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Blackfeet Reservation dig unearthing 1,000-year-old history

Travis Coleman
Great Falls Tribune
Sun, 08 Aug 2010 16:48 UTC
Image
© Great Falls Tribune
The Blackfeet Tribe's historic preservation officer John Murray, left, and crew member Jesse Ballenger look at bison bones uncovered at the Two Medicine bison jump site on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation.
Browning, Montana - Archaeologists are teaming with Blackfeet tribal members to uncover a vast and little-known former hunting complex and bison kill site along the Two Medicine River used at least 1,000 years ago.

Researchers say the 9-mile-long project area, containing a preserved system for driving bison over a cliff, bison bones and remnants of two campsites, could become one of the largest and most significant Blackfeet heritage sites in the region.

The Two Medicine bison jump site is located in the southeastern corner of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation on a remote plateau overlooking the river. Researchers, led by Dr. Maria Nieves Zedeno of the University of Arizona in Tucson, say they're eager to study how late prehistoric and later hunters - Blackfeet and others - used the land to kill bison. They also want to expand people's knowledge about this now extinct way of life.

"We really need to preserve this site for future generations," said Zedeno, an accomplished archaeologist from the University of Arizona's School of Anthropology and Bureau of Applied Research.
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Meteor

Planets Align for the Perseid Meteor Shower

Dr. Tony Phillips
Science@NASA
Sun, 08 Aug 2010 11:15 UTC
Image
© NASA
Looking northeast around midnight on August 12th-13th. The red dot is the Perseid radiant. Although Perseid meteors can appear in any part of the sky, all of their tails will point back to the radiant.
You know it's a good night when a beautiful alignment of planets is the second best thing that's going to happen. Thursday, August 12th, is such a night.

The show begins at sundown when Venus, Saturn, Mars and the crescent Moon pop out of the western twilight in tight conjunction. All four heavenly objects will fit within a circle about 10 degrees in diameter, beaming together through the dusky colors of sunset. No telescope is required to enjoy this naked-eye event: sky map.

The planets will hang together in the western sky until 10 pm or so. When they leave, following the sun below the horizon, you should stay, because that is when the Perseid meteor shower begins. From 10 pm until dawn, meteors will flit across the starry sky in a display that's even more exciting than a planetary get-together.
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Sun

M1 Class Solar Flare Just Misses Earth August 7th


Space Weather
Sun, 08 Aug 2010 11:03 UTC
On August 7th (1825 UT), magnetic fields around sunspot 1093 became unstable and erupted, producing a strong M1-class solar flare. Several amateur astronomers caught the active region in mid-flare, while NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded an extreme ultraviolet movie of the entire event:

The eruption hurled a coronal mass ejection (CME) into space, just missing a direct sun-Earth line. Forecasters expect the cloud to deliver no more than a glancing blow to our planet's magnetic field when it billows by on August 9th or 10th--not be a major space weather event.

Future eruptions could turn out differently. Active region 1093 is rotating toward Earth. By the end of this weekend, we'll be in the line of fire if its magnetic fields become unstable again.
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Telescope

How Heavens Have Affected Affairs on Earth

Ben Bova
Naples News
Sat, 07 Aug 2010 17:58 UTC
Image
© Don Dixon
I became interested in astronomy when I was 11 years old, on my first visit to a planetarium. When they turned out all the lights and flashed the stars onto that domed ceiling, I was hooked for life.

Astronomy is not only beautiful and exciting, it's been crucially important to our existence. It even led to the development of democracy.

Our ancestors were watching the night sky during the ice age. Paleontologists have discovered a fossilized bone some 30,000 years old that has the phases of the moon carved into it.

About 20,000 years later, when they invented agriculture, astronomy became a matter of life and death. Farming societies need to know when to plant their crops. If you plant at the wrong time of year and your crops don't grow, you starve.

In ancient Egypt, the Nile River's annual flood brought fresh, fertile silt to the parched land. It was vital to know when the Nile would rise. Stargazers determined that when the bright star Sirius rose just before dawn, the river's flood was only a few days away.
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Blackbox

Chlorine study suggests moon is dry after all?

Maggie McKee
New Scientist
Sat, 07 Aug 2010 15:36 UTC
Image
© NASA
Water has recently been found on the lunar surface, but researchers are divided about how much water lies inside the moon - a new study suggests the moon was very dry when it formed 4.5 billion years ago
The moon's interior may not be that wet after all, despite some recent studies that have suggested otherwise. A new analysis of Apollo rocks backs the old idea of a waterless world.

For decades after the Apollo astronauts touched down on the desolate lunar surface, the moon was considered to be parched. But that view began to change in 2008, when researchers found water inside tiny spheres of lunar volcanic glass at concentrations calculated to be similar to those found in some terrestrial volcanic rocks.

Now, researchers led by Zachary Sharp at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque say measurements of chlorine in a dozen Apollo samples suggest that the moon's interior has always been extremely dry, containing 10,000 to 100,000 times less water than Earth's.
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Question

Saturn Moon Loses Its Ring, Gains a Mystery

Ker Than
National Geographic News
Fri, 06 Aug 2010 15:30 UTC
Rhea
© NASA
Saturn's moon Rhea (file image).
Until this week Saturn's small moon Rhea was the only known solid space object thought to have a ring. (Other known ringed bodies, such as Saturn, are mainly gaseous.)

But a new study of optical images has failed to detect any signs of structures encircling the natural satellite.

Rhea orbits within Saturn's magnetic field, which creates a bubble of charged particles - ions and electrons - around the planet. During a 2005 flyby of Rhea, scientists working with NASA's Cassini spacecraft expected to see a dip in their readings where the moon's surface intercepted the particles.

The craft's readings did show the moon's wake, but they also revealed several unexpected dips in particle detections just outside the moon's diameter.

The best possible explanation seemed to be that something physical - a ring of debris around Rhea - was blocking the ions and electrons from reaching Cassini.

However, analysis of images taken by Cassini between 2008 and 2009 failed to turn up any evidence for rings around the Saturn moon.

"We're pretty confident that there is no solid material orbiting the moon," said astronomer Matthew Tiscareno of Cornell University in New York.
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Meteor

Deep impact market: the race to acquire meteorites

Laura Margottini
New Scientist
Thu, 05 Aug 2010 15:29 UTC
Image
© Museo Nazionale Dell'Antartide - Italy
Tread carefully, desert air has kept Kamil carter pristine for 5000 years
The bottle had gone and Mario Di Martino had a sick feeling that their secret was out. It was early 2010: he and his team were staring down into the Kamil crater in the Egyptian desert, miles from the nearest settlement.

Just a year before, Di Martino of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics in Turin, Italy, and colleagues had written their names on paper, placed it inside an empty bottle and thrown it into the crater. The reason? They were the first team to visit the site of a huge meteorite impact 5000 years ago. Few craters on Earth are so perfectly preserved. "We realised we were in front of a true rarity," recalls Di Martino. The team's analysis of the fragments they collected will appear in the 13 August issue of Science.

Though the meteorites were still there, ominously the bottle had disappeared. "Unequivocally, somebody had entered the site," says Di Martino. A few months later, samples of the Gebel Kamil meteorite - its official name - began to turn up at a market in France and online. The team was dismayed: the fragments disappearing into private hands meant vital information, such as the size of the meteorite that carved the crater, would be lost forever.
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Telescope

Trojan asteroids around Neptune could turn into comets that might hit Earth


Malaysia Sun
Sat, 31 Jul 2010 07:34 UTC
Image
© Unknown
An asteroid has been newly spotted in Neptune’s orbit. This asteroid indicates the existence of a much larger cloud of rocks in that region, though it is not seen yet.
Material from the Trojan asteroids that exist around the orbit of Neptune could go on to become comets that could strike our planet, according to a new study.

Many comets swing into the inner solar system every 200 to 300 years.

The origin of such so-called "short-period comets" is unknown but the immediate source is thought to be the Centaurs-these are a collection of an estimated million icy objects more than 1 kilometre across on elliptical orbits that come closest to the sun between the orbits of Jupiter and Neptune.

Only about 250 of these Centaurs have been imaged by telescopes. All are on unstable orbits, and have a big chance of receiving a gravitational boost when their orbit brings them near Jupiter or one of the other giant planets. Such perturbation could redirect them into the inner solar system - and possibly towards Earth.

As a wayward Centaur approaches the sun, its heat begins to evaporate the icy contents, resulting in a cometary tail.
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Pharoah

Archaeologists Find Tunnel Below the Temple of the Feathered Serpent in Teotihuacan


ArtDaily
Wed, 04 Aug 2010 01:20 UTC
tunnel found in front of the Temple of the Feathered Serpent.
© CNMH INAH
Contextual image of the tunnel found in front of the Temple of the Feathered Serpent.
Mexico City - After eight months of excavation, archaeologists from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) have located, 12 meters below , the entrance to the tunnel leading to a series of galleries beneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, in the Archaeologcial Area of Teotihuacan, where the remains of rulers of the ancient city could have been deposited.

In a tour made by to site today with the media, archaeologist Sergio Chavez Gomez, director of the Tlalocan Project went below the ground and announced the advances in the systematic exploration undertaken by the INAH of the underground conduit, which was closed for about 1,800 years by the inhabitants of Teotihuacan themselves and where no one has gone in since then.

INAH specialists hope to enter the tunnel in a couple of months and will be the first to enter after hundreds of years since it was closed. This excavation, which represents the most profound that has been done in the pre-Hispanic site, is part of the commemorations for the first 100 years of uninterrupted archaeological explorations (made in 1910) also called the City of Gods.
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Info

Brain Signal Persists Even in Dreamless Sleep

Michael C. Purdy
Newswise Science News
Fri, 06 Aug 2010 04:03 UTC
Image
© Getty Images
Neuroscientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have taken one of the first direct looks at one of the human brain's most fundamental "foundations": a brain signal that never switches off and may support many cognitive functions.

The results, appearing online this week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are an important step forward for efforts to outline what neuroscientists call the functional architecture of the brain. Better understanding of this architecture will aid efforts to treat brain injury and mental disorders.

Although the brain's different specialized regions can be considered as a collection of physical structures, functional architecture instead focuses on metaphorical structures formed by brain processes and interactions among different brain regions. The "foundation" highlighted in the new study is a low-frequency signal created by neuronal activity throughout the brain. This signal doesn't switch off even in dreamless sleep, possibly to help maintain basic structure and facilitate offline housekeeping activities.
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