Irish scientists have found fragments of Egyptian papyrus in the leather cover of an ancient book of psalms that was unearthed from a peat bog, Ireland's National Museum said on Monday.
The papyrus in the lining of the Egyptian-style leather cover of the 1,200-year-old manuscript, "potentially represents the first tangible connection between early Irish Christianity and the Middle Eastern Coptic Church", the Museum said.
Science & Technology
© The Register
Ha ha, imperialists - it is not only you who can build expensive crazy rayguns in giant aeroplanes!
Ha ha, imperialists - it is not only you who can build expensive crazy rayguns in giant aeroplanes!
Reports suggest that Russia has re-started work on a Cold War project intended to produce a laser cannon mounted on an enormous military transport aircraft in the style of the USA's Airborne Laser Testbed 747.
Erratic Muscovite journal Pravda reports the development, saying that the Russian military raygun programme was started in 1980 but then mothballed in the '90s when funds became tight. Now, however, it is said to have been restarted.
Though Pravda doesn't specify the name of the programme, it does state that the weapon system is carried aboard a modified Ilyushin-76 heavy transport: this suggests that the report refers to the Beriev A-60 programme of the 1980s and 90s. The A-60 supposedly mounted a one-megawatt gas laser.
Scientists have long tried to tease out the secrets of what makes us human by comparing human behavior to how other species behave, such as chimpanzees.
But now a research team hopes to get at the question another way - by studying the DNA of Neanderthals, early hominids that were similar to humans, said Richard "Ed" Green, a computational biologist at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
"What is clear is that our closest extinct relative is the Neanderthal," Green told an overflow crowd of University of Georgia professors and students in a Coverdell Hall lecture room Tuesday. "They are way more similar to humans than anything else."
Green is part of the research team, led by Svante Paabo of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, that partially sequenced the genome of Neanderthals using DNA from bones buried in a Croatian cave nearly 40,000 years ago.
But now a research team hopes to get at the question another way - by studying the DNA of Neanderthals, early hominids that were similar to humans, said Richard "Ed" Green, a computational biologist at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
"What is clear is that our closest extinct relative is the Neanderthal," Green told an overflow crowd of University of Georgia professors and students in a Coverdell Hall lecture room Tuesday. "They are way more similar to humans than anything else."
Green is part of the research team, led by Svante Paabo of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, that partially sequenced the genome of Neanderthals using DNA from bones buried in a Croatian cave nearly 40,000 years ago.
Recently, archaeologists found prehistoric hats of human beings who lived 4,600 years ago from an ancient tomb site at Tongliao City of Inner Mongolia.
Experts said it was the first time this kind of hats, which were made from bones, have been found in the same period of prehistoric culture.
As of now, archaeologists have found and cleared near 400 ancient tombs dating back 4,500 years ago around the site, and more than 1,500 objects of pottery, jade stone, horn and clam shell were excavated.
The newly-found bone hats were tightly cramped on dead bodies' heads and had the obvious shape of hats. After inspection, every such hat was made from 15 or 16 animal bones, and the length and radian of those are all very delicate.
Experts said it was the first time this kind of hats, which were made from bones, have been found in the same period of prehistoric culture.
As of now, archaeologists have found and cleared near 400 ancient tombs dating back 4,500 years ago around the site, and more than 1,500 objects of pottery, jade stone, horn and clam shell were excavated.
The newly-found bone hats were tightly cramped on dead bodies' heads and had the obvious shape of hats. After inspection, every such hat was made from 15 or 16 animal bones, and the length and radian of those are all very delicate.
© David Malin, Ray Sharples, and the Anglo-Australian Observatory.
The supernova that was spotted in the Large Magellanic Cloud in 1987 reached 3rd magnitude and was the brightest to grace our skies in 383 years
The supernova that was spotted in the Large Magellanic Cloud in 1987 reached 3rd magnitude and was the brightest to grace our skies in 383 years
Supernova 1987A peaked at 3rd magnitude, making it a snap to spot by eye. But, with its declination of -69°, the blast was invisible to virtually everyone north of the equator. I'm jealous of my southern astro-friends because I never got to see it. (In fact, I wonder how the popular perception of and appreciation for astronomy might be different had this event been in view from northern skies - a topic for another day!)
© Spencer Kellis, University of Utah
An array of 16 microelectrodes -- known as a microECoG grid -- is arranged in a four-by-four array and shown next to a US quarter-dollar coin with a Utah state design on its "tail" side. University of Utah researchers placed two such microelectrode grids over speech areas of a patient's brain and used them to decode brain signals into words. The technology someday might help severely paralyzed patients "speak" with their thoughts, which would be converted into a computerized voice.
An array of 16 microelectrodes -- known as a microECoG grid -- is arranged in a four-by-four array and shown next to a US quarter-dollar coin with a Utah state design on its "tail" side. University of Utah researchers placed two such microelectrode grids over speech areas of a patient's brain and used them to decode brain signals into words. The technology someday might help severely paralyzed patients "speak" with their thoughts, which would be converted into a computerized voice.
In an early step toward letting severely paralyzed people speak with their thoughts, University of Utah researchers translated brain signals into words using two grids of 16 microelectrodes implanted beneath the skull but atop the brain.
"We have been able to decode spoken words using only signals from the brain with a device that has promise for long-term use in paralyzed patients who cannot now speak," says Bradley Greger, an assistant professor of bioengineering.
Because the method needs much more improvement and involves placing electrodes on the brain, he expects it will be a few years before clinical trials on paralyzed people who cannot speak due to so-called "locked-in syndrome."
The Journal of Neural Engineering's September issue is publishing Greger's study showing the feasibility of translating brain signals into computer-spoken words.
© Mary Evans Picture Library
Say what you see.
Say what you see.
It's a big skull. No, wait, it's two people under an arch. Hold on, it's a skull again. Two very different images can be perceived in the trick picture Blossom and Decay (see left). Now we are one step closer to working out how the brain spontaneously flips between such views, with the discovery of what may be the relevant brain region.
The precise neural mechanism that provokes the brain to switch its view of a scene is unknown, but it is thought to play a major role in perception by acting as a sort of reality check, says Ryota Kanai of University College London. "We need a trigger to prompt possible different interpretations so that we don't get stuck with a potentially incorrect interpretation of the world."
To find out which part of the brain might be involved, Kanai and colleagues asked 52 volunteers to watch a video of a revolving sphere and press a button when the rotation of the sphere appeared to change direction. Crucially, the sphere was not changing direction; it could simply be perceived to be rotating in either direction. How long each rotation-direction was perceived for was recorded and an average "switch rate" assigned to each of the volunteers.
The team then used structural magnetic resonance imaging to search for active brain regions during this task. This pointed to the superior parietal lobes (SPL), two areas towards the back of the head known to control attention and process three-dimensional images. People whose cortex was thicker and better connected in this region had faster switch rates.
© Ringeisen/European Molecular Biology Laboratory
The brain of a marine ragworm has similarities to a human brain.
The brain of a marine ragworm has similarities to a human brain.
But just how this portion of the brain evolved has remained a mystery.
Now researchers report that something resembling a cerebral cortex exists in the marine ragworm, a small creature with ancient roots that has not changed in hundreds of millions of years. The findings appear in the journal Cell.
"You can say that the topography is so similar that the human and worm must come from a common ancestor," said Detlev Arendt, a researcher at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and one of the study's authors.
To conduct their study, Dr. Arendt and his colleagues used a technique called cellular profiling to determine what genes were turned on and off in the cells of the ragworm's brain. This sort of profiling provides a molecular footprint for each cell.
© Juan Forero/The Washington Post
Nigel Smith, left, a geographer, and archaeologist Augusto Oyuela-Caycedo study a clump of fruit trees in Peru. Ceramics in the forest indicate the presence of the Omaguas, an indigenous group.
Nigel Smith, left, a geographer, and archaeologist Augusto Oyuela-Caycedo study a clump of fruit trees in Peru. Ceramics in the forest indicate the presence of the Omaguas, an indigenous group.
Archaeologists, many of them Americans, say the opposite is true: This patch of forest, and many others across the Amazon, was instead home to an advanced, even spectacular civilization that managed the forest and enriched infertile soil to feed thousands.
The findings are discrediting a once-bedrock theory of archaeology that long held that the Amazon, unlike much of the Americas, was a historical black hole, its environment too hostile and its earth too poor to have ever sustained big, sedentary societies. Only small and primitive hunter-gatherer tribes, the assumption went, could ever have eked out a living in an unforgiving environment.
But scientists now believe that instead of stone-age tribes, like the groups that occasionally emerge from the forest today, the Indians who inhabited the Amazon centuries ago numbered as many as 20 million, far more people than live here today.
© Alamy
Exquisitely stone-carved Asparas dancers at the Cambodian temple of Angkor Wat.
Exquisitely stone-carved Asparas dancers at the Cambodian temple of Angkor Wat.
Amid the splendour of the 12th-century temple at Angkor Wat, they stand and stare like silent sentinels, sensuous rather than erotic, carved with elegance and care. But exactly who are these 1,786 mysterious women and why, more than a century after Cambodia's famed Hindu temple was rediscovered by Western archaeologists, did it take the efforts of an amateur researcher from Florida to push experts into trying to resolve the puzzle?
Though Kent Davis had lived in South-east Asia during the 1990s, he did not have an opportunity to see Angkor Wat until 2005. Like most visitors to the huge complex in the centre of the Cambodia, for many years cut off from the outside world because of the presence of the Khmer Rouge, he was mesmerised by the experience.
But he was also left with a flurry of questions. "I went to Angkor as a tourist and I was startled when I got there to notice these women," said Mr Davis, 54, a publisher and writer who now lives near Tampa, Florida. "I was not prepared for it. The human element of them struck me and I wanted to know who they were. I asked one of the guides and he said they were there to serve the king after he went to heaven."
Mr Davis's interest was tweaked, so he wanted to know more. He vowed he would return to the US and investigate. Yet when he got home he found there was essentially nothing written about these women, who appear throughout the temple complex in full body carvings.
Indeed, the only study of the female carvings he could find had been made in the early 20th century by the daughter of Frenchman Henri Marchal, then the curator of the temple site. Frustrated but intrigued, he decided he would find out for himself. Five years and several trips to Angkor later, Mr Davis has slowly begun to get some answers.
