In the 1930s there was an advertisement for an oil company that went: "Stonehenge Wilts, but Shell goes on forever." In 2012, with oil supplies falling and the remnants of the iconic slabs indomitable on the windswept plains of Wiltshire, the truth is surely otherwise.
"The stones themselves still stand, enduring in a society which is not," argues Christopher Chippindale, of the University of Cambridge's museum of archaeology and anthropology, who is also author of the book Stonehenge Complete. Today the World Heritage's foremost lintelled sarsen structure is not just enduring but thriving, spawning more academic research, wild theorising, bouncy art, and pagan robe sales than ever. |  |
Summer solstice: Stonehenge was actually for 'Stone Age Christmas'
The historic stone monument has been commonly associated with the annual celebration of summer but a researcher has suggested the winter festival was more important.
Mike Parker Pearson, professor of archaeology at Sheffield University, suggested the midwinter solstice was historically when people would kill their animals and was more significant than the midsummer solstice. He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "In a way, we can look at the midwinter solstice as being a kind of neolithic Christmas. |  |
Japanese deer 'eavesdrop' on monkeys for food
Sika deer "eavesdrop" on monkey chatter in order to find food, say scientists.
A team from Kyoto University, Japan, tested how macaque monkey calls affected the feeding behaviour of the deer that live on Yakushima Island. Previous research has focussed on species "listening to" one another to avoid danger. But when scientists played macaque calls from hidden speakers, the deer gathered nearby, indicating that they associate the sounds with benefits. |  |
Turtles fossilised in sex embrace
Turtles killed as they were having sex and then fossilised in position have been described by scientists.
The remains of the 47-million-year old animals were unearthed in the famous Messel Pit near Darmstadt, Germany. They were found as male-female pairs. In two cases, the males even had their tails tucked under their partners' as would be expected from the coital position. Details are carried in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters. |  |
June 21 2012
Not enough hours in the day? Scientists predict time will stop completely
The theory of time running out was devised by researchers from two Spanish universities trying to explain why the universe appeared to be spreading continuously and accelerating.
Observations of supernovae, or exploding stars, found the movement of light indicated they were moving faster than those nearer to the centre of the universe. But the scientists claimed the accepted theory of an opposite force to gravity, known as dark energy, was wrong, and said the reality was that the growth of the universe was slowing. |  |
Animal Oracles Chase Perfect Score
Paul the Octopus got all his predictions right during the 2010 World Cup. But can his feat be matched? Several animal oracles are doing their best to run the slate during this year's European Football Championship tournament. And so far, three of them have a perfect record. All hail the otters!
When Paul the Octopus ran the slate of football prophesy during the 2010 World Cup, fans around the globe were astonished. How, everyone wondered, was it possible that a simple cephalopod living in a tank in Oberhausen, Germany could see the football future? Paul managed eight correct predictions in a row -- surely an unprecedented feat?. |  |
Tiny human liver grown inside mouse's head
It may be small, but is it perfectly formed? A tiny human liver, just 5 millimetres in size, has been grown inside a mouse. It remains to be seen whether the organ can replicate all liver functions – and if it will be possible to scale up the tiny structure to useable dimensions.
Hideki Taniguchi and Takanori Takebe at Yokohama City University generated induced pluripotent stem cells from human skin cellsMovie Camera, then encouraged them to develop into liver precursor cells. They added two more types of cell – mesenchymal cells, and endothelial cells from umbilical cord blood vessels. Without the aid of any underlying scaffold, the cells "guided themselves" and generated a microstructure almost identical to normal liver tissue, says Takebe. |  |
You Owe Your Life to Rock
Thank goodness for granite. If not for the formation and subsequent erosion of large quantities of metal-rich granite on a supercontinent that formed billions of years ago, the evolution of multicellular life—including us—could have been stifled or delayed, according to a new study.
For much of its history, life on Earth existed as only single-celled organisms. Certain proteins critical for multicellular life, and presumed to have been equally critical for its evolution from single-celled ancestors, require heavy-metal elements, especially copper, zinc, and molybdenum, says John Parnell, a geoscientist at the University of Aberdeen in the United Kingdom. |  |
Pictures: New Terra-Cotta Warriors—And Unprecedented Armor
With the greatest of care, archaeologists in early June clean the head of a terra-cotta warrior in the funerary complex of China's first emperor—one of more than a hundred life-size figures uncovered during the latest phase of the excavation, which began in 2009.
Archaeologists have also recently found terra-cotta horses, chariots, weaponry, and drums as well as the clay army's first known shield—proof of the equipment real-life soldiers would have carried. |  |
Massive Gold Trove Sparks Archeological Dispute
A 3,300-year-old treasure trove of gold found in northern Germany has stumped German archeologists. One theory suggests that traders transported it thousands of miles from a mine in Central Asia, but other experts are skeptical.
Archeologists in Germany have an unlikely new hero: former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. They have nothing but praise for the cigar-smoking veteran Social Democratic politician. |  |
Mammoth field found at Serbia coal mine 'great find for Ice Age knowledge'
Archaeologists have unearthed at least five mammoths at a site in Serbia. The discovery last week at Kostolac coal mine, east of the Serbian capital of Belgrade, is the first of its kind in the region and could offer important insights into how the ice age affected the area now known as the Balkans. Miomir Korac, of Serbia's Archaeology Institute, said: "There are millions of mammoth fragments in the world, but they are rarely so accessible for exploration."
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Sale of $1 Million Dinosaur Skeleton Is Halted After Origin Questioned
An international legal dispute over a dinosaur skeleton sprouted last month from an innocent stack of mail at the American Museum of Natural History.
Mark A. Norell, who heads the museum’s paleontology division, was flipping through letters and packages in his office atop one of the museum’s turrets when he noticed an alarming curiosity in a catalog of scheduled auctions in Manhattan: a perfectly assembled Tyrannosaurus bataar skeleton. |  |
New Technology Reveals Invisible Details in Renaissance Art
We’ve all heard it too many times to count: Don’t judge a book by its cover. A new technology indicates that we may have to start taking this approach when we look at historic artworks, too.
As detailed in a paper published yesterday in the journal Optics Express, a team of Italian scientists has pioneered a new way of revealing layers of paint and other materials that are invisible to the naked eye. The researchers applied their technique to a pair of legendary works of art: frescoes painted by the Zavattari family in the Chapel of Theodelinda, near Milan, and “The Resurrection” by the Italian Renaissance artist Piero della Francesca. The technology uncovered previously undetectable details in both of the works, such as pigments in the subjects’ armor that had been painted over during previous restorations. |  |
Tour the Tomb of NASA’s First and Last Nuclear Reactor
Where a crown jewel once stood in NASA’s ambitious plans for human space exploration now lies a decontaminated nuclear grave.
Current laws bar NASA from building or researching nuclear devices. Yet in a bygone era five decades ago, the space agency’s future was dependent on one: the Plum Brook Reactor Facility in Sandusky, Ohio. |  |
China now third country to carry astronauts to an orbital space station
Early this morning at 2:07am EDT the Chinese crew of Shenzhou-9, China's 3-person orbital spacecraft, achieved China's first-ever space dock with their Tiangong-1 space station. In doing so, China became the third country to carry astronauts (or taikonauts) to an orbital space station, and at least a billion people celebrated. The flight also brought with it China's first woman into space.
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Where Do People Flee When Disaster Strikes?
Madame Bertil, 88, packed up what little she had left in the one-story house her son had built for her and prepared to leave Port-au-Prince. It was 21 January 2010, 8 days after a magnitude-7.0 earthquake ravaged the capital of Haiti, killing between 65,000 and 300,000 people and leaving over 1.8 million people homeless. Scared and unsure, Bertil called her brother Luca and made arrangements to stay with him almost 160 km away in the district of Acul du Nord. It would be 7 months before she returned to the capital. Bertil was just one of the more than 630,000 Port-au-Prince residents who fled the city—some leaving with nothing, not even shoes—in the aftermath of the earthquake.
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New Data on Elusive Particle Shrouded in Secrecy
Dr. Higgs, I presume?
A team of physicists gathered in a room at CERN on Friday to begin crunching new data from the Large Hadron Collider this year. And they will be at it all week.
What they are seeing nobody knows.
A team of physicists gathered in a room at CERN on Friday to begin crunching new data from the Large Hadron Collider this year. And they will be at it all week.
What they are seeing nobody knows.
Eat less meat to save planet, researchers warn
Eating less meat, particularly beef, recycling more waste and devoting more farmland to crops which can generate biofuels are essential if the world is to combat climate change, experts warned.
Failure to make our farms more efficient would leave us unable to feed the growing world population and potentially lead to an ecological disaster with ever more dangerous levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, they said. Drawing up models of how changes in our diet could impact on farming by 2050, the Exeter University team found that a "high-meat, low-efficiency" situation would increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 55 parts in a million. |  |