Science & TechnologyS


Sherlock

UK: Romans "Killed Babies at Brothel"

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© The Telegraph/ArchiveYewden Villa at Hambleden
Dozens of unwanted babies born during Roman times were murdered and buried on the site of a Roman brothel in Buckinghamshire, archaeologists suspect.

An extensive study of a mass burial at a Roman villa in the Thames Valley suggests that the 97 children all died at 40 weeks gestation, or very soon after birth.

The archaeologists believe that locals may have been killing and burying unwanted babies on the site in Hambleden, Buckinghamshire.

Unwanted pregnancies were common in Roman brothels due to little contraception and Romans also considered infanticide less shocking than it is today.

Infants were not considered to be human beings until about the age of two and were not buried in cemeteries if they were younger than that.

Cell Phone

Mobile Phone Masts Not Such a Menace

Unlikely to hurt babies unless they actually fall on 'em

A study of children born near mobile phone masts has concluded that having excellent mobile coverage does not increase the risk of cancer in unborn children.

The study, published by the British Medical Journal, used statistical analysis of 7000 children to establish that being exposed to the radiation from a mobile phone mast during pregnancy doesn't increase the risk of the child developing cancer in the first five years of life.

Comment: One wonders, who sponsors these so-called researchers. Many studies dispute the conclusions reached above:

Cell Phones and Brain Cancer: The Real Story
Study Shows: Long Conversations on Mobile Phones Can Increase Risk of Cancer
The BioInitiative Report - The Dangerous Health Impacts of Microwave Radiation


Rocket

US energy-weapon project going well

Raygun only inflicts 2x as much harm on self as on enemy

A US military tech project aimed at developing portable, functional battlefield energy weapons has successfully achieved initial goals and is now moving on towards "weapons-class performance levels".

The project in question is the optimistically-named Revolution In Fiber Lasers (RIFL), ultimately intended to deliver war-grade 100 kilowatt beams from equipment weighing less than 5kg per kilowatt.

Sherlock

Amelia Earhart May Have Survived Months as Castaway

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© Getty Images/Hulton ArchiveFish, turtle and bird bones found in fire pits on a remote Pacific island may be signs of Amelia Earhart's last efforts to survive.
The famous pilot and her navigator may have eaten turtles, fish and bird to survive on a remote island after making an emergency landing.

Amelia Earhart, the legendary pilot who disappeared 73 years ago while flying over the Pacific Ocean in a record attempt to fly around the world at the equator, may have survived several weeks, or even months as a castaway on a remote South Pacific island, according to preliminary results of a two-week expedition on the tiny coral atoll believed to be her final resting place.

"There is evidence on the island suggesting that a castaway was there for weeks and possibly months," Ric Gillespie, executive director of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), told Discovery News.

Gillespie has just returned from an expedition on Nikumaroro, the uninhabited tropical island in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati where Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan are believed to have landed when running out of fuel.

"We noticed that the forest can be an excellent source of water for a castaway in an island where there is no fresh water. After heavy rain, you can easily collect water from the bowl-shaped hollows in the buka trees. We also found a campsite and nine fire features containing thousands of fish, turtle and bird bones. This might suggest that many meals took place there," Gillespie said.

Sherlock

World's Largest Dinosaur Graveyard Found

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© Nobu TamuraCentrosaurus
The world's largest dinosaur graveyard has been discovered in Alberta, Canada, according to David Eberth of the Royal Tyrrell Museum and other scientists working on the project.

The Vancouver Sun reports that the massive dinosaur bonebed is 1.43-square miles in size. Eberth says it contains thousands of bones belonging to the dinosaur Centrosaurus, which once lived near what is now the Saskatchewan border.

Centrosaurus was a plant-eating, cow-sized dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous, around 75 million years ago. It cut quite a figure back then, with its top-of-the-head frills and rhino-like nose horn. There is some evidence that it engaged in horn to horn combat among its own species, probably males fighting over mates.

The impressive jaw muscles of Centrosaurus allowed it to sheer through extremely tough foliage with ease.

Sherlock

Vermont, US: Artifacts Dating Back to 5000 B.C. Found in Rutland Town

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© Northeast Archaeology Research Center16 projectiles dating back to 5000 B.C. found on land near Post Road in Rutland Town owned by Orin Thomas and Sons.
Ancient artifacts dating back roughly 7,000 years ago to 5000 B.C., were found by state archeologists on land near Thomas Dairy in Rutland Town recently.

John Thomas, one of the landowners, said the pointed projectiles looked like arrowheads and were discovered in at least two different locations on his property.

"One was close to Carey's Auto and another abuts the development on Blue Ridge acres," Thomas said Tuesday.

The discovery occurred as a part of an archeological dig - a standard procedure prior to subdivision - by the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation.

Scott Dillon, a survey archeologist with the division, said 16 projectiles were found at one location and appeared to be intentionally buried together in a pit. He said the relics studied by experts from the Northeast Archaeology Research Center Inc. were from the Native American era.

Sherlock

Archeologists Find Evidence of St Peter's Prison in Italy

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© AlamyThe Crucifixion of St Peter by Michelangelo
Archaeologists have discovered evidence to support the theory that St Peter was imprisoned in an underground dungeon by the Emperor Nero before being crucified.

The Mamertine Prison, a dingy complex of cells which now lies beneath a Renaissance church, has long been venerated as the place where the apostle was shackled before he was killed on the spot on which the Vatican now stands.

It been a place of Christian worship since medieval times, but after months of excavations, Italian archaeologists have found frescoes and other evidence which indicate that it was associated with St Peter as early as the 7th century.

Dr Patrizia Fortini, of Rome's department of archaeology for Rome, said: "It was converted from being a prison into a focus of cult-like worship of St Peter by the 7th century at the latest, maybe earlier.

Document

Adolf Hitler Wrote Begging Letter for Mercedes Loan

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© Press AssociationThe letter was found at a flea market and authenticated by the Bavarian State Archive in Munich.
Adolf Hitler wrote a begging letter to a Mercedes dealership asking for a loan for a limousine until his royalties for Mein Kampf came through.

The letter, was written in 1924 from his jail cell at Landsberg Fortress prison where he was imprisoned that year for his role in the "Bierkeller Putsch" when his nascent Nazi party tried, and failed, to seize power in Munich.

In jail he wrote Mein Kampf, the blueprint for power that would make him rich. However, when he penned a letter to Jakob Ferlin, owner of a Mercedes-Benz dealership in Munich, there was little money to be had.

Hitler, who one day would own a fleet of Mercedes' cars, had his heart set on the 11/40 model which at the time cost 18,000 Reichsmarks. He had set his heart on one in grey with spoked wheels and white-wall tyres.

Sun

Mystery glitch? Blame it on the sun

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© NASATrouble ahead
Ever think to check the space weather forecast? Power suppliers and the operators of oil pipelines and railroads might want to start.

Although it would take a truly massive space storm to cause a catastrophe, it is becoming clear that even modest solar activity poses a threat in our technology-dependent world. It makes railway signals go haywire and rusts oil pipelines to the point that they may leak, not to mention wearing down key components in power grids, which could drive up the cost of electricity.

If our planet happens to be in the line of fire when the sun belches out clouds of plasma, these coronal mass ejections (CMEs), can greatly disturb Earth's magnetic field. Such magnetic disturbances in turn can generate currents in power transmission lines, which act like giant antennas to pick up the disturbances.

Laptop

VeriSign SSL certs open to tampering, competitor warns

Bank of America attacks made easy

VeriSign and one of its partners have come under fire for publicly exposing webpages used to process customer security certificates, a practice a competitor claims puts some of the biggest names on the web at risk of serious targeted attacks.

According to Melih Abdulhayoglu, CEO of internet security firm Comodo, publicly accessible pages such as those here and here needlessly disclose sensitive internal information about VeriSign customers Bank of America and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts respectively. By exposing the email address of the organizations' security certificate managers and providing a comprehensive list of web addresses that use secure sockets layer protection, VeriSign puts them at risk of targeted phishing attacks, he said.