If you thought weather prediction was a recent phenomenon, you would be in for a surprise if told that weather prediction was done in ancient Egypt some 3,500 years ago!

A new translation of a 40-line inscription on a six-foot-tall 3,500-year-old calcite block from Egypt - called the Tempest Stela - describes rain, darkness and "the sky being in storm without cessation, louder than the cries of the masses".

The inscription could provide new evidence about the chronology of events in the ancient Middle East.

Two scholars at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute - Nadine Moeller and Robert Ritner - believe the unusual weather patterns described on the slab were the result of a massive volcano explosion at Thera - the present-day island of Santorini in the Mediterranean Sea.

"This is important to scholars of the ancient Near East and eastern Mediterranean, generally because the chronology that archaeologists use is based on the lists of Egyptian pharaohs, and this new information could adjust those dates," explained Moeller, an assistant professor of Egyptian archaeology at the Oriental Institute.

A volcano avalanche in Sicily 8,000 years ago triggered a devastating tsunami taller than a 10-story building that spread across the entire Mediterranean Sea, slamming into the shores of three continents in only a few hours.

A new computer simulation of the ancient event reveals for the first time the enormity of the catastrophe and its far-reaching effects .

The Mt. Etna avalanche sent 6 cubic miles of rock and sediment tumbling into the water - enough material to cover the entire island of Manhattan in a layer of debris thicker than the Empire State Building is tall.

The mountain of rubble crashed into the water at more than 200 mph. It pummeled the sea bed, transformed thick layers of soft marine sediment into jelly and triggered an underwater mudslide that flowed for hundreds of miles.

A new translation of a 40-line inscription on a 3,500-year-old stone block from Egypt called the Tempest Stela describes rain, darkness and the 'sky being in storm without cessation, louder than the cries of the masses.'
The Tempest Stela dates back to the reign of the pharaoh Ahmose, the first pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty. His rule marked the beginning of the New Kingdom, a time when Egypt's power reached its height.

Broken pieces of the stela were found in the third pylon of the temple of Karnak at Thebes, modern Luxor, between 1947 and 1951 by French archaeologists.

There is no such thing as an objective map. This was true of cave paintings, Roman tapestries, and colonialists' charts of Africa. It is also true of Google Maps.

About halfway through Jonathan Swift's boisterously witty epic poem On Poetry: A Rhapsody, the 18th century English satirist briefly turns his attention to maps of Africa, writing:

So geographers, in Afric maps,
With savage pictures fill their gaps,
And o'er uninhabitable downs
Place elephants for want of towns.

In Swift's time, European explorers had only skirted around the coastal edges of Africa and its interior remained, to all intents and purposes, a mystery. But as the poet pointed out, rather than just leave the middle of the continent blank, mapmakers would instead "fill their gaps" with things they thought might reside in such exotic corners of the world, such as strange monkeys, roaming lions, and "elephants for want of towns."

Controversial research programs, unethical experimentation, and human trials have been part of the medical field for centuries. It doesn't make it any less wrong, but certain scientists with questionable ethics have gotten away with a lot in the name of, well, science. The more (in)famous examples of wayward science include eugenics sterilization, electroshock therapy, ionizing radiation experiments, and the CIA program MKULTRA. But the government sponsored Tuskegee syphilis experiment, a program that ran for forty years in Macon County, Alabama during the mid-20th century, is one of the more appalling and deceitful of the bunch.

In 1932, the medical community still did not know a whole lot about treating syphilis. This was the case despite documentation of the disease dating all the way back to just after Columbus made his famous jaunt across the big blue.

According to the Oxford Journal, syphilis was a "cultural embarrassment" and had many different names that exemplified prejudices of different nationalities. The German and English called it the "French Pox." The Russians referred to it as the "Polish sickness" and the Poles as the "German sickness." The Japanese called it the "Chinese ulcer."

In the 16th century, Europe experienced a syphilis epidemic likely caused by the abundance of sailors traveling from sea port to sea port and doing what sailors do when they come into port. In fact, there is some evidence that points to Columbus and his crew being the ones who brought syphilis back from the new world. Either way, despite the disease being around for at least 450 years (and some evidence points to longer than that), there was no one, true, successful treatment for it. One popular remedy for several centuries was the use of mercury, which is quite poisonous in it's own right, either by ingestion or rubbing it on the skin. This led to the popular saying "a night in the arms of Venus leads to a lifetime on Mercury."

In 1908, Japanese scientist Sahachiro Hata (working in Germany) discovered the drug Salvarsan was somewhat effective as a treatment for syphilis. It was also quite toxic, as it came from the arsenic family. There were instances of patients losing limbs after taking the drug. Eventually, in 1912, Hata and Nobel Prize winner Paul Ehlric developed a easier-to-administer, but still toxic, drug called Neosalvarsan - which became the standard treatment for syphilis until the late 1940s.

The architects of the First World War are put on trial in the Hague and deserting soldiers celebrated in a graphic novel produced by Britain's leading comic artists designed to undermine "jingoistic" commemorations of the conflict's centenary.

To End All Wars, which includes 27 short stories based on real incidents, many told from a soldier's perspective, is intended as a corrective to Education Secretary Michael Gove's insistence that the conflict should be taught as a "just war" fought to halt German expansionism.

The anthology, illustrated in classic "war comic" style, includes The Coward's War, the story of Thomas Highgate, the first British soldier to be executed for desertion during the First World War. It concludes with the posthumous pardon awarded in 2006.

"Mud, Lice and Vice" depicts the devastation in the ranks caused by sexually transmitted diseases picked up by young British soldiers taking advantage of French brothels.

In "The Iron Dice," Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Secretary at the outbreak of war, is placed on trial at the International Criminal Court in the Hague at a hearing which undermines the claim that war was "inevitable".

A tomb newly excavated at an ancient cemetery in Egypt would have boasted a pyramid 7 meters (23 feet) high at its entrance, archaeologists say.
The tomb, found at the site of Abydos, dates back around 3,300 years. Within one of its vaulted burial chambers, a team of archaeologists found a finely crafted sandstone sarcophagus, painted red, which was created for a scribe named Horemheb. The sarcophagus has images of several Egyptian gods on it and hieroglyphic inscriptions recording spells from the Book of the Dead that helped one enter the afterlife.

There is no mummy in the sarcophagus, and the tomb was ransacked at least twice in antiquity. Human remains survived the ransacking, however. Archaeologists found disarticulated skeletal remains from three to four men, 10 to 12 women and at least two children in the tomb.

Newly discovered pyramid

The chambers that the archaeologists uncovered would have originally resided beneath the surface, leaving only the steep-sided pyramid visible.

"Originally, all you probably would have seen would have been the pyramid and maybe a little wall around the structure just to enclose everything," said Kevin Cahail, a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania, who led excavations at the tomb.

The pyramid itself "probably would have had a small mortuary chapel inside of it that may have held a statue or a stela giving the names and titles of the individuals buried underneath," Cahail told Live Science. Today, all that remains of the pyramid are the thick walls of the tomb entranceway that would have formed the base of the pyramid. The other parts of the pyramid either haven't survived or have not yet been found.

Evidence from skulls in east London shows plague had to have been airborne to spread so quickly

Archaeologists and forensic scientists who have examined 25 skeletons unearthed in the Clerkenwell area of London a year ago believe they have uncovered the truth about the nature of the Black Death that ravaged Britain and Europe in the mid-14th century.

Analysis of the bodies and of wills registered in London at the time has cast doubt on "facts" that every schoolchild has learned for decades: that the epidemic was caused by a highly contagious strain spread by the fleas on rats.

Now evidence taken from the human remains found in Charterhouse Square, to the north of the City of London, during excavations carried out as part of the construction of the Crossrail train line, have suggested a different cause: only an airborne infection could have spread so fast and killed so quickly.

The Black Death arrived in Britain from central Asia in the autumn of 1348 and by late spring the following year it had killed six out of every 10 people in London. Such a rate of destruction would kill five million now. By extracting the DNA of the disease bacterium, Yersinia pestis, from the largest teeth in some of the skulls retrieved from the square, the scientists were able to compare the strain of bubonic plague preserved there with that which was recently responsible for killing 60 people in Madagascar. To their surprise, the 14th-century strain, the cause of the most lethal catastrophe in recorded history, was no more virulent than today's disease. The DNA codes were an almost perfect match.

Have you ever wondered where the Irish get their light skin color from? Well, it appears we may now have the answer.

A major new US study at Penn State University has found that Europeans' light skin stems from a gene mutation from a single person who lived 10,000 years ago.

Scientists made the discovery after identifying a key gene that contributes to lighter skin color in Europeans, and the Irish fall into this category.

The Mail Online reports that, in earlier research, Keith Cheng from Penn State College of Medicine reported that one amino acid difference in the gene SLC24A5 is a key contributor to the skin color difference between Europeans and West Africans. This is undoubtedly where the Irish get their light skin from.

The first-ever archaeological excavations at the Nazi death camp Treblinka have revealed new mass graves, as well as the first physical evidence that this camp held gas chambers, where thousands of Jews died.

Presented in a new documentary, Treblinka: Hitler's Killing Machine, which will air Saturday (March 29) on the Smithsonian Channel, the excavations reveal that the Nazis weren't as adept at covering up their crimes as they believed when they razed the death camp in 1943. Brick walls and foundations from the gas chambers remain, as do massive amounts of human bone, including fragments now eroding out on the forested ground surface.

"For me, that was quite shocking," said project leader Caroline Sturdy Colls, a forensic archaeologist who normally works with police to find modern murder victims. "These artifacts are there, and these human remains are on the surface, and they're not being recorded or recovered."