Science & TechnologyS


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Ancient Roman Village Discovered in Parkland Around Stately Home

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© shoutcommunications.co.ukSkeletons were found buried in ditches at the site but may date from long before the Romans arrived.
A farming village established almost 2,000 years ago beside the Roman road leading westward out of London has been uncovered in the parkland around a stately home, now in deepest suburbia.

Extensive remains of the road and village, burials - including skeletons in ditches that are still puzzling archaeologists - and thousands of artefacts including pre-Roman jewellery were found at Syon House near the Thames in Isleworth. The mansion has been the London home of the Dukes of Northumberland for 400 years.

The finds were on the Brentford side of their land on a site being cleared for a new hotel. They were discovered only a few hundred yards from the spot where, according to passionately held local tradition, Julius Caesar crossed the Thames in 54 BC, defeating the British chieftain Cassivellaunus and his alliance of local tribes.

The haul includes pottery, a lava stone quern, coins, a dagger, jewellery including shale bangles and a gold Bronze Age bracelet, in addition to the foundations of huts and a stretch of Roman road.

The strange ditch burials, like the jewellery, may date from long before the Romans arrived, and are still being studied at the Museum of London.

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Italy: Temple of goddess of virgins, wild animals, unearthed

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© UnknownA Roman copy of a Greek original statue of Diana, goddess of the Hunt.
Rome - An almost 2,000 year-old Roman temple dedicated to Diana, the goddess of virgins and wild animals, has been unearthed in a protected park in the Italian region of Tuscany.

The ancient religious sanctuary, found in the Maremma national park is 350 square metres large, and was discovered in perfect condition by a team of Italian and other European archaeologists following a two-year dig.

War Whore

Acoustic gunshot locators get UK military field trials

Bullet-crack backtrack attack-smack

The UK Ministry of Defence has turned to famed techsploration firm BBN - which among other things gave the world the "@" symbol in email - to provide a shoulder-mounted gunshot detector able to backtrack bullets in flight and locate enemy gunmen firing at British troops.

soldier1
© The RegisterMost users will probably not remain this calm in field use.

Einstein

New Virtual Reality Systems Assess Effects of Brain Injury/Disease on Body Function

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© Science Daily
A researcher from Queen's University has created a medical tool that will improve the way brain injury and disease are assessed in patients.

Stephen Scott, creator of the medical tool and a professor at the Centre for Neuroscience Studies at Queen's University, developed the tool to assess brain function. This type of objective tool could eventually be used to design better therapies for treating brain disease or injury.

The medical tool is called the KINARM Assessment Station, and it is the only objective tool capable of assessing brain function. KINARM consists of a chair with robotic arms and a virtual reality system which guides the patients through several tasks. These standardized tasks mimic everyday activities such as hitting a ball with a virtual paddle. After completing these tasks, KINARM creates a detailed evaluation that specifies any abnormal behavior.

"The beauty of this system is that it captures the subtle deficits caused by a brain injury that are not measured by traditional tests," said Scott. "Traditional testing methods, such as touching a finger to the nose or bouncing a ball, just don't capture the complexity of brain processes."

Question

US Soldiers Using Invisibilty Cloaks In Iraq ?


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At Electronics Show, Eight Technologies to Watch For

With the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) only two months away, tech companies are gearing up to display their latest and greatest. The CES held a press preview event earlier this week in New York City, showcasing some of the tech goodies to expect next January in Las Vegas. From GPS-enabled ski goggles and high-tech solar phone chargers to teeny tiny upgradable computers, here's what's getting big buzz so far.

GE WattStation
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© GE Energy

The GE WattStation could easily become a roadside staple as more people pick electric cars as their vehicles of choice. Designed for plug-in electric vehicles, this charger significantly zaps the time needed to reenergize the cars, and the device's smart grid-enabled technology could also help utility companies manage keep track of the energy consumption for each charging station.

Magic Hat

Space: Time Cloak Could Hide Events

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© Universal/The Kobal CollectionImagine what the Invisible Man - memorably played by Claude Rains (above) - could do if his actions were invisible in spacetime...
Proposed device could edit actions out of history.

It would be the perfect hiding place: a hole carved out of space - time. Optical physicists have created blueprints for a cloak that generates a pocket in reality in which actions can be concealed. In practice, the proposed design can be built only inside the special environment of an optical fibre. But even this constrained space - time cloak could have useful effects, such as assisting quantum computing.

The ideal space - time cloak - the theory behind which is published in the Journal of Optics today1 - would be an upgraded version of the 'invisibility cloak' that was first proposed in 20062,3 and has since been built for some wavelengths of light. Such standard invisibility cloaks are made from metamaterials - substances with a complex internal structure that allows them to channel light around objects like water flowing around a rock in a river. A distant observer perceives the light as if it has travelled in a straight line without ever hitting an intervening object.

Telescope

Revival on Jupiter

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Think of the turmoil at the sea surface just before a massive submarine emerges from depth. Something like that is happening on Jupiter. A turbulent plume is breaking through the giant planet's cloudtops in the south equatorial zone, heralding the emergence of ... what? Scroll past this Nov. 14th photo from astrophotographer Paul Haese of Glenalta, South Australia for further discussion:

Meteor

Leonid Meteor Shower

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© A. Scott Murrell, Sky & Telescope Magazine
The annual Leonid meteor shower peaks this year on Nov. 17th when Earth passes through a thicket of debris from Comet Tempel-Tuttle. Earth is expected to miss the densest swarms of comet dust, making this an off-year for Leonids with a maximum of only 20 meteors per hour. The best time to look is during the dark hours before sunrise on Wednesday.

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Modern Humans Mature More Slowly Than Neanderthals Did

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© Graham Chedd (PBS)/Paul Tafforeau (ESRF); and Tanya Smith (Harvard University and MPI-EVA)
A sophisticated new examination of teeth from 11 Neanderthal and early human fossils shows that modern humans are slower than our ancestors to reach full maturity. The finding suggests that our characteristically slow development and long childhood are recent and unique to our own species, and may have given early humans an evolutionary advantage over Neanderthals.

The research, led by scientists at Harvard University, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology (MPI-EVA), and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), is detailed in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Teeth are remarkable time recorders, capturing each day of growth much like rings in trees reveal yearly progress," says Tanya M. Smith, assistant professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard. "Even more impressive is the fact that our first molars contain a tiny 'birth certificate,' and finding this birth line allows scientists to calculate exactly how old a juvenile was when it died."

Compared to even early humans, other primates have shorter gestation, faster childhood maturation, younger age at first reproduction, and a shorter overall lifespan. It's been unclear exactly when, in the 6 to 7 million years since our evolutionary split from non-human primates, the life course shifted.

Comment: See also our forum discussion The Neanderthal Legacy for more information on this topic.