Science & TechnologyS


Sherlock

Gas pipeline probe uncovers 1000-year-old shipwrecks in Baltic Sea


Agence France-Presse
Tue, 09 Mar 2010 08:12 UTC
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© AFP/Patrice DereMap of northern Europe showing the route of the planned Nord Stream gas pipeline.
A dozen previously unknown shipwrecks, some of them believed to be up to 1,000 years old, were discovered in the Baltic Sea during a probe of the sea bed to prepare for the installation of a large gas pipeline, the Swedish National Heritage Board said Monday.

"We have manage to identify 12 shipwrecks, and nine of them are considered to be fairly old," Peter Norman, a senior advisor with the heritage board, told AFP.

"We think many of the ships are from the 17th and 18th centuries and we think some could even be from the Middle Ages," he said, stressing that "this discovery offers enormous culture-historical value.

The shipwrecks were discovered during a probe by the Russian-led Nord Stream consortium of the sea bed route its planned gas pipeline from Russia to the European Union will take through the Baltic.

"They used sonar equipment first and discovered some unevenness along the sea bottom ... so they filmed some of the uneven areas, and we could see the wrecks," Norman explained.

The discovery was made outside Sweden's territorial waters, but within its economic zone, he said.
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Info

Why and How Did Native Americans Build Mounds?

Richard Thornton
Examiner
Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:34 UTC
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© Richard Thornton, ArchitectThe Great Temple Mound at Ocmulgee & acropolis dominated a 12 mile long cluster of villages.
When English and Scottish settlers first arrived in what was to become the United States, they encountered literally thousands of abandoned earthen and shell mounds that seemed not to be associated with occupied Indian villages. Typically, the new arrivals assumed that the "savages" were intellectually incapable of carrying out major public works. Therefore, they speculated that Europeans or advanced societies from the Middle East had once lived in the New World until they were exterminated by the Indians. It would not be for another 200 years that the public would become generally aware that about 90-95% of the societies who built those mounds had died of diseases or had been enslaved in the decades following Spanish exploration of the region.

Some tribes in the Lower Mississippi Valley were still occupying mounds when French settlers arrived, so there was no French speculation about the origin of abandoned mounds. The best known of these last mound builders were the Natchez. They also stopped building mounds after the 1720s.
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Info

A Mayan mural shows how the other half lived

Stéphan Reebs
Natural History Magazine
Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:41 UTC
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© Calakmul Archaeological Project1,300-year-old mural portrays a Mayan porter carrying a large vessel.
Very old artworks provide a fascinating glimpse of ancient life, but not without limitations: they typically portray the lifestyles of the rich and famous (rulers, royals, generals, and priests), abandoning the masses to the mists of history. That's why the recent discovery of a 1,300-year-old mural at Calakmul, Mexico, is so significant. It is the only known pre-Columbian artwork depicting ordinary Maya engaged in everyday activities, rather than serving the wealthy.
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People

Vast Majority of People Feel Internet Access is a Right

Tony Bradley
PC World
Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:49 UTC
A recent survey conducted by the BBC found that the vast majority of users around the world consider access to the Internet to be a right. The speed at which Internet access has gone from a privilege, to a luxury, and now to a right is a testament to how transformative it has been--shaping politics, news, entertainment, research, and more.

While individual users have come to view Internet and Web access as a right, it seems almost ludicrous to consider it anything other than a complete necessity for businesses today. Part of the reason that the current initiatives of the United States FCC are so important is that an open Internet is a requirement for keeping the business playing field level, and access to reasonable broadband speeds is essential for conducting business efficiently and effectively.
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Telescope

Lava Likely Made River-Like Channel on Mars


ScienceDaily
Sun, 07 Mar 2010 20:00 UTC
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© Jacob BleacherDetails from the Ascraeus channel (red), meandering across the surface of Mars. The insets in the black boxes show close-ups of some of the structures that lava can form: (left) branched channels, (middle) a snaking channel and (right) rootless vents; the rootless vents are also marked by yellow spots on the main image.
Flowing lava can carve or build paths very much like the riverbeds and canyons etched by water, and this probably explains at least one of the meandering channels on the surface of Mars. These results were presented on March 4, 2010 at the 41st Lunar and Planetary Science Conference by Jacob Bleacher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Whether channels on Mars were formed by water or by lava has been debated for years, and the outcome is thought to influence the likelihood of finding life there.

"To understand if life, as we know it, ever existed on Mars, we need to understand where water is or was," says Bleacher. Geologists think that the water currently on the surface of Mars is either held in the soil or takes the form of ice at the planet's north and south poles. But some researchers contend that water flowed or pooled on the surface sometime in the past; water in this form is thought to increase the chance of some form of past or present life.

One of the lines of support for the idea that water once flowed on Mars comes from images that reveal details resembling the erosion of soil by water: terracing of channel walls, formation of small islands in a channel, hanging channels that dead-end and braided channels that branch off and then reconnect to the main branch. "These are thought to be clear evidence of fluvial [water-based] erosion on Mars," Bleacher says.
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Sherlock

Archaeologists Amend Written History of China's First Emperor


ScienceDaily
Mon, 08 Mar 2010 00:00 UTC
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© Linda M. NicholasRemnants of the massive rammed-earth platform on the lower eastern slopes of Langya Mountain. This platform was built just above the sea.
The exploits of China's first emperor, Qin Shihuangdi, are richly documented in 2,000-year-old records of his conquests across eastern China. His reign was indeed noteworthy -- he is responsible for initiating construction of the Great Wall, and the discovery of life-size terracotta soldiers that guard his tomb in central China has generated worldwide attention.

But as the saying goes, history is written by the winners. Ancient texts can contain inaccuracies favorable to a strong ruler's legacy. That's why two Field Museum scientists and their Chinese collaborator have integrated textual information with archaeological research in order to further understand the impact of Shihauangdi's reign.

The scientists are Gary Feinman and Linda Nicholas -- husband and wife anthropologists who, since 1996, have spent four to six weeks each year walking across fields in rural China looking for pottery sherds and other artifacts with colleagues including Fang Hui of the School of History and Culture at Shandong University. They compared ancient written records to archaeological evidence and the result of their work is a more holistic view of China's first emperor and his influence on the eastern province of Shandong.
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Info

Fabled past awaits in Sudan desert

Guillaume Lavallee
Agence France-Presse
Sun, 07 Mar 2010 13:48 UTC
There is not a tourist in sight as the sun sets over sand-swept pyramids at Meroe, but archaeologists say the Nubian Desert of northern Sudan holds mysteries to rival Egypt.

"There is a magic beauty about these sites that is heightened by the privilege of being able to admire them alone, with the pyramids, the dunes and the sun," Guillemette Andreu, head of antiquities at the Louvre museum in Paris, says. "It really sets them apart from the Egyptian pyramids, whose beauty is slightly overshadowed by the tourist crowds."

Meroe lies about 200 kilometres northeast of Sudan's capital Khartoum and was the last capital of Kush, also called Nubia, an ancient kingdom centred on the confluence of the Blue Nile, the White Nile and the Atbara River.

Kush was one of the earliest civilisations in the Nile valley and, at first, Egypt dominated it. The Nubians gained their independence and, at the height of their power, they turned the table on Egypt and conquered it in the 8th century BC. They occupied the entire Nile valley for a century before being forced back into what is now Sudan.
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Radar

Shields down! Earth's magnetic field may drop in a flash


New Scientist
Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:33 UTC
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© NASA/SPLThere'll be little warning if Earth's magnetic field flips
Even if we knew precise details of Earth's core, we would not be able to predict a catastrophic flip in the polarity of its magnetic field more than a decade or two ahead.

Our planet's magnetic field has reversed polarity from time to time throughout its history. Some models suggest that a flip would be completed in a year or two, but if, as others predict, it lasted decades or longer we would be left exposed to space radiation. This could short-circuit satellites, pose a risk to aircraft passengers and play havoc with electrical equipment on the ground.

To test whether we would see a flip coming, Gauthier Hulot of Denis Diderot University in Paris, France, and colleagues ran computer simulations of Earth's magnetic dynamo based on a range of plausible values for inputs such as the viscosity, electrical and thermal conductivity of the outer core, and the temperature difference across it. The model's predictions remained consistent over this range of values for no more than a few decades, Hulot's team will report in Geophysical Research Letters. Their result implies that we can forecast a flip only this far in advance - and then only with data that is as precise as possible. "It's like predicting the weather," says Hulot.
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Blackbox

Universe's high-energy haze gets murkier

Rachel Courtland
New Scientist
Sat, 06 Mar 2010 17:25 UTC
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© NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT CollaborationThe source of most of the fog of gamma-ray light beyond the Milky Way is unknown
The universe's most powerful particle accelerators are responsible for just a fraction of the fog of gamma-ray light beyond the Milky Way, a new study suggests. The source of the rest remains a mystery, but dark matter could be a contributor.

The gamma-ray sky is dominated by the glow of our Milky Way as well as other known galaxies and individual neutron stars. But the universe is also aglow with a diffuse haze of gamma-ray light, produced by sources that may be too distant, dim, or diffuse to resolve individually.

By convention, astrophysicists have long assumed that most - if not all - of this gamma-ray fog gets its start inside galaxies whose supermassive black holes are spewing jets of charged particles into space as they feed on surrounding matter.

But a new analysis of data collected by NASA's Fermi telescope suggests these so-called active galactic nuclei (AGN) account for no more than 30 per cent of the universe's gamma-ray glow.

"Most of it - 70 per cent of the background - is unexplained at the moment," says study leader Marco Ajello of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology in Stanford, California. Ajello spoke with reporters on Tuesday at a meeting of the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society in Waikoloa, Hawaii.
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Satellite

NASA turned on by blow-up space stations

Paul Marks
New Scientist
Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:12 UTC
NASA is planning to investigate making inflatable space-station modules to make roomier, lighter, cheaper-to-launch spacecraft, it reveals in its budget proposal released on 22 February. We look into the technologies involved.

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