podcasts-news

Ancient city Troy to have own museum

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 14:35:31 +0100

“When digging first began in the soil of Troy, in 1863, the excavations were directed by Frank Calvert,” Aslan said. “It was later continued by German archaeologist Professor Manfred Osman Korfmann, in 1988. During that time the excavation area underwent huge changes.”

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Excavations at the site have also been carried out by foreign institutions. Germany’s Tübingen University has been conducting excavations since 1988, first headed by Professor Korfmann and then taken over by Professor Ernst Pernicka in 2005. The university halted excavations due to of financial problems in 2012.

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The long-running excavations are of great significance to the Aegean side of Turkey and its archeology, Aslan said, as Troy is the place where pre-history began.

“Troy is the place where the first archeological data relating to Homer’s epic was found. This means that this is not a surreal ancient city; this is the birthplace of archeology,” he said.

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A recently published book of articles on Troy retraces the city’s excavation and its relation to Anatolian culture.

Articles by Manfred Osman Korfmann, the former head of excavations at Troy, have been collected in a book entitled “Troia Rüzgarı” (Troy Wind), published last year in Turkish, English and German.

Ancient city Troy to have own museum

1st Photo of Alien Planet Forming Snapped by Telescope

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 14:32:21 +0100

"So far, planet formation has mostly been a topic tackled by computer simulations," astronomer Sascha Quanz of ETH Zurich in Switzerland, leader of the research team, said in a statement. "If our discovery is indeed a forming planet, then for the first time scientists will be able to study the planet formation process and the interaction of a forming planet and its natal environment empirically at a very early stage."

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The possible planet seems to fit the picture scientists are building of how worlds form. Stars themselves are born in clouds of gas and dust, and after the form, a disk of leftover material often orbits them. From this disk, baby planets can take shape. That's what appears to be happening here.

1st Photo of Alien Planet Forming Snapped by Telescope

Antarctic Lake Vostok yields 'new bacterial life'

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 14:30:25 +0100

Last year, the team drilled through almost 4km (2.34 miles) of ice to reach the lake and retrieve samples.

Vostok is thought to have been cut off from the surface for millions of years.

This has raised the possibility that such isolated bodies of water might host microbial life forms new to science.

"After putting aside all possible elements of contamination, DNA was found that did not coincide with any of the well-known types in the global database," said Sergei Bulat, of the genetics laboratory at the St Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics.

"We are calling this life form unclassified and unidentified," he explained.

Dr Bulat added that close attention was focused on one particular form of bacteria whose DNA was less than 86% similar to previously existing forms.

"A level of 90% usually means that the organism is unknown."

However, other researchers said the data needed to be carefully verified by other experts before the claims could be confirmed.

Antarctic Lake Vostok yields 'new bacterial life

OOPS,,,someone jumped the gun,,,

MOSCOW — Russian scientists on Saturday dismissed initial reports that they had found a wholly new type of bacteria in a mysterious subglacial lake in Antarctica.

Sergei Bulat of the genetics laboratory at the Saint Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics had said Thursday that samples obtained from the underground Lake Vostok in May 2012 contained a bacteria bearing no resemblance to existing types.

But the head of the genetics laboratory at the same institute said on Saturday that the strange life forms were in fact nothing but contaminants.

"We found certain specimen, although not many. All of them were contaminants" that were brought there by the lab during research, Vladimir Korolyov told the Interfax news agency.

"That is why we cannot say that previously-unknown life was found," he said.

Russia admits no new life form found in Antarctic lake

Monster goldfish are breeding in Lake Tahoe

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 14:15:09 +0100

Christine Ngai, of the University of Nevada, Reno, was among the researchers who found the first goldfish during a survey of invasive fish in the lake.

“You just see this bright golden orange thing starting to float up, and you’re like, what is that? And then you take a net and you scoop it up and you’re like, it’s a goldfish,” Ngai said of the initial discovery.

Ngai had heard stories from fishing guides about large goldfish, but they were the first to document the species.

“Then when I saw it — I was like, oh … it exists,” Ngai added.

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It's not certain how the goldfish first got into Lake Tahoe, Chandra said, but he suspects it's the result of aquarium dumping.

Policies are already in place to limit live-bait fishing, and boat inspections to limit the introduction of invasive species.

Now, some believe a new campaign to curb aquarium dumping may be necessary.

“Those small little things that people do can have a large impact when you consider that it's probably not just one person doing it,” said Ted Thayer, of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency.

Monster goldfish are breeding in Lake Tahoe

Fragments of ancient continent buried under Indian Ocean

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 14:03:22 +0100

Researchers have found evidence for a landmass that would have existed between 2,000 and 85 million years ago.

The strip of land, which scientists have called Mauritia, eventually fragmented and vanished beneath the waves as the modern world started to take shape.

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And although they are now separated by thousands of kilometres of ocean, India was once located next to Madagascar.

Now researchers believe they have found evidence of a sliver of continent - known as a microcontinent - that was once tucked between the two.

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"At the moment the Seychelles is a piece of granite, or continental crust, which is sitting practically in the middle of the Indian Ocean," explained Prof Torsvik.

"But once upon a time, it was sitting north of Madagascar. And what we are saying is that maybe this was much bigger, and there are many of these continental fragments that are spread around in the ocean."

Fragments of ancient continent buried under Indian Ocean

Loch Ness monster hunt continues 80 years on

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 13:45:55 +0100

Shine, who is 64, moved to the Highlands from his native Surrey in 1973, a restless maverick seeking “fame and glory, even in the cannon’s mouth – youth is like that”. He was part of a wave of amateur investigators each keen to find evidence that, depending on their own beliefs, the monster did or did not exist. There was something about that moment, in the late Sixties, early Seventies, as the countercultural tide lapped up against the shore of science, when anything – Atlantis, UFOs, Nessie – seemed possible, and Loch Ness became a proving ground for anyone with a working boat and a working theory.

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There have been generations of monster hunters, a sort of cryptozoological papacy full of heroes and villains, defenders of the faith and some who brought it into disrepute. Certain names still ring out in the Great Glen. The late Tim Dinsdale, an aeronautical engineer who led 56 expeditions between 1960 and 1987, and who shot an acclaimed black and white film which appeared to show a hump crossing the water. Robert Rines, the inventor, patent lawyer and Broadway composer, who, as a child, played a violin duet with Albert Einstein, and whose sighting in 1972 inspired him to spend the rest of his life seeking the monster, making an elegiac final expedition – in search of Nessie’s bones – in 2008, the year before his own death. And then there was Frank Searle, a hugely controversial figure, soldier-turned-greengrocer-turned-self-styled-“Monster-hunter extraordinary”, whose blue caravan and exhibition of photographs was a familiar sight on the loch-side in the mid-70s. He died eight years ago and is remembered now for his hoaxed pictures and aggressive conflicts with rival investigators.

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The loch does, however, still have at least one true believer. Steve Feltham moved here on 19 June, 1991, chucking his job and girlfriend, and he recently entered the Guinness Book of Records for his Nessie-seeking vigil. He lives in a converted mobile library at the side of the loch in the village of Dores with an adopted stray cat called “Miaow”, and makes his living selling small model monsters mounted on rocks washed ashore. He passes his nights reading about Nessie and playing the piano badly. He gets his water from a nearby tap and keeps warm by burning driftwood on a stove sourced on eBay.

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Even true believers need a break now and then, of course, and it turns out that Feltham has only just returned from a month in Guatemala. But – and it is a big but – he spent most of his time sitting next to Lake Atitilan, where there is believed to be a monster; so, a busman’s holiday of sorts. He is, for me, the guardian spirit of Loch Ness, the keeper of a flame passed from St Columba to Aldie Mackay to Adrian Shine and on down the years. Not that he would put it that way. “I’m the world champion,” he sighs, “of sitting on a beach and seeing bugger all.”

Loch Ness monster hunt continues 80 years on

'Genesis Death Sandwich' Discovered in Bible

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 13:32:32 +0100

Researchers using text-analysis software say they've discovered a new literary device in the first book of the Bible: the "Genesis death sandwich."

The name refers to a familiar rhetorical structure -- sandwiching bad news in between the good. In the case of Genesis, the slices of white bread are themes of life, and the slimy cold cuts in between are mentions of death.

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For their study, Rugg and his colleagues ran the King James version of the text through software known as the Search Visualizer, which plotted mentions of life in red and death in green on a single gridded page representing the whole book. Their results showed frequent mentions of life in the opening and closing verses of Genesis, while themes of death were clustered in the middle. They say the device is an example of a literary convention known as inclusio, also called bracketing, where one theme frames another.

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"Whether it was a deliberate use of inclusio or a subconscious use is an open question," Rugg wrote. "We don't think that this structure is likely to be a coincidence, given the number of times the two words occur within Genesis, and given that these are themes that have long been recognized as significant within it."

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Rugg and his colleagues ran other searches using the software for words not considered significant by scholars, finding no specific patterns in the book of Genesis. However, they did find the word "woman" appears overwhelmingly in the first part of Genesis, while it rarely pops up in the second half, Rugg wrote. Another term, "begat," illustrates something scholars have long recognized -- that the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John mirror the themes and structures of the Old Testament (which includes Genesis); sure enough, "begat" showed a striking cluster in the first part of Genesis, mirroring what was found in the first part of the gospel of Matthew, Rugg said.

'Genesis Death Sandwich' Discovered in Bible

Pottery 20,000 years old found in a Chinese cave

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 13:51:40 +0100

The research by a team of Chinese and American scientists also pushes the emergence of pottery back to the last ice age, which might provide new explanations for the creation of pottery, said Gideon Shelach, chair of the Louis Frieberg Center for East Asian Studies at The Hebrew University in Israel.

“The focus of research has to change,” Shelach, who is not involved in the research project in China, said by telephone.

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Wu Xiaohong, professor of archaeology and museology at Peking University and the lead author of the Science article that details the radiocarbon dating efforts, told The Associated Press that her team was eager to build on the research.

“We are very excited about the findings. The paper is the result of efforts done by generations of scholars,” Wu said. “Now we can explore why there was pottery in that particular time, what were the uses of the vessels, and what role they played in the survival of human beings.” Pottery 20,000 years old found in a Chinese cave

Writing the Illiad – date confirmed

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 13:11:56 +0100

“When the Homeric epics were produced is not known with certainty,” said Dr. Mark Pagel of the University of Reading. “Here we apply evolutionary-linguistic phylogenetic statistical methods to differences in Homeric, Modern Greek and ancient Hittite vocabulary items to estimate a date of approximately 710–760 BCE for these great works.”

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Professor Pagel added, “Our analysis of The Iliad has not been informed by historical, archaeological or cultural information but by a statistical analysis of shared vocabulary between three languages and the rates of lexical replacement in Indo European languages. Yet, our estimated dates fall in the middle of classicists’ and historians’ preferred date for Homer. The outcome of this research on The Iliad demonstrates the way in which language can be used, like genes, to unravel questions in history, archaeology and anthropology.”

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Returning to the Homeric Iliad conundrum researchers, writing in the journal Bioessays, conclude that their “model returns a date for Homer of 762 BCE with 95% conﬁdence intervals from 376 to 1157 BCE.

It is intriguing in this light that the ‘Nestor’s cup’, a vase excavated from an Ancient Greek site in Italy, contains an inscription that some scholars think refers to a line from the Iliad, and is dated to 740–720 BCE. Equally, the new 95% upper limit falls in the middle of the 12th century, the period during which some scholars think the Trojan wars might have been fought.”

Writing the Illiad – date confirmed

TOP 10 REASONS Why We Know the Earth is Round

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 22:38:39 +0100

Another quickie video showing what we really do know,,,

TOP 10 REASONS Why We Know the Earth is Round