Archaeologists say remains of a rare, circular 1850s prison block unearthed at the former Pentridge Prison is of world significance in penal history. Archaeologist Adam Ford is the director of the first major dig in five years at Pentridge Prison [Credit: Paul Jeffers]The public will next month be able to view the extraordinary bluestone foundations of the panopticon, shaped like a Trivial Pursuit...
National Park Service officials approved $3 million in illegal construction projects over a decade that damaged one of the nation's most sacred American Indian burial sites, but few have been punished for the bureaucratic failure, records show. Paul and Sue Schramm, of Dyersville, Iowa, hike one of the trails Nov. 8, 2010 at Effigy Mounds National Monument in Harpers Ferry, Iowa. Records show ...
Over 1,000 ancient Buddha statues have been found in north China's Shanxi Province, a local cultural relics protection department said today. An ancient Buddha statue found in north China's Shanxi Province [Credit: gmw.cn]The Buddha statues were found in three stone caves in a cliff in Yangqu County and could date back to the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), according to local archaeologists. The stone...
A tiny Egyptian mummy, once thought to be fake because it was inscribed with meaningless hieroglyphics, has now been revealed by a CT scan to contain human remains, proving that it is probably a mummified baby. The CT scan showed that most of the interior was taken by folded of a material, presumably linen bandages and within that an area is a darker area about 10cm long which appears to...
Vietnamese archaeologists have found a 4,700-year-old skeleton in the southern province of Long An. Archaeologist excavate a site in the southern province of Long An [Credit: Nguyen Khanh Trung Kien]The skeleton, believed to be that of a 1.5 meter tall human being, was found burying in a grave measuring 0.5 meter wide by 2 meters long, according to the archaeologists from the Southern Social Sciences...
A new cultural psychology study has found that psychological differences between the people of northern and southern China mirror the differences between community-oriented East Asia and the more individualistic Western world -- and the differences seem to have come about because southern China has grown rice for thousands of years, whereas the north has grown wheat. A new cultural psychology study...
Scientists at the University of California, Riverside have discovered a fossil of a newly discovered organism from the "Ediacara Biota" -- a group of organisms that occurred in the Ediacaran period of geologic time. Reconstruction of Plexus ricei [Credit: Droser Lab, UC Riverside]Named Plexus ricei and resembling a curving tube, the organism resided on the Ediacaran seafloor. Plexus ricei individuals...
A Case Western Reserve University student and his mentor have discovered an ancient kitten-sized predator that lived in Bolivia about 13 million years ago -- one of the smallest species reported in the extinct order Sparassodonta. View of the palate of the new, small sparassodont from Bolivia. The front end is to the right. The scale bar is 1 cm [Credit: Rick Wherley of the Cleveland Museum of...
A team of Austrian, Swiss and German researchers of the Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (BiK-F), the Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung and the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), from the University of Leipzig and the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology has summarized the current state of knowledge on the diversification of Tibetan plants and animals....
A team of researchers led by University of Texas at Austin astronomer Ivan Ramirez has identified the first "sibling" of the Sun -- a star that was almost certainly born from the same cloud of gas and dust as our star. Ramirez' methods will help other astronomers find other "solar siblings," work that could lead to an understanding of how and where our Sun formed, and how our solar system became hospitable...
Using thermal imagery, researchers can now see what lies beneath the dirt-covered desert landscape. A team of researchers from the University of North Florida and the University of Arkansas has successfully used drones to unearth a 1,000-year-old village in northwestern New Mexico, revealing never-seen-before structures, unique insight into who lived there and what the area was like. A team of researchers...
Archeologists have found a tomb dating back to around 1100 B.C. south of Cairo, Egypt's Antiquities Ministry said Thursday. An Egyptian conservator cleans limestones at a newly-discovered tomb dating back to around 1100 B.C. at the Saqqara archaeological site, 30 kilometers (19 miles) south of Cairo [Credit: AP/Amr Nabil]Antiquities Minister Mohamed Ibrahim said that the tomb belongs to a guard...
The Acropolis’ famed Caryatids, Greece’s most celebrated ancient beauties, are currently undergoing an extreme makeover to clean the century-old statues from pollution, smoke, and whatever else has settled on the statues for over more than a century. The restoration and conservation process is conducted using an innovative technique developed by the Acropolis Museum and the Institute of Electronic...
Eyes and wings are among the most stunning innovations evolution has created. Remarkably these features have evolved multiple times in different lineages of animals. For instance, the avian ancestors of birds and the mammalian ancestors of bats both evolved wings independently, in an example of convergent evolution. The same happened for the eyes of squid and humans. Exactly how such convergent evolution...
Poachers are slaughtering Tanzania's elephants for their ivory at such alarming rates that the population could be completely wiped out in just seven years, conservationists told a conference Friday. Poachers are slaughtering Tanzania's elephants for their ivory at such alarming rates that the population could be completely wiped out in just seven years, conservationists told a conference...
Germany is the European Union's worst polluter, with its production of CO2 gasses from fossil fuel rising by two percent in 2013 to 760 million tonnes, official data showed on Wednesday. The Frimmersdorf coal-fired power plant near Grevenbroich in North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany. According to a WWF study, this power plant is the second worst climate polluter in Europe [Credit: WWF-Canon/Andrew...
The diversity of the world’s life forms — from corals to carnivores — is under assault. Decades of scientific studies document the fraying of ecosystems and a grim tally of species extinctions due to destroyed habitat, pollution, climate change, invasives and overharvesting. Which makes Nick Gotelli’s new report in the journal Science rather surprising. Where will we find the causes of declining ecosystems?...
Using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and infrared telescopes, astronomers have made an important advance in the understanding of how clusters of stars come into being. This composite image shows one of the clusters, NGC 2024, which is found in the center of the so-called Flame Nebula about 1,400 light years from Earth. In this image, X-rays from Chandra are seen as purple, while...
Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have engineered a bacterium whose genetic material includes an added pair of DNA "letters," or bases, not found in nature. The cells of this unique bacterium can replicate the unnatural DNA bases more or less normally, for as long as the molecular building blocks are supplied. Illustration highlighting the expansion of the genetic alphabet by comparison...
The Galapagos Islands have an iconic status in the history of evolutionary study, now new research shows that the islands' own geological past may have influenced the evolution of the chain's native species. A Galapagos Islands Land Iguana [Credit: WikiCommons]Writing in the Journal of Biogeography, Jason Ali and Jonathan Aitchison explore how fluctuating sea level changes over thousands of years impacted...