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Greek Archaeologists Uncover Ancient Tombs


PhysOrg
Thu, 16 Sep 2010 11:00 UTC
Image
© PhysOrg
A warrior's bronze helmet with gold mouth protector dated to the 6th century BC, found at the west cementary in Archontiko Pellas, northern Greece.
Greek archaeologists on Thursday announced the discovery of 37 ancient tombs dating back to the iron age in a cemetery near the ancient Macedonian capital of Pellas.

Discoveries at the site included a bronze helmet with a gold mouthplate, with weapons and jewellery, in the tomb of a warrior from the 6th century BC.

A total of 37 new tombs were discovered during excavation work this year, adding to more than 1,000 tombs since work began in 2000, researchers said.

The tombs date from 650-280 BC, covering the iron age up to the Hellenistic period (323-146 BC).

The tombs contain iron swords, spears and daggers, plus vases, pottery and jewellery made of gold, silver and iron.
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Info

Australian Aborigines 'World's First Astronomers'


Agence France-Presse
Fri, 17 Sep 2010 02:16 UTC
Uluru
© AFP
A new study has uncovered signs that Australian Aborigines pre-dated European stargazers by thousands of years.
Sydney - An Australian study has uncovered signs that the country's ancient Aborigines may have been the world's first stargazers, pre-dating Stonehenge and Egypt's pyramids by thousands of years.

Professor Ray Norris said widespread and detailed knowledge of the stars had been passed down through the generations by Aborigines, whose history dates back tens of millennia, in traditional songs and stories.

"We know there's lots of stories about the sky: songs, legends, myths," said Norris, an astronomer for Australia's science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization (CSIRO).

"We wondered how much further does it go than that. It turns out also people used the sky for navigation, time-keeping, to mark out the seasons, so it's very practical.

"People were nomadic so when Pleiades (the Seven Sisters star cluster) was up they would move to where the nuts and berries are. Another sign and it would be time to move to the rivers to fish for barramundi, and so on."

Norris, who has studied Aboriginal culture and historical accounts by white settlers, and made several trips to Arnhem Land in Australia's remote Outback, said his research also revealed more detailed astronomical thought.
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Bizarro Earth

Researchers to Fight Global Warming by Shooting Sulfates into Stratosphere

Tiffany Kaiser
DailyTech
Thu, 16 Sep 2010 18:48 UTC
Image
© Wordpress
Models show a 90 percent reduction of the magnitude of climate change

Researchers at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology are looking to optimize climate change reduction by injecting sulfates into the stratosphere. George Ban-Weiss, lead author of the study, along with his team of Carnegie scientists, have studied how the injection of aerosols of sulfate into the stratosphere will affect Earth's chemistry and climate, and which aerosol distribution pattern will bring them closest to their climate goals.

To do this, Ban-Weiss and his team used a global climate model with different sulfate aerosol concentrations depending on latitude to run five simulations. They then determined what distribution of sulfates would bring them closest to climate goals by using the results from the simulations in an optimization model. These distributions were then tested in the global climate model to see how close they came to these goals.
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Telescope

Water Around Massive Young Stars


PhysOrg
Thu, 16 Sep 2010 16:00 UTC
Image
© NASA, Spitzer, Smith & Hora
An infrared image of the DR21 outflow region as seen by the Spitzer Space Telescope. New observations study the water in this outflow as well as in the dark gas clouds.
Water is critical to human life, but also plays an important role in the life of stars and their planetary systems. As a gas, water helps to cool collapsing clouds of interstellar material so that they can form new stars.

In the form of ice, water acts as a glue on dust grains to help them coagulate into planetesimals and then into planets around the new stars. Finally, liquid water transports molecules on planetary surfaces, helping bring them together for complex chemistry.

Astronomers are actively looking for water in the cosmos, measuring its abundance, temperature and other properties, and trying to understand why it is found in some places but not others. In 1998, a NASA team led by SAO astronomers launched a space mission to study water in space, the Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite (SWAS).

SWAS found water nearly everywhere it looked, but also found a puzzle: there was less of it (in relation to other molecules) than had been expected. One proposed solution was that considerable amounts of water are frozen out onto the surfaces of cold grains of dust.
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Info

Pluto Gets 14 New Neighbors


National Geographic
Wed, 15 Sep 2010 00:00 UTC
Beyond Neptune's orbit, roughly five billion miles from the sun, the solar system can seem like a dark, desolate place.

But like the murky depths of the ocean, the darkness hides millions of mysterious bodies - or at least, so we think.

Known collectively as trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs, the first of this population to be discovered was Pluto in 1930. Since then we've found a thousand or so objects in Pluto's domain. Some have even been given exotic names, such as Chaos, Ixion, Quaoar, and Rhadamanthus.

TNO's
© NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI)
A chart of the largest known trans-Neptunian objects as of 2007.
So far, two probes have ventured that deep into the solar system (that'd be Voyager 1 and 2) but neither one paid much heed to TNOs on their way farther afield.

That means astronomers using Earthly telescopes can only guess at how many bodies are out there, what they look like, and what they're made of.
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Telescope

NASA Finds "Cannibal" Star That Ate Its Neighbour

Heidi Blake
The Telegraph, UK
Thu, 16 Sep 2010 01:30 UTC
Image
© NASA
BP Piscium (BP Psc), is a more evolved version of our Sun about 1,000 light years from Earth
A "cannibal" star suspected of eating its neighbour has been found by NASA.

The billion-year-old red giant, called BP Piscium, is thought to have gobbled up a young star whose remnants are still visible.

BP Piscium is a more evolved version of our Sun located 1,000 light-years away in the constellation of Pisces. It has been found with the help of NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory.

Scientists begun studying it 15 years ago and were bemused by its unusual appearance.

It is orbited by a disc of dusty matter that usually betokens planets beginning to form around young stars.

But young stars are born in clusters and BP Piscium is isolated, leading astronomers to believe that it is in fact a red giant - a star in a late stage of evolution.
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Magnify

Adolf Hitler was a "Cowardly Pig," According to Fellow First World War Soldiers

Peter Hutchison
The Telegraph, UK
Thu, 16 Sep 2010 06:12 UTC
Image
© Hulton/Getty Images
Corporal Adolf Hitler pictured with two other soldiers during his stay in a military hospital.
Adolf Hitler was labeled a "cowardly pig" by fellow First World War soldiers in his regiment, newly discovered archives have disclosed.

Letters and diaries revealed for the first time in a new book portray the future Nazi leader as a loner, a wimp, and an object of ridicule.

The documents published in, Hitler's First War, overturn the commonly held view that he was popular within the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment.

The book dispels the myth that Hitler was at the heart of a close-knit regiment with many veterans going on to form the core of the National Socialist Party.

Dr Thomas Weber, a University of Aberdeen historian, who wrote the book, also discloses that Hitler's role during the Great War was exaggerated by Nazi propaganda.
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Book

Nazi Book Reveals Detailed Plans for Invasion of Britain

Richard Savill
The Telegraph, UK
Wed, 15 Sep 2010 01:30 UTC
Image
© NTI
Picture of Penzance from Hitler's invasion dossier, which detailed plans for Nazi invasion of Britain
Hilter's detailed plans to conquer Britain have been discovered in a rare Nazi briefing book which reveals how and where German troops hoped to land on the south coast.

The book pinpoints the English coastal towns in the path of the Nazi ground assault, which was only avoided because RAF fighter pilots managed to win air supremacy in the Battle of Britain in 1940.

It also reveals that postcards identifying unmistakable landmarks including Brighton Pier, and Lands End, were given to Nazi troops to identify their targets in preparation for their blitz of the British Isles.

The original copy of the book Militargoegraphiscke Angaben uber England Sudkuste for Operation Sealion detailed every attack point and weakness along England's south coast ahead of the Germans' assault in September 1940.

It included large color maps showing every part of the south coast, from Land's End to Foreness Point in Kent.
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Magnify

Secret Nazi Mission Saw German U-Boats Land Men on American Soil

Laura Roberts
The Telegraph, UK
Fri, 10 Sep 2010 04:41 UTC
Image
© Getty Images
The German documentary, called Attack on America? Hitler's 9/11 will be shown on Saturday on the anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York
Nazi U-boats dropped saboteurs onto American shores as part of a secret mission during the Second World War, a documentary has claimed.

Eight men landed on beaches off Long Island and Florida with the intention of sabotaging targets across the country over a period of up to two years.

Four men arrived ashore near Manhattan on June 13, 1942 carrying weapons, explosives and primers.

On 17 June 1942 a further four men landed off Ponte Verda Beach in Florida.

The German documentary, called Attack on America - Hitler's 9/11 will be shown on Saturday on the anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York.

The programme-makers, Spiegal TV, claim the men intended to attack economic targets such as Penn Station, hydroelectric plant at Niagara Falls and aluminium factories in Illinois and Tennessee.
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Satellite

Mysterious Force Holds Back NASA Probe in Deep Space

Robert Matthews
The Telegraph, UK
Sun, 10 Feb 2002 00:01 UTC
Image
© NASA
NASA launches Pioneer 10
A space probe launched 30 years ago has come under the influence of a force that has baffled scientists and could rewrite the laws of physics.

Researchers say Pioneer 10, which took the first close-up pictures of Jupiter before leaving our solar system in 1983, is being pulled back to the sun by an unknown force. The effect shows no sign of getting weaker as the spacecraft travels deeper into space, and scientists are considering the possibility that the probe has revealed a new force of nature.

Dr Philip Laing, a member of the research team tracking the craft, said: "We have examined every mechanism and theory we can think of and so far nothing works.

"If the effect is real, it will have a big impact on cosmology and spacecraft navigation," said Dr Laing, of the Aerospace Corporation of California.
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