Lost City Revealed Under Centuries of Jungle Growth

Archaeologist Brigitte Kovacevich in a looters’ tunnel inside the pyramid at the Head of Stone site.

Hidden for centuries, the ancient Maya city of Holtun, or Head of Stone, is finally coming into focus.

Three-dimensional mapping has “erased” centuries of jungle growth, revealing the rough contours of nearly a hundred buildings, according to research presented earlier this month.

Though it’s long been known to locals that something—something big—is buried in this patch of Guatemalan rain forest, it’s only now that archaeologists are able to begin teasing out what exactly Head of Stone was.

Using GPS and electronic distance-measurement technology last year, the researchers plotted the locations and elevations of a seven-story-tall pyramid, an astronomical observatory, a ritual ball court, several stone residences, and other structures. …

From about 600 B.C. to A.D. 900, Head of Stone—which is about three-quarters of a mile (1 kilometer) long and a third of a mile (0.5 kilometer) wide—was a bustling midsize Maya center, home to about 2,000 permanent residents.

But today its structures are buried under several feet of earth and plant material and are nearly invisible to the untrained eyed.

Even Head of Stone’s three-pointed pyramid—once one of the city’s most impressive buildings—”just looks like a mountain enveloped in forest,” said study leader Kovacevich, who presented the findings at a meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Sacramento, California. …

via Lost City Revealed Under Centuries of Jungle Growth.

A Star as Old as the Universe Found in Milky Way — A Galactic Mystery

“This star likely is almost as old as the universe itself.”

Anna Frebel, astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Astronomers have discovered a relic from the early universe — a star that may have been among the second generation of stars to form after the Big Bang. Located in the dwarf galaxy Sculptor some 290,000 light-years away, the star has a remarkably similar chemical make-up to the Milky Way’s oldest stars. Its presence supports the theory that our galaxy underwent a “cannibal” phase, growing to its current size by swallowing dwarf galaxies and other galactic building blocks.

Dwarf galaxies are small galaxies with just a few billion stars, compared to hundreds of billions in the Milky Way. In the “bottom-up model” of galaxy formation, large galaxies attained their size over billions of years by absorbing their smaller neighbors.

“If you watched a time-lapse movie of our galaxy, you would see a swarm of dwarf galaxies buzzing around it like bees around a beehive,” explained Frebel. “Over time, those galaxies smashed together and mingled their stars to make one large galaxy — the Milky Way.”

If dwarf galaxies are indeed the building blocks of larger galaxies, then the same kinds of stars should be found in both kinds of galaxies, especially in the case of old, “metal-poor” stars. To astronomers, “metals” are chemical elements heavier than hydrogen or helium. Because they are products of stellar evolution, metals were rare in the early Universe, and so old stars tend to be metal-poor. …

via A Star as Old as the Universe Found in Milky Way — A Galactic Mystery.

China confirms plans to build own orbital station

Chinese space officials have confirmed plans to build a 60-ton space station by 2020 and develop a space freighter for hauling supplies to the station, the China Daily newspaper said on Tuesday.

The China Manned Space Engineering Office unveiled on Monday a blueprint of the future orbital station, which will comprise an 18.1-meter core module and two 14.4-meter lab modules.

“The 60-ton space station is rather small compared to the International Space Station (419 tons), and Russia’s Mir Space Station (137 tons), which served between 1996 and 2001,” China Daily quoted Pang Zhihao, a space researcher and deputy editor-in-chief of the Space International magazine.

“But it is the world’s third multi-module space station, which usually demands much more complicated technology than a single-module space lab,” the researcher said.

China’s ambitious space program enjoyed a sound success in the past decade, including putting a human into orbit and launching a lunar probe.

In preparation for the construction of the orbital station, Beijing is planning to launch the space module Tiangong-1 and the Shenzhou 8 spacecraft in the second half of this year on the first unmanned rendezvous and docking mission.

Shenzhou 9 and Shenzhou 10 spacecraft are expected to dock with Tiangong-1 in 2012.

via China confirms plans to build own orbital station | World | RIA Novosti.

Lemming hordes perish in Swedish roadside ‘massacre’

Hordes of lemmings have been spotted leaving the safety of the mountains to make their way down to more inhabited areas, falling victim to traffic and being preyed upon by other animals.“I must have seen a thousand just since Saturday. They are absolutely everywhere. They are swimming about in the lake close to our house, they jump on the ice floes, and they scurry around the outside of our house,“ said holiday-maker Magnus Lundberg, to the local Östersundsposten (ÖP) daily.

Road users are reportedly struggling to avoid the advancing lemming hordes with many of the small furry animals ending up as road kill in what has been described as a real massacre on the roads.

However, Sweden’s pets and wild animals alike stand to gain as the lemming-strewn roads present a veritable feast for hungry predators.

Favourable weather has created the conditions for 2011 to become what Swedes call “a real lemming year”.

According to Birger Hörnfeldt, of the department of wildlife, fish and environmental studies at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Umeå, these traditionally occur every 3-4 years.

But the last three decades have seen such unfavourable weather that the number of lemmings had diminished considerably. …
Lemmings have traditionally been believed to undertake the occasional mass exodus, sometimes to meet their death by following each other off a cliff.

However, today this kind of migration behaviour is believed by experts to be a myth based on lies or at least highly exaggerated.

According to Bengt Landström of the mountain unit at the County Administrative Board in Norrbotten, this may well be a record year for lemmings, but he does not believe in a bona fide ‘lemming exodus’, where the lemmings blindly follow one another to their death.

“No, that kind of lemming migration is just a fairy tale, a tall story,“ he told local paper Piteå Tidningen.

Unfortunately, exodus or no exodus, the move from the mountaintops often means that the little rodents go to their death.

If they are not hit by cars wild or domestic animals are very keen to get their paws on them.

“Our dogs are eating the lemmings while we are out walking. It is not much we can do about it. The dogs just bite down on them, throw them up in the air and then swallow them almost whole. They probably devour between five and ten a day,” Magnus Lundberg told ÖP.  …

via Lemming hordes perish in Swedish roadside ‘massacre’ – The Local.

Dogs Detecting Cancer? It’s in the Breath, Experts Say

Carol Witcher says she knows it sounds crazy, but she swears that her dog, Floyd Henry, discovered the cancer in her breast in 2008. “When he sniffed me, he kind of turned back and really pushed into my right breast, real hard,” she said. “He started sniffing, sniffing, sniffing, sniffing.”

It took four days of nudging and nipping by the 8-year-old boxer before Witcher went to a doctor. “He pushed real hard for one shot. … Then he looked at me straight in the face, took his right foot and began to paw my right breast. And I thought, ‘This is not good,’” she said. “I knew instantly that there was an issue.”

Witcher’s stage-three cancer required surgery, chemotherapy and radiation.” Her type of cancer was rather large in her breast,” said Dr. Sheryl Gabram-Mendola, a breast surgical oncologist at Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University.  “I absolutely believe that the dog saved Miss Witcher’s life.

“Gabram-Mendola has been studying the breath of cancer patients. She said cancer causes the body to release certain organic compounds that dogs can smell but people cannot. Gabram-Mendola and her team have developed a test in which they look for more than 300 molecules in the breath.

“Our model predicted in over 75 percent of the time correctly which patients did have breast cancer and which ones did not,” Gabram-Mendola said. When Witcher breathed into the tube, the test confirmed that she was sick.

“You could potentially go to a physician’s office, blow in the bottle and ultimately have a direct read system where we would know in the office …

It’s estimated that a dog’s sense of smell is up to a million times better than that of a human, depending on the breed. Dogs have also reportedly sniffed out skin, bladder, lung and ovarian cancers.

“Dogs smell different things and they understand different things,” said Charlene Bayer, a principal research scientist at Georgia Tech Research Institute. “They don’t necessarily know what’s wrong, but they know that there’s something that’s not normal, that you don’t smell the way you normally do.” …

via Dogs Detect Cancer? Experts Say Compounds in Breath Can Signal Breast Cancer – ABC News.

Search for ET Put on Hold

The Allen Telescope Array, a major instrument designed to speed up our hunt for intelligent beings elsewhere in the galaxy, has been turned off.

On April 15, this phalanx of small antennas, built to eavesdrop on signals that might reach us from civilizations hundreds of trillions of miles distant, was put into park, and its multimillion channel receivers powered down. It’s as if Columbus’s armada of ships, having barely cleared Cadiz, were suddenly ordered back to Spain.

The reason for the shutdown is both prosaic and lamentable. Money. The Array was built as a joint project between the SETI Institute (my employer) and the University of California at Berkeley’s Radio Astronomy Laboratory. The former raised the funds to construct the instrument, and UC Berkeley was responsible for operations. But the grievous financial situation of the State of California and reduced funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) have sharply curtailed the university’s research budget, and private donations haven’t yet been adequate to keep the Array in operation.

In tough economic times, a lot of folks who hear this story will dismiss its importance. After all, with problems like expensive health care, a weakened education system, and pervasive joblessness, it’s unlikely that people are going to march in the streets to get the hunt for ET back on track. They’re more likely to shake their heads, and profess that this sort of exploration is superfluous. …

via Seth Shostak: Search for ET Put on Hold.

Federal and state funding cutbacks for operations of U.C. Berkeley’s Hat Creek Radio Observatory (HCRO) force hibernation of Allen Telescope Array – In an April 22, 2011 email (PDF) to Allen Telescope Array stakeholder level donors, SETI Institute CEO Tom Pierson described in detail the recent decision by U.C. Berkeley, our partner in the Array, to reduce operations of the Hat Creek Radio Observatory (and thus the Allen Telescope Array) to a hibernation state effective this month. NSF University Radio Observatory funding to Berkeley for HCRO operations has been reduced to approximately one-tenth of its former level and, concurrently, growing State of California budget shortfalls have severely reduced the amount of state funds available for support of the HCRO site. …

Public help is needed – Donate now – Help return the ATA to operations and support the exciting SETI exploration of the Kepler planets over the next two years.

via seti.org

Amazon seller lists book at $23,698,655.93 — plus shipping

Lots of normal people would pay $23 for a book. But $23.7 million plus $3.99 shipping for a scientific book about flies!? This unthinkable sticker price for “The Making of a Fly” on Amazon.com was spotted on April 18 by Michael Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and blogger. The market-blind book listing was not the result of uncontrollable demand for Peter Lawrence’s “classic work in developmental biology,” Eisen writes. Instead, it appears it was sparked by a robot price war. “What’s fascinating about all this is both the seemingly endless possibilities for both chaos and mischief,” writes Eisen, who works at the University of California at Berkeley and blogs at a site called “it is NOT junk.” “It seems impossible that we stumbled onto the only example of this kind of upward pricing spiral. “Eisen watched the robot price war from April 8 to 18 and calculated that two booksellers were automatically adjusting their prices against each other. One equation kept setting the price of the first book at 1.27059 times the price of the second book, according to Eisen’s analysis, which is posted in detail on his blog. The other equation automatically set its price at 0.9983 times the price of the other book. So the prices of the two books escalated in tandem into the millions, with the second book always selling for slightly less than the first. Not that that matters much when you’re selling a book about flies for millions of dollars. The incident highlights a little-known fact about e-commerce sites such as Amazon: Often, people don’t create and update prices; computer algorithms do. Individual booksellers on Amazon and other sites pay third-party companies for algorithm services that automatically update prices. Some of these computer programs purportedly work very well, getting sellers up to 60% more sales because they underbid the competition automatically and repeatedly.

via Amazon seller lists book at $23,698,655.93 — plus shipping – CNN.

Video: Norman Foster Recreates Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Car

http://vimeo.com/21160399

“I was privileged to collaborate with Bucky for the last 12 years of his life and this had a profound influence on my own work and thinking. Inevitably, I also gained an insight into his philosophy and achievements,” shared Lord Norman Foster.

Recreating the legendary futuristic Dymaxion Car, Foster’s No. 4 version was a lengthy and expensive two year project, but was obviously a labor of love. Buckminster Fuller’s futuristic three wheeled car was brief, with a mere three actually built. Incredibly efficient the streamlined body with long tail-fin averaged 35 miles to the gallon and could achieve 120 mph. The Zeppelin inspired design with a V8 Ford engine was intended to fly as well, Fuller’s vision of revolutionizing how people traveled.

via Video: Norman Foster Recreates Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Car | ArchDaily.

The Dymaxion car was a concept car designed by U.S. inventor and architect Buckminster Fuller in 1933.^[1] The word Dymaxion is a brand name that Fuller gave to several of his inventions, to emphasize that he considered them part of a more general project to improve humanity’s living conditions. The car had a fuel efficiency of 30 miles per US gallon (7.8 L/100 km; 36 mpg_-imp). It could transport 11 passengers. While Fuller claimed it could reach speeds of 120 miles per hour (190 km/h), the fastest documented speed was 90 miles per hour (140 km/h). – wiki

Steytlerville ‘monster’ strikes again

A ‘monster’ plaguing the sleepy Karoo town of Steytlerville struck again over the Easter weekend, Eastern Cape police said on Monday.

Another two sightings of the “shape-shifting creature” were reported on Sunday evening, said Warrant Officer Zandisile Nelani .

“Two men were walking near a tavern when they saw another man wearing a black jacket. One of the men, identified only as Nozipho, went up to the stranger and asked him, “What is your problem?” said Nelani.When the stranger did not respond, Nozipho went closer and saw that the man had no head. The man then turned into a dog that was “very angry” and “as big as a cow”, Nelani said.

He said that as Nozipho and his friend ran away, the monster allegedly turned on another group of people in the same road. “They said it turned into a big monkey, and then it was gone,” Nelani said.

He said that since the monster was spotted near the tavern, people were afraid to go there at night.

Last week police were told by residents that the monster changed shape while one looked at it. One man had reported that it changed from a man wearing a suit into a pig and then into a bat.

There had also been rumours that the monster could fly. Previously, the monster had only been spotted near the church. It had even been seen peering through the windows during a service, but had vanished by the time the congregation came outside.

Nelani said that the community had dubbed the monster “Bawokozi”, meaning ‘brother-in-law’.Sightings of the monster began over a month ago when it was seen by mourners attending two separate funerals, Nelani said.

He said that the community requested a meeting with police because they were frightened of it. Police agreed to work with residents, but asked them to try to take a photograph of it as evidence.

Nelani said that a photograph had since been taken of the monster resting under a tree.

He said that when the photo was taken the monster had been in human form but when the photo was developed an unknown animal was visible in the picture.

“It is a very strange thing happening in Steytlerville, but no one has been hurt by it,” Nelani said.

via Steytlerville ‘monster’ strikes again: News24: South Africa: News.

Enormous statue of powerful pharaoh unearthed

Archaeologists unearthed one of the largest statues found to date of a powerful ancient Egyptian pharaoh at his mortuary temple in the southern city of Luxor, the country’s antiquities authority announced Tuesday.

The 13 meter (42 foot) tall statue of Amenhotep III was one of a pair that flanked the northern entrance to the grand funerary temple on the west bank of the Nile that is currently the focus of a major excavation.

The statue consists of seven large quartzite blocks and still lacks a head and was actually first discovered in the 1928 and then rehidden, according to the press release from the country’s antiquities authority. Archaeologists expect to find its twin in the next digging season.

Excavation supervisor Abdel-Ghaffar Wagdi said two other statues were also unearthed, one of the god Thoth with a baboon’s head and a six foot (1.85 meter) tall one of the lion-headed goddess Sekhmet.

Archaeologists working on the temple over the past few years have issued a flood of announcements about new discoveries of statues. The 3,400-year-old temple is one of the largest on the west bank of the Nile in Luxor, where the powerful pharaohs of Egypt’s New Kingdom built their tombs.

Amenhotep III, who was the grandfather of the famed boy-pharaoh Tutankhamun, ruled in the 14th century B.C. at the height of Egypt’s New Kingdom and presided over a vast empire stretching from Nubia in the south to Syria in the north.

The pharaoh’s temple was largely destroyed, possibly by floods, and little remains of its walls. It was also devastated by an earthquake in 27 B.C. But archaeologists have been able to unearth a wealth of artifacts and statuary in the buried ruins, including two statues of Amenhotep made of black granite found at the site in March 2009. …

via Enormous statue of powerful pharaoh unearthed – Yahoo! News.