Science & TechnologyS


Magnify

Classic Maya history is embedded in commoners' homes

Diana Yates
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Wed, 14 Apr 2010 18:09 UTC
Image
© Lisa J. LuceroThe researchers excavated two modest homes in a small Maya center called Saturday Creek, in central Belize. Numerous artifacts, including vessels, stones and human remains, were found in the floors of each dwelling.
They were illiterate farmers, builders and servants, but Maya commoners found a way to record their own history - by burying it within their homes. A new study of the objects embedded in the floors of homes occupied more than 1,000 years ago in central Belize begins to decode their story.

The study, from University of Illinois anthropology professor Lisa J. Lucero, appears in the Journal of Social Archaeology.

Maya in the Classic period (A.D. 250-900) regularly "terminated" their homes, razing the walls, burning the floors and placing artifacts and (sometimes) human remains on top before burning them again.

Evidence suggests these rituals occurred every 40 or 50 years and likely marked important dates in the Maya calendar. After termination, the family built a new home on the old foundation, using broken and whole vessels, colorful fragments, animal bones and rocks to mark important areas and to provide ballast for a new plaster floor.
Read More...
Saturn

Cassini Captures First Movie of Lightning on Saturn

Nancy Atkinson
Universe Today
Wed, 14 Apr 2010 17:29 UTC
NASA's Cassini spacecraft has captured images of lightning on Saturn, allowing the scientists to create the first movie showing lightning flashing on another planet. "Ever since the beginning of the Cassini mission, a major goal of the Imaging Team has been the detection of Saturnian lightning," said team leader Carolyn Porco in an email. Porco said the ability to capture the lightning was a direct result of the dimming of the ringshine on the night side of the planet during last year's Saturn equinox. "And these flashes have been shown to be coincident in time with the emission of powerful electrostatic discharges intercepted by the Cassini Radio and Plasma Wave experiment," Porco added.
Embedded video from
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology
Read More...
Blackbox

Do Dartmoor's ancient stones have link to Stonehenge?

Linda Geddes
New Scientist
Wed, 14 Apr 2010 16:35 UTC
Image
© Tom GreevesThe Cut Hill stones were placed around the same time as Stonehenge
Littered across the hills of Dartmoor in Devon, southern England, around 80 rows and circles of stones stand sentinel in the wild landscape. Now, striking similarities between one of these monuments and Stonehenge, 180 kilometres to the east, suggest they may be the work of the same people.

The row of nine stones on Cut Hill was discovered in 2004 on one of the highest, most remote hills of Dartmoor national park. "It is on easily the most spectacular hill on north Dartmoor," says Andrew Fleming, president of the Devon Archaeological Society. "If you were looking for a distant shrine in the centre of the north moor, that's where you would put it."

Ralph Fyfe of the University of Plymouth and independent archaeologist Tom Greeves have now carbon-dated the peat surrounding the stones. This suggests that at least one of the stones had fallen - or been placed flat on the ground - by between 3600 and 3440 BC, and another by 3350 to 3100 BC (Antiquity, vol 84, p 55).

That comes as a surprise to archaeologists, who, on the strength of artefacts found nearby, had assumed that Dartmoor monuments like Cut Hill and Stall Moor (pictured) dated from the Bronze Age, around 2100 to 1600 BC. Instead, Fyfe suggests that Cut Hill is from the Neolithic period, the same period that Stonehenge was built.
Read More...
UFO 2

US professor says UFO studies should be legitimate university subject

Andrew Hough
UK Telegraph
Wed, 14 Apr 2010 15:20 UTC
Image
The studing of UFOs and other unexplained phenomena from space should be a legitimate university subject, an American professor, Philip Haseley, has claimed.

The New York anthropology professor said the subject should be part of the mainstream as a serious "area of study".

The Niagara County Community College, a state university in New York, lecturer said due to the high amount of sightings every year, it should follow that students should be able to investigate phenomenon.

"(A sighting) happens to millions of people (around the world)," he said.

"It's about time we looked into this as a worthy area of study.

"It's important that the whole subject be brought out in the open and investigated."

Prof Haseley, who is also head of the Western New York Mutual UFO Network, an organisation that is focused on UFO research, said there were up to 50 UFO sightings are reported every month across region.
Read More...
Cloud Lightning

Giant Natural Particle Accelerator Above Thunderclouds


Science Daily
Wed, 14 Apr 2010 15:02 UTC
Accelerators
© Serge Soula / Oscar van der VeldeA lightning researcher at the University of Bath has discovered that during thunderstorms, giant natural particle accelerators can form 40 km above the surface of the Earth. On Wednesday 14th April Dr. Martin Fullekrug will present his new work at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2010) in Glasgow. The image shows a transient airglow or 'sprite' above a thunderstorm in France in September 2009.
A lightning researcher at the University of Bath has discovered that during thunderstorms, giant natural particle accelerators can form 40 kilometers above the surface of the Earth.

On April 14, Dr. Martin Fullekrug presented his new work at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2010) in Glasgow.

When particularly intense lightning discharges in thunderstorms coincide with high-energy particles coming in from space (cosmic rays), nature provides the right conditions to form a giant particle accelerator above the thunderclouds.

The cosmic rays strip off electrons from air molecules and these electrons are accelerated upwards by the electric field of the lightning discharge. The free electrons and the lightning electric field then make up a natural particle accelerator.
Read More...
Bulb

New PV Cell Generates Electricity From UV, Visible, Infrared Lights

Tetsuo Nozawa, Nikkei Electronics
Tech On
Tue, 23 Mar 2010 14:05 UTC
Image
The PV cell prototyped at the Kyoto Institute of Technology by adding cobalt to a p-type GaN thin film and laminating an n-type material (right). The cell with an absorbing layer measures 10 x 10mm. The surrounding thin rectangular patterns are electrodes. And the p-type GaN thin film without cobalt (left).
A Japanese research group prototyped a photovoltaic (PV) cell that can generate electricity from a wide wavelength band of light including ultraviolet light, visible light and infrared light.

The group, which is led by Saki Sonoda, associate professor at the Kyoto Institute of Technology, made the announcement March 19, 2010, at the 57th Spring Meeting of the Japan Society of Applied Physics.

The PV cell was realized by adding "3d transition metals" including manganese (Mn) to transparent composite semiconductors with a wide bandgap such as gallium nitride (GaN). It could enable to develop a highly-efficient PV cell by using a simply-joined cell without making a multi-junction cell.

Currently, the conversion efficiency of the new PV cell is low, but its open voltage (Voc) is as high as 2V.

The research group delivered a 90-minute lecture on the cell under the title "Nitride Semiconductor Added With Transition Metals as a Photoelectric Conversion Material for Ultraviolet, Visible and Infrared Lights ~ In the Aim of Realizing the Next-generation Super-efficient PV Cell With a Simple Element Structure."
Read More...
Blackbox

Mysterious radio waves emitted from nearby galaxy

Stephen Battersby
New Scientist
Wed, 14 Apr 2010 14:09 UTC
Image
© NASA/ESA/STScI/AURASomething in there is producing an unusually regular radio signal
There is something strange in the cosmic neighbourhood. An unknown object in the nearby galaxy M82 has started sending out radio waves, and the emission does not look like anything seen anywhere in the universe before.

"We don't know what it is," says co-discoverer Tom Muxlow of Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics near Macclesfield, UK.

The thing appeared in May last year, while Muxlow and his colleagues were monitoring an unrelated stellar explosion in M82 using the MERLIN network of radio telescopes in the UK. A bright spot of radio emission emerged over only a few days, quite rapidly in astronomical terms. Since then it has done very little except baffle astrophysicists.

It certainly does not fit the pattern of radio emissions from supernovae: they usually get brighter over a few weeks and then fade away over months, with the spectrum of the radiation changing all the while. The new source has hardly changed in brightness over the course of a year, and its spectrum is steady.
Read More...
Meteor

Stunning Comet's Size Shocks Scientists


SPACE.com
Wed, 14 Apr 2010 01:13 UTC
Image
© Patrick BoomerPatrick Boomer, captured these photographs Southwest of Red Deer, Alberta, Canada. These comparison photos of Comet McNaught, taken on Jan. 6th, Jan. 7th and Jan 9th (2007) shows the difference a day makes. Both photos were taken at 5:36pm local time.
Comet McNaught, the so-called Great Comet of 2007, has been identified as the biggest comet measured to date, according to scientists, whose calculations were based on the comet's overall influence in space.

Instead of using the length of the comet's tail to measure the scale of the comet, astronomers used data from the ESA/NASA Ulysses spacecraft to determine the size of the region of space disturbed by the comet's presence - a cosmic wake across the solar system.

Through analysis of magnetometer data, scientists found evidence of a decayed shockwave surrounding the comet, which was created when ionized gas emitted from the comet's nucleus joined the fast-flowing particles of the solar wind. That, in turn, caused the solar wind around the comet to abruptly slow down.
Read More...
Pharoah

Biblical plagues really happened say scientists

Richard Gray
The Telegraph
Sat, 27 Mar 2010 17:03 UTC
Image
© GettyThe arrival of toxic algae would have forced frogs to leave the water where they lived
The Biblical plagues that devastated Ancient Egypt in the Old Testament were the result of global warming and a volcanic eruption, scientists have claimed.

Researchers believe they have found evidence of real natural disasters on which the ten plagues of Egypt, which led to Moses freeing the Israelites from slavery in the Book of Exodus in the Bible, were based.

But rather than explaining them as the wrathful act of a vengeful God, the scientists claim the plagues can be attributed to a chain of natural phenomena triggered by changes in the climate and environmental disasters that happened hundreds of miles away.

Comment: The whole point is that it serves the interests of religions to ascribe to natural disasters the "wrath of God". How would they hold power over the rest of us otherwise?

Read More...
Info

Fear of getting fat seen in healthy women's brain scans


Brigham Young University
Tue, 13 Apr 2010 15:11 UTC
A group of women in a new study seemed unlikely to have body image issues - at least their responses on a tried-and-true psychological screening presented no red flags.

That assessment changed when Brigham Young University researchers used MRI technology to observe what happened in the brain when people viewed images of complete strangers.

If the stranger happened to be overweight and female, it surprisingly activated in women's brains an area that processes identity and self-reflection. Men did not show signs of any self-reflection in similar situations.

"These women have no history of eating disorders and project an attitude that they don't care about body image," said Mark Allen, a BYU neuroscientist. "Yet under the surface is an anxiety about getting fat and the centrality of body image to self."

Allen makes his report with grad student Tyler Owens and BYU psychology professor Diane Spangler in the May issue of the psychological journal Personality and Individual Differences.
Read More...