear this, the oldest known recording of the human voice, and the NYT can put it online and make it instantly available to millions of people?