Pharaonic princess's tomb found near Cairo, Egypt
CAIRO (AP) — Czech archaeologists have unearthed the 4,500-year-old tomb of a Pharaonic princess south of Cairo, in a finding that suggests other undiscovered tombs may be in the area, an official from Egypt's antiquities ministry said Saturday.
Mohammed El-Bialy, who heads the Egyptian and Greco-Roman Antiquities department at the Antiquities Ministry, said that Princess Shert Nebti's burial site is surrounded by the tombs of four high officials from the Fifth Dynasty dating to around 2,500 BC in the Abu Sir complex near the famed step pyramid of Saqqara.
Mohammed El-Bialy, who heads the Egyptian and Greco-Roman Antiquities department at the Antiquities Ministry, said that Princess Shert Nebti's burial site is surrounded by the tombs of four high officials from the Fifth Dynasty dating to around 2,500 BC in the Abu Sir complex near the famed step pyramid of Saqqara.
'Dwajastambham' of ancient temple collapses
PALAKOLLU, WEST GODAVARI: The 150-feet 'dwajasthambham' of the 300-year-old Ksheera Ramalingeswara Swamy temple in Palakollu of West Godavari collapsed in the early hours of Friday due to heavy rains. The temple is one of the five famous Pancharamams in the state.
"When I saw it collapsing on power lines at around 7.30 am, I immediately called up electricity department officials and asked them to switch off power supply," temple priest Suribabu said.
"When I saw it collapsing on power lines at around 7.30 am, I immediately called up electricity department officials and asked them to switch off power supply," temple priest Suribabu said.
In-Sync Brain Waves Hold Memory of Objects Just Seen
The brain holds in mind what has just been seen by synchronizing brain waves in a working memory circuit, an animal study supported by the National Institutes of Health suggests. The more in-sync such electrical signals of neurons were in two key hubs of the circuit, the more those cells held the short-term memory of a just-seen object.
Charles Gray, Ph.D., of Montana State University, Bozeman, a grantee of NIH's National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), and colleagues, report their findings Nov. 1, 2012, online, in the journal Science Express. |  |
Mysterious Grid Patterns in China's Deserts Explained
A mysterious grid of dots spanning several miles of Western China's sand dunes like a giant chessboard may be the result of geological surveys for nickel mines, according to new analysis of satellite images of the area.
"In the satellite maps, we can see a man-made texture on the soil, a huge band which seems created by relatively small holes or mounds," wrote the study author, Amelia Carolina Sparavigna, a physicist at Italy's Polytechnic University of Turin, on Oct. 25 on the website arXiv.org, ahead of publication to a scientific journal. "This curious texture on the desert soil was probably produced by the pinpointing of geophysical [research].". |  |
Reserve is haven for study of Brazil's Atlantic rainforest
Brazil's Salto Morato Nature Preserve is a haven for scientists studying the dwindling Atlantic rainforest, an area less renowned than the Amazon forest but just as biologically diverse and equally threatened by human encroachment.
The preserve in Guaraquecaba, in the southeastern state of Parana, covers a corner of what was once a huge littoral rainforest known as the Mata Atlantica. The Mata covered 1.3-million square kilometers, or about a quarter the size of the Amazon rainforest, when Portuguese colonizers arrived in the 16th century. |  |
Why Mars Life Hunt Targets Methane
The hunt for life on Mars took a new turn today (Nov. 2), with the news that NASA's Mars rover Curiosity detected no methane in its first few sniffs of Red Planet air.
The search for Red Planet life has long been intertwined with the search for methane, which is why so many scientists and laypeople alike were probably disappointed by the initial atmospheric readings from Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars instrument, or SAM. |  |
Asteroid belts could show us where intelligent life is hiding in the galaxy
If we want to find intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, it might be wise to look for stars with asteroid belts similar the one in our own Solar System.
According to the theory of punctuated equilibrium, evolution goes faster and further when life has to make rapid changes to survive new environments -- and few things have as dramatic an effect on the environment as an asteroid impact. If humans evolved thanks to asteroid impacts, intelligent life might need an asteroid belt like our own to provide just the right number of periodic hits to spur evolution on. Only a fraction of current exoplanet systems have these characteristics, meaning places like our own Solar System -- and intelligent aliens -- might be less common than we previously thought. |  |
No Potatoes?!? Will Climate Change Force Us To Change What We Eat?
The United Nations committee on world food security has issued an alarming new report on the impact of global warming: we may have to stop eating potatoes and get used to bananas instead.
Based on research by the CGIAR agricultural partnership, the committee published a policy briefing this October explaining that given the diverse impacts of climate change — of which Superstorm Sandy is arguably one such freak example — we may be forced to change what we eat. |  |
NASA Curiosity Close to Solving Mystery of Mars' Missing Atmosphere
NASA's Curiosity rover has taken significant steps toward understanding how Mars may have lost much of its original atmosphere. Learning what happened to the Martian atmosphere will help scientists assess whether the planet ever was habitable. The present atmosphere of Mars is 100 times thinner than Earth's. A set of instruments aboard the rover has ingested and analyzed samples of the atmosphere collected near the "Rocknest" site in Gale Crater where the rover is stopped for research.
|
The Ancient Glaciers of Mars --Is the Red Planet Between Ice Ages?
"Mars is not a dead planet -it undergoes climate changes that are even more pronounced than on Earth," according to James Head, planetary geologist, Brown University.
The image above was taken on 6 June 2012 by ESA’s Mars Express --combined to form a natural-color view of Nereidum Montes. Undulations in crater floors are commonly seen in mid-latitude regions on Mars and are believed to be a result of glacial movement. This perspective view highlights many of the rippled sand dunes which form on the leeward (wind-sheltered) sides of mounds and canyons, as well as the lobate and fan-shaped surface around the impact crater which dominates the lower portion of the image.
The image above was taken on 6 June 2012 by ESA’s Mars Express --combined to form a natural-color view of Nereidum Montes. Undulations in crater floors are commonly seen in mid-latitude regions on Mars and are believed to be a result of glacial movement. This perspective view highlights many of the rippled sand dunes which form on the leeward (wind-sheltered) sides of mounds and canyons, as well as the lobate and fan-shaped surface around the impact crater which dominates the lower portion of the image.
WHO DIDN'T HAVE SEX WITH NEANDERTHALS?
The only modern humans whose ancestors did not interbreed with Neanderthals are apparently sub-Saharan Africans, researchers say.
New findings suggest modern North Africans carry genetic traces from Neanderthals, modern humanity's closest known extinct relatives. Although modern humans are the only surviving members of the human lineage, others once roamed the Earth, including the Neanderthals. Genetic analysis of these extinct lineages' fossils has revealed they once interbred with our ancestors, with recent estimates suggesting that Neanderthal DNA made up 1 percent to 4 percent of modern Eurasian genomes. Although this sex apparently only rarely produced offspring, this mixing was enough to endow some people with the robust immune systems they enjoy today. |  |
If Meteorite Hit 13 Million Years Earlier, Dinosaurs Might Still be Around
Jonathan Mitchell, a Ph.D. student on the University of Chicago's Committee on Evolutionary Biology, Peter Roopnarine of the California Academy of Sciences, and Kenneth Angielczyk of the Field Museum have collaborated to produce a fascinating simulations-based analysis of the factors that helped dinosaurs go extinct en masse at the close of the Cretaceous era.
The authors used a food web program they wrote, which looked at dozens of species. They looked to lay to rest debates about dinosaurs' diet (e.g. did a T. rex eat Triceratops, Duck-Billed dinosaurs, or a mixture of both?) by carrying out a number of simulations with each possibility considered. A total of 17 food webs, based on species alive at the time, were inspected. |  |
Have India’s poor become human guinea pigs?
Drug companies are facing mounting pressure to investigate reports that new medicines are being tested on some of the poorest people in India without their knowledge.
"We were surprised," Nitu Sodey recalls about taking her mother-in-law Chandrakala Bai to Maharaja Yeshwantrao Hospital in Indore in May 2009. |  |
Scientific fraud is rife: it's time to stand up for good science
Science is broken. Psychology was rocked recently by stories of academics making up data, sometimes overshadowing whole careers. And it isn't the only discipline with problems - the current record for fraudulent papers is held by anaesthesiologist Yoshitaka Fujii, with 172 faked articles.
These scandals highlight deeper cultural problems in academia. Pressure to turn out lots of high-quality publications not only promotes extreme behaviours, it normalises the little things, like the selective publication of positive novel findings – which leads to "non-significant" but possibly true findings sitting unpublished on shelves, and a lack of much needed replication studies. |  |
Japanese Airport Reopens After Bomb Scare
An undetonated bomb was found Tuesday near a runway at a northern Japanese airport. The 550-pound bomb, thought to be a dud, is believed to have been dropped from U.S. forces during the Second World War. The device still appears to have a working detonator, so officials are proceeding with caution.
Sendai Airport canceled all of its 92 domestic and international flights on Tuesday. The airport reopened Wednesday, but not before building a 10-foot high concrete wall to prevent the bomb from being triggered. While experts figure out how to discard or safely detonate the bomb, authorities have re-directed all traffic to the main runway. |  |
Measurements retroactively force photons to be both wave and particle
One of the stranger features of the quantum world is that light—even individual photons—can behave as a wave or a particle, depending on how you measure it. But, according to papers released by Science today, the quantum weirdness doesn't end there. Researchers have now found a way to put a photon in a quantum superposition where it is both a wave and a particle at the same time. Worse still, one setup allows them to determine the photon's nature as a wave or particle after it has gone through an apparatus where it must act as one or the other.
Got that? Didn't think so, so let's go through it in more detail. |  |
HOBBIT BANNED AS TITLE OF LECTURE ON PREHISTORIC ‘HOBBIT’
It was, perhaps, inevitable that Homo floresiensis, the three-foot-tall species of primitive human discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores, would come to be widely known as “hobbits”. After all, like JRR Tolkien’s creation, they were “a little people, about half our height”. But a New Zealand scientist planning an event about the species has been banned from describing the ancient people as “hobbits” by the company which owns the film rights to The Hobbit.
Dr Brent Alloway, associate professor at Victoria University, is planning a free lecture next month at which two of the archaeologists involved in the discovery of Homo floresiensis in 2003, Professor Mike Morwood and Thomas Sutikna, will speak about the species. The talk is planned to coincide with the premiere of The Hobbit film, and Alloway had planned to call the lecture “The Other Hobbit”, as Homo floresiensis is commonly known.
Dr Brent Alloway, associate professor at Victoria University, is planning a free lecture next month at which two of the archaeologists involved in the discovery of Homo floresiensis in 2003, Professor Mike Morwood and Thomas Sutikna, will speak about the species. The talk is planned to coincide with the premiere of The Hobbit film, and Alloway had planned to call the lecture “The Other Hobbit”, as Homo floresiensis is commonly known.
NEOLITHIC MONUMENT UNEARTHED IN CORNWALL
Archaeologists working at the site of the future Truro Eastern District Centre (TEDC) in Cornwall, southwest England, have discovered the fragmentary remains of a prehistoric enclosure built around 5,500 years ago.
Initial surveys of the site were carried out in 2009, with a condition of the planning approval being to carry out further archaeological research. Preliminary findings from the excavations, led by Cornwall Council’s Historic Environment Service, suggest the eastern end of the site may represent a henge or possible causewayed enclosure dating to the early Neolithic period (circa 3800 to 3600BCE).
Initial surveys of the site were carried out in 2009, with a condition of the planning approval being to carry out further archaeological research. Preliminary findings from the excavations, led by Cornwall Council’s Historic Environment Service, suggest the eastern end of the site may represent a henge or possible causewayed enclosure dating to the early Neolithic period (circa 3800 to 3600BCE).
The future of bike tires could be airless
Airless tires have been proposed and demonstrated for cars many times, but one company is showing off a sophisticated new version intended for bicycles. Is this the end for bike pumps, or are the company's claims overinflated?
Britek Tire and Rubber has been working on an airless car tire for years that it calls the Energy Return Wheel. A rubber tread and sidewall is stretched over an internal scaffolding of rods and cushions that allows the tire to give — and, the company claims, lose less energy to bumps and other compressions.
Britek Tire and Rubber has been working on an airless car tire for years that it calls the Energy Return Wheel. A rubber tread and sidewall is stretched over an internal scaffolding of rods and cushions that allows the tire to give — and, the company claims, lose less energy to bumps and other compressions.
No comments:
Post a Comment