China submersible breaks 7,000-metre mark
A manned Chinese submersible broke through the 7,000-metre mark for a new national record on Sunday, state media said, as the rising Asian nation showed off its technological might.
The "Jiaolong" craft dived 7,015 metres (23,015 feet) in the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean on its fourth dive since arriving in the area earlier this month, the official Xinhua news agency said. The dive came on the same day as China was attempting its first manual space docking, a complex manoeuvre that will bring the country a step closer to building a space station. |  |
When Mammals Ate Dinosaurs
What dinosaurs ate, and how they ate it, is an endless source of fascination. Whether it’s the predatory habits of Tyrannosaurus rex or how sauropods managed to horf down enough food to fuel their bulky bodies, the details of dinosaurs’ paleo diets fuel scientific study and dinosaur restorations alike. If basic cable documentaries have taught me anything, it’s that dinosaurs were all about eating.
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How Do We Know What’s in the Earth’s Core? PM Explains
It’s a common refrain that the ocean depths are the last great frontier of the Earth. Yet there’s a place that’s even more inhospitable to humans than the crushing depths of the sea: our planet’s interior. It’s made of iron, in some places it’s 10,000 degrees F, and plenty of scientists devote their life’s work to understanding it. But how exactly do you conduct research on an impenetrable, hostile environment like the Earth’s core?
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Human Evolution Discoveries in Iraq
Iraq is the home of the Fertile Crescent, the Cradle of Civilization. But the country’s importance in human history goes back even further, to the time of the Neanderthals. In 1951, American archaeologist Ralph Solecki discovered Neanderthal remains in Shanidar Cave. The cave sits in the Zagros Mountains in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq, about 250 miles north of Baghdad. From 1951 to 1960, Solecki and colleagues excavated the cave and recovered fossils belonging to 10 individuals dating to between 65,000 and 35,000 years ago.
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Underwater archaeologists get education far away from the sea
Although the city is 250 kilometers away from the sea Konya’s Selçuk University runs Turkey’s only underwater archaeology department. The head of the department, says it sheds light on underwater richness
Turkey’s first underwater archaeology department isn’t located near the sea, but resides at Selçuk University in the central Anatolian province of Konya, 250 kilometers away from the sea. Students in the department are trained to carry out all kinds of underwater research and excavations. |  |
Hammer vandals damage 5,500-year-old 'Stone of Destiny'
GARDAI are hunting vandals who attacked a 5,500-year-old standing stone at the Hill of Tara in Co Meath with a hammer.
Damage has been caused in 11 places on all four faces of the Lia Fail Standing Stone -- also know as the 'Stone of Destiny' -- which is mentioned in ancient texts about the High Kings of Ireland.
Damage has been caused in 11 places on all four faces of the Lia Fail Standing Stone -- also know as the 'Stone of Destiny' -- which is mentioned in ancient texts about the High Kings of Ireland.
Cave art suggests that Neanderthals weren't such Neanderthals, after all
New tests show that crude Spanish cave paintings of a red sphere and handprints are the oldest in the world, so ancient they may not have been by modern man.
Some scientists say they might have even been made by the much-maligned Neanderthals, but others disagree. Testing the coating of paintings in 11 Spanish caves, researchers found that one is at least 40,800 years old, which is at least 15,000 years older than previously thought. That makes them older than the more famous French cave paintings by thousands of years. |  |
Pentagon’s Prosthetic Plan: Tap Spinal Fluid to Fuel Fake Limbs
The prostheses of the future will be powered by spinal fluid.
At least that’s the idea of one group of MIT researchers, who are working with Pentagon funding to create fluid, lifelike, neurally mediated prosthetic limbs. They’ve already designed the brain-implant portion of such a prosthetic, which is meant to interface with the brain’s neurons and communicate those signals to the artificial limb. Now they’ve come up with novel new fuel cells to power that implant … by squeezing energy out of the patient’s own spinal fluid. The team, whose research is partly funded by the Office of Naval Research and Darpa, this week published a paper that describes a prototype of its spinal-fluid-sucking strategy. |  |
4,000 year-old necropolis found in southern Serbia
VRANJE -- An early-Bronze-Age necropolis has been found in the vicinity of the southern Serbian city of Vranje.
A team of experts from the Archeological Institute of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences (SANU) and the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade have discovered the necropolis. It is located at the Manište dig in the village of Ranutovac, three kilometers north of Vranje, on the route of Corridor 10. |  |
Monmouth ruin find could pre-date pyramids
Archaeologists claim to have unearthed the remnants of a large prehistoric building, which they say could be older than Egypt's pyramids.
Experts said they were mystified by the "unique" find on the site of a housing development in Monmouth. Monmouth Archaeology, which found the wooden foundations, said they dated to at least the Bronze Age, but could be early Neolithic, about 6,500 years old. It said the pyramids were built about 4,500 years ago. |  |
13th century volcano mystery may be solved
SELFOSS, Iceland — One of the biggest mysteries in volcanology may finally have a solution. An eruption long thought to have gone off in the year 1258, spreading cooling sulfur particles around the globe, happened the year before in Indonesia, scientists report.
Until now, researchers have known a big volcano went off somewhere in the world around that time, but they didn’t know exactly where or when. |  |
The Ax Murderer Who Got Away
Shortly after midnight on June 10, 1912—one hundred years ago this week—a stranger hefting an ax lifted the latch on the back door of a two-story timber house in the little Iowa town of Villisca. The door was not locked—crime was not the sort of thing you worried about in a modestly prosperous Midwest settlement of no more than 2,000 people, all known to one another by sight—and the visitor was able to slip inside silently and close the door behind him. Then, according to a reconstruction attempted by the town coroner next day, he took an oil lamp from a dresser, removed the chimney and placed it out of the way under a chair, bent the wick in two to minimize the flame, lit the lamp, and turned it down so low it cast only the faintest glimmer in the sleeping house.
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Small, cheap black-hole hunter could be new NASA model
You don't have to be big to hunt black holes. NASA's telescope NuSTAR, which was due to take off from an island in the South Pacific on 13 June, is small enough to fit beneath the belly of an aircraft, even including its launch rocket. Once in orbit, it will unfold to the length of a school bus.
The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array will be the first telescope to bring high-energy X-rays into focus, letting astronomers map and study the extreme physics around black holes and the explosions of massive stars. Its images of these objects will be 10 times crisper and 100 times more sensitive than those of previous telescopes. |  |
Data from Voyager 1 point to interstellar future
Data from NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft indicate that the venerable deep-space explorer has encountered a region in space where the intensity of charged particles from beyond our solar system has markedly increased. Voyager scientists looking at this rapid rise draw closer to an inevitable but historic conclusion - that humanity's first emissary to interstellar space is on the edge of our solar system.
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Amazon was not all manufactured landscape, Smithsonian scientist says
Population estimates for the Amazon basin just before Europeans arrived range from 2 to 10 million people. The newly reported reconstruction of Amazonian prehistory by Smithsonian scientist Dolores R. Piperno and colleagues suggests that large areas of western Amazonia were sparsely inhabited. This clashes with the belief that most of Amazonia, including forests far removed from major rivers, was heavily occupied and modified. The team's research is published in the June 15 issue of Science.
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Once We Wire It Up, What Will the Ocean Tell Us?
John Delaney stepped out onto the deck of the Thomas G. Thompson shortly 
before dawn one day last August and paused to look at Puget Sound, an evergreen-lined inlet near Seattle that meanders out to the Pacific. As the ship made its way toward the ocean, he glanced at the white peaks of the Olympic Mountains with a knowing eye. “Those rocks were created on the seafloor, distilled from molten material from the mantle,” he said. “They were part of a tectonic plate that got jammed up onto the continent.” He watched as the glassy, protected waters of the sound gave way to ripples and sparkling wavelets, hints of the interplay between wind and sea and the currents that course around the globe.
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Mystery Mini Space Shuttle X-37B Lands in California
The mysterious unmanned mini-space shuttle on a classified mission has finally returned to earth.
It landed early Saturday morning at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California after weather conditions kept pushing back landing attempts the last few days. The Air Force's X-37B, is an unmanned reusable spacecraft built by Boeing that has spent more than a year on a classified mission in space. |  |
Robots Enter the Job Market
For all the speech lines we hear about jobs these days, rarely does anyone mention robots.
They do occasionally, but usually it’s saved for the “innovation” speeches. This is understandable. If you’re running for office, better to keep the two ideas separated, because while jobs are good because they’re, well, jobs, and robots are good because they mean progress, mix the two together and soon enough people will start asking how you’ll be able to create a lot of jobs if these really smart machines are doing more and more of the work. |  |
What is So Good About Growing Old
Even as certain mental skills decline with age—what was that guy’s name again?—scientists are finding the mind gets sharper at a number of vitally important abilities. In a University of Illinois study, older air traffic controllers excelled at their cognitively taxing jobs, despite some losses in short-term memory and visual spatial processing. How so? They were expert at navigating, juggling multiple aircraft simultaneously and avoiding collisions.
People also learn how to deal with social conflicts more effectively. For a 2010 study, researchers at the Univer- sity of Michigan presented “Dear Abby” letters to 200 people and asked what advice they would give. Subjects in their 60s were better than younger ones at imagining different points of view, thinking of multiple resolutions and suggesting compromises. |  |
Roman jewelry found in Kyoto tomb
Glass jewelry believed to have been made by Roman craftsmen has been found in an ancient tomb near Kyoto, researchers said, in a sign the empire's influence may have reached the edge of Asia.
Tests have revealed that three glass beads discovered in the fifth-century Utsukushi burial mound in Nagaoka, Kyoto Prefecture, were probably made sometime between the first and fourth centuries A.D., according to the Nara National Research Institute for Cultural Properties. The government-backed institute has recently finished analyzing components of the 5-mm glass beads, which have tiny fragments of gilt attached. |  |