Science & TechnologyS


Sherlock

Canada: 3,000-year-old tools unearthed in Labrador


CBC News
Fri, 27 Aug 2010 09:58 UTC
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© CBC NewsA worker at the archeological dig in Sheshatshui, Labrador, holds the tip of a broken arrowhead that was found at the site.
Workers at a housing project in Sheshatshiu, central Labrador, have uncovered 3,000-year-old artifacts, including tools and weapons.

What started as a housing development has evolved into an archaeological dig.

"It's a very important time period. It's the time period that's the least studied in Newfoundland and Labrador archeology, so its going to hopefully fill in a lot of gaps and help to answer a lot of questions," said archeologist Scott Neilson, one of the project's leaders.

Some of the people working on the project grew up around the area where artifacts are now being found. They said it's rewarding work.

"I love it. I really do. There is always a chance of something pretty amazing to be found, so it keeps you interested," said Judy Ashini. She's studying archeology at Memorial University of Newfoundland and grew up near the dig.
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Sherlock

2000-Year-Old Relics Show How Ancient Chinese Lived, Died


People's Daily
Fri, 27 Aug 2010 04:08 UTC
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© Hebei Youth Daily
The excavation of 93 ancient tombs at the No. 2 Ruins in Zhangduo Village under Xingtai's jurisdiction in China's Hebei Province finished a few days ago, and the relics have been checked and accepted by the provincial cultural relics bureau. These precious cultural relics show modern people the lives of ancient people over 2,000 years ago.

An archaeological team discovered 104 ancient tombs at the No. 2 Ruins in Zhangduo Village under Xingtai's jurisdiction in 2009, and the purpose of this archaeological activity was to ensure the smooth progress of the South-to-North Water Transfer Project.

In early 2010, the archaeological team conducted a second investigation into the No. 2 Ruins, which has been renamed "Cemetery in Southern Zhangduo," at the request of the Hebei Cultural Relics Bureau and unearthed 93 ancient tombs.

Li Jun, team leader in charge of the archaeological excavation, introduced the cultural relics excavated from the 93 tombs to the reporter.
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Sherlock

Mayan Water Reservoir in Mexican Rainforest: Archaeologists Find Huge Artificial Lake With Ceramic-Lined Floor


ScienceDaily
Fri, 27 Aug 2010 00:00 UTC
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© Proyecto Arqueológico UxulUncovering the water reservoir's floor.
Archaeologists from the University of Bonn have found a water reservoir the size of a soccer field, whose floor is lined with ceramic shards, in the Mexican rainforest. It seems that in combination with the limestone on top, the shards were supposed to seal the artificial lake. The system was built about 1,500 years ago. It is the first example of this design found for the Maya. It is not yet known whether the reservoir's entire floor is tiled.

Since 2009, researchers from Bonn and Mexico have been systematically uncovering and mapping the old walls of Uxul, a Mayan city. "In the process, we also came across two, about 100 m square water reservoirs," explained Iken Paap, who directs the project with Professor Dr. Nikolai Grube and the Mexican archaeologist Antonio Benavides Castillo.

Such monster pools, which are also known from other Mayan cities, are called "aguadas." Similar to present-day water towers, they served to store drinking water. But the people of Uxul seem to have thought of a particularly smart way to seal their aguada. "We conducted a trial dig in the center of one of the water reservoirs," explains Nicolaus Seefeld, a young scholar. "We found that the bottom, which is at a depth of two meters, was covered with ceramic shards -- probably from plates -- practically without any gaps. But we don't know yet whether it's like this throughout the entire aguada."
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Meteor

Double Meteorite Strike "Caused Dinosaur Extinction"

Howard Falcon-Lang
BBC News
Fri, 27 Aug 2010 11:00 UTC
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© UnknownThe dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago by at least two meteorite impacts, rather than a single strike, a new study suggests.
The dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago by at least two meteorite impacts, rather than a single strike, a new study suggests.

Previously, scientists had identified a huge impact crater in the Gulf of Mexico as the event that spelled doom for the dinosaurs.

Now evidence for a second impact in the Ukraine has been uncovered.

This raises the possibility that the Earth may have been bombarded by a whole shower of meteorites.

The new findings are published in the journal Geology by a team lead by Professor David Jolley of Aberdeen University.

When first proposed in 1980, the idea that a meteorite impact had killed the dinosaurs proved hugely controversial. Later, the discovery of the Chicxulub Crater in the Gulf of Mexico, US, was hailed as "the smoking gun" that confirmed the theory.
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Sherlock

Romans Wore Socks with Sandals, New British Dig Suggests

Richard Alleyne
The Telegraph, UK
Wed, 25 Aug 2010 16:00 UTC
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© CorbisA fresco painting of the Roman general Furius Camillus by Francesco Salviati in the Sala dell'Udienza, or Audience Hall, of the Palazzo Vecchio
Britons may be famous for their lack of fashion sense and Italians for their style. But it appears we may have inherited one of our biggest sartorial crimes from the Romans.

New evidence from an archaeological dig has found that legionnaires wore socks with sandals.

Rust on a nail from a Roman sandal found in newly discovered ruins in North Yorkshire appears to contain fibres which could suggest that a sock-type garment was being worn.

Now scientists are examining the remains in the laboratory to see if it is true.

The fashion faux pas was found in a 2000-year-old "industrial estate" excavated as part of a £318 million Highways Agency scheme to upgrade the A1 between Dishforth and Leeming in North Yorkshire.
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Magnify

Acoustic Archaeology: The secret sounds of Stonehenge

Trevor Cox
New Scientist
Fri, 27 Aug 2010 13:53 UTC
Trevor Cox reveals how the acoustic footprint of the world's most famous prehistoric monument was measured

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Sherlock

Echoes of the past: The sites and sounds of prehistory

Trevor Cox
New Scientist
Fri, 27 Aug 2010 13:57 UTC
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© Bertrand Gardel/GettyEasy on the ears as well as on the eyes.
Did our ancient ancestors build to please the ears as well as the eyes? Trevor Cox pitches into the controversial claims of acoustic archaeologists. And in our web-only article Acoustic Archaeology: The secret sounds of Stonehenge, he explains how the acoustic footprint of the world's most famous prehistoric monument was measured

"The wind, playing upon the edifice, produced a booming tune, like the note of some gigantic one-stringed harp. No other sound came from it... Overhead something made the black sky blacker, which had the semblance of a vast architrave uniting the pillars horizontally. They entered carefully beneath and between; the surfaces echoed their soft rustle; but they seemed to be still out of doors..."

This atmospheric description of a "temple of the winds" comes from the dramatic climax of Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles. The setting is Stonehenge, arguably the most famous prehistoric monument of all. Its imposing ring of standing stones is visible for miles on Salisbury plain in southern England. On the day of the summer solstice its outlying "Heelstone" is exactly in line with rays of the rising sun. A more perfect example of the visual impact of an ancient monument would be hard to find.

Might we be missing here something that both Hardy and our prehistoric ancestors understood? Some archaeologists have begun to think so. They argue that sound effects were an important, perhaps even decisive, factor in how early humans chose and built their dwellings and sacred places. Caves that sing, Mayan temples that chirp, burial mounds that hum: they all add up to evidence that the aural, and not just the visual, determined the building codes of the past. But is that sound science?
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Telescope

Midnight Sky Show


Space Weather
Fri, 27 Aug 2010 17:25 UTC
On August 26th, the two brightest objects in the night sky got together for a spectacular conjunction. Tom Cocchiaro reports from Portsmouth, New Hampshire: "I went outside just after midnight to get some mail I had forgotten and--BOOM! There they were, the moon and Jupiter wedged between two tall maple trees like something from 2001 A Space Odyssey." He grabbed his new Canon T2i and recorded the scene:
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© Tom Cocchiaro

Readers, did you miss it? An even better version of this conjunction occurs next month. The Moon and Jupiter will meet again on Sept. 22nd when the Moon is full and Jupiter simultaneously reaches an 11-year peak in brightness. Mark your calendar!
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Sun

Take a close look at sunspot 1084: First light from the New Solar Telescope


Space Weather
Fri, 27 Aug 2010 17:20 UTC
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© New Solar Telescope (NST)Sunspot 1084 - up close
This is a first light adaptive optics image from the New Solar Telescope (NST) at the Big Bear Solar Observatory in California. "With a 1.6-meter primary mirror, the NST is the largest solar telescope in the world," says Nicolas Gorceix of the observatory staff. "It has realtime correction for atmospheric distortion (adaptive optics), so we can see things in very high resolution--as small as 65 km wide on the sun."

"For perspective," he adds, "Earth is slightly smaller than the whole sunspot including the dark umbra and the daisy petal-like penumbra. The spot is surrounded by the sun's ubiquitous granular field [which shows the boiling motions of the sun's surface]."

Researchers believe that high-resolution studies of sunspots can help them understand how sunspots evolve and anticipate when they're about to erupt. "Next year, we plan to upgrade the telescope with a much higher-order adaptive optics system to get even better images," says Gorceix.
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Satellite

Large Hadron Collider in Space: Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer set to launch in to Earth orbit


European Space Agency
Thu, 26 Aug 2010 15:33 UTC
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© CERNAMS-02 began the first stage of its voyage to the International Space Station from Geneva international airport, in Switzerland.
One of the most complex space scientific instruments ever built, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02) arrived at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, escorted by astronauts who will fly with it on the Space Shuttle in February 2011.

The antimatter hunter AMS-02 began the first stage of its voyage to the International Space Station (ISS) from Geneva international airport, in Switzerland. During a ceremony organised by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), the experiment was loaded onto the US Air Force Galaxy transport aircraft that carried it to Cape Canaveral.

AMS-02 will not only be the largest scientific instrument to be installed on the ISS, but it could also be considered the result of the largest international collaboration for a single experiment in space.

Even before its launch, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer has already been hailed as a success with more than a decade of work and cooperation between 56 institutes from 16 different countries. The AMS-02 experiment is led by Nobel Prize Laureate Samuel Ting of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
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