Newsdesk Archive

The Brewsters in Oregon often host star parties at their dream house, with guests from a nearby university, complete with slideshows of the pictures they’ve taken of the distant universe, and a chance to do some real-time observing. They planned and scouted for years to find the perfect construction spot, even meeting the realtors at night to investigate local views of the Milky Way.  For the recent eclipse, the house's main dome photographed the corona; another set-up with a drone captured the moon’s shadow flying towards them as well as flares, shadow bands, atmospheric effects. The house's astronomy equipment can be programmed to capture even spectacular images even when the homeowners are fast asleep.

This is a feature-length documentary directed by Academy Award nominated filmmaker and activist Josh Fox, Academy Award nominated filmmaker James Spione, and indigenous filmmaker and Digital Smoke Signals  media founder Myron Dewey, written by Floris White Bull.   Awake premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City this past April. Standing Rock, North Dakota, became one of the most watched places on Earth, and the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe captured world attention through their peaceful resistance.  Awake, A Dream from Standing Rock, captures the story of Native-led defiance that forever changed how we fight for our environment and the future of our planet.  Go here for info and screenings.  Article contains a link to the film's official trailer video.

For 100 years, doctors have used poppy seed oil to check for blockages in women’s reproductive systems. The oil is used because it contains iodine, which glows white in scans to show whether the tubes are clear. But doctors noticed that when they swapped it for water mixed with iodine, fewer became pregnant - indicating that the poppy oil boosted patients’ fertility. Scientists at the University of Adelaide found that 40% of women whose fallopian tubes were flushed with poppy seed oil became pregnant within six months.

In the 1920s, British military vet Percy Fawcett and his teenage son vanished while mapping an ancient civilization in the Amazon. Director James Grey tells Fawcett’s (Charlie Hunnam) story with nature’s compelling power and the need to preserve one’s legacy. Lush greens crackle, World War I battle sequences glide by, and fragile family drama anchors The Lost City of Z.  “Who are the Savages and the Civilized?” gets asked, and recent studies about Amazonian stonehenges and the research behind the best-selling book, “1491”, may prove the premise correct about hidden and lost Amazonian civilizations. From the book written by David Grann, who also wrote “Killers of the Flower Moon”, about the Osage murders for oil money. Article provides a link to the film's official trailer video based on the true story.

As part of a several month educational tour along the east coast of the US in 2017, two Christopher Columbus’ replica 1492 sailing vessels, the Nina and Pinta, arrived at the Albany Yacht Club in New York, on July 15th. Upon their arrival, a group of 20 Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) canoeists, including Chief Jake Edwards of the Onondaga Nation, met with the captain of the vessels to discuss the impact of Christopher Columbus on Indigenous Peoples.  Chief Jake Edwards of Onondaga Nation told Captain Sanger, “What we’re after is for you to acknowledge the Doctrine of Discovery and talk about the terrible actions that happened.”  “This type of ship shouldn’t be traveling on along the river because of the cultural genocide that comes with it,” said Jay Ohcee, a Mohawk from Akwesasne who was at the event. “They are only telling half-truths. They should show the reality of it.”

Wilma Mankiller was the first woman ever to be elected Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation. This documentary is a poignant, thoughtful and captivating documentary that tells a veritable “Phoenix rising from the ashes” story about a woman who, as a little girl, was forced to participate in the Indian relocation program and leave her Cherokee tribe and culture behind. The story of Wilma Mankiller is well-known to many in Indian country, but the combination of efforts of Native director Valerie Red-Horse Mohl and Hollywood heavyweight Gale Anne Hurd (The Terminator, Aliens,  and The Walking Dead) as the executive producer provided some long-needed feminine energy to create a true work of artistic perfection.  Article contains a link to the film's official trailer video.

The fate of the crew of the Hunley submarine crew has been a mystery for over 150 years since its disappearance in 1864 after its first and last mission.  Rresearchers suggest that a deadly blast wave from the Hunley's own weapon may have killed its crew. Blast injuries are consistent with the way the remains were found inside the boat, as lethal blast waves would not have provided the crew with the chance to try to escape.  To figure out how the Hunley's torpedo may have affected its own crew, the scientists conducted a series of experiments over the course of three years. The findings from the experiments suggested that the Hunley's crew died instantly when the blast wave from the torpedo traveled through the soft tissue of their bodies, especially their lungs and brains; an instant fatality that leaves no marks on skeletons.

Virgin primeval forest like Bia?owie?a once covered the European plain 10,000 years ago, and the Polish government is currently fighting an order from the European Union to stop logging it. Bialowieza Forest blankets the border between Poland and Belarus, and is one of the last remaining habitats of European bison and many rare birds.  This BBC news article is in 6 minute video format.

Carved into the chalk of a hillside in southern England, the Uffington White Horse is utterly unique. Stretching 360 feet from head to tail, it is the only prehistoric geoglyph—a large-scale design created using elements of the natural landscape—known in Europe. “There’s just nothing like it,” says University of Southampton archaeologist Joshua Pollard, who points to the Nazca lines in Peru as the closest parallel. Pollard says that because the site is so anomalous, researchers have resisted grappling with its distinct nature. As a consequence, few new interpretations of the site have been advanced since the early twentieth century. “Archaeologists are tripped up by things that are unique,” says Pollard, “and the White Horse has thrown us.” But now, after making a close study of the site and its relationship to the landscape around it, a theory has emerged that connects the Uffington Horse with an ancient mythological tradition.

A 1,500 year old mosaic floor bearing Greek writing dating back to the Byzantine Empire has been unearthed near Damascus Gate in Jerusalem's Old City by workers digging to install communication cables. Archaeologists describe the new find as a truly unique discovery of an ancient artifact and a historic document in one. Experts believe it to be part of the floor of a luxurious hostel dating back to around 550 or 551 AD, thus during Justinian’s reign.

How do you get an emperor scorpion to hop up onto a scale to peer at its weight? Or get a yawning Asiatic lioness to stand still for a minute so that you can take her measurements? At the London Zoo, they do it very carefully — with patience, scales, ingenious tactics, and bribes. Mark Habben, the head of zoological management at the Zoological Society of London, said that 70 zookeepers began just such an undertaking the day before: the zoo’s annual weigh-in.  Armed with giant rulers, big (and little) scales, along with the animals’ favourite foods, they are measuring, weighing and counting most of the nearly 20,000 animals covering 750 species in the care of the zoo.

Indigenous leaders from the area around Peru’s largest oil field have threatened to block the government from accessing their territories and halt oil production unless an indigenous rights law is applied within 20 days.  The tribal leaders, who hail from four different Amazon river basins, accuse the government of refusing to carry out a consultation process even though it is negotiating a new 30-year contract for oil block 192 with Frontera Energy, a Canadian firm, whose current contract expires in early 2019.

Smithsonian is on the scent of a story from the US Botanic Garden, in Washington, DC, where three Amorphophallus titanium are about to bloom at the same time. It is the largest unbranched inflorescence in the plant kingdom, and each bloom is an event that is between one and 10 years in preparation. The scientific name for these odd shaped blooms means “giant, misshapen penis,” but the popular name is more to the point: corpse flowers.  Native to Sumatran and Indonesian rainforests, they bloom so seldom because of the energy required to produce such large and odoriferous flowers. They bloom and stink for 24 to 48 hours each, and smell like death to attract the flies and beetles that pollinate the plant.  The botanical gardens has set up a livestream webcam, and has extended visitor hours for the blooming event.

Grouse moors are to blame for persecuting endangered birds of prey in the Scottish Highlands and Uplands, according to a wildlife crime expert. Ian Thomson, the head of investigations at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds Scotland, said data from birds of prey that had been satellite-tagged showed a direct correlation between dead and disappeared birds and grouse moors.  The industry in Scotland is fighting to persuade ministers to drop proposals to introduce licensing for shooting estates, which can include pheasant and partridge, in a further effort to crack down on illegal persecution of birds of prey.

A documentary 33 years in the making, from a historic genocide trial to the ousting of a president, 500 Years tells a sweeping story of mounting resistance in Guatemala, through the actions and perspectives of the majority indigenous Mayan population, who now stand poised to change their society. “500 Years”, the third film from director Pamela Yates, continues the epic saga of indigenous resistance in Guatemala that began with When the Mountains Tremble (1983), followed by Granito: How to Nail a Dictator (2011). All three films will have premiered at the Sundance Film Festival over a 33-year period. Article contains a link to watch the official movie trailer video.

Companies have been told to accept moral responsibility and provide counseling to those people who inadvertently discover health risks when researching their ancestral DNA. People who use genetic tests, now growing in popularity, to trace their ancestry only to discover that they are at risk of succumbing to an incurable illness are being left to suffer serious psychological problems. Dementia researchers say the problem is particularly acute for those found to be at risk of Alzheimer’s disease, which has no cure or effective treatment. Yet these people are stumbling upon their status inadvertently after trying to find their Viking, Asian, Native American, or ancient Greek roots. “These DNA tests have the potential to cause great distress,” said Anna Middleton, head of Society and Ethics Research at the Wellcome Genome Campus in Cambridge. "Companies should make counseling available before and after people have the testing done."

It has now been claimed that a mysterious Baltic Sea anomaly is a 14,000 year-old ancient temple lost beneath the waves. The odd-shaped object has fascinated mystery buffs since it was discovered in June 2011. The anomaly is a 70-metre long (210 feet) strangely-shaped feature that showed up on sonar laying 100 metres (300 feet) beneath the waves. Theories as to what the anomaly could be have ranged from the interesting to the outrageous, with the most crackpot claim to date that it could be part of fleet of crashed UFOs on ocean floor. Some conspiracy theorists even point out that it bears a striking resemblance to the Star Wars Millennium Falcon with a steel grey appearance. Others have claimed it could be the remains of a sunken city lost to the waves years ago.  The mystery deepens following claims electric and satellite diving equipment cuts out when near the anomaly.

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea claims that they have found an ancient royal tomb deep underground in a recluse state. The regime released a rare, international, English-language statement announcing that local archaeologists discovered the royal burial site of the Goguryeo Dynasty (918-1392) in its border city of Kaesong.

In another sign of our warming world, a Russian tanker has completed an Arctic trip from Norway to South Korea in record time, becoming the first ship to cross the Northern Sea Route (NSR) without the aid of an icebreaker vessel travelling ahead.  Although that's partly due to shrinking ice coverage, the Christophe de Margerie vessel has also been specially built with this journey in mind – the ship comes with icebreakers already fitted. However, there's no doubt that the thawing of the Arctic ice is making the shipping route more viable than ever. Fewer than 500 ships have made the journey since 1906, but Sovcomflot, which owns the tanker, expects journeys through this route to become routine in the future.

Taylor Sheridan’s first big film as a director is a chilling thriller that follows a rookie FBI agent (Elizabeth Olsen) who teams up with a local gametracker (Jeremy Renner), with deep community ties and a haunted past to investigate the murder of a local girl on the remote Wind River Indian Reservation in the hopes of solving her mysterious death.  Native actors include Gil Birmingham, Graham Greene, Martin Sensmeier, Julia Jones, Tantoo Cardinal and Tokala Clifford. Reps of the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Nations of Wind River were on set in Utah and were supportive of the filming, the Tunica-Biloxi Nation of Louisiana partly financed it.  Article provides link to the film's official US trailer video.

Thought-provoking blog article details technologies used to render maps of a geographical area which was used to house and contain tons of radioactive waste from nuclear testing done in the Pacific between 1946 and 1962.  Maps and photographs are deeply encoded with cultural meaning, memories, and power. Our experiences and social relations give shape to the space that we inhabit, and we each live in a singular world that we map out for ourselves every day. Cartography has always been a storytelling medium—through maps, we chart the stories of our past and navigate the tides of history. What’s different today is the ability for anyone, not just trained professionals, to use maps to describe something spatially meaningful, and to share this situated knowledge, these personal geographies, with others. With each photograph we take, and each story we tell, we mark another waypoint on the map, we stretch the imagination, and we strive to find our place in the world.

Udderly ridiculous, traditionalists might say, but goat yoga is just another of the weird, wonderful and apparently wildly popular ways people do yoga these days.  Thousands are flocking to sign up for these exercise classes with goat kid accompaniment.  Already a trend in the United States, goat yoga classes and retreats are now popping up around Sydney, Australia.  Yoga has its benefits and everybody loves baby animals so combine the two together and what more could you want?  During outdoor classes, participants who were both new and old to yoga flowed through a traditional yoga sequence while baby goats roam free, climbing on people, romping, playing, and not always behaving.

For more than 3,000 years, the Iñupiat people of Alaska have passed on stories to their children. Like all enduring fiction, the stories deliver truths that transcend cultural shifts. They act as seeds of moral instruction and help to define and preserve the community’s identity. The videogame Never Alone's purpose is to preserve fading tribal stories, but in order to convince the Iñupiat young people of the stories’ enduring power and worth, it must also succeed as a video game. In a sense, it was perhaps the riskiest way of approaching the Iñupiat’s problem: this kind of storytelling requires an entirely new vocabulary. Reconciling narrative demands with the need to be engaging and functional remains one of the greatest challenges in game development; it’s a struggle for even the largest and best-funded teams.

Any visitor today to the site of Los Adaes, in northwest Louisiana, will take in a landscape that was the easternmost point of Spanish expansion in the southwest. It was the location of a Spanish mission and presidio, constructed in 1721 and occupied until 1773, in a high, defensible position. A previous Los Adaes mission had been built in 1717, a short distance away, but was abandoned because of initially poor relations with the Caddo Indians.  In 1717, the Spaniards’ intention was to halt French incursions into the region and to prevent the French from using the Mississippi River as a means to trade with Mexico. They also were supposed to convert the Caddo to Catholicism. The Los Adaes mission, however, situated on the frontier and far from both Spain and Mexico, took on a unique character. According to archaeologist from Northwestern State University, Los Adaes became a place of intense cultural exchange among the Spanish, the French, and the Caddo. “It’s what we call ‘creolization’ here in Louisiana,” he says. The archaeological record, with its robust mixture of ceramics from all three cultures, bears this out. Ultimately, these people weren’t supposed to get along, but they did.

The debate about the existence of the soul and whether it is immortal or dies with the person is an endless story that for centuries has occupied the time of the great thinkers of universal history. Its mysterious nature continues to fascinate different areas of science, but now a group of researchers has discovered a new truth.   According to two leading scientists,  Dr. Stuart Hameroff, an American Physicist and Emeritus in the Department of Anesthesiology and Psychology, and Sir Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist at Oxford University,  the human brain is in fact a biological computer, and the consciousness of humans is a program run by the quantum computer located inside the brain that even continues to exist after we die.  As the experts explain it, “After people die, their soul comes back to the universe, and it does not die.”

Little fungi pack a punch: “Magic mushrooms” of the Psilocybe species produce psychoactive compounds that alter perception when ingested. Recently, the effects on the neuronal system caused by their ingredient psilocybin have attracted the interest of pharmacologists. German scientists have now identified four of the enzymes responsible for the biosynthesis of psilocybin. In the journal Angewandte Chemie, they describe the biosynthetic pathway and introduce a synthetic route that could form the basis of biotechnological production.  For centuries, Central American cultures considered Psilocybe mushrooms to be divine and used them for spiritual purposes. More recently, they have been called magic mushrooms and used for their hallucinogenic effects. These mushroom drugs may soon also be in use as pharmaceuticals that treat the existential anxiety of advanced-stage cancer patients, depression, and nicotine addiction.

Two Florida college students launched from summer bargain shopping at a Titusville, Florida, thriftshop closeout sale straight into the stuff of NASA collectors' legend when they paid 20 cents each for five rare NASA flight suits that experts say could be valued at $5,000 each or more at auction.  The pair claim the blue NASA flight suits, along with one white control suit, were in the bottom of a plastic bin tucked under some forgotten winter sweaters in a back corner of the store.  The students are currently enrolled in local colleges studying astrophysics and aeronautical engineering.  Titusville is located on the "Space Coast" of Florida and is home to Kennedy Space Center.  According to NASA officials, the suits seem to be genuine from Space Shuttle personnel circa 1983 to 1986.

Australian prisoners are caring for rescue animals that have been abandoned, attacked by predators, hit by cars, or even seized in a drug bust as part of a rehabilitation programme.  Kangaroos, emus, wombats, snakes and cockatoos are just some of the native creatures being nursed back to health by inmates at a wildlife centre based in the John Morony Correctional Complex outside Sydney.  Officials say the scheme helps instill a sense of responsibility, compassion, and develops lifeskills for offenders preparing for re-entry to the outside world.

Autonomous vehicles can add a new member to their ranks—the self-driving wheelchair. This summer, two types of robotic wheelchairs made headlines: one at a Singapore hospital and another at a Japanese airport.  The chairs' computers use data from 3 LiDARS to create a map, then determine the best route to the destination the user programs.  Each chair has six wheels for stability, and is designed to make tight turns and fit through doorframes.  Manufacturers are now working on a SMART wheelchair which will eventually be programmed and hailed by Smartphone app.

Since 1879, residents of a quaint town in upstate New York have mediated conversations between loved ones — parents and children, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters. What’s so special about that? These mediators connect the living…with the dead.

About 67,000 years ago, a gigantic mammoth chowed down on enormous mouthfuls of grass in Texas, just west of where modern-day Austin is located, according to new research. The finding is surprising, given that the beast's remains were discovered in Waco, Texas, more than 120 miles (200 kilometers) away from the Columbian mammoth's (Mammuthus columbi) ancient picnic spot near Austin, the researchers said.

Pyramids were recently found in Honduras, and city ruins were found in a deep forest in Cambodia.  These discoveries were only possible thanks to LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), a technology that uses light detection and ranging sensors to send out laser pulses to create a detailed 3D map.  LiDAR has become more well-known in recent years as the technology that enables autonomous vehicles and self-driving cars to sense and navigate the world. But this technology extends far beyond the transportation industry: It can help machines “see” and impacts the way humans view the physical world.  Similar to early explorers using maps to communicate sights and worlds unknown, we are now recreating this same phenomenon in a more advanced manner. From discovering lost worlds to planning cities of the future, we can’t see the future—but LiDAR might.

Capo, a golden retriever wearing a bright orange rescue harness, runs with his handler in tow towards a body sprawled in the high grass as a giant drone whirrs overhead. The scene was part of a simulated dog rescue operation this week aimed at highlighting the rapidly growing use of drones to help speed up and expand such searches in Switzerland. The exercise took place on the same day as a massive landslide on the Piz Cengalo mountain in the Swiss Alps that left eight people missing, and triggered a search-and-rescue mission where similar dogs and drones were deployed.

The annual Great Pyramid Race in Queensland, Australia, must have seemed like a good time for some publications to bring up the controversial theory that Walsh's Pyramid is an actual pyramid build by Egyptians. Those running the race probably noticed that Walsh's Pyramid is covered in vegetation and dirt and at no point does anyone step on a pyramid stone. However, that doesn’t stop those who believe that 300 carvings on two sandstone walls in Gosford, NSW, are actually Egyptian hieroglyphs made around 3000 BCE by Egyptians who settled there. Discovered in 1975, the Gosford Glyphs are generally dismissed by egyptologists as fakes made in the 1920s during the worldwide Egypt craze caused at that time by Howard Carter's discovery of the unlooted Tomb of Tutankhamun.  Supposedly, the glyphs say that two pyramids were built there by Egyptians – one in Gympie, Queensland, which no longer exists and one in Cairns. The mysteriously missing Gympie pyramid was allegedly the tomb of an Egyptian royal named Lord Nefer-ti-ru.  No evidence of the lord has been found in Gympie.

Usually humans are scared of wild animals. But in the Norwegian far-north, an Arctic tourist guide has been fined 1,300 euros ($1,500) for scaring a polar bear. When a group of tourists on a snowmobile expedition on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard in May spotted a polar bear standing still, 900 metres (2,950 ft) away, their guide decided to approach the predator to take a closer look. The animal fled the scene. According to officials, the regulations say that it is forbidden to approach polar bears in such a way that they are disturbed, regardless of the distance.  Polar bears have been a protected species since 1973.

Three different clay recipes were used to construct the army of 7,000 terracotta warriors, bricks, and other figures in Emperor Qin Shihuang’s mausoleum constructed in the third century BC, according to researchers in London.  Stamps and inscriptions on some of the objects indicate they may have been crafted at off-site factories in collaboration with local potters.

In a recent study of healthy young adults published in the Clinical Journal of American Nephrology, marijuana use in healthy young adults was not associated with change in kidney function over time or the appearance of albumin in the urine, which is a sign of kidney damage. Additional studies are needed to assess the effects of marijuana in older adults and patients with kidney disease, so more research is needed.

The weird world of quantum mechanics is going for a swim. A team of Chinese researchers has, for the first time, transmitted quantum entangled particles of light through water – the first step in using lasers to send underwater messages that are impossible to intercept.  “People have talked about the idea of underwater quantum communication before, but I’m not aware of anyone who has done an experiment like this,” says Thomas Jennewein at the University of Waterloo in Canada. “An obvious application would be a submarine which wants to remain submerged but communicate in a secure fashion.”

At top of a pyramid built thousands of years ago in Lima, Peru, archaeologists found the remains of 16 Chinese laborers who died here around the late 19th century. Eleven of the bodies were wrapped in simple cloth shrouds; the remaining five were laid to rest in wooden coffins and wore blue-green jackets, Reuters reports. During Europe’s “Age of Exploration,” small numbers of people from Asia came to this part of the world on ships that stopped in Macau and other Asian cities. But the largest migration of Chinese people to Peru began in the late 1840s, with the decline of slave labor.  In the 1900s, over 100,000 indentured laborers came to Peru from China.

The Masaya Volcano in Nicaragua is a frightening place. The active volcano sports a crater the size of the Empire State Building that houses a lake full of molten lava.  A GE science expedition literally dove into Masaya to install sensors and collect data to learn more about conditions in the volcano. Ride along with these bold researchers through GE's fascinating digital volcano website, which plays out like an interactive documentary.

A Native American appears to stare at a smartphone in a mural of colonial America that dates to 1937 sparking theories it could be proof of time travel. This baffling painting, Mr. Pynchon and the Settling of Springfield, shows a man in the foreground holding 21st century technology - yet it depicts a scene from the 17th century. The intriguing figure, wearing feathers in his hair and loincloth, is holding a mystery object just like modern people hold their smartphones... 7 decades before their invention.  Mr. Pynchon was a fur trader born in 1590 responsible for founding Springfield, Massachusetts.

Metallurgy is one of the criteria used to determine cultural advancement in ancient peoples.  An interesting picture has emerged as archaeologists have gradually realized that Great Lakes copper was at the center of an industry for thousands of years, utilized by many different cultures by means of intertribal trade. Furthermore, various dating techniques are constantly pushing the fabrication of advanced copper tools further back into America’s ancient past.  Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) allows for the dating of copper artifacts by showing the age of textiles or wooden fragments adhering to the artifacts. This method has recently dated two copper conical points from Wisconsin to 5740 +/- 40 BC and 5355 +/- 60 BC.   The early manufacture of advanced copper tools sets North America apart from most of the ancient world.  In North America, copper tools were contemporary with or earlier than copper ornaments. Eventually it may be proven that advanced copper tools were made in North America earlier than anywhere else on earth.

Controversy around the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) continues with the latest news that the company behind the oil pipeline is now suing Greenpeace and other environmental groups who were involved in extensive protests against the project.  Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) has filed a federal racketeering lawsuit, alleging the dissemination of "materially false and misleading information" about the pipeline.  The company is claiming that Greenpeace, Earth First and other organizations allegedly engaged in "criminal activity" to increase their donation funds and advance their own agendas.  Several indigenous groups in North and South Dakota, including the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, are still battling the pipeline in court.  Amongst grave concerns over Native American rights and the destruction of sacred ground, opponents of the project also expressed fears that the oil pipeline - which is routed under the Missouri River and the Lake Oahe reservoir near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation - would affect local drinking water for over 2 million people.

The crew onboard the International Space Station helped raise awareness for pediatric cancer on August 23 with the in-orbit debut of a handpainted spacesuit inspired by the cooperation between the orbiting laboratory's partner nations.  Expedition 52 Flight Engineer Jack Fischer donned "Unity," a patchwork costume spacesuit decorated by children with cancer in the US, Russia, Germany, Japan, and Canada — the same countries that operate the space station. The multicolor garment, a product of the Spacesuit Art Project, was pieced together by the same company that furnishes the softgoods for NASA's real spacesuits.

A joint archaeology team from University of South Florida and Italy conducted chemical analysis of residue on unglazed pottery unearthed at the Copper Age site (3500-2300 BC) of Monte Kronio in Agrigento, located off the southwest coast of Sicily.  The researchers determined the residue contains tartaric acid and its sodium salt, which occur naturally in grapes and in the winemaking process.  The finding is significant as it’s the earliest discovery of wine residue in the entire prehistory of the Italian peninsula.  They are now attempting to discern whether the wine was red or white.

Astronomers have observed the elusive 'Phoenicid meteor shower' and have determined that it was spawned by the now vanished Comet Blanpain. They also found that Comet Blanpain was active, though only weakly, in the early 20th Century. This is the first time that researchers could determine the activity of a comet by observing its associated meteor shower. These results are important for understanding the evolution of minor bodies in the Solar System.

Japan's government’s decision in late July to nominate a group of 49 ancient burial sites in southern Osaka Prefecture for UNESCO World Heritage status has raised local hopes for a major boost in international prestige and tourism appeal.  But the move also raises sometimes politically sensitive questions about what the sites, called kofun, really are, who are buried within, and how to explain their history and meaning.

With funding from energy utilities, researchers from University of Alabama are collaborating with peers across the Southeast US to understand the frequency and possible size of floods along the Tennessee River that pre-date reliable weather and streamflow records.  With a better understanding of floods from the past 10,000 years, utilities can better prepare for historic natural disasters that could threaten dams and nuclear plants in and around the Tennessee River, said Dr. Lisa Davis, UA associate professor of geography, who leads the research team on this project.

Scientists at NASA have developed a hugely ambitious strategy to counter the looming threat of an apocalyptic super-eruption from the Yellowstone Caldera.  Yellowstone is one of about 20 known supervolcanoes around the world, and an eruption from any of these could produce so much fiery magma that the ensuing ash cloud might starve the Earth of sunlight in a choking, years-long volcanic winter.  This article details the plans proposed benefits, potential drawbacks and planetary ramifications.  It also compares and contrasts the potential devastation of a super-eruption with that of an impending asteroid impact.  Because one thing's for sure – these ancient, colossal time bombs aren't going anywhere, and their clocks are ticking louder than ever.

Homo naledi fossils, first found in South Africa’s subterranean Dinaledi Chamber and later a second nearby cave, came from a species that lived between 236,000 and 335,000 years ago.  It had a largely humanlike lower body, a relatively small brain and curved fingers suited for climbing trees. The fossils of this humanlike species previously revealed an unexpectedly peculiar body plan. Now its pockmarked teeth speak to an unusually hard-edged diet.  Homo naledi displays a much higher rate of chipped teeth than other members of the human evolutionary family that once occupied the same region of South Africa, say biological anthropologists. Dental damage of this kind results from frequent biting and chewing hard gritty objects such as raw tubers dug out of the ground.

The story of how horses got their hooves began, Harvard University researchers believe, millions of years ago when they moved from living in protected forests to open grassland.  A single hoof better supports a horse’s weight and allows it to swing its legs more efficiently to gallop at a much greater speed, researchers at Harvard University found by performing 3-D scans of 12 fossils.

A new robot will enable street artists to create murals in places that were previously impossible or too expensive to reach.  The company SprayPrinter has developed a prototype for a robot that can scale buildings and towers to create a street art painting of whatever image it's programmed to.  In its first full-scale demonstration, it created a giant, five-color mural of a woman on a chimney with just one pass by switching colors as it sprayed.  Article contains a link to that demo video.

A 3,700-year-old clay tablet has proven that the Babylonians developed trigonometry 1,500 years before the Greeks and were using a sophisticated method of mathematics.  The tablet, known as Plimpton 332, was discovered in the early 1900s in Southern Iraq by the American archaeologist Edgar Banks, who was the inspiration for Indiana Jones.  The true meaning of the tablet has eluded experts until now, but new research by the University of New South Wales, Australia, has shown it is the world’s oldest and most accurate trigonometric table which was probably used by ancient architects to construct temples, palaces and canals.

More evidence that our intestinal microbes are profoundly influenced by the foods we eat—or don't: The gut ecosystems of members of a small group of hunter-gatherers inhabiting Tanzania's Rift Valley show a strong cyclicality consistent with the population's seasonally changing diet. The advent of agriculture about 10,000 to 15,000 years ago has radically altered our diet. In the past century alone, the typical person's lifestyle has undergone further vast alterations: labor-saving devices' encouragement of a sedentary existence, the introduction of antibiotics, and the gradual supplanting of fiber-filled whole grains, fruits and vegetables by increasingly processed and fiber-free foods.

Construction in Oregon and other US locations is booming, yet loggers are facing a labor shortage. Can new technology attract young people to a life in the forest?  Logging is difficult, dirty, dangerous, and declining. Death or injury can come from trees falling in the wrong direction, or hitting another tree and falling back on someone, or from what are known as “struck-by” injuries, where a loose felled log hits somebody.  The decline of logging towns is partly connected to increasing restrictions on harvesting on public lands, which itself is partly due to environmental values becoming more prominent in land management. But new machines which improve working conditions, safety, and the job’s prestige may just ensure that logging has a future.

Sasquatch: The Opera, being performed at Edinburgh, Scotland's, Summerhall complex is a warped, opioid love story, a monumentally strange interspecies take on Romeo and Juliet in which addiction and withdrawal feature prominently.  With scenes of people tweaking in forest glades and communing with the moon, this makes for a spectacularly bizarre, occasionally impenetrable, but nonetheless hypnotic experience;  a throbbing psychotropic oddity.

Underwater archaeologists using a new state-of-the-art technology are mapping out the submerged portion of the 17th-century town of Port Royal in Jamaica.   Port Royal was the English mercantile capital of the New World, and an important and wealthy centre for trade and commerce for the entire West Indies. On June 7th 1692, Port Royal was destroyed by an earthquake, quicksand and a final crushing blow of a tsunami. Two thirds of the city was wiped out, sending it to the bottom of the sea.

The ocean is a noisy place. Beyond the typical noises like crashing waves there is the increasing presence of ships to makes things even louder. Above the water this might not seem like a big deal, but below the waves, noise from oceanliners and large container ships can travel for miles and upset creatures like whales and dolphins that depend on their own noises to communicate and survive. New research from Oregon State University suggests that blue whales are learning to adapt by changing the frequency of their songs.  Essentially, they're starting to communicate on a different audio band. The researchers believe the whales are doing this deliberately to avoid interference from human sounds.

A Kent State archaeologist is testing the innovative engineering feats of the Clovis People, one of the earliest groups to inhabit North America, turning a simple lab into a modern day weapons workshop.  Stone age people 12,000 years ago in Ohio and other areas of North America invented shock-absorption technology, and implemented it in their stone spear points.   He characterized the special fluted Clovis arrowheads as the most "bad-ass Stone Age weapons."  Using the test lab to create replicas of everything, they strive to make the replicas as accurate as possible using the same techniques the Clovis people would have used, by striking rocks against each other in a method known as flint knapping.  The lab just received a three-year grant to continue a collaborative study, and endeavors to become the premier archaeology lab in North America.

Just south of Awendaw, South Carolina, in the Francis Marion National Forest, is an example of a type of architectural artifact that still baffles archaeologists.  For every explanation someone offers up, there are many more that refute it.  Here's the story:  5,000 years ago, there lived a people by the sea who, in various locations along America's southeastern seaboard, piled up millions upon millions of clam and oyster shells in either a circle or U-shaped formation measuring, in some cases, more than 200 feet (61 meters) across and 10 to 12 feet (three to 3.5 meters) high.  Piling up shells in a mound was common throughout ancient times. Such remains are called middens and are quite abundant. Basically, they are garbage dumps. People would feast on clams, mussels or oysters and throw the shells on a pile; nothing special there. But from the Sewee Shell Ring in South Carolina, and running down around the tip of Florida, the people didn't just make mounds of shells—they shaped these mounds very carefully into doughnut shapes. The question is, why? Theories abound, and parts of all these theories may be true, but something seems to be missing.  For one thing, why are the rings found only at seashore sites?  Inland middens from the same time period abound.  But those are not piled in such careful circles…

The migraine. It's more common than diabetes, asthma, and knee osteoarthritis all combined.  It’s one of more than 200 different types of headaches, and according to neurologist and director of the University of BC Headache Clinic, Dr. Siân Spacey, and “by far and away” the most common type.  An unfortunate two percent of the population suffer from chronic migraines, which means they have headaches for 15 or more days every month that can be accompanied by symptoms such as nausea and sound or light sensitivity. Their quality of life is significantly impacted. Vancouver, Canada, will host the International Headache Congress, September 7-10, 2017.  It's an opportunity for clinicians to keep up to date on all the best therapies available for patients. Information is also provided for free public seminars surrounding the event, one of which will be entitled Migraine Myths, Realities and Treatments.

An estimated 65 million people worldwide suffer from epilepsy.  People with epileptic seizures often benefit from following a Ketogenic diet.  Written by a Nurse Practitioner in New York, this clinical advisor forum article expounds the virtues of the well-documented Ketogenic diet for better control and management of epileptic seizures - often with no need for medication.  According to the author's expertise, the Ketogenic diet is—and remains—the only treatment with the consistent ability to prevent seizures.  The diet increases the conversion of glutamate into glutamine into GABA, reducing neuronal excitability. It increases antioxidant status in the neuronal mitochondria, improving their function. It also reduces free radical formation in neurons, a likely cause of seizures.  Many reference links to recent research materials and studies are provided, as well as a link to the actual diet itself.

Indigenous Australians have interpreted objects and shapes in the night sky for tens of thousands of years. Whether they were the world’s first astronomers remains open to debate, but there’s a strong possibility that indeed they were.  Aboriginal astronomy offers a way for scientists to view the depth and richness of one of the world’s oldest stargazing cultures.  This lengthy but fascinating article details how researchers from several different disciplines are studying this ancient knowledge before it becomes irretrievably lost.  Part Two is published in a separate link.

Indigenous astronomy in Australia includes many mythological figures associated with the creation of the sky and constellations.  This fascinating article is a veritable encyclopedia of ancient Australian Aboriginal star knowledge, cultural legends and folklore collected by researchers from several different disciplines.  Part One is published under a separate link.

Evidence of communities on the Humber dating back 8,000 years resulting from a geophysical study and small scale excavation between Outstrays and Skeffling village last autumn. The study found that the area contains a long and interesting history, with evidence of storm surge deposits, ancient river channels and areas of peat from as far back as the Middle and New Stone Age, approximately 3,000 to 8,000 years ago, which suggests that landscapes occupied and exploited by prehistoric people survive beneath the current farmland.

Native plants need a helping hand in the Atlantic oak woodlands of Argyll if they are to recover from invasive rhododendron, Scottish ecologists have discovered. A new study in the Journal of Applied Ecology reveals that – even at sites cleared of rhododendron 30 years ago – much native flora has still not returned.  As a result, rhododendron eradication programmes may need to be supplemented by reseeding for the original plant community to re-establish.

When cattle first became a part of American agriculture, New World colonists raised rugged cows of diverse stock.  Some were native to North America, others brought from Europe, but all were dual-purpose or tri-purpose breeds; good for milk, meat, and draft power. Unlike today’s cows, who are often GMO cornfed and heavily medicated in vast indoor feeding facilities, these “heritage” breeds of cows were scrappy, hearty, and able to thrive outdoors on unmanaged grasses.  To this day, heritage cattle are naturally disease-resistant, produce offspring without human intervention, and can be milked well into their teen years.  And they’re slowly going extinct.

South African National Parks is under fire after centuries-old gold artefacts were stolen from one of its museums.  The artefacts include a necklace‚ bracelets and beads excavated from two graves at the Thulamela archaeological site in Kruger National Park‚ which was inhabited between the 13th and 17th centuries. “Gold artefacts are an extreme rarity and that is why the Thulamela theft is a travesty‚” Sian Tiley-Nel‚ who manages the museums at the University of Pretoria.

Do you ever feel guilty about leaving your dog at home alone when run errands or head to work?  If you do, a new robot may be able to change that. The Anthouse Pet Companion Robot can play fetch, feed and even let you talk to your pet from your desk. The $349 robot, which comes in white or yellow, can be set to automatic mode or be controlled via a companion app to interact with pets in real-time.

Lake Titicaca has long been the center of various socio-political cultures in South America. The lake has seen many cultures along its shores, such as the Pucará (400BC-100AD) and the Tiwanaku (200BC-1000AD), and still remains a place of value and livelihood for the Uru peoples of the famed Floating Islands. Yet it is the Incas who encapsulated the essence of the great lake around which they built their own civilization. Lake Titicaca was enveloped into their mythological and religious beliefs as the center of the cosmos.

The hallucinogenic effects of magic mushrooms are well documented. But nobody knows what psilocybin, the chemical responsible, does for the mushrooms themselves. Now, one of the first genomic analyses of hallucinogenic fungi has deciphered psilocybin production, and even suggested a function for it. By messing with insect neurochemistry, psilocybin may act as a psychedelic repellent.

UK postal service the Royal Mail is trialling completely electric vans from carmaker Arrival. Arrival, also based in the UK, has partnered with the postal service to operate nine trucks to deliver mail and packages in London and surrounding areas. The trucks are three different sizes and will begin deliveries today from the postal service’s central London hub.

A British father was arrested in front of his family at a Turkish airport after trying to bring home 13 historic bronze coins he found while snorkeling on holiday. The 52 year old ambulance driver was arrested at Bodrun airport on Turkey’s Aegean coast and could face up to five years in prison if convicted of trying to take artifacts out of the country.  He told police he had no idea it was against the law to take the coins, which he felt had been dislodged in a recent earthquake.  Officials say it could be a month or more before his release, provided he is cleared of the charges.

A “robot priest”, dubbed Pepper, adorned with Buddhist robes and a high-resolution tablet is now programmed to perform funeral rites for less cost than a human.  The robot displayed its funeral rite capabilities including sutras chanted in a computerized voice and a drum ritual at a recent funeral industry event in Tokyo, the Life Ending Industry Expo.

B vitamins are among the most popular vitamin supplements taken today in the US.  New research suggests long-term, high-dose supplementation with vitamins B6 and B12, long touted by the vitamin industry for increasing energy and improving metabolism, is associated with a two-to-four-fold increased lung cancer risk in men relative to non-users, especially those who smoke.

Facebook's website appears to be suffering a serious outage, leaving online social network users unable to login, share posts, or check their Newsfeed. Thousands of Facebook users in the UK, Europe and parts of the US are reporting issues regarding the site not working every minute.  This article includes information on a user-determined bypass solution. At the time of publication, both the root cause and estimated time of its correction are unknown.

Graham Hancock, maverick archaeologist, investigative journalist, and acclaimed author, has survived his second NDE (near death experience), and it is hoped that Graham will be around to challenge the archaeological status quo for a long time to come.  He provides a vital balance in the archaeological community. For a body of science to continue without a dissenting voice renders the increase of knowledge impossible. How can progress ever be made if new evidence is ignored because of old theories? Archaeology, and indeed academia in general, needs Graham Hancock, though they may not always appreciate his input. Graham, however, after making public his recent brush with death explained in his own words, is more aware than ever of his own mortality.

Amazonian hallucinogen Ayahuasaca’s current trendy status among Westerners has created a veritable cottage industry of somewhere between 30 and 100 ayahuasca centers around the steamy tropical town of Iquitos, Peru.  “Iquitos is the Disneyland of Ayahuasca,” Mick Huerta said, who lives among the Shipibo and is writing a book. “The boom is changing both the people who come and the people providing the medicine. There is a valuing of indigenous culture and knowledge on the one hand, and people taking advantage of it on the other.”  Huerta explained that with the average daily wage standing at $3 for a 10-hour day, meaning that local indigenous people are very poor, the chance to make several hundred dollars off an ayahuasca ceremony has a strong pull. “They can feed a family for four months on what they make from one ceremony,” he explained.

A Japanese-Egyptian team has been working painstakingly since 2010 to lift, restore, and reconstruct the wooden solar boat, which was buried around 4,500 years ago as part of Khufu’s burial rites, intended for use in the afterlife.  About 745 out of 1,264 pieces of the boat have been removed so far from the excavation pit. One of the boat’s beams was damaged by a malfunctioning crane.

In the mid-1990s, over 1,000 truckloads of orange peels and orange pulp were purposely unloaded onto a barren pasture in a Costa Rican national park. Today, that area is covered in lush, vine-laden forest.  A team led by Princeton University researchers surveyed the land 16 years after the orange peels were deposited. They found a 176 percent increase in aboveground biomass, or the wood in the trees, within the 3-hectare area (7 acres) studied. Their results are published in the journal Restoration Ecology.  This story, which involves a contentious lawsuit, showcases the unique power of agricultural waste to not only regenerate a forest but also to sequester a significant amount of carbon at no cost.

Plate tectonics has shaped the Earth's surface for billions of years.  Continents and oceanic crust have pushed and pulled on each other, continually rearranging the planet's facade.  As two massive plates collide, one can give way and slide under the other in a process called subduction.  The subducted slab then slips down through the Earth's viscous mantle like a flat stone through a pool of honey.   Geologists at MIT have found that this density boundary was much less pronounced in the ancient Earth's mantle 3 billion years ago, and the researchers note that the ancient Earth harbored a mantle that was as much as 200 degrees Celsius hotter than it is today.

It’s an exciting time for those interested in space and everything it has to offer us. Between our potential to travel in space and how much we’ve come to learn, and can still learn, from unmanned probes and satellites, it’s hard to not be hopeful for the future of our interest in the seemingly-boundless expanse that surrounds us.  NASA’s Acting Administrator Robert M. Lightfoot, Jr., feels the same about the exploration of space.  To him, the many plans, projects, and initiatives focused in this respect are well worth getting excited about.

Excavations of architecture and associated deposits left by hunter-gatherers in the Black Desert in eastern Jordan have revealed bones from wild sheep known as mouflon - a species previously not identified in this area in the Late Pleistocene. According to the team of University of Copenhagen archaeologists, who led the excavations, the discovery is further evidence that the region often seen as a 'marginal zone' was capable of supporting a variety of resources, including a population of wild sheep 14,500 years ago. These bones coincide with petroglyphs containing what appear to be horned sheep images found in the Black Desert in November 2016.

On one of Scotland’s Orkney Islands there’s the Neolithic-era standing stone and the lighthouse built by members of the famed Stevenson engineering clan. But look out to the shoreline and you’ll spot something altogether more particular to this island. Small sheep, wrapped in thick fleeces of brown, black, white, and gray, nimbly pick their way across the sandy shore and wet rocks. As waves break close behind them, they pass basking seals and munch on seaweed, thick pieces of brown kelp trailing from their mouths. A primitive breed, part of the North European short-tailed sheep group, and smaller than most modern breeds, these North Ronaldsay sheep have evolved in isolation since their arrival on the island, possibly as far back as the Iron Age.  There are approximately 3,000 left in existence.

At the Nashville Zoo in TN, the giraffes ran in confused circles, orangutans climbed, the flamingos huddled together, and the rhinos just headed for bed.  Over 7,000 visitors that day watched and recorded how the animals behaved when the sky turned dark during the total solar eclipse of August 21. There was plenty to see when the moon slipped in front of the sun.  The visitors' noise — drowned out the zoo animals, crickets and cicadas — and zookeepers still have to figure whether the strange behavior was from the eclipse, or the people there to watch the show. The zoo project was only one of many science experiments planned for the historic event. Citizen-scientists and their more professional counterparts loaded up on pictures, video, data and just plain weird experiences as the eclipse's shadow crossed the United States.

For a lot of scientific topics such as climate change or evolution, there's a big gap between what science understands and what the public thinks it knows.  It would be reassuring to think that the gap is simply a lack of information.  Get the people with doubts about science up to speed, and they'd see things the way scientists do.  But a number of studies indicate that is a false premise; that the public's doubts about science have little to do with how much they understand that topic.  A new study indicates that scientific knowledge makes it easier for those who are culturally inclined to reject a scientific consensus.

A Hellenistic temple has been discovered in Umm Qais, around 75 miles north of Amman, according to a report from The Jordan Times.  A team from Yarmouk University discovered the temple along with a water network. The temple was built during the Hellenistic era (332-63 BC) and went on to be reused during the Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic eras.

Japanese car manufacturer Toyota is developing a device that would allow objects to turn invisible, or at least transparent. They recently received a patent from the US Patent and Trademark Office for a device meant to improve the visibility of drivers by removing existing and problematic "blindspots".

A malfunctioning net at a Cooke Aquaculture fish farm near Cypress Island in Washington State resulted in the release of some 305,000 10-pound Atlantic salmon over the weekend, The Seattle Times reports.  Exceptionally high tides and currents coinciding with this week’s solar eclipse caused the structural failure of a net pen which contained 3 million pounds of fish.  The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife is working with the fish farm to develop a complete spill-response plan, but for now has invited the public to help, with no limits on the size or number of Atlantic salmon that can be caught.

The eruption of a supervolcano is an extremely powerful, but also a very rare event. The first happened 25 million years ago, long before humans ever evolved. However, the last happened just 71,000 years ago, when Toba, located on the island of Sumatra, blew up.  The caldera of Toba, a hole visible even from space, formed when the volcano collapsed during the eruption. An estimated 1,700 cubic-miles of rock, a volume comparable to almost 3 million Empire State Buildings, were displaced by the eruption.

Spiders aren't domesticated, and attempts to make the silk proteins in other organisms haven't been entirely successful.  The silk, once you have it, doesn't always cooperate with modern manufacturing techniques.  But researchers in India figured out a way to get spider silk to play nicely with lasers. Under the right conditions, the silk itself helps amplify a laser's power, to the point where it can either cut the silk in specific locations, or soften it to the point where it can be bent or welded.

Britain's National Landscape Discovery Centre aims to recreate the area's rare grasslands.  Replicating this community of plants on the roof of the Sill is a botanical experiment, one that has never before been attempted. A shallow ramp leads up through grass and wildflowers, turning in an angular spiral as it rises, the gradient copying the gentle slope of the sill itself.  The planting changes as it goes, so that it becomes a journey across Northumberland's landscape from Hadrian's Wall to the salty coast.  Over 10,000 remarkable plants are being grown in special medium within a biodegradable mesh.

Using sediment cores, scientists from Rice University have determined that as recently as 15,000 years ago, the area of the western Ross Sea was covered by thick ice that later retreated hundreds of miles inland to its current location.  Maps created from state-of-the-art sonar data collected by the National Science Foundation research vessel Nathaniel B. Palmer revealed how the ice retreated during a period of global warming after Earth's last ice age. In several places, the maps show ancient water courses—not just a river system, but also the subglacial lakes that fed it.

When a team of recreational scuba divers spotted four whale sharks stuck in a fishing net, the animals were veiled by a thin mesh netting, facing certain death. Trapped just off the coast of Cenderawasih Bay, in West Papau, Indonesia, the huge fish were freed after a heroic effort to coax them out of the net. Whale sharks are the largest fish on Earth. The four sharks seen in the video were still juveniles, but adults can grow to be the size of a school bus.

Archaeologists have unearthed vessels portraying "Tree of Life" motifs in the Domuztepe Mound region of the settlement of Kahramanmaras.  Investigation has covered some very significant artifacts. Dr. Halil Tekin stated that the most fascinating find is undoubtedly the early examples of a tree motif, known as the “tree of life” in ancient Near East archaeology. “The origin of this tree, which has become the Christmas tree in the Christian world throughout time, is here in Mesopotamia. The earliest known example of it is in Domuztepe, from around 7000 BCE period,” Tekin said, pointing out the cultural significance of the Tree of Life motifs. “It is not an ordinary tree. It is related to a faith system, and a burial tradition."

While surveying the positions of over a billion stars, ESA's Gaia mission is also measuring their colour, which is a key diagnostic in studying the physical properties of stars. A new image provides a preview of Gaia's first full-colour all-sky map, which will be unleashed in its highest resolution with the next data release in 2018.

When it is carefully examined, rock art in the Namib Desert may shine light on forgotten rituals and practices from thousands of years ago. One particularly interesting feature appears to show ancient initiation rites meant to help young girls pass into womanhood. But you may not catch that view with your first glance of what appears to be a dancing female antelope. The representation of that female antelope, known as a kudu, has been interpreted as a symbol of girls learning how to behave as women in a hunter-gatherer society dwelling in the Namib Desert about 3000 years ago.

On September 1, an asteroid almost three miles wide named after Florence Nightingale will safely fly by Earth at a distance of 4.4 million miles. The last time it came closer to Earth was 1890 and the next time it will come anywhere near us will be 2500. Florence, is one of the biggest near-Earth objects (NEOs) currently being tracked by NASA and will be the largest to pass us at a relatively close distance since the space agency began monitoring them 20 years ago. It is classified as a “potentially hazardous” by the Minor Planet Center.

Archaeologists have made a sensational discovery during an archaeological excavation on the Danish island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea: two complete stones with cup mark stone carvings dating back to the early Stone Age.  This makes them the oldest known such cup mark petroglyphs in Scandinavia by about 1,200 years.  The carvings contain figures and symbols which have been cut, chipped, and ground, into the stone and were regarded as typical of the Bronze Age--the period following the Stone Age.  Many archaeologists suspected that they were in use long before this, and now they have the first evidence to prove it.

Italian magistrates have opened an inquiry into the cause of a fire that gutted an aristocrat's library in the southern city of Cosenza on Saturday, 19 August, killing three people and destroying ‘priceless’ works by the Renaissance philosopher Bernardino Telesio and letters to Galileo Galilei.  The leading Corriere della Sera newspaper described the private museum housing the collection of the Bilotti Ruggi D'aragona family as the most important library in southern Italy.  Telesio was once hailed by Francis Bacon, the English father of empiricism, as “the first of the moderns” among philosophers for his development of scientific method based on observation.