Newsdesk Archive
Scientists have named a new dinosaur species "thunder-thighs" because of the huge thigh muscles it would have had.Fossil remains recovered from a quarry in Utah, US, are fragmentary but enough to tell researchers the creature must have possessed extremely powerful legs.The new species, described in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, is a sauropod - the family of dinosaurs famous for their long necks and tails.
A magnitude-6.3 earthquake that hit Christchurch, New Zealand, at 12:51 p.m. local time today is the country's deadliest in 80 years. Details are still trickling in, and the numbers of dead and injured are expected to rise following what Prime Minister John Key has said "may well be New Zealand's darkest day".But this earthquake is just one of a series that has shaken the area during the past six months. A magnitude-7.0 earthquake on 3 September 2010 caused an estimated NZ$1.4 billion (US$1 billion) of damage, but no deaths. Nature examines whether the earthquakes are linked and what caused them.
If the Large Hadron Collider does not prove the existence of the Higgs boson in the next two years, physicists say the entire Standard Model theory of subatomic structure must be reassessed.The announcement, made at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting on 21 February, 2011, comes as the CERN nuclear research team in Geneva reveals that the temporary closure of the particle accelerator for maintainence will be put off an extra year, until the end of 2012."By the end of next year, we hope very much that we will be able to say something about the Higgs," said Felicitas Pauss, head of international relations at CERN.
Rising sea levels could threaten an average of 9 percent of the land within 180 U.S. coastal cities by 2100, according to new research led by University of Arizona scientists.The Gulf and southern Atlantic coasts will be particularly hard hit. Miami, New Orleans, Tampa, Fla., and Virginia Beach, Va. could lose more than 10 percent of their land area by 2100.The research is the first analysis of vulnerability to sea-level rise that includes every U.S. coastal city in the lower 48 with a population of 50,000 or more.
Two German inventors have created an electric vehicle that recharges the battery through a wind turbine carried in the car. To test the vehicle, the duo recently completed a 3,100-mile trek across Australia.It is almost like German adventurers Dirk Gion and Stefan Simmerer saw the latest models of electric cars, and decided to see if they could go out and make the manufacturers feel bad. In a move that will have green aficionados cheering and gearheads gently weeping at the state of the world, a new electric car powered by a wind turbine has just been unleashed into the Australian wilds.
The discovery of extraterrestrial life might not shake people's faith in their religious beliefs, but it could lead them to wonder if Jesus Christ had incarnations on alien planets, scientists and theologians say.These speculations and more arose from researchers presenting at a meeting of the Royal Society in London last year addressing the potentialimpacts of aliens on society, who detailed their analysis this month in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A.
Using the super-sharp radio "vision" of astronomy's most precise telescope, scientists have extended a directly-measured "yardstick" three times farther into the cosmos than ever before, an achievement with important implications for numerous areas of astrophysics, including determining the nature of Dark Energy, which constitutes 70 percent of the Universe. The continent-wide Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) also is redrawing the map of our home Galaxy and is poised to yield tantalizing new information about extrasolar planets, among many other cutting-edge research projects.
The threat of solar storms that could wreak havoc on the world's electronic systems must be taken more seriously, the UK government's chief scientist has warned. A severe solar storm could damage satellites and power grids around the world, he said, leading to a "global Katrina" costing the world's economies as much as $2tn (£1.2tn)."This issue of space weather has got to be taken seriously," said John Beddington, the UK government's chief scientific adviser, speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington DC. "We've had a relatively quiet [period] in space weather and we can expect that quiet period to end. Over the same time, over that period, the potential vulnerability of our systems has increased dramatically. Whether it's the smart grid in our electricity systems or the ubiquitous use of GPS in just about everything these days.
Oil from the BP spill remains stuck on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, according to a top scientist's video and slides that she says demonstrate the oil isn't degrading as hoped and has decimated life on parts of the sea floor.That report is at odds with a recent report by the BP spill compensation czar that said nearly all will be well by 2012.
Plastic bags help you carry your groceries home, they make excellent liners for smaller-sized trash cans, and now they can help you to heat your home. A Japanese inventor has found a way to convert plastic grocery bags, bottles and caps into usable petroleum.Plastic bags are, of course, made from petroleum to begin with, but it is not the same kind of petroleum that is used in fuel. In order to turn home waste into home power the machine heats up the waste plastic and traps the vapors created in a system of pipes and water chambers. Finally, the machine condenses the vapors into crude oil, that can be used for heating on the home level.
Global warming driven by human activity boosted the intensity of rain, snow and consequent flooding in the northern hemisphere over the last half of the 20th century, research released Wednesday has shown.Two studies, both published in Nature, are among the first to draw a straight line between climate change and its impact on potentially deadly and damaging extreme weather events.Australia, Sri Lanka, Brazil and Pakistan have all been recently ravaged by massive flooding, raising questions as to whether global warming was at least partly to blame.
On an isolated segment of islands in the Pacific Ring of Fire, residents endure volcanoes, tsunamis, dense fog, steep cliffs and long and chilly winters.Sounds homey, huh?At least it might be for inhabitants of the Kuril Islands, an 810-mile archipelago that stretches from Japan to Russia. The islands, formed by a collision of tectonic plates, are nearly abandoned today, but anthropologists have learned that thousands of people have lived there on and off as far back as at least 6000 B.C., persevering despite natural disasters.
New research gives the first accurate estimate of how much faster Earth's core is rotating compared to the rest of the planet.Previous research had shown that Earth's core rotates faster than the rest of the planet. However, scientists from the University of Cambridge have discovered that earlier estimates of 1 degree every year were inaccurate and that the core is actually moving much slower than previously believed -- approximately 1 degree every million years. Their findings are published on 20 February, in the journal Nature Geoscience.
A study from Stony Brook University has suggested that earliest humans were not very different from us.Archaeologist John Shea believes that experts have been focusing on the wrong measurement of early human behaviour - 'behavioural modernity' instead of 'behavioural variability.'Behavioural modernity is a quality supposedly unique to Homo sapiens, while behavioural variability is a quantitative dimension to the behaviour of all living things.
When bears hibernate, their body temperature drops. But a novel experiment conducted on Alaskan black bears in an artificial den, outfitted with high-tech sensors, indicates that the temperature doesn't drop as much as scientists thought it did. That finding is stirring up fresh questions about the phenomenon of hibernation, and it's also reawakening the sci-fi dream of putting humans into suspended animation for medical therapy or even space travel.The research on hibernating bears was published in this week's issue of the journal Science and discussed today at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual meeting in Washington."When black bears emerge from hibernation in spring, it has been shown that they have not suffered the losses in muscle and bone mass and function that would be expected to occur in humans over such a long time of immobility and disuse," said the study's senior author, Brian Barnes, who directs the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks..
The Kepler space telescope measures the sizes and ages of stars five times better than any other means - when it "listens" to the sounds they make.Bill Chaplin, speaking at the AAAS conference in Washington, said that Kepler was an exquisite tool for what is called "astroseismology".The technique measures minuscule variations in a star's brightness that occur as soundwaves bounce within it.The Kepler team has now measured some 500 far-flung stars using the method.
Researchers are developing a specialized skin "printing" system that could be used in the future to treat soldiers wounded on the battlefield.Scientists at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine were inspired by standard inkjet printers found in many home offices."We started out by taking a typical desktop inkjet cartridge. Instead of ink we use cells, which are placed in the cartridge," said Dr. Anthony Atala, director of the institute.The device could be used to rebuild damaged or burned skin.
The final line-up of teams competing for the $30 million (£18.5m) robotic Moon-explorer prize has been confirmed.The prize will go to the builders of the first robot to send back video as it travels over 500 metres of the Moon's surface.Competition organisers hope to spur the development of low-cost robotic space exploration.The Google-sponsored Lunar X-Prize will be fought over by 29 teams from 17 different countries.
For all of the mind-boggling achievements of modern medicine, only one -- one! -- disease has ever been completely eradicated: smallpox.But now guinea worm -- the preventable disease that forces people to live with worms up to three-feet long inside them -- is teetering on the brink of joining that very, very short list of diseases."Guinea worm disease is fewer than 1,800 cases away from becoming only the second disease in history to be wiped from Earth," said former President Jimmy Carter, yesterday, at an awards ceremony for his eponymous center.
A team of archaeologists studying the famous statues dotting the landscape of a tiny Pacific island have been awarded two thirds of a million pounds by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.The AHRC award of just over £640,000 will allow project directors Professor Sue Hamilton, from University College London and Dr. Colin Richards from The University of Manchester, to continue their groundbreaking study of Easter Island.AHRC Principal Investigator Professor Hamilton and Dr. Richards will continue their task of unravelling the mystery of the stone statues - or moai - dotted around the coastline of the island.
Physicists have built the world's first device that can cancel out a laser beam - a so-called anti-laser.The device, created by a team from Yale University, is capable of absorbing an incoming laser beam entirely.But this is not intended as a defence against high-power laser weapons, the researchers said.Instead they think it could be used in next-generation supercomputers which will be built with components that use light rather than electrons.
Future climate change could change the profile of tropical forests, with possible consequences for carbon storage and biodiversity, a study says.It suggests that if current trends continued, the drier conditions would favour deciduous, canopy species at the expense of other trees.US researchers based their findings on the changes they recorded in a Costa Rican forest over a 20-year period.The team's paper has been published in the journal Global Change Biology.
DNA from the stomach bacteria of a young man who died hundreds of years ago is shedding light on movement patterns of North American peoples and when they came in contact with Europeans.University of Saskatchewan researcher Treena Swanston worked with Helicobacter pylori DNA amplified from the stomach tissue of a young man who died between 340 and 160 years ago on a glacier high in the mountains of Tatshenshini-Alsek Park in British Columbia.
"Too simple" and "not so fast" suggest biological anthropologists from the George Washington University and New York University about the origins of human ancestry. In the upcoming issue of the journal Nature, the anthropologists question the claims that several prominent fossil discoveries made in the last decade are our human ancestors. Instead, the authors offer a more nuanced explanation of the fossils' place in the Tree of Life. They conclude that instead of being our ancestors the fossils more likely belong to extinct distant cousins.
The most popular model used by geneticists for the last 35 years to detect the footprints of human evolution may overlook more common subtle changes, a new international study finds.Classic selective sweeps, when a beneficial genetic mutation quickly spreads through the human population, are thought to have been the primary driver of human evolution. But a new computational analysis, published in the February 18, 2011 issue of Science, reveals that such events may have been rare, with little influence on the history of our species.
Humans and dolphins are inventing a common language together. This is big news!In all the hoopla over the world ending due to being asteroid-smashed, man becoming immortal thanks to the singularity in 2045, and Watson the trivia-machine winning Jeopardy! the story of budding interspecies communication got under-reported. Denise Herzing and her team with the Wild Dolphin project has begun developing a language to allow humans and dolphins to communicate. If successful, the ability to communicate with dolphins would fundamentally change animal intelligence research, animal rights arguments, and our ability to talk to aliens.
A NASA spacecraft heading for Mercury has beamed to Earth an amazing space photo: a family portrait of six major planets in our solar system.To make the planet photo mosaic, NASA's Messenger spacecraft snapped 34 individual images over a two-week period last November. Messenger mission scientists took those images and stitched them together into a single mosaic to build a view of our solar system as it appears from the center."This snapshot of our neighborhood also reminds us that Earth is a member of a planetary family that was formed by common processes four and a half billion years ago," Messenger mission principal investigator Sean Solomon, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, said in a statement. "Our spacecraft is soon to orbit the innermost member of the family, one that holds many new answers to how Earthlike planets are assembled and evolve.
Paleontologists working high in a remote range of Antarctic mountains have found a new species of primitive dinosaur dating back to nearly 200 million years ago -- a time when one of the coldest parts of the world was a temperate forest.William Hammer of Augustana College found the new creature -- a four- to five-foot ornithischian or bird-hipped dinosaur that he believes is related to the fabrosaur or heterodontosaur.
A set of maps created by the University of Sheffield have illustrated, for the first time, how our last British ice sheet shrunk during the Ice Age.Led by Professor Chris Clark from the University´s Department of Geography, a team of experts developed the maps to understand what effect the current shrinking of ice sheets in parts of the Antarctic and Greenland will have on the speed of sea level rise.The unique maps record the pattern and speed of shrinkage of the large ice sheet that covered the British Isles during the last Ice Age, approximately 20,000 years ago. The sheet, which subsumed most of Britain, Ireland and the North Sea, had an ice volume sufficient to raise global sea level by around 2.5 metres when it melted.
Have ancients transmitted information for 12,000 years till present?, By Ritesh Singh, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur.One Sentence Summary: Recent research shows that ancients could probably pass on concrete knowledge of happenings of end of Last Glacial Maximum (eLGM) around 10,000 Before Common Era (BCE) to present times.
Hundreds of tour guides gathered Monday at the nearly deserted Great Pyramid of Giza near Cairo. Their Valentine's Day message, written on banners in English, French, German and Russian: "Egypt loves you."They could have added: "And needs you."Egypt's crucial tourism industry draws 14.7 million visitors a year, accounts for one out of every eight jobs and represents 11% of the nation's economic output. But it has collapsed in the wake of pro-democracy demonstrations that began three weeks ago.
Two thousand-year-old footprints left by a Roman child playing by the side of a road have been found in North Yorkshire.Archaeologists made the remarkable discovery while excavating a muddy area of a former Roman settlement on the A1 near Leeming.Helen Maclean of archaeology firm AECOM described the find as very rare."I'm not aware of many other footprints being found, everybody was quite amazed by it," she said.
Several ancient terraces have been recently restored at Machu Picchu, El Comercio reports. The terraces are located in the eastern part of the archaeological complex over an area encompassing four hectares, and have been divided into five groups for the purposes of restoration. To date, work has been completed on the first four groups.According to park director and anthropologist Fernando Astete Victoria, the first three groups will be ready to receive tourists starting in June. In group 1, officially inaugurated this past Saturday, there are 23 terraces and a ceremonial water fountain. Group 4 features several more ceremonial fountains.
A 6,000-year-old axe head and an Anglo-Scandinavian sword handle are among hundreds of archaeological treasures unearthed in Scotland since 2009.The items are included in the latest Treasure Trove report - a list of the valuable finds made by members of the public in 2009/10.A medieval ring and silver cross pendant were also dug up on Scotland's shores and are expected to join the country's museum collections.
As the dust settles on Egypt's recent protests, one less-discussed outcome of the uprising is the damage done to some of the country's ancient artifacts. After would-be looters broke into the famous Egyptian museum in Cairo in search of gold on Jan. 29, approximately 70 artifacts were damaged.Among the items were several small statues, a 3,000-year-old tomb, and a statue of King Tutankhamun. The king, who formerly stood atop a panther, was severed from the animal after the break-in.With some twenty-five artifacts now in line for restoration, we looked further into the science of conservation.
You know how you sometimes can sense that something is present even though you can't see it? Well, astronomers are getting that feeling about a giant, hidden object in space.And when we say giant, we mean GIANT.Evidence is mounting that either a brown dwarf star or a gas giant planet is lurking at the outermost reaches of our solar system, far beyond Pluto. The theoretical object, dubbed Tyche, is estimated to be four times the size of Jupiter and 15,000 times farther from the sun than Earth, according to a story in the British paper The Independent.
Scientists around the world will be watching closely as three eruptions from the Sun reach the Earth over Thursday and Friday.These "coronal mass ejections" will slam into the Earth's magnetic shield.The waves of charged solar particles are the result of three solar flares directed at Earth in recent days, including the most powerful since 2006.The biggest flares can disrupt technology, including power grids, communications systems and satellites.The northern lights (Aurora Borealis) may also be visible further south than is normally the case - including from northern parts of the UK.
Recalculating the global use of phosphorous, a fertilizer linchpin of modern agriculture, a team of researchers warns that the world's stocks may soon be in short supply and that overuse in the industrialized world has become a leading cause of the pollution of lakes, rivers and streams.
Have you seen those big, bulky, breakable photovoltaic cells that now collect the sun's rays? Well, what if solar energy could be harnessed using tiny collectors that could be spray painted on a roof, a wall or even a window?The science of converting sunlight into electrical energy is more than a century old, but the reality of doing it efficiently and affordably is ongoing.
There's a fresh upswing of buzz about the potential for the existence of a large planet on the edge of our solar system, more than 10,000 times farther away from the sun than our planet. Do astronomers already have the evidence for a Planet X, and does this mean all those predictions of a planetary cataclysm in 2012 could actually come true? Not really, and here's why.First, about that buzz: Astronomers have been wondering for years whether a Planet X, or perhaps an as-yet-undetected brown dwarf, could account for what seems to be an unusual pattern in the influx of comets from the outer solar system.
Two artificial big toes -- one found attached to the foot of an ancient Egyptian mummy -- may have been the world's earliest functional prosthetic body parts, says the scientist who tested replicas on volunteers.University of Manchester researcher, Dr Jacky Finch, has shown that a three-part wood and leather artefact housed in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, along with a second one, the Greville Chester artificial toe on display in the British Museum, not only looked the part but also helped their toeless owners walk like Egyptians.
With one arm raised and a determined scowl, the figure looks ready to march right off his carved tablet and into the history books. If only we knew who he was -- corn god? Tribal chief? Sacred priest?"It's beautiful and was obviously very important," says University of Wisconsin-Madison archaeologist John Hodgson of the newly discovered stone monument. "But we will probably never know who he was or what the sculpture means in its entirety.
Ancient Britons were not averse to using human skulls as drinking cups, skeletal remains unearthed in southwest England suggest.The braincases from three individuals were fashioned in such a meticulous way that their use as bowls to hold liquid seems the only reasonable explanation.The 14,700-year-old objects were discovered in Gough's Cave, Somerset.Scientists from London's Natural History Museum say the skull-cups were probably used in some kind of ritual.
A 22-year study of abnormally short individuals suggests that growth-stunting mutations also may stunt two of humanity's worst diseases.Published in Science Translational Medicine, the study raises the prospect of achieving similar protection in full-grown adults by other means, such as pharmaceuticals or controlled diets.The international study team, led by cell biologist Valter Longo of the University of Southern California and Ecuadorian endocrinologist Jaime Guevara-Aguirre, followed a remote community on the slopes of the Andes mountains.
The drug known as ecstasy has been used by 12 million people in the United States alone and millions more worldwide. Past research has suggested that ecstasy users perform worse than nonusers on some tests of mental ability. But there are concerns that the methods used to conduct that research were flawed, and the experiments overstated the cognitive differences between ecstasy users and nonusers.In response to those concerns, a team of researchers has conducted one of the largest studies ever undertaken to re-examine the cognitive effects of ecstasy, funded by a $1.8 million grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and published in the journal Addiction. The study was specifically designed to minimize the methodological limitations of earlier research.
NEW DELHI: There is bad news on the global food front. In an alert issued this week, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) warned that more than two-thirds of China's gigantic wheat crop may be under risk "because of substantially below-normal rainfall" this winter.The affected areas in the northern plains of China produced over 75 million tonne of China's total production of 112 million tonne of wheat last year. Any shortfall in Chinese production would have serial effects on availability and prices of wheat around the world.
That human evolution follows a progressive trajectory is one of the most deeply-entrenched assumptions about our species. This assumption is often expressed in popular media by showing cavemen speaking in grunts and monosyllables (the GEICO Cavemen being a notable exception). But is this assumption correct? Were the earliest humans significantly different from us?.
Prehistoric paintings of antelope, snakes and giraffes that have survived for around 5,000 years are now under threat from looting and a lack of protection.The rock paintings, which include renderings of dogs and sheep as well as human figures, were discovered at Dhambalin, in a unique sandstone shelter close to the Red Sea in Somaliland, a breakaway state from war-torn Somalia.
As I watched the television footage of demonstrators in Cairo's Tahrir Square make the decision to reduce the violence going on around them by sitting down in the street when word came that thugs from the Mubarak regime were on the way to break up their rally, I was reminded of how it felt in the spring of 1965 to be part of the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march.What we are witnessing in Egypt should not seem strange to Americans. For it is nothing less than Egypt's version of the kind of protest that permanently changed our way of life more than 45 years ago.
Colombia has announced it is negotiating with China to build an alternative to the Panama Canal.The proposed transport route is intended to promote the flow of goods between Asia and Latin America.The plan is to create a "dry canal" where the Pacific port of Buenaventura would be linked by rail, across Colombia, to the Atlantic Coast.Trade between Colombia and China has increased from $10m in 1980 to more than $5bn last year.
A building whose foundations were unearthed during an excavation at Marden Henge (Wiltshire, England) last summer could have been a Neolithic sauna. Archaeologist Jim Leary said that the chalk foundations contained a sunken hearth that would have given out intense heat. "It brings to mind the sweat lodges found in North America," he said. "It could have been used as part of a purification ceremony." Also found was a midden or rubbish heap with dozens of pig bones, some still attached, likely to be the remains of a huge feast that took place 5,000 years ago.
Ancient Britain was a peninsula until a tsunami flooded its land-links to Europe some 8,000 years ago. Did that wave help shape the national character?The coastline and landscape of what would become modern Britain began to emerge at the end of the last Ice Age around 10,000 years ago.What had been a cold, dry tundra on the north-western edge of Europe grew warmer and wetter as the ice caps melted. The Irish Sea, North Sea and the Channel were all dry land, albeit land slowly being submerged as sea levels rose.
LONDON: In what sounds like a plot from a science fiction, scientists are developing a spacecraft which they say can make its own decision and reason like humans.It is a concept that had fatal consequences for astronauts in "2001: A Space Odyssey" after their computer running on artificial intelligence reasoned it had to kill them in order to continue the mission.
On a cliff overlooking the floodplain of the San Juan River (Utah, USA), rock art specialists Ekkehart Malotki and Henry Wallace have examined several highly stylized images carved into the rock face including what they believe to be the first example of prehistoric Native American rock art to show a mammoth. While such images are common in the caves of Europe, they are surprisingly unknown in the New World.
Protesting employees demonstrated Wednesday outside the ministry's Zamalek premises demanding better wages and the appointment of seasonal employees. Another of their demands was the removal of the culture ministry's supervisor, who supervises the construction work of the National Museum of Civilization, the Grand Egyptian Museum and the rehabilitation project of historic Cairo.
About 4,200 years ago a series of disasters struck cities and civilizations throughout the Middle East.In Egypt the central government collapsed. The same state that had built the great pyramids, and kept pharaoh as the supreme authority, could no longer keep the country united. This ushered in an era of powerful provincial leaders (known as nomarchs) and rival claimants to the Egyptian throne.
A novel X-ray imaging technology is helping scientists better understand how in the course of evolution snakes have lost their legs. The researchers hope the new data will help resolve a heated debate about the origin of snakes: whether they evolved from a terrestrial lizard or from one that lived in the oceans. New, detailed 3-D images reveal that the internal architecture of an ancient snake's leg bones strongly resembles that of modern terrestrial lizard legs. The results are published in the 8 February issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
As if future Earth voyagers to Mars wouldn't have enough on their minds to worry about, here's another: An increased risk to cancer.But a physics professor offers a provocative suggestion which he says would protect human astronauts sent on any Mars missions: Hitch a (temporary) ride on an asteroid.
Evolution is not a steady march towards ever more sophisticated beings and therefore the search for the living "missing links" is pointless, according to findings published by a team of researchers led by Dr. Hervé Philippe of the Université de Montréal's Department of Biochemistry.
Ancient stone faces carved into the walls of a well-known limestone cave in East Timor have been discovered by a team searching for fossils of extinct giant rats.The team of archaeologists and palaeontologists were working in Lene Hara Cave on the northeast tip of East Timor."Looking up from the cave floor at a colleague sitting on a ledge, my head torch shone on what seemed to be a weathered carving," CSIRO's Dr Ken Aplin said.
A team of Australian scientists has stumbled upon ancient stone carvings in an East Timorese cave dating back at least 10,000 years.The findings, just published in the journal Antiquity, follow the discovery in the Lene Hara cave in May 2009.The team of archaeologists and palaeontologists had been looking for the fossilised remains of extinct giant rats.
Eight small teeth found in a cave near Rosh Haain, central Israel, are raising big questions about the earliest existence of humans and where we may have originated, says Binghamton University anthropologist Rolf Quam. Part of a team of international researchers led by Dr. Israel Hershovitz of Tel Aviv University, Qaum and his colleagues have been examining the dental discovery and recently published their joint findings in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
Arusha. Anxiety is building up of what would be of the famous hominid footprints at Laetoli in Arusha Region as they are being exhumed starting yesterday.Scientific experts from across the world are converging at a remote site near the Ngorongoro crater to witness the event amid controversy on how the 3.6 million-year old footprints should be best preserved.Mr Donatus Kamamba, the director of Antiquities in the ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism told The Citizen on the phone yesterday that the exercise would last for seven days.
Brno, Feb 4 (CTK) - The prehistoric Czech "Venus of Predmosti", north Moravia, an engraving of a woman on a mammoth tusk, which is one of the oldest artifacts in Europe, may exist in another version that is in a U.S. collection, Martina Galetova, from Brno's museum, has told CTK.The engraving dating back to the Upper Palaeolithic Age was found over 100 years ago by archaeologist Martin Kriz.
The Tiberias excavations are located in the heart of the ancient city of Tiberias, less than 1 km south of the modern city, just across the street from the beautiful and historic Sea of Galilee.Tiberias was founded in 19 C.E. by king Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great, as the new capital of his kingdom. In spite of the original objection of the Jews of Galilee to settle the new city, named in honor of the Roman emperor Tiberius, it was not long before Tiberias became the Jewish capital of the Galilee, rivaled only by its sister-city, Sepphoris. Historical sources inform us of both pagan and Christian communities struggling to find their place alongside the Jewish community within the social and urban networks. Although sources are mute regarding the political leadership in Tiberias during the Byzantine period, some records, along with recently discovered archaeological finds, point to a strong Christian community lead by the bishop of the city.
The Singularity is back in the spotlight, thanks to a Time cover story focusing on inventor/futurist Ray Kurzweil and his forecast that "the end of human civilization as we know it" will come in about 35 years ... just as Kurzweil is nearing his 100th birthday.Kurzweil is doing everything in his power to make sure he's ready for the big event, which he calls the Singularity. He takes 150 pills a day, keeps himself in shape and looks forward to the day when he can start re-engineering his own body for immortality. And he's not alone. Kurzweil has been spreading the word about the Singularity in a series of books and two documentaries ("The Singularity Is Near" and "Transcendent Man") as well as academic programs at Singularity University in California's Silicon Valley.
IS this just a pile of rocks placed in a semicircle, or proof that Aborigines were the world's first astronomers?After years of meticulous examination, a group of Australia's most distinguished astro-physicists is starting to believe it's the latter - a discovery that could turn history upside down and render England's famous Stonehenge an also-ran.Dubbed Wurdi Youang, the strange stone arrangement was found on property near Mt Rothwell, 80km west of Melbourne - its two points set in perfect alignment with the setting sun on a midsummer's day.
The Kepler Space Observatory's discovery of over 1200 planet "candidates" announced last week left me with a chilling cosmic loneliness.Although the Kepler finding makes me even more convinced that E.T. is out there, I can't help but ask the question: Where is everybody?The evidence may be staring us in the face and we don't recognize it. It might even be buried as an obscure and mildly curious dataset in our ballooning vault of astronomical observations.The thesis: advanced civilizations realize that two-way communication between stars is impractical given the roaming charges imposed by the speed of light. So instead they build a beacon that simply says: We Are Here!.
Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to be used by alien life, yet.This molecule which is ever so important for life as we know it can be found in so many places in the cosmos that it is no wonder that some scientists think the chance of finding a life-friendly planet is good -- although we have yet to detect water-drinking ET. Before it gets to a planet, however, it starts in a place like this, the Orion Nebula.Oh sure, this is not the Orion Nebula as you are used to seeing it. The "invisible light" that our eyes cannot see often highlights new features and processes that we would have otherwise missed. If you go to longer wavelengths than what our eyes can see, you eventually get to the sub-millimeter wave regime, in this fuzzy region between the radio and the infrared.
In 1974, humans broadcast the first message targeted at extraterrestrial life using the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. The message, which was aimed at the globular star cluster M13 located 25,000 light years away, consisted of binary digits that encoded information about our DNA, as well as graphics of a human, our Solar System, and the Arecibo telescope. Since then, humans have sent three other messages to nearby stars and planets (20-69 light-years away). These messages have become more complex and anthropocentric, with music, photographs, and drawings submitted by the public.
Major droughts may have spurred the demise of multiple cultures and cities in pre-Hispanic Mexico over the last millennium.A new study, which used tree rings to add many hundreds of years to the region's climate record, pinpointed four severe droughts in the region over the last 1,200 years. Some were far more intense and prolonged than anything ever seen in modern meteorological records, and many coincided with major historical events.One, for example, lasted for 25 years around the year 900 and accompanied the end of a flourishing era of Mayan city-states.
With the media focusing on the riots and status of political reform in Egypt, it's hard to get the peoples view as to what's happening on the streets of Cairo and the protection of Archaeological remains.ArchNews has been in correspondence with political editor and middle eastern writer Wessam Sherif Salem to find out more. Wessam Sherif Salem has been an editor for some of the largest publications in the middle east and is currently based in Cairo. We also have the viewpoint of Jane Akshar, ArchNews editor who's based in Luxor and writes the award winning blog, Luxor News.
Astronomers have spotted a strange new solar system with small "puffy" planets packed in close orbit to their sun.And an orbiting space telescope has pointed scientists to more than 1,200 other possible exoplanets -- planets outside our own solar system -- the space agency NASA said on Wednesday.The solar system discovery, published in the journal Nature, is mystifying astronomers for the time being and illustrates just how much variety is possible in the universe.The team at NASA and a range of universities has named the system Kepler-11, after the orbiting Kepler space telescope that spotted it.
Three ancient burials have been unearthed at Lichfield Cathedral.It follows an archaeological investigation in the Chapter House by Cathedral Archaeologist Kevin Blockley.For the last 750 years, two of the skeletons have lain just below the floor of the Chapter House, which was originally built in the 1240s.The dig was in preparation for the Staffordshire Hoard Temporary Exhibition which is due to take place later this summer.
This is Willo and his heart of stone. Or so we thought. Willo's heart, it turns out, may truly just be stone and nothing more.A decade ago, we reported that palaeontologists thought they had found a fossilised heart inside the articulated chest of a plant-eating dinosaur (genus Thescelosaurus), nicknamed "Willo".The story got widespread attention. Based on CT scans, North Carolina state palaeontologist Dale Russell had reported in Science (vol 288, p 503) that the rock was the remains of a heart. Dinosaur metabolism was a hot topic at the time, and the "heart's" structure led him to conclude the dinosaur had an active metabolism, unlike cold-blooded reptiles.
One article of faith that took hold in the 20th century and has only grown stronger is that we humans are all equal -- genetically, anyway. That while differences among people may seem strong because of culture and nationality, under the skin, we're the same.
One article of faith that took hold in the 20th century and has only grown stronger is that we humans are all equal -- genetically, anyway. That while differences among people may seem strong because of culture and nationality, under the skin, we're the same..
Hindus have asked that landmark Preah Vihear Hindu temple complex, cause of an ongoing border dispute between Thailand and Cambodia, should be turned over to United Nations (UN) control.Hindu statesman Rajan Zed, in a statement in Nevada (USA), said that the 11th century Preah Vihear temple is a UNESCO World Heritage site and it is the moral duty of the world to keep it preserved and intact for coming generations.Rajan Zed pointed out that frequent clashes between Cambodia and Thailand due to the long-running land feud might further damage the already fragile temple. UN presence would help in protecting the sacred site, and allow easier access and provision of needed facilities to devotees and other visitors. The result of this intervention would bring economic development and investment into the region, clear land-mines and help save lives which are lost due to conflict.
Scientists hunting for fossils of giant rats in East Timor stumbled on unique rock carvings up to 12,000 years old, Australia's research agency said.The experts were digging in Timor's Lene Hara cave, a treasure trove of fossils and rock art, when they chanced upon a group of stylised human faces etched in the rock."Looking up from the cave floor at a colleague sitting on a ledge, my head torch shone on what seemed to be a weathered carving," said Ken Aplin of Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organisation (CSIRO).
Play was a central element of people's lives as far back as 4,000 years agoThis has been revealed by an archaeology thesis from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, which investigates the social significance of the phenomenon of play and games in the Bronze Age Indus Valley in present-day Pakistan.It is not uncommon for archaeologists excavating old settlements to come across play and game-related finds, but within established archaeology these types of finds have often been disregarded.
A French architect campaigning for a new exploration of the 4,500-year-old Great Pyramid of Giza said on Thursday that the edifice may contain two chambers housing funereal furniture.Jean-Pierre Houdin -- who was rebuffed three years ago by Egypt in his appeal for a probe into how the Pyramid was built -- said 3-D simulation and data from a U.S. egyptologist, Bob Brier, pointed to two secret chambers in the heart of the structure.The rooms would have housed furniture for use in the afterlife by the pharaoh Khufu, also known as Cheops in Greek, he told a press conference.
Plans for a subsea electricity cable linking Scotland and Norway will be examined as part of a study into a proposed new North Sea interconnector.First Minister Alex Salmond said the technical preference for the shortest route could mean a north east of Scotland landing site being involved.Mr Salmond made the announcement at an offshore wind conference in Aberdeen.He said an integrated grid was essential to contribute to Europe's sustainable energy policy.
University of Oxford scientists have discovered a way to make solar cells from a metal oxide found in toothpaste.A team led by Dr Henry Snaith at the physics department combined the oxide with a thin dye printed on to glass to turn the sun's energy into electricity.The glass can be produced in a range of different transparent colours for use in windows and cladding buildings."It opens up a lot of versatility and a lot of possibilities for building design," said Dr Snaith.
Modern humans may have emerged from Africa up to 50,000 years earlier than previously thought, a study suggests.Researchers have uncovered stone tools in the Arabian peninsula that they say were made by modern humans about 125,000 years ago.The tools were unearthed at the site of Jebel Faya in the United Arab Emirates, a team reports in the journal Science.The results are controversial: genetic data strongly points to an exodus from Africa 60,000-70,000 years ago.Simon Armitage, from Royal Holloway, University of London, Hans-Peter Uerpmann, from the University of Tuebingen, Germany, and colleagues, uncovered 125,000-year-old stone tools at Jebel Faya which resemble those found in East Africa at roughly the same time period.
The global consumption of fish has hit a record high, reaching an average of 17kg per person, a UN report has shown.Fisheries and aquaculture supplied the world with about 145m tonnes in 2009, providing about 16% of the population's animal protein intake.The findings published by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) also stressed that the status of global fish stocks had not improved.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is to continue operating in 2012 after officials dropped plans for an extended shut down at the end of this year.The decision by managers at Cern - the organisation that runs the LHC - was announced in an advisory report.The machine's advisory committee says the LHC's experiments stand a good chance of finding new physics in the next two years.
"If the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, is safe, Egypt is safe," newly appointed Egyptian Minister of Antiquities Zahi Hawass wrote on his web page Thursday. Yet Egypt is anything but safe and the museum is on the front lines of the ongoing street battle between anti-government demonstrators and those loyal to President Hosni Mubarak.
PERTH, Australia, Feb. 4 (UPI) -- An Australian researcher says he's found many potential archaeological sites in Saudi Arabia -- from his office in Perth, using satellite images from Google."I've never been to Saudi Arabia," David Kennedy at the University of Western Australia says. "It's not the easiest country to break into.
The mummies, who lost their heads as yet another casualty of Egypt's political chaos, are unknown ancient Egyptians, officials told Discovery News. Prior to the uprisings that spread across the Arab nation, they had been used to test the CT scan machine in the museum.Vandalized a week ago at Cairo's Egyptian Museum, where thieves looking for antiquities broke 70 objects, the mummies have become the symbol of the world's concern for ancient Egyptian cultural heritage.The shocking image of their heads lying on the floor of the Egyptian Museum with broken bones scattered all around have been haunting Egyptologists and mummy experts for a week.
Reports of damage to one of the few ancient Egyptian tombs devoted solely to a woman have tempered the news that most of Egypt's priceless antiquities have escaped damage and that teams of foreign archaeologists are safe amid widespread protests against the regime led by Hosni Mubarak.
SHENYANG, Feb. 4 (Xinhua) -- Archaeologists have identified the dilapidated walls in northeast China to be the remains of the "Wooden" Great Wall, breaking the stereotype that the landmark wall of China was only made of stone and earthen bricks.
Human remains from Stonehenge and other ancient settlements will be reburied and lost to science under legislation that threatens to cripple research into the history of humans in Britain, a group of leading archaeologists says today.In a letter addressed to the justice secretary, Ken Clarke, and printed in the Guardian today, 40 archaeology professors write of their "deep and widespread concern" about the issue.
A Stone Age-era artifact carved with multiple zigzags and what is likely a woman with spread legs suggests that fertility rituals may have been important to early Europeans, according to new research.The object, which will be documented in the March issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, is made out of a large elk antler and has been radiocarbon dated to about 10,900 years ago.
Berkeley astronomers have won approval for a telescope project that will reach back in time more than 10 billion years to probe the role of mysterious dark energy in speeding the universe's early expansion.The telescopic venture will provide new information that will allow scientists to map the entire universe in greater detail than ever before.
Circular ships, vertical aerial cylinders, spheres, disks, wheels in the sky, hat-shaped things, flying pillars or columns and triangular-shaped objects.At first glance, you might think those are common, almost daily, descriptions of UFOs reported by eyewitnesses. Well, yes ... sort of. Those are the actual words, found in ancient texts, that characterize unidentified flying objects, spanning biblical accounts through the 1800s.And that's exactly what two leading researchers have done: trace the huge numbers of UFOs reported that couldn't possibly be attributed to or misinterpreted as artificially constructed objects seen in the sky.
Early human ancestors stopped swinging in trees and started walking on the ground sometime between 4.2 and 3.5 million years ago, according to a new study.This key moment, when our ancestors became anatomically and behaviorally less ape-like, coincides with increased cooling, more defined seasonality, and a grassland growth spurt. All transformed former forest habitats into more varied ones, forcing our very early relatives to change their ways."With the trees being farther apart, it became energetically advantageous for hominids to cross the gaps bipedally," said Gabriele Macho, lead author of the study that was published in the latest issue of Folia Primatologica.
Humans, versus other great apes, are built for running fast and long as opposed to very impressive strength, but what about Neanderthals? If a modern human and a Neanderthal competed in a marathon, who would win?In a short sprint, the Neanderthal might have had a chance, but most fit humans would always win longer races, suggests new research accepted for publication in the Journal of Human Evolution.Anthropologist David Raichlen of the University of Arizona and his colleagues determined that our modern human ancestors were better runners. The researchers did this by studying the hominids' fossilized remains.
What separates humans from Chimpanzees? Is it the genetics of our population, or our different structures and behavior capabilities? To Professor Wallace Arthur it is all of these points, which is why his latest book Evolution: A Developmental Approach sits between the traditional population approach to evolutionary theory and the molecular approach to provide a complete view on the evolutionary development of our world.
As if we haven't had enough doomsday fatigue from Mayan calendar, Nostradamus, and biblical scripture soothsayers, the Russian news agency, Ria Novosti, reported last week: "Russian Astronomers Predict Apophis-Earth Collision in 2036."Popularized by Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart, the 1,300-foot long near-Earth asteroid Apophis has been widely reported as a "doomsday asteroid." It has projected razor-thin near-misses with our frail blue planet in 2029, 2036, 2056, 2068, and beyond.
Israeli archeologists have discovered ancient artifacts in a cave outside of Tel Aviv that could shed new light on the theory of human origins. Tel Aviv University archeologist Ran Barkai says what his team has excavated at Qesem Cave show a much more advanced people than the accepted image of our Stone Age ancestors in the Middle Paleolithic period.These early hominids hunted for food, cooked meat over fires and crafted a sophisticated array of flint tools.