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Italy: Asian Skeleton Found in Ruins Suggests Roman Empire Larger than Thought

Nick Squires
Telegraph
Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:12 EST

Archeologists have discovered the 2,000-year-old skeleton of an Asian man in an ancient cemetery in Italy, suggesting that the Roman Empire's reach was far more extensive than previously thought.

Although the Romans are known to have traded for silk and exotic spices with China, it was thought that most of the commerce was conducted through intermediaries along the Silk Route and that no Chinese or other Asians entered the empire itself.

But that orthodoxy will now have to be re-examined after a team of Canadian archaeologists conducted DNA analysis on the man's bones and found that he came from East Asia.

The skeleton was excavated from a cemetery which formed part of an imperial Roman estate at Vagnari, in the province Puglia, which forms the heel of the Italian boot.

Lamont Wood
TechNewsDaily
Mon, 08 Feb 2010 21:02 EST

© Samsung
Solid-state drives (SSDs) are faster but more expensive alternatives to normal hard drives, which use platter technology.

SSDs try to give users the best of everything: the access speed of a hard drive (some run 50 percent faster than normal hard drives), without the hard drive's noise, power consumption, tendency to succumb when dropped or vibrated, and the eventual certainty of a mechanical failure.

The trade-off, of course, is cost. Byte for byte, a SSD is about five times more expensive than a normal hard drive.

Andrew Hough
Telelgram.co.uk
Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:52 EST

© REX
Saturn's icy Moons visible here, from left to right are: Janus, Enceladus and Epimetheus captured by the Cassini spacecraft wide angle camera

New evidence that liquid water lies beneath the surface on the Saturn moon of Enceladus has been discovered by Nasa scientists, suggesting that life may exist.

Nasa's Cassini spacecraft flew through icy plumes created by ice volcanoes on and detected negatively charged water molecules, in a clear sign an underground sea exists.

On Earth this short-lived type of ion is produced where water is moving, such as in waterfalls or crashing ocean waves.

Obama vs. Einstein

Frank J. Tipler
Pajamas Media
Sun, 07 Feb 2010 17:50 EST

A renowned physicist demolishes a paper by Laurence Tribe, that President Obama played some roll in crafting, on the "revolutionary" aspects and legal implications of 20th century physics.

According to the Washington Post, David Axelrod, Barack Obama's senior advisor, said that the president worked with "[Harvard professor] Laurence Tribe on a paper on the legal implications of Einstein's theory of relativity." I've read that paper, "The Curvature of Constitutional Space." It's complete nonsense. It shows no understanding of Einstein's theory of relativity, or of the relationship between relativity theory and Newton's theory.

I - to use Obama's favorite word - do understand relativity theory. I was trained in relativity theory by the best. I was the post-doc of the late Princeton professor John A. Wheeler, who was himself the post-doc of Nobel Prize winner Niels Bohr. Wheeler's most famous student was Nobel Prize Winner Richard Feynman. I was also the post-doc of the late Oxford professor Dennis Sciama, who was a student of Nobel Prize winner Paul Dirac. Sciama's most famous student was Stephen Hawking.

Hasibur Rahman Bilu
The Daily Star
Sat, 06 Feb 2010 06:00 EST

© The Daily Star
A joint excavation team of France and Bangladesh have discovered an ancient city gate on the southwestern side of Mahasthangarh archaeological site in Bogra.

Archaeologists in Mahasthangarh archaeological site have recently discovered an ancient city gate, used as the city's entrance at least 1,500 years ago.

A joint archaeological excavation team of France and Bangladesh found the ancient city gate on February 1 on the south-western side of the site.

After the discovery, the team claimed that the age of the gate considering the earth and area is at least 1,500 years as they made a similar archaeological discovery at the location last year.

French archaeologist Ernelle Berliet said that several types of stone including sandstones were used along with brick to construct the floor of the gate. The width of the gate was at least 2.95 metres, according to archaeologists.

Iran producing attack drones: general

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
Mon, 08 Feb 2010 09:01 EST

© Associated Press
Iranian Defence Minister Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, pictured here in Tehran in 2009, says the unmanned aircraft would be able to carry out surveillance and long-range offensive missions, state TV reported.

Unmanned aircraft said to have long range

Iran has launched two production lines to build unmanned aircraft with surveillance and attack capabilities, the country's defence minister announced Monday.

Iran also announced it will soon deploy a missile air defence system more powerful than the advanced Russian S-300 system Tehran ordered from Moscow in 2007 but has yet to receive.

State television quoted Defence Minister Gen. Ahmad Vahidi as saying the unmanned aircraft would be able to carry out surveillance and offensive tasks with high precision and a long range. The two types of drones are named Ra'd (Thunder) and Nazir (Herald), with the former possessing attack capabilities.

Radio-Active Sunspot

SpaceWeather
Mon, 08 Feb 2010 09:02 EST

Behemoth sunspot 1045 is crackling with M-class solar flares--and that's not all. "There have been many loud shortwave radio bursts over the past two days," reports amateur radio astronomer Thomas Ashcraft of New Mexico. "Some of the bursts have completely saturated my receivers." Just listen to the sounds coming from the loudspeakers in his observatory.

Colin Barras
New Scientist
Fri, 15 Jan 2010 23:48 EST

There's some humbling news from the chemical world for anyone who has ever found themselves lost in a garden maze. A simple droplet of organic solvent can find its way through a complicated labyrinth with nothing more to go on than a slight pH difference.

Bartosz Grzybowski's team at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, used a common polymer to fashion a two-dimensional labyrinth some 2 centimetres on each side. They then flooded the maze with strongly alkaline potassium hydroxide solution, before placing a hydrochloric acid-soaked chunk of gel at the maze exit.

After about 40 seconds they placed a droplet of mineral oil containing hexyldecanoic acid at the maze entrance. The oil, which cannot mix with the potassium hydroxide solution, sits on the surface. But it remains still only for a matter of seconds - it soon begins tearing around the maze at speeds of up to 10 millimetres per second, sniffing out the shortest path to the acid-soaked gel, and solving the maze in the process.

Space Daily / SPX
Sun, 07 Feb 2010 22:45 EST

This composite image shows the effects of two galaxies caught in the act of merging. A Chandra X-ray Observatory image shows a pair of quasars in blue, located about 4.6 billion light years away, but separated on the sky by only about 70 thousand light years.

These bright sources, collectively called SDSS J1254+0846, are powered by material falling onto supermassive black holes. An optical image from the Baade-Magellan telescope in Chile, in yellow, shows tidal tails - gravitational-stripped streamers of stars and gas - fanning out from the two colliding galaxies.

This represents the first time a luminous pair of quasars has been clearly seen in an ongoing galaxy merger.

"Quasars are the most luminous compact objects in the Universe, and though about a million of them are now known, it's incredibly hard work to find two quasars side by side," said Paul Green, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, MA, who led the study.

Pentagon to make 'immortal organisms'

Press TV
Sun, 07 Feb 2010 14:58 EST

The Pentagon's advanced research division has allocated $6 million to create immortal synthetic organisms, which can die on command and keep a genetic record of what they have been doing, a report says.

Based on the 2011 budget of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the project, known as 'BioDesign,' aims to create artificial life, presumably with military purposes, Wired News reported.

The DNA of these genetically engineered organisms is altered to "produce the intended biological effect." These changes will ideally prevent cell death but induce the 'self-destruct option' in case of malfunction or falling into the wrong hands.

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