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Eti Bonn-Muller
Archaeology
Wed, 17 Mar 2010 20:29 EDT

© Prof. N. Ch. Stampolidis
Excavation director Nicholas Stampolidis at the entrance to a recently excavated eighth-century B.C. tomb of an important high priestess and her three female protégés, with ARCHAEOLOGY's Eti Bonn-Muller and budding archaeologist Baki Agelarakis.

Evidence of a powerful female bloodline emerges from the Iron Age necropolis of Orthi Petra at Eleutherna on Crete.

For a quarter century, Greek excavation director Nicholas Stampolidis and his dedicated team have been unearthing the untold stories of the people buried some 2,800 years ago in the necropolis of Orthi Petra at Eleutherna on Crete. Until now, the site has perhaps been best known for the tomb its excavators dubbed "A1K1," an assemblage of 141 cremated individuals, all but two of whom were aristocratic men who likely fell in battle in foreign lands. Excavated between 1992 and 1996, this elaborate rock-cut tomb was brimming with fantastic burial goods that date from the ninth to the seventh century B.C., including bronze vessels, gold and silver jewelry, and military regalia, as literally befits the burial of Homeric war heroes. Now, two unprecedented discoveries since 2007--three lavish jar burials that contained the remains of a dozen related female individuals and a monumental funerary building where a high priestess and her protégés, also all related, were laid to rest--are adding to our knowledge of Eleutherna's women, and forcing the scholarly community to reevaluate their importance and role in the so-called "Dark Ages" of Greece (see "Top 10 Discoveries of 2009").

Huge monkey god statue found

The Straights Times
Wed, 17 Mar 2010 20:21 EDT

Cairo - Egyptian archaeologists have discovered a colossal ancient statue of the pharaonic deity of wisdom, Thoth, in the shape of a baboon, the council of antiquities said in a statement on Tuesday.

The four-metre tall statue was discovered in four pieces along with two statues while workers were lowering ground waters beneath Luxor to help preserve the city's pharaonic temples, the statement said. It dates back to the 18th Dynasty, which ruled Egypt until 1292 BC.

Gail Gallessich
University Of California, Santa Barbara
Wed, 17 Mar 2010 20:04 EDT

© George Foulsham
Avi Shporer with a graph
that shows how the observed
light intensity emanating from a star
drops when the newly discovered
planet moves in front of the star.

Santa Barbara, California - - An international team of scientists, including several who are affiliated with UC Santa Barbara, has discovered a new planet the size of Jupiter. The finding is published in the March 18 issue of the journal Nature.

The planet, called CoRoT-9b, was discovered by using the CoRoT space telescope satellite, operated by the French space agency, The Centre National d'Études Spatiales, or CNES. The newly discovered planet orbits a star similar to our sun and is located in the constellation Serpens Cauda, at a distance of 1500 light-years from Earth.

Associated Press
Wed, 17 Mar 2010 16:45 EDT

Site was a winter palace used by Muslim caliphs, not an ancient synagogue

Jerusalem - Israeli archaeologists have announced that ruins long thought to be of an ancient synagogue are actually the remains of a palace built by Arab caliphs 1,300 years ago.

The site, on the banks of the Sea of Galilee, was identified as a synagogue in the 1950s because archaeologists found a carving of a menorah, a seven-armed candelabra that is a Jewish symbol. But scholars said in a report published this week that the identification was an error, and that the site was a winter palace used by the caliphs of the Umayyad dynasty, the same rulers who built Jerusalem's gold-capped Dome of the Rock.

Early Arab historians had described the palace, calling it al-Sinnabra, but its location was previously unknown.

Caroline Davies
guardian.co.uk
Wed, 17 Mar 2010 12:09 EDT

Human regeneration has to date been the preserve of science fiction. But mammals may have a dormant ability to regrow healthy tissue, research suggests, possibly paving the way for scar-free healing at some point in the future.

Biologists believe that a gene called p21 may hold the key to spontaneous healing, which could allow limited regeneration of the human body, as witnessed in newts, flatworms and the hydra.

It is thought that in mammals this healing potential has been lost through evolution, but may lie dormant in cells and could be reactivated by switching off the p21 gene. Mice engineered in the laboratory to lack the p21 gene, were able to renew surgically removed tissue so that no trace of an injury remained.

Removing p21 causes adult cells to behave like stem cells - those cells in embryos with a "pluripotent" power to become any kind of tissue.

Racism is linked to Religious dogmatism

John Shook
Center for Inquiry
Tue, 16 Feb 2010 00:52 EST

Religious people can be racist, and that's not news. But are they more likely to be racist than non-religious people? A new study now confirms this hypothesis.

The February issue of Personality and Social Psychology Review has published a meta-analysis of 55 independent studies conducted in the United States which considers surveys of over 20,000 mostly Christian participants. Religious congregations generally express more prejudiced views towards other races. Furthermore, the more devout the community, the greater the racism.

Cassini Cruises By Saturn's Moon Rhea

Space Daily / JPL
Tue, 16 Mar 2010 21:29 EDT

© NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
This picture was taken on March 02, 2010 and received on Earth March 03, 2010. The camera was pointing toward RHEA at approximately 38,532 kilometers away, and the image was taken using the CL1 and CL2 filters. This image has not been validated or calibrated. A validated/calibrated image will be archived with the NASA Planetary Data System in 2011.

Cassini's closest-ever flyby of Saturn's moon Rhea went quite smoothly and teams are busy checking out their data! These flybys never fail to amaze me. And the raw images - which give us an unprocessed first look - are really cool!

Raw image N00152150 gives us a view of part of the bright, fractured terrain we refer to as "wispy terrain" from about 14,000 kilometers (8,900 miles) away. We know that Rhea's albedo overall is quite high. (When I say "albedo," I basically mean "brightness" or "reflectivity." Studying the albedo can tell a lot about surface composition, geologic processes, and interactions with external environment.)

But this image demonstrates how bright these cracks are since they are so shiny that the surrounding terrain looks quite dark. There are also some interesting apparent albedo variations seen in this image, which are really intriguing.

This raw image (N00152175) from Cassini's narrow-angle camera image was taken about 40 minutes after closest approach. The image shows a region adjacent to the wispy terrain -craters, craters everywhere! And wow, are those crater rims bright compared to the surrounding terrain.

Moon Daily / SPX
Tue, 16 Mar 2010 21:25 EDT

© NASA/GSFC/ASU
The seven instruments aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter provide varied and unique datasets. This photo album published in concert with the first major public data release, gives a small taste of each instrument's measurements and highlights some of the notable early achievements of the mission.

The public can follow along with NASA on its journey of lunar discovery. On March 15, the publicly accessible Planetary Data System will release data sets from the seven instruments on board NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

"The Planetary Data System is a NASA funded program to archive data from past and present planetary missions as well as astronomical observations and laboratory data," said Dr. John Keller, LRO Deputy Project Scientist from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

"The purpose of the Planetary Data System is to make available to the public the fruits of NASA funded research and to allow advanced research on solar system science."

Each of the seven instruments is unique and will provide data in different formats to the Planetary Data System. Much of the data will be in a relatively low level form, not highly processed, which allows researchers to maximize flexibility in working with the data.

Rachel Courtland
New Scientist
Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:51 EDT

The heart of Venus may belong to Earth. Our planet could be tugging on the core of Venus, exerting control over its spin.

Whenever Venus and Earth arrive at the closest point in their orbits, Venus always presents the same face to us. This could mean that Earth's gravity is tugging subtly on Venus, affecting its rotation rate. That idea, raised decades ago, was disregarded when it turned out that Venus is spinning too fast to be in such a gravitational "resonance".

But Earth could still be pulling on Venus by controlling its core, according to calculations by Gérard Caudal of the University of Versailles-Saint Quentin, France.

Caudal made large assumptions about Venus's interior, which we know little about. For his hypothesis to be correct, the planet would, like Earth, need a solid core surrounded by a liquid layer. This could allow the solid core to rotate slower than the rest of the planet. The core would also have to be asymmetric or heterogeneous, so that Earth can exert a variable tug as Venus spins. "For the resonance to be possible, there should be something that the gravity of the Earth could grasp," Caudal says.

Jupiter's spot seen glowing

Dr. Henri Boffin
ESO
Tue, 16 Mar 2010 19:00 EDT

© ESO/NASA/JPL/ESA/L. Fletcher
New thermal images from ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) and other ground-based telescopes show swirls of warmer air and cooler regions never seen before within Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. The images enable scientists to make the first detailed weather map of the inside of the giant storm system. One observation illustrated by this image is the correspondence between a warm core within an otherwise cold storm system and the reddest colour of the Great Red Spot. The image on the left was obtained with the VISIR on the VLT in Chile on May 18, 2008. It was taken in the infrared wavelength range of 10.8 microns, which is sensitive to Jupiter's atmospheric temperatures in the 300 to 600 millibar pressure range. That pressure range is close to the altitude of the white, red and brown aerosols seen in the visible-light image on the right, which was obtained by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope on May 15, 2008. These images show the interaction of three of Jupiter's largest storms -- the Great Red Spot and two smaller storms nicknamed Oval BA and Little Red Spot.

"This is our first detailed look inside the biggest storm of the Solar System," says Glenn Orton, who led the team of astronomers that made the study. "We once thought the Great Red Spot was a plain old oval without much structure, but these new results show that it is, in fact, extremely complicated."

The observations reveal that the reddest colour of the Great Red Spot corresponds to a warm core within the otherwise cold storm system, and images show dark lanes at the edge of the storm where gases are descending into the deeper regions of the planet. The observations, detailed in a paper appearing in the journal Icarus, give scientists a sense of the circulation patterns within the solar system's best-known storm system.

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