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Greenland Vikings 'had Celtic blood'


The Copenhagen Post Online
Fri, 19 Mar 2010 21:04 UTC
Norsemen who settled in southern Greenland carried more Celtic than Nordic blood - but they were still decidedly Scandinavian.

An analysis of DNA from a Viking gravesite near a 1000 year-old church in southern Greenland shows that those buried there had strong Celtic bloodlines, reported science website Videnskab.dk.

The analysis - performed by Danish researchers on bones from skeletons found during excavations in south Greenland - revealed that the settlers' Nordic blood was mixed with Celtic blood, probably originating from the British Isles.
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Magnify

Oldest temple in the world found in Turkey


UPI.com
Fri, 19 Mar 2010 21:00 UTC
Ankara, -- Archaeologists say a temple being excavated in southeastern Turkey is 12,000 years old and is likely the oldest temple ever uncovered.

The site was first identified in 1986 when a farmer tilling his field in Sanliurfa found a statuette in the soil, the Radikal newspaper reported Wednesday.

Since then, archaeologists have uncovered the foundation of the temple built in the Neolithic Age along with carvings of pigs, foxes, snakes, fawns and headless humans.
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Chalkboard

Researcher Maps How Age, Gender Can Affect Risk to Radiation Exposure


Science Daily
Fri, 19 Mar 2010 11:44 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Doctors have a clearer picture than ever before of how much radiation reaches sensitive tissues during routine X-rays and similar imaging, thanks to sophisticated models of the human body being developed at the University of Florida.

"We're building a rich library of computer simulation tools and 3-D patient models that will make dose estimates much more accurate and patient-specific," said Wesley E. Bolch, Ph.D., a professor in the UF departments of nuclear and radiological engineering and biomedical engineering, and a member of the UF Shands Cancer Center.

In the March 5 issue of Physics in Medicine and Biology, Bolch and researchers in his lab discuss how they used three-dimensional microCT imaging to describe cartilage, bone marrow and two types of mineral bone in 20 different skeletal sites from two newborns. It is the second in a series of planned articles that will describe variations in tissue and bone that can affect how much radiation is absorbed by the body.
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Sherlock

Students Discover New Species of Raptor Dinosaur in Inner Mongolia


ScienceDaily
Fri, 19 Mar 2010 00:00 UTC
Image
© Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology & PalaeoanthropologyA photograph of the entire Linheraptor exquisitus skeleton.
A new species of dinosaur, a relative of the famous Velociraptor, has been discovered in Inner Mongolia by two PhD students.

The exceptionally well preserved dinosaur, named Linheraptor exquisitus, is the first near complete skeleton of its kind to be found in the Gobi desert since 1972, and will help scientists work out the appearance of other closely related dinosaur species.

Linheraptor is in the Dromaeosauridae family of the carnivorous theropod dinosaurs and lived during the Late Cretaceous period. In addition to Linheraptor and Velociraptor, theropod dinosaurs include charismatic meat-eaters like Tyrannosaurus rex and modern birds.
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Bad Guys

Boeing Completes Design of Shipboard Superlaser

Nathan Hodge
Wired.com
Thu, 18 Mar 2010 10:29 UTC
light
© wired.com
The U.S. military is bankrolling all kinds of projects to harness the power of directed energy, from laser-equipped aircraft that can shoot down ballistic missiles to smaller beam weapons mounted on Humvees that could zap mortars or artillery shells. The Navy is no exception: It wants a shipboard laser that is powerful enough to destroy anti-ship missiles.

Defense giant Boeing now says it has completed the preliminary design of one such weapon, the Free Electron Laser, or FEL. In a news release today, the company said it had presented its FEL design, which will operate by forcing a stream of high-energy electrons through a series of magnetic fields, creating a weapons-grade blast of laser light.
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Clock

Da Vinci "Predicted World Would End in 4006," Says Vatican Researcher

Richard Owen
The Times
Mon, 15 Mar 2010 00:00 UTC
A date for your diary: Leonardo da Vinci predicted that the world would end on November 1, 4006, according to a Vatican researcher.

Sabrina Sforza Galitzia said the clues were to be found in da Vinci's Last Supper mural. The central half-moon window, or lunette, above his painting of Christ with his disciples before the Crucifixion contains a "mathematical and astrological" puzzle which she has deciphered, she said.

She claimed to have worked out that da Vinci foresaw the end of the world in a "universal flood" which would begin on March 21, 4006 and end on November 1 the same year. Documents showed that he believed that this would mark "a new start for humanity", Ms Sforza Galitzia said.

"There is a da Vinci code - it is just not the one made popular by Dan Brown," she said.

Comment: For the real code hidden in Leonardo's Last Supper, read Laura Knight Jadczyk's article, "The True Identity of Fulcanelli and The Da Vinci Code," or purchase amazingly comprehensive and detailed The Secret History of the World.

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Arrow Up

When Less is More: The Case for Teaching Less Math in Schools

Peter Gray
Psychology Today
Thu, 18 Mar 2010 23:09 UTC
In an experiment, children who were taught less learned more.

In 1929, the superintendent of schools in Ithaca, New York, sent out a challenge to his colleagues in other cities. "What," he asked, "can we drop from the elementary school curriculum?" He complained that over the years new subjects were continuously being added and nothing was being subtracted, with the result that the school day was packed with too many subjects and there was little time to reflect seriously on anything. This was back in the days when people believed that children shouldn't have to spend all of their time at school work--that they needed some time to play, to do chores at home, and to be with their families--so there was reason back then to believe that whenever something new is added to the curriculum something else should be dropped.

One of the recipients of this challenge was L. P. Benezet, superintendent of schools in Manchester, New Hampshire, who responded with this outrageous proposal: We should drop arithmetic! Benezet went on to argue that the time spent on arithmetic in the early grades was wasted effort, or worse. In fact, he wrote: "For some years I had noted that the effect of the early introduction of arithmetic had been to dull and almost chloroform the child's reasoning facilities." All that drill, he claimed, had divorced the whole realm of numbers and arithmetic, in the children's minds, from common sense, with the result that they could do the calculations as taught to them, but didn't understand what they were doing and couldn't apply the calculations to real life problems. He believed that if arithmetic were not taught until later on--preferably not until seventh grade--the kids would learn it with far less effort and greater understanding.
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Bulb

Medieval child's brain to unlock human thought processes

Peter Allen
The Telegraph
Wed, 17 Mar 2010 21:51 UTC
The almost perfectly preserved brain of a medieval toddler who died 800 years ago is set to provide ground-breaking information into human thought processes.

The brain was found mummified inside a wooden coffin in boggy soil close to Quimper, in Brittany, before being placed in formalin solution.

The boy, who was around 18 months old, appeared to have died of a skull fracture before his head was placed in a leather envelope, and then on a pillow in the 13th Century.
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Brick Wall

Wiping Out Graffiti? Here's an App for That

Jim Walsh and Dennis Wagner
USA Today
Tue, 02 Mar 2010 01:46 UTC
Graffiti coverup
© Michael Schennum, The Arizona RepublicJoe Bender spray-paints over graffiti at a convenience store in Avondale, Ariz. The city has struggled for years with graffiti and next month will enlist residents to download new software and help.
The old school practice of American graffiti may have met its match in some high-tech prevention programs designed to spot, report and remove the blight from city and private property.

The latest weapon comes in the form of an iPhone application, developed by a Los Angeles company, that will allow cities to catalog graffiti, dispatch cleanup crews and provide key evidence to police.

The software application lets citizens or government officials photograph graffiti with an iPhone and send the image to the company's databases. The location of the graffiti is automatically marked using the phone's GPS capabilities. An electronic work order is created and, in minutes, a technician is sent with matching paint to cover up the graffiti. The images are catalogued and mapped so police can track down suspects and build a stronger case.
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Meteor

Future Shock From Gliese 710

Kelly Beatty
Sky & Telescope
Thu, 18 Mar 2010 20:31 UTC
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Image
© Don DavisThe Oort Cloud, which envelops our solar system with perhaps trillions of icy objects, extends to perhaps 5 trillion miles (50,000 astronomical units) from the Sun.
urveyors of doom often look to the heavens for their protagonists. During the 1980s, we were briefly captivated by Nemesis, a supposed companion of the Sun that triggered a death-dealing rain of comets every 26 million years. During the 1990s we endured wild speculations about Nibiru, which managed somehow not to destroy Earth in 2003.

Now there's a new threat - but unlike Nemesis and Nibiru, this one's real. It's called Gliese 710 (pronounced GLEE-zuh), an obscure, 10th-magnitude orange dwarf star situated about 63 light-years away in the constellation Serpens. Astronomers first took note of this modest star about a decade ago, when Joan García-Sánchez (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and others found, based on positional observations from the Hipparcos satellite, that in roughly 1½ million years Gliese 710 should pass about 1.3 light-years from the Sun.
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