Science & TechnologyS


Sherlock

Armenia: Archeologists Say They've Found Remains of World's Oldest Human Brain

An Armenian-American-Irish archeological expedition claims to have found the remains of the world's oldest human brain, estimated to be over 5,000 years old. The team also says it has found evidence of what may be history's oldest winemaking operation. The discoveries were made recently in a cave in southeastern Armenia.

An analysis performed by the Keck Carbon Cycle Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Laboratory at the University of California, Irvine confirmed that one of three human skulls found at the site contains particles of a human brain dating to around the first quarter of the 4th millennium BC.

"The preliminary results of the laboratory analysis prove this is the oldest of the human brains so far discovered in the world," said Dr. Boris Gasparian, one of the excavation's leaders and an archeologist from the National Academy of Science's Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology in Yerevan. "Of course, the mummies of Pharaonic Egypt did contain brains, but this one is older than the Egyptian ones by about 1,000 to 1,200 years."

Info

Hawking Gives Up Academic Title

Hawking
© Getty ImageA new Lucasian Professor will be appointed in the near future
Professor Stephen Hawking has given up a prestigious academic title.

The physicist, who has motor neurone disease, is completing his last day as Cambridge University's Lucasian Professor of Mathematics.

The university said it was policy for holders of the title to retire at 67 and Prof Hawking was 67 in January.

Prof Hawking, who is one of the world's leading cosmologists, will continue working at the university and a new Lucasian Professor will be appointed.

Previous holders of the title, founded by MP Henry Lucas in 1663, include Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Babbage, Sir Joseph Larmor and Sir James Lighthill.

Info

Genetic Testing of African Refugees Raises Outcry From Scientists

Testing
© iStockphoto
Scientists in the United Kingdom are outraged over a new program that seeks to determine asylum seekers' nationalities through DNA and the isotopes present in their hair and fingernails. "Horrifying," "naïve," and "flawed" are among the adjectives geneticists and isotope specialists have used to describe the "Human Provenance pilot project," launched quietly in mid-September by the U.K. Border Agency [Science Insider]. The experts say the tests simply aren't accurate enough to pinpoint a person's country of origin.

The program will be tried out on asylum seekers from the Horn of Africa, and will seek to establish whether applicants from Kenya or Ethiopia are masquerading as refugees from war-torn Somalia. Yet scientists say the Border Agency's goals confuse ancestry or ethnicity with nationality. David Balding, a population geneticist at Imperial College London, notes that "genes don't respect national borders, as many legitimate citizens are migrants or direct descendants of migrants, and many national borders split ethnic groups" [Science Insider].

Satellite

European Union Launches Satellite System to Fine-Tune GPS

Free network may help pilots, drivers and the blind

The European Union launched a free satellite navigation network on Thursday that could help pilots, drivers and blind people by fine-tuning the accuracy of the U.S. global positioning system (GPS) to around 2 meters.

The EGNOS system will use three satellites and 34 ground stations to narrow the horizontal accuracy of GPS from around 7 meters previously and improve its vertical accuracy to help pilots during landings.

The "Safety-of-Life" service for aircraft navigation could be in place next year, the EU executive said in a statement.

Magnify

Myth of Ancient Greece's 'Heroes' Blown Away

Alexander
© AP PhotoAngelina Jolie, Val Kilmer and Collin Farrell in 'Alexander'
Spartans! Prepare for, well, embarrassment. It seems that far from being elite, noble warriors, each worth 1,000 of any rival soldiers, King Leonidas' crack troops were a bunch of bullying thugs. And Alexander the Great? A mummy's boy: in fact, his mum was a better fighter by a long chalk and died a soldier's death on the battlefield.

They and other figures from antiquity are to have their reputations shattered by a new British study which reveals the "truth" behind long-established legends. Michael Scott, a classicist at Cambridge University, points to evidence that could change the way we think about our classical heroes.

The heroic Spartans of Thermopylae, whose valiant standoff with an enormous Persian army is immortalised in the Hollywood film 300, are unmasked by Dr Scott as little more than war-mongering bullies of the ancient world who policed Athens with near-mindless violence, destroying anything they took a dislike to.

Binoculars

Best of the Stones: The Ancient Structures at Stonehenge are Truly Rocks of Ages

Stone
© S. CalderBeyond the velvet rope: Simon Calder gets inside the stone circle
You know Stonehenge, of course: a haunting silhouette from the past that stands gaunt and defiant on the chalky grassland of Wiltshire, just where the busy A303 and A344 meet. This inspirational stone circle, a triumph of the human spirit, was bequeathed millennia ago. It is now protected by English Heritage and forms part of a Unesco World Heritage Site.

Last year, almost 900,000 visitors stepped from their cars and coaches to get closer to the neolithic wonder. An enriching experience, set to become better still when a new visitor centre opens next year. It is tantalising, though, to be so close to the stones, yet unable to wander through them and wonder at the forces that brought them here. Since 1978, they have been off-limits because of worries about vandalism and erosion caused by rising visitor numbers.

How much more rewarding it would be to be able to walk unfettered beyond the "velvet rope" that keeps visitors at bay. Well, an average of 1,000 people a month are lucky enough to get up close for a personal experience of the stone circle. On a range of days throughout the year, people who book ahead can get access to the heart of the site, in groups no larger than 26.

Sherlock

Mystery Head Could Be Rare Statue of Emperor Nero

Head
© SolentThe damaged head will be scanned and recreated to see if it is a rare marble statue of Nero as a young boy.
A piece of a marble statue discovered at a Roman site in Sussex could be one of only three in existence depicting the Emperor Nero.

The chunk of stone, which is the right side of a boy's head and his lower face, is to be scanned using sophisticated technology and the remainder generated by computer to suggest what he may have looked like.

Archaeologists suspect the sculpture, which was found at Fishbourne Roman Palace in West Sussex, is of Nero as a young boy.

The only other known statues of Nero are in the Italian National Museum of Antiquities in Parma and the Louvre Museum in Paris.

Sherlock

The Dogu Have Something To Tell Us

Venus
© Chino City Board of EducationTanabatake "Venus": A big-bottomed dogu from Nagano Prefecture, 2500-1500 B.C.
Neither human nor animal, Japan's Jomon sculptures are a mystery to be enjoyed

They are, according to their kanji, part earth and part spirit, somewhere between animal and human. They are dogu, the most remarkable products of Japan's Jomon Period, a Neolithic era before the advent of rice cultivation, when the Japanese archipelago supported higher population densities than any other pre-agricultural society in the world.

The dogu are humanoid forms shaped in clay, large and small, richly decorated or homely and unadorned. Some 18,000 of them have been unearthed to date, in Jomon-period settlements stretching from Kyushu, north through Tohoku to Hokkaido. The oldest are nearly 10,000 years old, the youngest a mere 2,300. Yet despite their advanced age, they're on the move.

Sixty-seven dogu, loaned from collections across Japan, have taken up temporary residence in the British Museum, London, for a new exhibition: "The Power of Dogu." In December, they return home for three months' display at Tokyo National Museum.

Sherlock

Archaeologists Discover 'Count Dracula's' Cellar

Dracula
© WikipediaDuke of Wallachia, Vlad III Tepes, "Dracula"
Archaeologists have found a cellar in the university town of Pécs in southern Hungary, which they believe to have belonged to Wallachian Duke Vlad III, more commonly known as "Dracula."

Tamás Fedeles, tutor of medieval and early modern history at Pécs University said his research showed that Vlad III Tepes alias "Dracula," lived in a two-story town house on what is now the city's central square.

Fedeles says the Duke of Wallachia (modern-day southern Rumania) owned the house in the 1460s and this is confirmed by a 1489 document that refers to it as "Drakulya House." The document contains a detailed description of the house and from this, Fedeles says the cellar most likely belonged to "Drakulya".

Olivér Gábor, a local archaeologist, agrees. He says this cellar was one of the most impressive medieval cellars found to date. In his opinion, further excavations could turn up interesting finds.

Better Earth

Ancient Earth's Magnetic Field was Structured like Today's Two-Pole Model

basalt
© Catherine RoseThe well-exposed layering of basalt flows in formations near Lake Superior is aiding scientific understanding of the geomagnetic field in ancient times.
Princeton University scientists have shown that, in ancient times, the Earth's magnetic field was structured like the two-pole model of today, suggesting that the methods geoscientists use to reconstruct the geography of early land masses on the globe are accurate. The findings may lead to a better understanding of historical continental movement, which relates to changes in climate.

By taking a closer look at the 1.1 billion-year-old volcanic rocks on the north shore of Lake Superior, the researchers have found that Earth's ancient magnetic field was a geocentric axial dipole -- essentially a large bar magnet centered in the core and aligned with the Earth's spin axis.

Some earlier studies of these rocks had led other teams to conclude that the magnetic field of the ancient Earth had a far more complex structure -- some proposing the influence of four or even eight poles -- implying that present models of the supercontinents that relied on paleomagnetic data and an axial dipole assumption were wrong.