Archaeologists find traces of 2,500-year old chocolate
Experts have long thought cacao beans and pods were mainly used in pre-Hispanic cultures as a beverage, made either by crushing the beans and mixing them with liquids or fermenting the pulp that surrounds the beans in the pod. Such a drink was believed to have been reserved for the elite.
But the discovery announced this week by Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History expands the envelope of how chocolate may have been used in ancient Mexico. |  |
Curiosity rover: Why is Nasa so curious about Gale Crater?
Early on Monday morning, Nasa's Curiosity rover will attempt a hazardous landing on the Martian surface. It will take seven minutes from the capsule hitting the top of the atmosphere at six kilometres per second to the van-sized vehicle being placed gently on the ground.
A heat shield to withstand heating to 1,600C, the largest and strongest supersonic parachute yet built, and finally a new piece of kit called the Sky Crane will all be used. |  |
Persistent near-tropical warmth on Antarctic continent during early Eocene epoch
The warmest global climates of the past 65 million years occurred during the early Eocene epoch (about 55 to 48 million years ago), when the Equator-to-pole temperature gradients were much smaller than today1, 2 and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were in excess of one thousand parts per million by volume3, 4. Recently the early Eocene has received considerable interest because it may provide insight into the response of Earth’s climate and biosphere to the high atmospheric carbon dioxide levels that are expected in the near future5 as a consequence of unabated anthropogenic carbon emissions.
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Human cycles: History as science
Sometimes, history really does seem to repeat itself. After the US Civil War, for example, a wave of urban violence fuelled by ethnic and class resentment swept across the country, peaking in about 1870. Internal strife spiked again in around 1920, when race riots, workers' strikes and a surge of anti-Communist feeling led many people to think that revolution was imminent. And in around 1970, unrest crested once more, with violent student demonstrations, political assassinations, riots and terrorism.
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Elephants sing low the same way humans do
Mammals produce sounds in two ways, either via the flow of air over vocal folds (vocal chords), as in humans and many other mammals, or via active muscular contractions as in the cat’s purr. Until now no one has been sure how elephants produce their lowest tones, but a new study has solved the mystery.
African elephants produce "infrasounds," which are low-frequency (<20 Hz) vocalizations capable of travelling up to 10 kilometers. Their frequency is usually too low for them to be audible to the human ear. |  |
Natural immunity may protect Peruvians from rabies
A group of Peruvians thought to have survived untreated rabies infection have bucked the notion that the virus is universally lethal to humans.
A team led by Amy Gilbert of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in collaboration with the Peruvian Ministry of Health, travelled to two communities in a remote part of the Peruvian Amazon. Outbreaks of rabies infection caused by bites from vampire bats have occurred regularly in Peru over the past couple of decades. |  |
Your Sneeze is a Biological Response to Nose's 'Blue Screen of Death'
New research suggests that sneezing is the body's natural reboot and that patients with disorders of the nose such as sinusitis can't reboot, explaining why they sneeze more often than others.
Who would have thought that our noses and Microsoft Windows' infamous blue screen of death could have something in common? But that's the case being made by a new research report appearing online in The FASEB Journal. Specifically, scientists now know exactly why we sneeze, what sneezing should accomplish, and what happens when sneezing does not work properly. |  |
Cavers find mass fossil deposit Down Under
Australian scientists said Wednesday cavers had stumbled upon a vast network of tunnels containing fossils that could offer key insights into species' adaptation to climate change.
The limestone caves in Australia's far north contained what University of Queensland paleontologist Gilbert Price described as a "fossil goldmine" of species ranging from minute rodents and frogs to giant kangaroos. |  |
Neandertals Didn't Bite the Volcanic Dust
About 40,000 years ago, a huge volcanic eruption west of what is now Naples, Italy, showered ash over much of central and Eastern Europe. Some researchers have suggested that this super-eruption, combined with a sharp cold spell that hit the Northern Hemisphere at the same time, created a "volcanic winter" that did in the Neandertals. But a new study of microscopic particles of volcanic glass left behind by the explosion concludes that the eruption happened after the Neandertals were already mostly gone, putting the blame for their extinction on competition with modern humans.
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Crusader's Hoard found in ruins: trove of gold coins uncovered in 13th century cast
A team of researchers from Tel Aviv University has uncovered a hoard of real-life buried treasure at the Crusader castle of Arsur (also known as Apollonia), a stronghold located between the ancient ports of Jaffa and Caesarea, in use from 1241 to its destruction in 1265. The hoard, comprised of 108 gold coins, mostly dinars dated to the Fatimid Period (ca. 900 to 1100 AD), was discovered in a pot by a university student. The coins bear the names of sultans and blessings, and usually include a date and a mint name that indicates where a coin was struck.
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variation and ancient interbreeding
Human diversity in Africa is greater than any place else on Earth. Differing food sources, geographies, diseases and climates offered many targets for natural selection to exert powerful forces on Africans to change and adapt to their local environments. The individuals who adapted best were the most likely to reproduce and pass on their genomes to the generations who followed.
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In Acre, an ancient dock emerges from the sea
The remains of a 2,300-year-old naval pier have been uncovered in Acre, adding to the coastal city’s long and varied history by showing it was a substantial port in the Hellenistic period.
The remains, unveiled at the site by the Israel Antiquities Authority on Tuesday, were uncovered by marine archaeologists this month during restoration work on Acre’s southern seawall. The remains appear to be a dry dock on which ships would have been pulled out of the water for maintenance, according to Kobi Sharvit, the IAA’s chief marine archaeologist. They include a ramp 5 meters (yards) wide between two stone walls, with a groove in the middle to fit the bottom of a ship’s hull and a mooring stone to which a vessel would have been tied. |  |
A Portal to the Heavens
Visitors to Rome overwhelmed by all it has to offer—"the abundance of its pasts" in the words of the poet Rilke—can find relief with a stop at the Pantheon. Embodying the city's pagan and Christian identities, the Pantheon is Rome in microcosm.
Built in the second century by the Emperor Hadrian as a temple to all the Roman gods, it is the only major work of Roman Imperial architecture still intact. It owes its survival to having been consecrated a Christian church (Santa Maria ad Martyres) in the seventh century, which placed it under papal protection. |  |
Britain's sacred ground resurrected and restored
Hartcliffe is not the first place you’d look for holy ground. A vast, deprived, post-war housing estate on the southern edge of Bristol – reputedly one of the most problematic in Britain – it long ago lost its major employer, a tobacco company, and then was told it was to lose its church, too.
But the battered community revolted: the brutish, decaying concrete St Andrew’s might not be pretty, but after decades of baptisms and marriages, festivals and funerals, it had driven roots into apparently stony soil. And, with a clutch of real trees of its own, it provided a rare splash of green. |  |
Clues to 3,400-Year-Old Mystery
Israeli archaeologists have recently unearthed a palace at the Tel Hatzor National Park in Upper Galilee, revealing rare findings – jugs containing scorched wheat from some 3,400 years ago.
The find provides still more tangible evidence of the destruction of Canaanite city of Hatzor, an event dated at the mid-13th century B.C.E. The jugs were found during the excavation of storerooms in what archaeologists say was a palace. In addition to the jugs, many other artifacts found at the site testify to a large fire that raged through the palace – sooty walls, bricks that burned and became rock-hard from the extreme heat, a ceiling that collapsed and burnt cedar wood beams. |  |
'Seeds' of Supermassive Black Holes Discovered
We've found small black holes and we've found really, really big black holes. But what about the "inbetweener" black holes?
The very existence of this class of black hole is disputed, but a Japanese group of astronomers have found the potential locations of three intermediate black hole (IMBH) candidates inside previously unknown star clusters near the center of the Milky Way. But what are IMBHs and why are they so important? |
Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer claims huge cosmic ray haul
The largest-ever experiment in space has reported the collection of some 18 billion "cosmic ray" events that may help unravel the Universe's mysteries.
The data haul is far greater than the total number of cosmic rays recorded in a full century of looking to date. Run from a centre at Cern, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) aims to spot dark matter and exotic antimatter. The astronauts who installed it on the space station in 2011 are in Geneva to see an update on how it is performing. |  |
Kolodny’s In Search of First Contact Rewrites History, and Then Some
In her extraordinary book In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery (Duke University Press Books, 2012), internationally renowned literary critic Annette Kolodny takes a fine-tooth comb to two medieval Icelandic sagas. Untangling the myths, politics and conventional history surrounding the “discovery” of Turtle Island, she reveals the narratives of Europeans’ first contact with the Indigenous Peoples of America—500 years before Christopher Columbus set foot there.
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Yes, Fish Get Skin Cancer, Too
Maybe it's time fish use sunblock. A new study has found the first skin cancers in wild fish, specifically in coral, bar-cheeked, and blue spotted trout swimming on Australia's Great Barrier Reef. The lesions and dark patches are a scalier version of what melanomas look like on humans, but it's unclear whether they make the animals unsafe to eat.
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The Double Dinosaur Brain Myth
There’s no shortage of dinosaur myths. Paleontologist Dave Hone recently compiled a list of eight persistent falsehoods over at the Guardian–from the misapprehension that all dinosaurs were huge to the untenable idea that Tyrannosaurus could only scavenge its meals–but there was one particular misunderstanding that caught my attention. For decades, popular articles and books claimed that the armor-plated Stegosaurus and the biggest of the sauropod dinosaurs had second brains in their rumps. These dinosaurs, it was said, could reason “a posteriori” thanks to the extra mass of tissue. It was a cute idea, but a totally wrong hypothesis that actually underscores a different dinosaur mystery.
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Ancient Climate Change: Antarctica Was Once Covered with Palm Trees
Known for its expansive glaciers and the coldest temperatures on Earth, the Antarctica of today is a far cry from its tenure as a subtropical paradise 53 million years ago, replete with palm trees, summer highs near 25°C (77 F), and frost-free winters sitting near 10°C (50 F) despite the endless darkness.
Describing a recent study lead by Jörg Pross, Jason Palmer writes about the anomalous warm bubble known as the Eocene, noting that soaring atmospheric carbon dioxide levels drove the global average temperature to increase by 5°C. Drilling into an offshore site near Wilkes Land, a part of eastern Antarctica that lies south of Australia, Pross and his team collected sediment from deep below the sea floor that was laid down and subsequently buried over the past 53 million years. |  |
Test Flight Could Revolutionize Archaeological Mapping
Archaeological sites that currently take years to map will be completed in minutes if tests underway in Peru of a new system being developed at Vanderbilt University go well.
The Aurora Flight Sciences unmanned aerial vehicle will be integrated into a larger system that combines the flying device that can fit into a backpack with a software system that can discern an optimal flight pattern and transform the resulting data into three-dimensional maps. The project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between Vanderbilt archaeologist Steven Wernke and engineering professor Julie A. Adams. They call it SUAVe – for Semi-autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. It was partially financed by an Interdisciplinary Discovery Grant from Vanderbilt. |  |
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