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This Day in History 1605: King James Learns of Gunpowder Plot


History
Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00 UTC
Guy Fawkes
© History
Early in the morning, King James I of England learns that a plot to explode the Parliament building has been foiled, hours before he was scheduled to sit with the rest of the British government in a general parliamentary session.

At about midnight on the night of November 4-5, Sir Thomas Knyvet, a justice of the peace, found Guy Fawkes lurking in a cellar under the Parliament building and ordered the premises searched. Some 20 barrels of gunpowder were found, and Fawkes was taken into custody. During a torture session on the rack, Fawkes revealed that he was a participant in an English Catholic conspiracy to annihilate England's Protestant government and replace it with Catholic leadership.

What became known as the Gunpowder Plot was organized by Robert Catesby, an English Catholic whose father had been persecuted by Queen Elizabeth I for refusing to conform to the Church of England. Guy Fawkes had converted to Catholicism, and his religious zeal led him to fight in the Spanish army in the Netherlands. Catesby and the handful of other plotters rented a cellar that extended under Parliament, and Fawkes planted the gunpowder there, hiding the barrels under coal and wood.
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Sherlock

Oldest American Artefact Unearthed

Rex Dalton
Nature News
Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:00 UTC
Oregon cave
© Tom StaffordAn Oregon cave has yielded the oldest artifact ever found in the Americas.
Oregon caves yield evidence of continent's first inhabitants.

Archaeologists claim to have found the oldest known artefact in the Americas, a scraper-like tool in an Oregon cave that dates back 14,230 years.

The tool shows that people were living in North America well before the widespread Clovis culture of 12,900 to 12,400 years ago, says archaeologist Dennis Jenkins of the University of Oregon in Eugene.

Studies of sediment and radiocarbon dating showed the bone's age. Jenkins presented the finding late last month in a lecture at the University of Oregon.

His team found the tool in a rock shelter overlooking a lake in south-central Oregon, one of a series of caves near the town of Paisley.

Kevin Smith, the team member who uncovered the artefact, remembers the discovery. "We had bumped into a lot of extinct horse, bison and camel bone - then I heard and felt the familiar ring and feel when trowel hits bone," says Smith, now a master's student at California State University, Los Angeles. "I switched to a brush. Soon this huge bone emerged, then I saw the serrated edge. I stepped back and said: 'Hey everybody - we got something here.'"
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Neural Stem Cells in Mice Affected by Gene Associated with Longevity


ScienceDaily
Thu, 05 Nov 2009 05:00 UTC
A gene associated with longevity in roundworms and humans has been shown to affect the function of stem cells that generate new neurons in the adult brain, according to researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The study in mice suggests that the gene may play an important role in maintaining cognitive function during aging.

"It's intriguing to think that genes that regulate life span in invertebrates may have evolved to control stem cell pools in mammals," said Anne Brunet, PhD, assistant professor of genetics. She is the senior author of the research, which will be published Nov. 6 in Cell Stem Cell.

Unlike your skin or your intestine, your adult brain doesn't make a lot of new cells. But those it does are critical to learning, memory and spatial awareness. To meet these demands, your brain maintains two small caches of neural stem cells, which can both self-renew and give rise to neurons and other cells known as oligodendrocytes and astrocytes. Properly balancing these functions allows you to generate new nerve cells as needed while also maintaining a robust neural stem cell pool.
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Telescope

Dark matter "wrecking ball" may have hit Milky Way

Dan Vergano
USA Today
Sun, 01 Nov 2009 10:03 UTC
Darth Vader's Death Star? Ming the Merciless and his war rockets? The awesome power of Chuck Norris?

Piffle, suggests one astrophysicist, at least when it comes to explaining what force could have permanently bent a ring in our Milky Way Galaxy within the last 60 million years. The real explanation may be the power of an invisible wrecking ball made of dark matter - a cloud of the enigmatic physics particles born in the fiery aftermath of the Big Bang and weighing as much as 10 million suns.
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In the Mediterranean, Killer Tsunamis From an Ancient Eruption

William J. Broad
New York Times
Wed, 04 Nov 2009 21:50 UTC
Image
The massive eruption of the Thera volcano in the Aegean Sea more than 3,000 years ago produced killer waves that raced across hundreds of miles of the Eastern Mediterranean to inundate the area that is now Israel and probably other coastal sites, a team of scientists has found.

The team, writing in the October issue of Geology, said the new evidence suggested that giant tsunamis from the catastrophic eruption hit "coastal sites across the Eastern Mediterranean littoral." Tsunamis are giant waves that can crash into shore, rearrange the seabed, inundate vast areas of land and carry terrestrial material out to sea.
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Archaeologists uncover prehistoric landscape beneath Oxford


PhysOrg.com
Wed, 04 Nov 2009 21:43 UTC
Image
© PhysOrg.comArchaeologists excavating the former Radcliffe Infirmary site in Oxford have uncovered evidence of a prehistoric monumental landscape stretching across the gravel terrace between the Thames and Cherwell rivers.
The work was carried out over the summer in preparation for Oxford University's proposed Radcliffe Observatory Quarter - plans for which were revealed earlier this month.

In addition to these findings, the work has also uncovered evidence of a 6th century Saxon settlement, including a sunken featured craft hut known as a Grübenhauser and a pit containing unfired clay loom weights.
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Rocket

Elevator to Space? They're Really Trying


The Associated Press
Wed, 04 Nov 2009 06:03 UTC
Rocketing into space? Some think an elevator might be the way to go.

That's the future goal of this week's $2 million Space Elevator Games in the Mojave Desert.

In a major test of the concept, robotic machines powered by laser beams will try to climb a cable suspended from a helicopter hovering more than a half-mile (one kilometer) high.

Three teams have qualified to participate in the event on the dry lakebed near NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards. Attempts were expected from early Wednesday through Thursday.

Funded by a space agency program to explore bold technology, the contest is a step toward bringing the idea of a space elevator out of the realm of science fiction and into reality.
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Telescope

Supernova mystery solved?

Geoff Brumfiel
Nature News
Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:42 UTC
Image
© NASA/CXC/SAO
Sooty neutron star could lie at the heart of Cassiopeia A.

Two astrophysicists believe that they have dispelled the mystery surrounding an object at the centre of a distant supernova remnant.

Around 330 years ago, a massive star in the constellation Cassiopeia exploded. The supernova may have been recorded by John Flamsteed, the English Astronomer Royal, who, at the time, observed a 'star' in the constellation that doesn't correspond to any known on today's charts.

The remains of the supernova, known as Cassiopeia A, have been something of a mystery to astronomers. Supernovae usually leave behind an extremely dense object such as a black hole or neutron star. But for decades no such object was seen at the centre of Cassiopeia A.
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Blackbox

Murderer with 'aggression genes' gets sentence cut

Ewen Callaway
New Scientist
Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:44 UTC
A judge's decision to reduce a killer's sentence because he has genetic mutations linked to violence raises a thorny question - can your genes ever absolve you of responsibility for a particular act?

In 2007, Abdelmalek Bayout admitted to stabbing and killing a man and received a sentence of 9 years and 2 months. Last week, Nature reported that Pier Valerio Reinotti, an appeal court judge in Trieste, Italy, cut Bayout's sentence by a year after finding out he has gene variants linked to aggression. Leaving aside the question of whether this link is well enough understood to justify Reinotti's decision, should genes ever be considered a legitimate defence?
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Ancient DNA Reveals Lack of Continuity between Neolithic Hunter-Gatherers and Contemporary Scandinavians


Current Biology
Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:22 UTC
The driving force behind the transition from a foraging to a farming lifestyle in prehistoric Europe (Neolithization) has been debated for more than a century. Of particular interest is whether population replacement or cultural exchange was responsible.

Scandinavia holds a unique place in this debate, for it maintained one of the last major hunter-gatherer complexes in Neolithic Europe, the Pitted Ware culture. Intriguingly, these late hunter-gatherers existed in parallel to early farmers for more than a millennium before they vanished some 4,000 years ago.
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