Newsdesk Archive
A medieval stone coffin rumoured to have been Richard III's has been placed at its new home in Leicestershire.The coffin was found in a garden in Earl Shilton where it had been used in a water garden.Archaeologists believe it dates from the time the 15th Century king died, and could once have been located at Greyfriars Church in Leicester.
A 250-METRE-long embankment, a quay and some Ptolemaic baths are the most recent discoveries at Karnak Temples, Nevine El-Aref reports.Coincidence always makes for important discoveries. It led to Tutankhamun's tomb, the distinguished funerary collection of King Khufu's mother Hetep Heres, and those of Pharaoh Akhenaten's grandparents Yuya and Thuya, to mention just a few. This time, it makes a better understanding of the construction plans of the temples of Karnak as they were drawn by the ancient Egyptians.
This chic, tree-lined California town might seem an unlikely place to begin the colonization of Earth's oceans. Palo Alto is known for expensive modernism, Stanford University, al fresco dining, and land prices so high a modest cottage still sells for well over $1 million.If Patri Friedman gets his way, the area will also be remembered for birthing a political movement called seasteading. The concept is as simple to explain as it will be difficult to achieve: erecting permanent dwellings on the high seas outside the territorial waters claimed by the world's governments.
It may be futile to try producing stem cells by putting human DNA into cow or rabbit eggs and making hybrid cloned embryos, a strategy that triggered controversy recently in Britain, a new study says.The animal eggs don't reprogram human DNA in the right way to generate stem cells, researchers report."Instead of turning on the right genes, it turns out the animal eggs actually turn them off," said senior study author Dr. Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Mass.
LONDON: Scientists at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center have announced the discovery of a vast new class of previously unrecognised mammalian genes that do not encode proteins, but instead function as long RNA molecules.The researchers describe their discovery as a novel class of "large intervening non-coding RNAs" (lincRNAs). According to them, these genes play critical roles in both health and disease, including cancer, immune signaling and stem cell biology."We've known that the human genome still has many tricks up its sleeve. But, it is astounding to realize that there is a huge class of RNA-based genes that we have almost entirely missed until now," said Eric Lander, founding director of the Broad Institute.
Birds survived the global catastrophe that wiped out their dinosaur relatives due to superior brainpower, a new study suggests.The idea came from examining a pair of prehistoric seabirds found in southeast England by Victorian-era fossil hunters, according to researchers from the Natural History Museum in London.
Malaysian archaeologists have announced the discovery of stone tools they believe are more than 1.8 million years old and the earliest evidence of human ancestors in Southeast Asia.The stone hand-axes were discovered last year in the historical site of Lenggong in northern Perak state, embedded in a type of rock formed by meteorites which was sent to a Japanese lab to be dated.
If we know enough to say the solar system is a filigree construction, we might reasonably assume we know where all its bits are. But lurking in the solar system's dark recesses, rumour has it, is an unsighted world - Planet X, a frozen body perhaps as large as Mars, or even Earth.Planet X would be the most significant addition to the solar system since the discovery of Pluto, the now notorious non-planet, in 1930. When the International Astronomical Union voted to downgrade Pluto to dwarf planet status in 2006, they established three criteria for a fully blown planet in our solar system: it must orbit the sun; its gravity must suffice to mould it into a near-spherical shape; and it must be massive enough to have ploughed its orbit clear of other bits and bobs. Pluto falls down on this third point. It is just one of many Kuiper belt objects (KBOs), icy bits of debris that pepper space from Neptune's orbit at 30 astronomical units out to around 50 AU, where 1 AU is the distance between Earth and the sun.
The most brilliant of all the constellations dominates our evening sky this week, climbing well up in the south around 9 p.m. local time. It is, of course, Orion, the Hunter. But just exactly who was he?As is also the case with the mighty Hercules, the figure of Orion has been associated in virtually all-ancient cultures with great national heroes, warriors, or demigods. Yet, in contrast to Hercules, who was credited with a detailed series of exploits, Orion seems to us a vague and shadowy figure.
EVER wanted to explore the deep ocean without getting wet? Now you can with Ocean in Google Earth, the new addition to the company's virtual Earth model.The tool will allow users to fly beyond the beach and, in place of the flat seabed image of previous versions, see a shimmering, semi-transparent sea. Dive beneath it and the oceanic mountain ranges, trenches and abyssal plains are there for all to see. To try all that for yourself, download the latest version of the Google Earth software.
Mars enthusiasts can fly from the towering peak of Olympus Mons to Mars Pathfinder's peaceful resting place in an add-on to the latest version of the desktop application Google Earth, which was released on Monday.The new Mars map amasses some 1000 gigabytes of data from a range of Mars probes, including NASA's Viking orbiters, Europe's Mars Express orbiter, and six landers, such as NASA's twin rovers, to create a three-dimensional view of the planet at a wide range of scales.
Each hour, more than a million gallons of water from the state's most polluted large lake flow downstream into vital Lake County waterways.With that flow comes a noxious mix of algae, phosphorus, nitrogen and other plant particles that can change crystal-clear lakes into an unhealthy pea-soup color, driving away swimmers, boaters and fishermen.
Controversy burns on a week after Pope Benedict XVI reversed the excommunication of the four bishops of the breakaway Lefebvrite movement, including a vocal Holocaust denier. Developments over just two days include: an Italian priest of the same arch-traditionalist group added his own doubts about Nazi gas chambers to those expressed last week by British-born Bishop Richard Williamson; another cleric from the splinter faction publicly criticized the Pope and condemned his 2006 visit to Istanbul's Blue Mosque; Israel's chief Rabbinic council said inter-faith talks with the Vatican should be put on hold, while others have questioned whether a slated papal Holy Land trip in May should be called off over the episode. Meanwhile, Catholic progressives around the world have taken the Pope's actions as a deliberate slap because the followers of French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre reject the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.
AN UPDATED family tree of the animal kingdom could radically change the way we think about the evolution of species.According to conventional thinking, simple animals, including sponges, jellyfish and corals, evolved step-by-step in a linear fashion into those with more complex bodies, such as mammals.Now Rob DeSalle of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and his colleagues have challenged this way of thinking.
IF MEDICAL isotopes were created using particle accelerators rather than nuclear reactors it might keep the supply going when reactors shut down.Thomas Ruth at Canada's National Laboratory for Particle and Nuclear Physics in Vancouver says that bombarding uranium with a powerful beam of light, rather than the neutrons used in traditional reactors, could produce the medical isotope molybdenum-99 (Nature, vol 457, p 5). The intense light could be produced by firing a 2-megawatt beam of electrons from a particle accelerator at a tungsten target.
LAST year's food crisis, which left the world's poorest people struggling to buy food, is far from over. And things could get worse if money isn't quickly invested in agricultural technology.Compared with the record highs reached last year, food prices have dropped by around 30 per cent. But that doesn't necessarily mean fewer are going hungry as the worldwide economic downturn has left people with less money to buy food.
In February, NASA and European Space Agency officials will meet in Washington, DC, to decide between two missions to the outer solar system.Should they aim for Saturn's moon Titan, or send a pair of orbiters to explore Jupiter and some of its satellites?
After the wet and cold centuries of the Little Ice Age (around 1550-1850 A.D.), the world's climate recuperated some warmth, but did not replicate the balmy period known as the Middle Age Warm Period (around 800-1300 A.D.), when the margins of Greenland were green and England had vineyards.Climate began to cool again after World War II, for about 30 years. This is undisputed. The cooling occurred at a time when emissions of C02 were rising sharply from the reconstruction effort and from unprecedented development. It is important to realize that.By 1978 it had started to warm again, to everybody's relief. But two decades later, after the temperature peaked in 1998 under the influence of El Nino, climate stopped warming for eight years; and in 2007 entered a cooling phase marked by lower solar radiation and a reversal of the cycles of warm ocean temperature in the Atlantic and the Pacific. And here again, it is important to note that this new cooling period is occurring concurrently with an acceleration in CO2 emissions, caused by the emergence of two industrial giants: China and India.
We are sorry to announce that due to staff absence over the next 4 days (until 8th February), newsdesk updates could be limited. Apologies. In the meantime, please sign up to the mailing list to receive our weekly news updates.-GrahamHancock.com staff
SOME men mark their 40th birthday by buying a flashy new car, changing jobs or finally getting started on that novel. Ted Ciamillo decided he would pedal across the Atlantic in a one-man submarine he has designed and built himself.
Richard DawkinsWhich facts about evolution had to be true, and which just happen to be true? Did the genetic code have to be digital in order for natural selection to work? Could any other class of molecules have substituted for proteins? How inevitable was the evolution of sex? Eyes? Intelligence? Language? Consciousness? Was the origin of life itself a probable event, and therefore is life common in the universe?
In a column published Tuesday in London's Telegraph newspaper, the mayor of London called upon US President Barack Obama to call off the US effort to extradite and prosecute the British hacker who in 2001 broke into computer systems in the Department of Defense, NASA and the US Army.Mayor Boris Johnson called US efforts to prosecute self-acknowledged hacker Gary McKinnon a "legal nightmare".
Investigators in Poland say there is no evidence to back up theories that the country's wartime leader, General Wladyslaw Sikorski, was murdered.The general died when his plane crashed off Gibraltar in 1943, but some of the details of the crash remain unclear.This has fuelled some people's belief that he may have been killed by the Soviet Union or Britain.
HAS the grand Roman Pantheon been keeping a secret for nearly 2000 years? An expert in ancient timekeeping thinks so, arguing that it acts as a colossal sundial.The imposing temple in Rome, completed in AD 128, is one of the most impressive buildings that survives from antiquity. It consists of a cylindrical chamber topped by a domed roof with an oculus in the top which lets through a dramatic shaft of sunlight. It boasts a colonnaded courtyard at the front.
A University of California archeologist has found evidence that sheds new light on the venerable question of whether King David and his son King Solomon controlled the copper industry in the Kingdom of Edom, which is present-day southern Jordan.The term "King Solomon's Mines" was made famous by a 19th century novel of the same name - although, until now, no such mines have been proven to exist during the time period mentioned in the Bible.
THE ancient, intricate geometric patterns stamped on the surface of a desert in Peru have long been thought of as messages to the gods, or as markers that tracked celestial objects. Now new details about these geoglyphs suggest they may have been made for "prayer walking".The Nasca lines are a collection of lines, giant trapezoids, and figures of humans, plants and animals in a desert 400 kilometres south of Lima, Peru. They were created between 400 BC and AD 650 by the removal of reddish oxidised stones from the desert pavement to reveal the lighter sand beneath.
Discovery of over 50 ancient rock engravings in Tonga, may shed some light on the pre-Polynesian Lapita peoples who voyaged across the Pacific.The petroglyphs, including stylised images of people and animals, were found emerging from beach sand at the northern end of Foa island, late last year, the Matangi Tonga newspaper reported.
A 2,000-year-old sarcophagus lies in pieces where it fell, protected from the elements and scavengers by yellow police tape and a blue tarpaulin.Excited, curious kids duck under the yellow plastic strip and wander through the rubble, blissfully unaware the ground they tread on is strewn with ancient bone fragments from the stone coffin.
To honor their gods and goddesses, ancient Greeks often poured blood or wine on the ground as offerings. Now a new study suggests that the soil itself might have had a prominent role in Greek worship, strongly influencing which deities were venerated where.
In Arctic Canada, a team of geologists from the University of Rochester has discovered a surprise fossil: a tropical, freshwater, Asian turtle. The find strongly suggests that animals migrated from Asia to North America not around Alaska, as once thought, but directly across a freshwater sea floating atop the warm, salty Arctic Ocean.
Stephen Larsen, whose book The Fundamentalist Mind was awareded the Gold Medal in Psychology, will be with us in our Author Of The Month messageboard throughout February to discuss his latest book featured in our most recent Forum Article
Once upon a time, 4.6 billion years ago, something was brewing in an unremarkable backwater of the Milky Way. The ragbag of stuff that suffuses the inconsequential, in-between bits of all galaxies - hydrogen and helium gas with just a sprinkling of solid dust - had begun to condense and form molecules. Unable to resist its own weight, part of this newly formed molecular cloud collapsed in on itself. In the ensuing heat and confusion, a star was born - our sun.
Looking at the planets of the solar system, you could be forgiven for thinking that if they do belong to the same family, it is by adoption rather than kinship. Not so: the story of the solar system's birth reveals that they are blood siblings, all created from the same molecular cloud whose collapse formed the sun. You might also think that these disparate bodies are scattered across the solar system without rhyme or reason. But move any piece of the solar system today, or try to add anything more, and the whole construction would be thrown fatally out of kilter. So how exactly did this delicate architecture come to be?.
The desire to contact intelligent life on other planets is much older than the UFO craze and the SETI movement. Several 19th century scientists contemplated how we might communicate with possible Martians and Venusians.These early proposals - which predate by 150 years the first extraterrestrial message that was sent in 1974 - were based on visual signals, as the invention of radio was still decades away.
Critics continue to press the case that Israel committed "war crimes" in its war with Hamas, because of the civilian casualties in Gaza. Ironically, many of these wounds may have been caused by a weapon designed to reduce collateral damage. Not that the Israelis admit they have the thing.We first reported on Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME) munitions in 2006. The weapons originated as an offshoot of a bunker-busting program, when it was found that adding tungsten powder to explosives seemed to increase the blast effect over a small area. The powder was acting as micro-shrapnel which only carries for a few feet (compared to hundreds of feet for larger fragments), so the result was dubbed the "focused lethality munition" (FLM) which does massive damage in a small area and nothing outside.
It is said that there is a greater concentration of ancient monuments in the Wiltshire countryside between Marlborough and Avebury than anywhere else in Britain. Many present an eternal puzzle to archaeologists as to how and why they came to be, but Silbury Hill out-puzzles them all. There it sits by the A4, an outlandish sight dwarfing the cars that stream past its circular base. It is 30-metres high and 160-metres wide, the largest man-made mound in Europe, but in silhouette it looks like an alien spaceship from a Fifties sci-fi movie.
SYDNEY, Australia - Britain's Queen Elizabeth II narrowly escaped disaster in 1970 when a large wooden log was placed on a railroad track in an apparent attempt to derail her train as she traveled across Australia, a retired detective said Wednesday.Former New South Wales state Detective Superintendent Cliff McHardy, 81, said the Queen and her husband, Prince Philip, were traveling through the Blue Mountains on April 29, 1970, when their train struck the log, which became stuck under the front wheels.
GEORGE TOWN: Evidence of human existence dating back 1.83 million years was uncovered at Bukit Bunuh in Lenggong, Perak recently.Universiti Sains Malaysia Centre for Archaeological Research Malaysia director Assoc Prof Dr Mokhtar Saidin said hand-axes which were unearthed showed evidence of the early existence of Homo erectus in the South-East Asia region.He said the previous pre-historic hand-axes found in Africa dated back 1.6 million years.
The rover Spirit failed to carry out directions it received on Sunday, its 1800th day on the Martian surface.Another anomaly, according to Nasa, was that the day's activities were not saved to the rover's long-term memory.As of Wednesday, the rover seems to have recovered and is responsive to commands from Earth.The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) team operating Spirit will begin diagnostic tests to determine the cause of Sunday's glitches.
What drove Charles Darwin to his extraordinary ideas on evolution and human origins? Adrian Desmond, with co-author James Moore, argue in a new book that the great scientist had a "sacred cause": the abolition of slavery."It makes one's blood boil," said Charles Darwin.Not much outraged the gentle recluse, but the horrors of slavery could cost him a night's sleep.He was thinking of the whipped house boy and the thumbscrews used by old ladies in South America, atrocities he had witnessed on the Beagle voyage.
When the Behre family comes in from the Pennsylvania cold, their coats often stay on.Their mom keeps the temperature at 66 degrees - not just to save money, but because her middle-school-aged daughters, Jane and Annie, insist, CBS News correspondent Ben Tracy reports."We are inheriting all the problems that we are facing so we need to start dealing with those problems now," Jane said.The girls are part of a new generation of eco-warriors, teaching their parents about conservation and recycling.
The world's largest, most powerful particle smasher probably won't generate any planet-gobbling black holes, according to a new analysis.That's contrary to suggestions in a news article Wednesday that invoked a possible doomsday scenario and said black holes created by the collider could stick around longer than predicted.
With the demise of the Phoenix Lander at the end of last year, and with the Spirit and Opportunity rovers reaching their old age (see an image gallery), a robotic aircraft could be the best bet to uncover the origin of the plumes of methane on the red planet.So says Joel Levine, principal investigator of a NASA project to test the feasibility of flying in the Red Planet's atmosphere.
About 100 million years ago, Triceratops likely engaged in horn-to-horn battles with its kin, according to a new analysis of the scrapes, bruises and healing fractures preserved on fossils of the dinosaurs' bony headgear."Paleontologists have debated the function of the bizarre skulls of horned dinosaurs for years now," said lead study researcher Andrew Farke, curator at the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology in California. "Some speculated that the horns were for showing off to other dinosaurs, and others thought that the horns had to have been used in combat against other horned dinosaurs. Unfortunately, we can't just go and watch a Triceratops in the wild."
Just as "Y2K" and its batch of predictions about the year 2000 have become a distant memory, here comes "Twenty-twelve."Fueled by a crop of books, Web sites with countdown clocks, and claims about ancient timekeepers, interest is growing in what some see as the dawn of a new era, and others as an expiration date for Earth: December 21, 2012.
OSWIECIM, Poland - Dozens of survivors marked the 64th anniversary of the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz by remembering the Nazi death camp's horrors and celebrating the acts of humanity or random chance that kept them alive.More than 1 million people, mostly Jews, died in Auschwitz's gas chambers or through forced labor, disease or starvation. The anniversary of its liberation has been established as an annual Holocaust remembrance day by the United Nations.
New data, published today, disproves the recent theory that a large comet exploded over North America 12,900 years ago, causing a shock wave that travelled at hundreds of kilometres per hour and triggering continent-wide wildfires.Dr Sandy Harrison from the University of Bristol and colleagues tested the theory by examining charcoal and pollen records to assess how fire regimes in North America changed between 15 and 10,000 years ago, a time of large and rapid climate changes.Their results provide no evidence for continental-scale fires, but support the fact that the increase in large-scale wildfires in all regions of the world during the past decade is related to an increase in global warming.
To be or not to be ... a planet? That's not really the big question anymore, no matter how you feel about Pluto's so-called demotion.The truly big question, addressed in two books that look at Pluto's present position from completely different perspectives, has to do with what kinds of planets are out there. That applies to our own solar system as well as the hundreds of other worlds being detected in the universe beyond.
SANTA CRUZ ISLAND, California - A graduate student this month photographed what some thought was a remarkable find: A complete tusk of a prehistoric pygmy mammoth.It turned out to be something far older.A team of researchers spent two days on Santa Cruz Island excavating and determined it was a jawbone from an extinct whale species.
High in the sky above Mars, it is snowing right now. Very gently snowing. The snow does not settle on the rubble-strewn land below - not these days, anyway - but instead vaporises into the thin atmosphere long before it reaches the ground.The first flakes of snow, on a planet that until fairly recently was believed to be waterless, were spotted just a few months ago. A Nasa lander near the planet's north pole was scanning the sky with a laser when it noticed the telltale signs of snowfall. The probe, called Phoenix, announced the news in a radio signal that was picked up by an overhead orbiter and beamed back to Earth. Nothing like it had ever been seen before.
A sharp-eyed instrument on the Very Large Telescope has given astronomers a peek at the heart of a nearby galaxy, revealing a host of young, massive and dusty stellar nurseries and a possible twin of our own Milky Way's supermassive black hole.The galaxy, dubbed NGC 253, is one of the brightest and dustiest spiral galaxies in the sky. It is also known as the Sculptor Galaxy, because it is located in the Sculptor constellation.
The upcoming issue of Science will be publishing the announcement of a newly discovered 1.2 million-year-old female Homo erectus pelvis. The fossil was found in 2001 at the Gona Study Area in the Afar region Ethiopia. Excavations were completed in 2003.Sileshi Semaw, the leader of the Gona Project, said that the birth canal of this pelvis is 30% larger than earlier estimates based on the 1.5-million-year-old juvenile male pelvis of KNM-WT 15000 (Turkana Boy) found in Kenya.
Burnt animal bones, petrified lightning and a bronze male hand grasping a silver lightning bolt have all been unearthed at the mountaintop site of a Mycenaean Greek cult whose members gathered around an "open fire altar," according to University of Pennsylvania Museum archaeologists.The evidence suggests the cult worshiped Zeus, the "king of gods" in Greek mythology, more than 3,200 years ago at the top of Mt. Lykaion in Arcadia.
You would think, on meeting him, that Sameh Zakout has a contented life - a career in music, occasional trips abroad, the very embodiment of an Israeli Arab who has made the most of his opportunities.But speaking in his home-town of Ramla, near Tel Aviv, Sameh says he is always "depressed" and indeed "oppressed" as well. This is not a matter of material circumstances, but of family history.
CAIRO, Jan 26 (Reuters Life!) - Egyptian archaeologists have discovered a pier used by ancient Egyptians to access the Karnak temple complex during the dry season in the southern city of Luxor, the Egyptian government said on Monday.The discovery was further evidence of the importance the complex held in the religious life of ancient Egypt, as other temples had a single dock, according to archaeologist Mansour Boraik, who led the expedition that uncovered the dock.
Even as the Phoenix Mars Lander completed its mission and sent its last transmission from the frigid Martian arctic last November, NASA engineers were busy getting their next, even more ambitious Mars mission under way. The Mars Science Laboratory will be the most sophisticated and versatile robot ever to touch down on alien soil.The $1.9 billion Mars Science Lab, slated to be launched in the fall of 2011 and to land less than a year later, will carry a six-wheeled, plutonium-powered research vehicle the size of a Mini Cooper. The rover will be packed with scientific goodies.
THE ancient, intricate geometric patterns stamped on the surface of a desert in Peru have long been thought of as messages to the gods, or as markers that tracked celestial objects. Now new details about these geoglyphs suggest they may have been made for "prayer walking".The Nasca lines are a collection of lines, giant trapezoids, and figures of humans, plants and animals in a desert 400 kilometres south of Lima, Peru. They were created between 400 BC and AD 650 by the removal of reddish oxidised stones from the desert pavement to reveal the lighter sand beneath.
Cast your mind back 30 years, if you are old enough, and you may just remember a rather humdrum, though retrospectively momentous, event. In 1979, the Japanese firm NET launched the first cellular phone network in Tokyo.For decades the objects remained toys of the super-rich. Who would have thought that today there would be enough cellphones for half the world's population to have one.
She's one of the world's best-preserved bodies: Rosalia Lombardo, a two-year-old Sicilian girl who died of pneumonia in 1920. "Sleeping Beauty," as she's known, appears to be merely dozing beneath the glass front of her coffin in the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, Italy.Now an Italian biological anthropologist, Dario Piombino-Mascali of the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman in Bolzano, has discovered the secret formula that preserved Rosalia's body so well. (Piombino-Mascali is funded by the National Geographic Society's Expeditions Council. National Geographic News is owned by the National Geographic Society.)
Climate change is essentially irreversible, according to a sobering new scientific study.As carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise, the world will experience more and more long-term environmental disruption. The damage will persist even when, and if, emissions are brought under control, says study author Susan Solomon, who is among the world's top climate scientists."We're used to thinking about pollution problems as things that we can fix," Solomon says. "Smog, we just cut back and everything will be better later. Or haze, you know, it'll go away pretty quickly."
In the eerie green glow of flashing lasers in a darkened University of Michigan lab, a cylinder on springs moves methodically up and down in a giant tank as water flows over it, simulating a stream.Whirligigs of illuminated particles form as the water pours over and under the cylinder in rhythmic patterns.
The vast majority of Etruscan art has come from tombs and cemeteries, and until the 1960s and 1970s excavation of Etruscan settlements, where citizens conducted their daily activities, was virtually unheard of. In recent years, the picture of Etruscan society has been broadened by a new generation of archaeological projects that explore the full range of Etruscan life. The Meadows Museum exhibition New Light on the Etruscans: Fifteen Years of Excavation at Poggio Colla, on view January 25-May 17, 2009, brings for the first time to a North American public the findings from an interdisciplinary archaeological research project, the SMU-led excavations in Tuscany. Under the umbrella of the Mugello Valley Archaeological Project, these excavations have centered on the site of Poggio Colla, an Etruscan settlement and religious sanctuary in the Mugello Valley, about 20 miles northeast of Florence, Italy. Nearly 100 objects from the site will be displayed, along with new scientific evidence relating to Etruscan daily life and religious rituals.
The film Valkyrie tells the story of an attempt on Hitler's life by an army colonel, Claus von Stauffenberg, played by Tom Cruise. In Germany the question whether it does justice to the German Resistance is being fiercely debated, as Dan Payne discovered.If you are getting off a train while on your way to meet a contact in an historic part of Stuttgart, it is a good idea not to graze your right hand against a door hinge so hard that you lose most of the skin from your middle knuckle.
Archaeology's ability to reveal the truth untainted by political, cultural and nationalist bias remains a matter for heated debate. Matthew Reisz reportsThere is a dark side to archaeology that is seldom acknowledged in Indiana Jones films; namely a long tradition of using excavations to prop up nationalist and colonial claims; to confirm (or occasionally challenge) the truth of religious and classical texts; and to present an idealised picture of groups seen as "ancestors".
Recent discoveries by a Polish archaeological mission at Tel Al-Farkha (literally "the chicken hill") in the north-eastern Delta about 120 kilometres north-east of Cairo are remarkable and sensational. Remarkable in that they reveal that the "Two Lands" of Upper and Lower Egypt were not rivals in predynastic times but culturally united. Sensational in the material objects discovered. They include numerous statuettes and amulets carved of hippopotamus tusk, and several dozen golden plate fragments came to light, the latter arduously reconstructed into figurines of exceptional beauty. Although a mere 60 centimetres in height, these naked standing men have eyes made of lapis lazuli, while various details such as sticking out ears, large phalluses, and detailed fingers and toes reveal characteristics of later Pharaonic art.
Professor Liu Fengjun, doctoral supervisor in art and archaeology at Shandong University (China), has declared his recent discovery of Changle bone inscriptions in Weifang city of the country's Shandong Province. Liu believes that the markings on Changle bones represent some kind of original characters of Chinese language approximately 1000 years older than those found in Yinxu. Yinxu is a world-famous site in China for its unearthed oracle bone inscriptions originated in Shang Dynasty (1,600 - 1,046 BCE), which is generally recognized as the earliest record of Chinese language. Hence, the discovery of Changle bone inscriptions may have far-reaching implications.
Back when he was a high school student, in April 1981, Robert Ess says he was absolutely transfixed by NASA's very first flight of its new space shuttle. "I was obsessed with it," he says.The aging shuttle fleet is scheduled to be mothballed next year, after construction of the international space station is complete. Now Ess is obsessed with the first test flight of the shuttle's replacement. This time around, though, it's his job.
Individual nerve cells in the front part of the brain can hold traces of memories on their own for as long as a minute and possibly longer, researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have found.The study, available online and appearing in the February issue of Nature Neuroscience, is the first to identify the specific signal that establishes nonpermanent cellular memory and reveals how the brain holds temporary information. It has implications for addiction, attention disorders and stress-related memory loss, said Dr. Don Cooper, assistant professor of psychiatry at UT Southwestern and senior author of the study conducted in mice.
On Antarctic research bases, chefs rely on imported and often frozen food in order to feed crewmembers.The 1959 Antarctic Treaty sets aside the continent as a nature reserve devoted to peace and science and bases have, over the years, stopped eating fresh wildlife.Fresh seal brains, penguin eggs or grilled cormorant were once considered the "delicacies of the Antarctic," but are now off the menu."You have to use what you've got in the store. Frozen stuff, tinned stuff and if you're really desperate the dried stuff," said Alan Sherwood, a widely praised chef at the British Rothera base on the Antarctic Peninsula.
SPY satellites have a new role: as well as watching us they are now spying on each other.The Pentagon admitted last week that it is using two covert inspection satellites developed for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to assess damage to a failed geostationary satellite - something no one suspected the US could do. If such satellites can get that close to a target, they could probably attack it.
A sleek new European Space Agency satellite set to launch this year, perhaps as early as February, aims to map out the planet's gravitational field in unprecedented detail. The Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer, or GOCE, will gather data useful for research in oceanography, solid Earth physics and climate change.
AAs the first African-American president in United States history takes office, researchers have shown that it may be possible to scientifically reduce racial bias.After being trained to distinguish between similar black male faces, Caucasian test subjects showed greater racial tolerance on a test designed to to measure unconscious bias.The results are still preliminary, have yet to be replicated, and the real-world effects of reducing bias in a controlled laboratory setting are not clear. But for all those caveats, the findings add to a growing body of research suggesting that science can battle racism.
The man in the moon may once have faced out to space, until a chance collision with a giant asteroid billions of years ago, scientists have found.A study of the heavily cratered surface has revealed evidence of a huge impact early in the moon's history that may have been powerful enough to set it spinning, making its far side periodically point towards Earth.
Charles Darwin's "tree of life", which shows how species are related through evolutionary history, is wrong and needs to be replaced, according to leading scientists.The great naturalist first sketched how species might evolve along branches of an imaginary tree in 1837, an idea that quickly came to symbolise the theory of evolution by natural selection.
When I started tracing my ancestors online a few years back, the trail went cold about 200 years ago at Westmeath in Ireland. Now I have moved on and reached back 50,000 years thanks to the Genographic project, now in its fourth year, organised by National Geographic. The project is collecting data about us that not even Google can reach. A team from NG is scouring the Earth to collect more than 100,000 DNA samples to which are added many more from members of the public such as me. A few weeks ago I dispatched two samples of saliva, in phials from a kit NG provided, to a laboratory in Houston, Texas.
How quickly things change. Just as Blu-ray is starting to replace the DVDs in our homes, another technology is developed that could sound its death knell.A dual-layer Blu-ray disc can store an impressive 50 gigabytes, but discs which can hold 20 times as much data have just taken a step closer, thanks to new materials that make reading and writing 3D holograms more reliable.
It may have been dreamt up in 1950, but the Turing test - a simple way to tell if a machine can think - still holds powerful sway over many researchers striving to produce a machine at least in some respects equal with a human.Nowadays, although UK mathematician Alan Turing's test is still relevant, and unbeaten, new forms of it have evolved. In this online special, New Scientist discovers the different ways in which machines can be tested for human-like abilities - and how close they have come to passing as one of us.
The lithe young woman rotates her wrists and hips, slowly and elegantly moving across the stage to the music of a traditional Cambodian orchestra. She seems the very embodiment of an apsara, the beautiful supernatural being that dances for the pleasure of Indian gods and heroes in their heavenly palaces. Reliefs of such creatures dot the nearby temples of Angkor Wat, where graceful poses have been frozen in stone for eight centuries by sculptors of the Khmer Empire.
An archaeological site dating back about 5,500 years and believed to be older than Mohenjodaro has been found in Pakistan's southern Sindh province. A team of 22 archaeologists found some semi-precious and precious stones and utensils made of clay, copper and other metals during an excavation at the site in Lakhian Jo Daro in Sukkur district yesterday.
Scientists from Cambridge University have developed a light, flexible, and strong type of carbon nanotube material that may bring space elevators closer to reality. Motivated by a $4 million prize from NASA, the scientists found a way to combine multiple separate nanotubes together to form long strands. Until now, carbon nanotubes have been too brittle to be formed into such long pieces.
A 700-year-old hangi pit, the first one of its kind found in New Zealand, has been discovered on the final day of the three-week Wairau Bar excavation, but it will be left largely unexamined.The exceptional find has been described as bad timing, because the excavation has ended, with no plans to continue digging.
Ambitious plans to send probes to the outer planets are being considered by US and European space officials.One proposal envisages sending an orbiter to Saturn which would also drop a lander and a balloon on to the haze-shrouded moon Titan.The other sees two separate orbiters despatched to investigate Jupiter and its icy moons - Europa and Ganymede.Space agency officials will meet next week to decide which of the two plans should go forward for further study.
WASHINGTON: Engineers are joining forces with experts from other branches of science to develop a new type of gelled fuel, in the hope that it would improve the safety, performance and range of rockets for space and military applications."This is a very multidisciplinary project," said Stephen Heister, the Purdue University professor of aeronautics and astronautics who is leading one of two teams on the project, which is funded by the U.S. Army Research Office.
With his 90th birthday in July, a trip into space scheduled for later in the year and a new book out next month, 2009 promises to be an exciting time for James Lovelock. But the originator of the Gaia theory, which describes Earth as a self-regulating planet, has a stark view of the future of humanity. He tells Gaia Vince we have one last chance to save ourselves - and it has nothing to do with nuclear powerYour work on atmospheric chlorofluorocarbons led eventually to a global CFC ban that saved us from ozone-layer depletion. Do we have time to do a similar thing with carbon emissions to save ourselves from climate change?Not a hope in hell. Most of the "green" stuff is verging on a gigantic scam. Carbon trading, with its huge government subsidies, is just what finance and industry wanted. It's not going to do a damn thing about climate change, but it'll make a lot of money for a lot of people and postpone the moment of reckoning. I am not against renewable energy, but to spoil all the decent countryside in the UK with wind farms is driving me mad. It's absolutely unnecessary, and it takes 2500 square kilometres to produce a gigawatt - that's an awful lot of countryside.
Pope Benedict XVI has reinstated four bishops from an archconservative breakaway wing of the Roman Catholic Church, a decision that is bound to stir controversy within his own flock. But Saturday's announcement that the Vatican will undo the 20-year schism between the Vatican and the so-called Lefebvrian movement is all the more sensitive because it comes only days after the broadcast of an interview in which British-born Bishop Richard Williamson, one of those Benedict is bringing back into the fold, denies that the Nazi Holocaust ever happened.
The reclassification of cannabis as a Class B drug has come into effect in England amid complaints by magistrates the new laws are "illogical".The government said it went against its advisors to upgrade the drug because of worries of its affect on mental health.Magistrates welcomed the reclassification but said planned fines for possessing small amounts undermined the more serious classification.They said it sent the signal cannabis is not as bad as other Class B drugs.
This month, the City of Newark, Delaware became the first electric utility in the US to use a car to store and provide power for the local electric grid.The vehicle, which runs on electricity alone, is specifically designed to store energy and improve grid reliability. University of Delaware researchers helped develop the concept, called Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G). With the City of Newark's approval, the UD team is now conducting V2G testing at two outlets within the City's service territory.
Take some moon dust, add some ground up spaceship, zap the mix with electricity, and presto! Moon bricks.Astronauts living on the moon could someday use such a formula to construct an interlocking, virtually indestructible dome-shaped home."The habitat would look just like an igloo," said Kathryn Logan, a professor at Virginia Tech involved in the project. "No nails, no cement would be necessary to hold it together. The shape of the bricks will do that."
Researchers have successfully teleported information from one trapped atom to another one sealed up in a container sitting 3.3 feet (1 meter) away. That's one small step for teleportation, and one quantum leap for code-makers and code-breakers.But if you're waiting for the kind of teleporter that can beam Captain Kirk down from the Starship Enterprise ... well, don't hold your breath."The term 'teleportation' is a little weird," research team leader Christopher Monroe told me today. "When people see that word they think of Captain Kirk, and that's a big problem."
The fossil of a lizard-like New Zealand reptile has been identified by a team of scientists from UCL (University College London), University of Adelaide, and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. The fossil, dating back 18 million years, has triggered fresh arguments over whether the continent was fully submerged some 25 million years ago.
New research into language evolution suggests most Pacific populations originated in Taiwan around 5,200 years ago.Scientists at The University of Auckland have used sospisticated computer analyses on vocabulary from 400 Austronesian languages to uncover how the Pacific was settled.
BALTIMORE, Jan. 22 (AScribe Newswire) -- Follow along online as Johns Hopkins University Egyptologist Betsy Bryan and her team of students, artists, conservators and photographers return to their investigation of Mut Temple this month, once again focusing their attention on the temple's Sacred Lake. Bryan and her crew are resuming their excavation in Luxor, Egypt, and are sharing their work via "Hopkins in Egypt Today," their popular digital diary offering a virtual window into day-to-day life on an archaeological dig.
To better understand the early migrations of humans, modern scientists have followed their stomachs.The findings, based upon an analysis of bacteria in the guts of modern humans, show that two major migrations from Southeast Asia populated the islands of the Pacific.The researchers, including gastroenterologists at Baylor College of Medicine and the Michael E. DeBakey Veterans Affairs Medical Center, sampled the bacterial parasite Helicobacter pylori in the stomachs of present-day aborigines in the Pacific.
A video clip is causing a lot of people to do a double-take, after a mysterious object zipped across the Washington Monument during Tuesday's inauguration.What was flying in front of the Washington Monument on the day of President Obama's inauguration?News 4's own Graphic Artist Jerry Vinciguerra said, " I didn't know what it was."Some people watching it did a double take.Kurt Murphy, News 4 Art Director said, "It flew by and I thought, 'wow what is that?'"The video footage is posted on CNN's website along with other inaugural coverage.
I first heard about the mysterious and fanciful Miracle Fruit about ten years ago when I was researching the possibility of becoming an ethnobotanist and exploring the field. That ethnobotany, the study of the relations between plants and people, could encompass plants from the mundane potato to the obscure and strange, such as the miracle fruit, was a very exciting prospect, and I decided to end my 7-year stint as a computer-graphics programmer in Silicon Valley to start a Ph.D. in ethnobotany at City University of New York, researching medicinal plants of Peru and Mali. I had to wait several years before I finally tasted the miracle fruit I had been seeking and feel its strange effects, but when I did, it lived up to its miraculous reputation.
Chinese archeologists discovered in Shaanxi Province the earliest known cave dwelling residence complex to date. This large scale ancient complex shows that the history of ancient people living in cave dwellings can be traced as far as 5,500 years ago. The private pottery kilns found at the complex indicate that the concept of private property had already developed by that time.
On Sunday journalists, photographers and TV crews crowded into room 44 on the ground floor of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo to witness the handover of an ancient Iraqi bronze statuette depicting a standing woman in a praying position to the Iraqi ambassador to Egypt, Abdel-Hadi Fadel.Ahmed Mustafa, director of the returned antiquities department at the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), told Al-Ahram Weekly that the story of the statuette goes back to 2005 when Egyptian border police stopped an Egyptian citizen who was attempting to smuggle the statuette into the country through the port of Nuweiba. An archaeological committee was set up to verify the object's provenance. "All the members of the committee affirmed that it was a Mesopotamian object," Mustafa said.
Nature turned against one of America's early civilizations 3,600 years ago, when researchers say earthquakes and floods, followed by blowing sand, drove away residents of an area that is now in Peru."This maritime farming community had been successful for over 2,000 years, they had no incentive to change, and then all of a sudden, boom, they just got the props knocked out from under them," anthropologist Mike Moseley of the University of Florida said in a statement.Moseley and colleagues were studying civilization of the Supe Valley along the Peruvian coast, which was established up to 5,800 years ago.
This past Friday, Clarkson hosted the first liberal arts colloquium of the semester featuring Dr. Steven Stannish of SUNY Potsdam who presented his theory on religion and Egyptian culture.
More than 120 findings dating back from 4th and 3rd century BCE have been recovered on the fields around San Severo (Foggia, Italy) by Guardia di Finanza (Revenue) officers who caught in the act four 'tombaroli'. The officers also found a series of tombs, one of them containing the human remains of an ancient Dauno warrior. An important discovery, according to Giovanna Pacilio, archaeologist of the Soprintendenza ai Beni Archeologici della Puglia, mainly because the findings were found still inside the tombs.