For the past 50 years—since the discovery of a thousand-year-old Viking way station in Newfoundland—archaeologists and amateur historians have combed North America's east coast searching for traces of Viking visitors.
It has been a long, fruitless quest, littered with bizarre claims and embarrassing failures. But at a conference in Canada earlier this month, archaeologist Patricia Sutherland announced new evidence that points strongly to the discovery of the second Viking outpost ever discovered in the Americas. |  |
Evidence of Stone Age tomb found near a Swedish megalithic monument
Archaeologists have discovered evidence of a Stone Age tomb near the site of a megalithic monument known as Sweden's Stonehenge.
Remains of a burial site thought to be 5,500 years old were found near to Ale's Stones, an arrangement of 59 boulders on a cliff on the Swedish Baltic coast. According to local folklore the stones are the final resting place of a legendary leader known as King Ale, but other theories say it could be an astronomical calendar with the same underlying geometry as Stonehenge. Researchers from the Swedish National Heritage board discovered the traces of the ancient tomb after digging a trial trench at the centre of the stone circle, which itself is thought to be between 1,000 and 2,500 years old. 'The findings confirm what we have believed; that this has been a special place for a very long time,' archaeologist Bengt Söderberg told Swedish news agency TT. |  |
'Gospel of Jesus' Wife' Faces Authenticity Tests
The "Gospel of Jesus' Wife" papyrus, which may or may not be a forgery, seems to be in limbo, as the Harvard Theological Review has pulled the scientific article describing the discovery from their January 2013 issue.
This withdrawal, however, doesn't mean the journal will never publish the scientific paper by Harvard historian Karen King on the supposed lost Gospel. "Harvard Theological Review is planning to publish Professor King's paper after testing is concluded so that the results may be incorporated," Kit Dodgson, director of communications at Harvard Divinity School, wrote in an email to LiveScience. Even so, the announcement has garnered both anger and elation. |  |
Brain scans during sleep can decode visual content of dreams
Scientists have learned how to discover what you are dreaming about while you sleep.
A team of researchers led by Yukiyasu Kamitani of the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, used functional neuroimaging to scan the brains of three people as they slept, simultaneously recording their brain waves using electroencephalography (EEG). The researchers woke the participants whenever they detected the pattern of brain waves associated with sleep onset, asked them what they had just dreamed about, and then asked them to go back to sleep. |  |
Physics unlocks the secrets of roulette
Thinking like a physicist can improve your chances of winning at roulette, say researchers.
A paper in a recent issue of the journal Chaos shows how a computer program can be used to give an expected return of at least 18 per cent, instead of the usual -2.7 per cent. "It's a fairly simple model that we're using and the result we get is the one you would expect to get," says lead author, mathematician Professor Michael Small of the University of Western Sydney. |  |
'Butterfly wing' buildings would never need painting
A new material inspired by butterfly wings repels water and gleams with brilliant color. Like iridescent butterflies, the material uses tiny structures on its surface to achieve both qualities.
A material that's both colorful and water-repelling could someday go into sensors that regulate the interior temperature of "smart buildings," said Shu Yang, a University of Pennsylvania chemist whose research group made the new material.
A material that's both colorful and water-repelling could someday go into sensors that regulate the interior temperature of "smart buildings," said Shu Yang, a University of Pennsylvania chemist whose research group made the new material.
Greenest gas? Synthetic fuel made from air and water
LONDON (Reuters) - A small British company has developed a way to create petrol from air and water, technology it hopes may one day contribute to large-scale production of green fuels.
Engineers at Air Fuel Synthesis (AFS) in Teeside, northern England, say they have produced 5 litres of synthetic petrol over a period of three months.
The technique involves extracting carbon dioxide from air and hydrogen from water, and combining them in a reactor with a catalyst to make methanol. The methanol is then converted into petrol.
Engineers at Air Fuel Synthesis (AFS) in Teeside, northern England, say they have produced 5 litres of synthetic petrol over a period of three months.
The technique involves extracting carbon dioxide from air and hydrogen from water, and combining them in a reactor with a catalyst to make methanol. The methanol is then converted into petrol.
Big, Smart and Green: A Revolutionary Vision for Modern Farming
What they’re doing on Marsden Farm isn’t organic. It’s not industrial, either. It’s a hybrid of the two, an alternative version of agriculture for the 21st century: smart, green and powerful.
On this farm in Boone County, Iowa, in the heart of corn country, researchers have borrowed from both approaches, using traditional techniques and modern chemicals to get industrial yields — but without industrial consequences. If the approach works at commercial scales, and there’s good reason to think it will, it might just be an answer to modern farming’s considerable problems. |  |
What Makes Earth So Perfect for Life?
There are a few key ingredients that scientists often agree are needed for life to exist — but much debate remains as to what limits there actually might be on life.
The closest star system to our own made headlines on Tuesday (Oct. 16) with the announcement that it hosts a planet about the mass of Earth — a tantalizing discovery so close, astronomically speaking, to us. While the newfound planet may be Earth-sized, researchers say it is almost certainly barren. |  |
First Human Ancestor Looked Like a Squirrel
Newly discovered fossilized bones for the world's oldest and most primitive known primate, Purgatorius, reveal a tiny, agile animal that spent much of its time eating fruit and climbing trees, according to a study.
The fossils, described today in a presentation at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology's 72nd Annual Meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina, are the first known below-the-head bones for Purgatorius. Previously, only teeth revealed its existence. |  |
Prehistoric Flamingo Nest with Eggs Discovered
A fossil bird's nest has been discovered in Spain, cradling at least five eggs that scientists believe belonged to an ancient flamingo some 18 million years ago.
The nest was found in a limestone block in the Ebro Basin in northeastern Spain. The researchers think it was abandoned and sunk to the bottom of a shallow, salty lake (which once also housed snakes, turtles and crocodiles) before being covered in mud and fossilizing during the early Miocene. |  |
Tarbosaurus the Tip of the Black Market Iceberg
For the past six months, the fate of a million-dollar tyrannosaur has been in limbo. A composite Tarbosaurus skeleton has been awaiting the outcome of an ongoing court trial–will the dinosaur bones go home to Mongolia or wind up in the hands of the private collector who successfully bid for the dinosaur?
At every step, the case has become more complex. What was thought to be a single, mostly complete dinosaur turned out to be a jumble of many, and the documents used to import the fossils to the United States hint that these dinosaurs were indeed smuggled out of Mongolia. Earlier this week, federal officials arrested the man who imported and assembled the contentious skeleton. |  |
Battle scars reveal dinos were head bangers
Fossilised skulls of dome-headed dinosaurs retain signs of injuries from violent head butting or head shoving, say US scientists.
The dinosaurs, known as pachycephalosaurs (meaning "thick-headed lizards") have long puzzled paleontologists, who wondered why the heads of these dinosaurs looked to have built-in football helmets. It's been suspected that dome-headed dinosaurs fought with their heads, but the latest investigation provides some of the most direct evidence for this antagonistic behaviour. |  |
"Seventy-two Is the New 30": Why Are We Living So Much Longer?
A 72-year-old in today's Japan has the same odds of dying as a 30-year-old in the preindustrial world. That's the startling conclusion of a new study that gauges just how far the death rate has fallen in industrialized countries in recent centuries. "In other words," the researchers write, " ... 72 is the new 30."
Humans nowadays survive much longer than our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, which rarely live past 50. Even hunter-gatherers—who often lack the advanced nutrition, modern medicine, and other benefits of industrialized living—have twice the life expectancy at birth as wild chimpanzees.
Humans nowadays survive much longer than our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, which rarely live past 50. Even hunter-gatherers—who often lack the advanced nutrition, modern medicine, and other benefits of industrialized living—have twice the life expectancy at birth as wild chimpanzees.
Archaeology: Europe’s ‘oldest town’ found near Bulgaria’s Varna, professor says
Europe’s oldest urban settlement is near Provadia, a town of about 13 000 people about 40km inland from Bulgaria’s Black Sea city of Varna, according to archaeology Professor Vassil Nikolov, citing evidence from work done at the Provadia – Solnitsata archaeological site in summer 2012.
The team of archaeologists headed by Nikolov excavated stone walls estimated to date from 4700 to 4200 BCE. The walls are two metres thick and three metres high, and according to Nikolov are the earliest and most massive fortifications from Europe’s pre-history.
The team of archaeologists headed by Nikolov excavated stone walls estimated to date from 4700 to 4200 BCE. The walls are two metres thick and three metres high, and according to Nikolov are the earliest and most massive fortifications from Europe’s pre-history.
Archaeology: Crete, 3500-year-old Minoan building found
ANSA MED
ATHENS, OCTOBER 4 - An accidental meeting in 1982 between a well-known Greek archaeologist, Yannis Sakellarakis, and a shepherd from Crete has led to an archaeological discovery of great importance – Zominthos, a settlement from the Minoan era on the plain by the same name, 1.187 metres above the sea. The settlement is at the feet of the highest mountain in Crete, Mount Psiloritis, eight kilometres from the village of Anogia along the road which led from Knossos to Ideon Andron, the cave where Zeus was born according to Greek mythology.
A New Leap Forward for Radiocarbon Dating
Until 1949, when archaeologists dug up prehistoric bones, stone points, charcoal remnants or other artifacts from early human history, they had no way of knowing exactly how old these objects were. Chemist Willard Libby changed that, devising an ingenious method for dating ancient objects based on the types of carbon atoms contained within them.
Libby and his colleagues based their idea on the fact that living things incorporate tiny amounts of a certain isotope of carbon (C-14) from the atmosphere into their structure; when they die, they stop adding new C-14, and the quantity left inside slowly degrades into a different element, nitrogen-14. By figuring out that the half-life of C-14 (the amount of time it takes for half of a given quantity of C-14 to decay into N-14) is 5,730 years, they could chemically analyze the ratio of C-14 to N-14 inside a piece of wood or bone and determine just how long it had been dead. |  |
No Life Found In Lakes Beneath Antarctic Glaciers—Yet
Earlier this year, a decades-long drilling program came to completion. Russian scientists had aimed to punch through nearly 2.4 miles of ice over Antarctica’s subglacial Lake Vostok, and in February the scientists announced that they had made it through to the water hidden below. Cut off from the rest of the world beneath the crushing ice, with no access to the atmosphere for the past 15 million years, Lake Vostok is a truly isolated system. Scientists are hoping to find life in the deep, in the form of extremophilic bacteria that can survive on what little nutrients and energy made it into the lake.
Magic mushrooms and cancer: My magical mystery cure?
A symphonic note lit three strands of deep-red light trickling like water in my right visual field. Deeper tones were huge blue clouds in the middle distance, pouring from above. A prolonged violin solo turned the sky yellow, and brought with it a comet's tail of body parts flying from the upper left of my visual field to the lower right, disappearing behind me.
This happened within the first hour of my swallowing a capsule of psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in "magic mushrooms". I'd volunteered to be a scientific-research-study subject at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine's Behavioural Pharmacology Research Unit (BPRU) as part of a clinical trial to test the hypothesis that psilocybin can help cancer patients to regain a sense of existential meaning in the face of their disease. |  |
Curiosity Rover Finds More Strange, Bright Objects in Martian Soil
NASA’s Curiosity rover took three scoops from a small Martian sand dune and found several bright particles in the soil. Scientists think these are unrelated to the odd bright object that Curiosity saw last week, which turned out to be plastic that fell from the probe, and are probably indigenous Martian mineral flecks.
Curiosity has sat for several weeks at an area called Rocknest, where its job has been to sample the Martian soil, practicing using its scoop and analysis instruments. The plan was to take three scoops and send the sand through the Collection and Handling for In-Situ Martian Rock Analysis (CHIMRA) tool to clean it of any material that may have hitchhiked from Earth. |  |
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