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Ancient Sculptures Coated in Blood

Charles Q. Choi
livescience.com
Wed, 19 Dec 2007 15:02 UTC
Sculptors from the extraordinarily wealthy ancient Mali Empire - once the source of nearly half the world's gold - at times coated their works of art with blood, scientists confirmed for the first time.

At its height, the empire, which lasted from the 13th century to the 17th century, extended over an area larger than Western Europe and was renowned for its gold mines.

Researchers have often reported or suspected the presence of blood on many African relics, purportedly shed during ancient ceremonies involving animal sacrifice. While crusts or patinas supposedly made of blood have been found on many such artifacts, accurately confirming the presence of blood has proven hard because little has remained on the objects over the ages.

©Credit: Daniel Vigears, Center for Research and Restoration for the Museums of France.
A new, highly sensitive analytical test was used to confirm the presence of blood in the coating of this humanoid artifact used in ancient Mali rituals.
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Newspaper

The Incredible Art of Bacteria


livescience.com
Wed, 19 Dec 2007 12:39 UTC
Professor Eshel Ben-Jacob of Tel-Aviv University and Professor Herbert Levine of UCSD's National Science Foundation Frontier Center for Theoretical Biological Physics watched bacteria solve problems in the petri dish for years. In doing so, they caught bacteria in the act of creating beautiful art.

"While the colors and shading are artistic additions, the image templates are actual colonies of tens of billions of these microorganisms," according to the researchers. "The colony structures form as adaptive responses to laboratory-imposed stresses that mimic hostile environments faced in nature. They illustrate the coping strategies that bacteria have learned to employ, strategies that involve cooperation through communication. These selfsame strategies are used by the bacteria in their struggle to defeat our best antibiotics...

©Credit: Eshel Ben-Jacob et al., Tel-Aviv University
Colonies of tens of billions of microorganisms create their own artwork as they adapt to stresses in a petri dish. Scientists add the colors and shading.
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Better Earth

Book Review: New Light on the Black Death by Mike Baillie

Laura Knight-Jadczyk
Sott.net
Wed, 19 Dec 2007 08:08 UTC
Triumph of Death

Hell on Earth, the nightmare depicted by Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel in his mid-16th-century The Triumph of Death reflects the social upheaval and terror that followed the plague that devastated medieval Europe. Was there a cosmic connection?


I just finished reading this one and all I can say is: Wow! This was an intense book! Not a long one, either - just 208 pages including appendices. It's tight and economical with no wasted words or idle rambling around. Every example and temporary diversion is crucial to the central argument which is - brace yourself for this one - Mike Baillie (yeah, a real scientist and not a crackpot), is saying that the Black Death, one of the most deadly pandemics in human history, said to have killed possibly two thirds of the entire population of Europe, not to mention millions all over the planet, probably wasn't Bubonic Plague but was rather Death By Comet(s)!

Oh yeah! That's far out, isn't it?

Maybe not. Baillie has the scientific evidence to support his theory and his evidence actually supports - and is supported by - what the people of the time were saying: earthquakes, comets, rains of death and fire, corrupted atmosphere, and death on a scale that is almost unimaginable. Most people nowadays are not really aware of what happened just 660 years ago. (Hmmm... the inquiring mind immediately wonders what might happen when we hit 666 years after?! That would be 2012...)

Comment: Continue to Part Two: The Hazard to Civilization From Fireballs and Comets

See also:

Black Death found to be Ebola-like virus

New Light on the Black Death: The Viral and Cosmic Connection

Related:

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Question

The mother of all civilisations in South Americas?

Shobhan Saxena
The Times of India
Wed, 19 Dec 2007 01:03 UTC
The ruins were so magnificent and sprawling that some people believed that the aliens from a faraway galaxy had built the huge pyramids that stood in the desert across the Andes.

Some historians believed that the complex society, which existed at that time, was born out of fear and war. They looked for the telltale signs of violence that they believed led to the creation of this civilisation. But, they could not find even a hint of any warfare. It was baffling. Even years after Ruth Shady Solis found the ancient city of pyramids at Caral in Peru, it continues to surprise historians around the world. It took Ruth Shady many years and many rounds of carbon dating to prove that the earliest known civilisation in South Americas - at 2,627 BC - was much older than the Harappa Valley towns and the pyramids of Egypt.
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Pharoah

Egypt's Oldest Known Art Identified, Is 15,000 Years Old

Dan Morrison
National Geographic
Wed, 11 Jul 2007 00:49 UTC


©Dirk Huyge
Etchings at Qurta, located about 400 miles (640 kilometers) south of Cairo, Egypt, depict a now extinct species of wild cow. The rediscovered artwork - similar in look and age to iconic paintings in Spain and France - pushes "Egyptian art, religion, and culture back to a much earlier time," archaeologists say.
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Pharoah

Surprise Finds at Egypt Temple "Change Everything"

Steven Stanek
National Geographic
Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:03 UTC


©Steven Stanek
Recent discoveries at Egypt's Temple of Amun at Karnak include a private ramp (top) likely used by the pharaoh Taharka to enter the temple from his royal boat and a pair of public baths (bottom) in which worshippers bathed before entering the holy site.

A series of surprising discoveries has been made at the foot of Egypt's famous Temple of Amun at Karnak, archaeologists say.
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Telephone

New phone device allows you to 'speak' through your ear


Agence France-Presse
Tue, 18 Dec 2007 23:03 UTC
A Japanese company Tuesday unveiled a new device that will allow people to "speak" through their ear so they can use their mobile telephones in noisy places.

©Unknown
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Key

We Have Ze Key: New Vista Random Numbers Include NSA Backdoor

Bruce Schneier
Wired News
Tue, 18 Dec 2007 06:22 UTC
Schneier is reporting that Microsoft has added the new Dual_EC-DRBG random-number generator to Vista SP1. This random-number generator is the same one discussed earlier that may have a secret NSA backdoor built into it.
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Rocket

Florida: Fuzzy object spotted in night sky was a fuel dump


Sun Herald
Tue, 11 Dec 2007 05:24 UTC
It wasn't a plane. It wasn't a bird. It certainly wasn't Superman (or even Tim Tebow).

But something was there in the early evening night sky over our area Monday night. It was far bigger than a star, fuzzy like a comet, seemingly moving only with the slow rotation of the earth.
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Better Earth

Energy Source of Northern Lights Found


Associated Press
Tue, 11 Dec 2007 23:16 UTC
SAN FRANCISCO - Scientists think they have discovered the energy source of the spectacular color displays seen in the northern lights. New data from NASA's Themis mission, a quintet of satellites launched this winter, found the energy comes from a stream of charged particles from the sun flowing like a current through twisted bundles of magnetic fields connecting Earth's upper atmosphere to the sun.
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