Possible Egyptian pyramids found using Google Earth
Two unidentified, possible pyramid complexes have been located with satellite imagery from Google Earth.
One of the complex sites contains a distinct, four-sided, truncated, pyramidal shape that is approximately 140 feet in width. This site contains three smaller mounds in a very clear formation, similar to the diagonal alignment of the Giza Plateau pyramids. The second possible site contains four mounds with a larger, triangular-shaped plateau. The two larger mounds at this site are approximately 250 feet in width, with two smaller mounds approximately 100 feet in width. This site complex is arranged in a very clear formation with the large plateau, or butte, nearby in a triangular shape with a width of approximately 600 feet. |  |
'Paparazzi on Mars' snap Curiosity parachuting
Thousands of humans weren't the only ones with eyes trained on NASA's newest Mars rover last night: one of the robot's orbiting relatives captured this lucky shot as Curiosity descended onto the Red Planet.
The HiRISE camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was in position to observe Curiosity as it plunged through the Martian atmosphere during its harrowing Entry, Descent and Landing phase, also called the "7 minutes of terror". Seen about a minute before touchdown, Curiosity is still tucked into its backshell, part of the larger spacecraft that encased the rover during its roughly eight-month trek from Earth to Mars. |  |
Aboriginal bush-burning in Western Desert helps preserve biodiversity
STANFORD University researchers have produced hard data to show desert Aboriginal bush-burning practices result in smaller, cooler fires and help conserve reptiles and small mammals while promoting plant diversity.
Ecological anthropologist Associate Professor Rebecca Bliege-Bird says key game species are more plentiful near Western Desert communities and well-used roads, where people frequently light hunting fires. “Where people are lighting fires and making small fire mosaics you tend to find more kangaroo (Macropus robustus) and you also tend to find more sand goannas (Varanus gouldii),” she says. |  |
Solar flares increase in appearances, intensity
Increased numbers of solar flares have become common at the moment, as the sun’s normal 11-year activity cycle is ramping up.
In July, the sun emitted its strongest solar flare of the summer, causing vivid aurora borealis, or northern lights, in parts of southern Canada and northern United States. Also in July, the sun emitted a medium-intensity flare believed to be the reason for India’s worst power outage in history. According to James R. Webb, astronomy professor in the Department of Physics, solar flares are a pretty common occurrence, typically occurring in cycles. The current cycle is expected to peak in 2013. |  |
Huge solar filament stretches across the Sun
The Sun wanted to let us know there was action going on in other places in the Solar System besides Mars.
A huge, dark-colored filament stretched across nearly half the solar face on August 5th. Estimates are this filament was about 800,000 km in length! Wow! Paul Andrew took six images to create a composite, full image of the Sun, and below is an 11-panel mosaic by Leonard Mercer from Malta to show the surrounding region with the main sunspots 1535, 1538, 1540 present. |  |
Island nation to be first habited place to go fully solar
Tokelau, a small island nation, is officially becoming the first habited place on Earth to completely rely upon solar for its energy needs. Tokelau is a tiny group of coral islands that have up to now used diesel fuel for the daily needs of its roughly 1,400 residents. Within the next few weeks, the nation will make the historic switch to solar.
Currently the diesel fuel used by Tokelau's three islands — Atafu, Nukunonu and Fakaofo — is shipped in barrels in a dangerous sea-crossing from the New Zealand mainland. It's both costly and unsafe for the environment. |  |
Study Finds More of Earth Is Hotter and Says Global Warming Is at Work
The percentage of the earth’s land surface covered by extreme heat in the summer has soared in recent decades, from less than 1 percent in the years before 1980 to as much as 13 percent in recent years, according to a new scientific paper.
The change is so drastic, the paper says, that scientists can claim with near certainty that events like the Texas heat wave last year, the Russian heat wave of 2010 and the European heat wave of 2003 would not have happened without the planetary warming caused by the human release of greenhouse gases. |  |
How Do You Count Parallel Universes? You Can’t Just Go 1, 2, 3, …
Cosmologists have been thinking for years that our universe might be just one bubble amid countless bubbles floating in a formless void. And when they say “countless,” they really mean it. Those universes are damned hard to count. Angels on a pin are nothing to this. There’s no unambiguous way to count items in an infinite set, and that’s no good, because if you can’t count, you can’t calculate probabilities, and if you can’t calculate probabilities, you can’t make empirical predictions, and if you can’t make empirical predictions, you can’t look anyone in the eye at scientist wine-and-cheese parties. In a Sci Am article last year, cosmologist Paul Steinhardt argued that this counting crisis, or “measure problem,” is reason to doubt the theory that predicts bubble universes.
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Mark Twain was Secretly A Geek, and Here’s Footage to Prove It
In the long tradition of awesome people hanging out with each other, this is a video of Mark Twain made by Thomas Edison. In fact, it’s the only footage of Twain that we know of.
The film is silent, and that’s how Twain will remain to history – sadly, no recordings exist of the famous author’s voice. But it’s not for lack of trying on Twain’s part. In 1891 Twain attempted to dictate his novella “An American Claimant.” But after burning through 48 wax cylinders in the phonograph, he gave up. Those 48 cylinders are now lost. He tried again in 1909 at Edison’s lab, but those recording were lost in a 1914 fire. |  |
How science is unlocking the secrets of Dickens
Previously unseen passages from Charles Dickens's manuscripts are being revealed for the first time, thanks to digital technology which removes his crossings-out and corrections.
The new technique allows researchers to discover how the author shaped and reshaped his prose.
The Victoria & Albert Museum pilot study focused on his Christmas story, The Chimes, using technology developed by Ian Christie-Miller, a former visiting research fellow at London University. Although no dramatic revelations emerged from deletions in that short story, scholars are excited by the technology's potential on novels such as Bleak House.
The new technique allows researchers to discover how the author shaped and reshaped his prose.
The Victoria & Albert Museum pilot study focused on his Christmas story, The Chimes, using technology developed by Ian Christie-Miller, a former visiting research fellow at London University. Although no dramatic revelations emerged from deletions in that short story, scholars are excited by the technology's potential on novels such as Bleak House.
Physicists study famous historical myths for hidden truths
The truth behind some of the world’s most famous historical myths, including Homer’s epic, the Iliad, has been bolstered by two researchers who have analysed the relationships between the myths’ characters and compared them to real-life social networks.
In a study published in the journal EPL (Europhysics Letters), Pádraig Mac Carron and Ralph Kenna from Coventry University performed detailed text analyses of the Iliad, the English poem, Beowulf, and the Irish epic, the Táin Bó Cuailnge.
In a study published in the journal EPL (Europhysics Letters), Pádraig Mac Carron and Ralph Kenna from Coventry University performed detailed text analyses of the Iliad, the English poem, Beowulf, and the Irish epic, the Táin Bó Cuailnge.
Apes and Olympians Celebrate the Same Way
Fist pumps, hands in the air and jumping up and down, seen at every event at the Olympics, turn out to be the same across all cultures and likely have their roots in non-human primate displays.
When Olympic athletes like Michael Phelps, Gabby Douglas and Usain Bolt celebrate their wins, they are displaying a declaration of success that could date back to the earliest human societies and beyond, according to a new study that has been accepted for publication in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior. “There is evidence for similar behavior in primates,” lead author David Matsumoto told Discovery News. “In non-human primates, there are similar behaviors involving body enlargement, although with different hardware.” . |  |
Elephants May Be Knocking Over Too Many Trees
Tree loss in areas with elephants is up to six times higher than in regions without the voracious pachyderms, suggests a new aerial survey.
Humans have essentially engineered the problem by relocating, either directly or indirectly, pachyderm populations. According to the survey, described in the journal Ecology Letters, elephants prefer toppling trees in the 16- to 30-foot range, with annual losses of up to 20 percent in these height classes. A strong elephant can topple over a tree in mere seconds. If you jump to around the 1:45 mark in the video below, you can see a mother elephant knocking over a tree so that her calves can enjoy the leaves and fruit. |  |
Secret to Elephants' Thundering Calls Discovered
Elephants' deepest calls can thunder up to 6 miles (10 kilometers) away. Now, researchers have learned for the first time how the massive animals produce these sounds.
It turns out that they do it in the same way that humans talk, pushing air through their vocal cords to make them vibrate. Elephants can go much lower than humans, however, because their vocal cords are eight times longer. "The sounds the elephants make are off the piano keyboard," said study researcher Christian Herbst, a voice scientist at the University of Vienna, Austria. In fact, at less than 20 hertz in frequency, the main components of these ultra-deep calls aren't detectable to the human ear. |  |
Human-Triggered Earthquakes Surprisingly Common
As hydrofracturing, also known as fracking, has become more widespread, it has also grown more controversial.
Beyond groundwater pollution and environmental contamination, the multi-step process of extracting natural gas from the Earth by injecting liquids deep underground has raised concerns that parts of the process may be triggering earthquakes. In fact, found a new study, small earthquakes are more common than expected near wells that are used for injecting waste fluids from fracking, as well as from other processes, including oil extraction and geothermal energy production. |  |
Paradoxical Materials Can Expand When Compressed
Call it the reverse psychology of stuff. Imagine a cushion that swells up instead of compressing when you sit on it. Or a rubber band that shrinks instead of elongating when you stretch it. If two physicists at Northwestern University are right, scientists may soon be able to make materials with such mind-boggling behavior.
The two researchers, Adilson Motter and Zachary Nicolaou, describe their proposal in work that appeared online in May in Nature Materials. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) They show how the unusual response, called negative compressibility, could theoretically emerge from putting together the right building blocks into a “metamaterial”—a material whose behavior is dictated not by its chemical or molecular composition but by its patterning at larger scales.
The two researchers, Adilson Motter and Zachary Nicolaou, describe their proposal in work that appeared online in May in Nature Materials. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) They show how the unusual response, called negative compressibility, could theoretically emerge from putting together the right building blocks into a “metamaterial”—a material whose behavior is dictated not by its chemical or molecular composition but by its patterning at larger scales.
Amazon selling more Kindle ebooks than print books
The UK's biggest book retailer Amazon now sells more ebooks than hardbacks and paperbacks combined, the company has said.
For every 100 print books sold through the site, Amazon said it sold 114 titles for its Kindle e-reader device. It added that the average Kindle owner bought up to four times more books than they did before owning the device. |  |
Possible da Vinci painting found in farmhouse; could be worth $150 million
Fiona McLaren, 59, had kept an old painting in her Scottish farmhouse for decades. She reportedly didn't think much of the painting, which had been given to her as a gift by her father. But after she finally decided to have the painting appraised, some experts are speculating that it may in fact be a 500-year-old painting by Leonardo da Vinci and potentially worth more than $150 million.
"I showed it to him [auctioneer Harry Robertson] and he was staggered, speechless save for a sigh of exclamation," said Ms. McLaren, according to The People. |  |
British expedition to Pacific 'treasure island' where pirates buried their plunder
It eluded Franklin Roosevelt, Sir Malcolm Campbell and Errol Flynn, but now an explorer from Melton Mowbray could be on the trail of a multi-million-pound hoard of gold, silver and jewellery stolen by pirates and buried on a treasure island.
Shaun Whitehead is leading an archaeological expedition to Cocos Island, the supposed hiding place of the “Treasure of Lima” – one of the world’s most fabled missing treasures. The haul – said to be worth £160 million – was stolen by a British trader, Captain William Thompson, in 1820 after he was entrusted to transport it from Peru to Mexico. |  |
Parallel solar system discovered
Researchers have detected a solar system 10,000 light years away that is very much like our own, with planets that have aligned orbits close to a parent star.
Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of California at Santa Cruz discovered the faraway system by examining data from NASA's Kepler space telescope. The centre of this mirror system is a massive, bright star named Kepler-30, which operates much like our sun. |  |
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