September 27, 2006, 8:08 PM CT

Wealth During Second Temple Period

Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Bar-Ilan University have discovered uncommonly high concentrations of silver in samples of a number of different types of pottery from excavations in Jerusalem of the late Second Temple period, the first century BCE (Before the Common Era) through 70 CE (Common Era). This is the first study ever conducted on silver in archaeological ceramics.

David Adan-Bayewitz, Associate Professor at Bar-Ilan in Ramat-Gan, Israel, and a guest at Berkeley Lab, and Frank Asaro and Robert D. Giauque of Berkeley Lab's Environmental Energy Technologies Division made their discovery of performing measurements on 1,200 pottery vessels from 38 sites in Roman Judea (present-day Israel). They used high-precision X-ray fluorescence (HPXRF) and instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA). The Berkeley Lab team developed a variation of INAA, the INAA coincidence technique, specifically for measuring silver concentrations in archaeological samples, as a more accurate means of checking the results of HPXRF and conventional INAA.

The research was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation.

The major finding is that samples of pottery from Jerusalem during this era showed anomalously higher concentrations of silver, as in comparison to samples from all other non-urban sites dated to the same period of time. A number of of the samples from Jerusalem and other sampled sites were otherwise indistinguishable in date, shape and chemical composition. High silver abundances were also detected in pottery found at other urban sites. But a number of of the Jerusalem samples had higher silver values than any of the samples from the other cities.........

Posted by: William      Permalink         Source

September 23, 2006, 11:21 AM CT

Dinosaurs' Climate Shifted Too

Ancient rocks from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean suggest dramatic climate changes during the dinosaur-dominated Mesozoic Era, a time once thought to have been monotonously hot and humid.

In this month's Geology, researchers from Indiana University Bloomington and the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research present new evidence that ocean surface temperatures varied as much as 6 degrees Celsius (about 11 degrees Fahrenheit) during the Aptian Epoch of the Cretaceous Period 120 million years ago.

The finding is relevant to the ongoing climate change discussion, IUB geologist Simon Brassell says, because it portrays an ancient Earth whose temperatures shifted erratically due to changes in carbon cycling and did so without human input.

"Combined with data from the Atlantic, it appears clear that climate changes were taking place on a global scale during this time period," said Brassell, who led the study.

A prior study from an Atlantic Ocean site had suggested a changeable climate around the same time period. But it was not known whether the Atlantic data indicated regional climate change unique to the area or something grander.

"We had virtually no data from the middle of the largest ocean at that time period," Brassell said. "The data we collected suggest significant global fluctuations in temperature."........

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September 20, 2006, 8:07 PM CT

Infant hominid

The fossilised remains of the child, estimated to have died at the age of three and who was probably a female, shed light on a hotly disputed branch of the human tree known as Australopithecus afarensis.

The best-known A. afarensis is the famous fossil Lucy, recovered in Ethiopia in 1974 and who, for more than 20 years, was the earliest known member of the hominid family.

Hominids are primates who split from apes between five and seven million years ago.

They are considered the forerunners of anatomically modern humans, who appeared on the scene about 200,0000 years ago.

Still unclear, though, is the exact line of geneaology from these small, rather ape-like creatures to the rise of the powerfully-brained H. sapiens.

Once thought by some to be our ancestor, A. afarensis is now widely considered to be a failed branch of the human tree, for a number of experts suspect the hominid was anatomically far closer to apes than humans.........

Posted by: Tyler      Permalink         Source

September 14, 2006, 8:50 PM CT

Earliest Writing in the New World

UC Riverside Anthropologist Karl Taube helped confirm the earliest writing in the New World, carved into the flat surface of a stone block in a in a remote region in southern Veracruz, Mexico. The research would be reported in the Sept. 15 issue of the journal Science.

Taube, a professor at UC Riverside for 18 years, was part of a team of scientists who traveled in the Spring to examine 62 hieroglyphic signs, 28 of them distinct elements. The team determined that they were created by the Olmec people no later than 900 BC, based on nearby art.

"This is extremely important because we never recognized this writing system, until this discovery," said Taube. "This is a whole new ball game when looking at the Olmec. We've known they have very elaborate art, and iconography, but this is the first strong indication that they had visually recorded speech."

The initial discovery was made by two archeologists from Mexico, Maria del Carmen Rodríguez and Ponciano Ortíz, but there was some debate about the significance of the find. Taube was one of the experts brought in to make a positive identification.

A full copy of the report is available through the Office of Public Programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Contact: (202) 326-6440 or scipak@@@aaas.org.........

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September 14, 2006, 8:34 PM CT

Finding 67 Dinosaurs In One Week

One recent week in the Gobi Desert produced 67 dinosaur skeletons for a team of paleontologists from Montana and Mongolia who want to flesh out the developmental biology of dinosaurs.

Montana State University paleontologist Jack Horner said Wednesday that the same area yielded 30 skeletons last year, so scientists at MSU and Mongolia's Science and Technology University now have about 100 Psittacosaurus skeletons. The skeletons ranged in length from one to five feet and stood about two feet tall.

"That's what I was there for -- getting as a number of of those as we could possibly get," Horner said as he waited for the rest of the MSU team to return to Bozeman.

He was specifically looking for Psittacosaurus fossils because it was a very common dinosaur and would give him lots of specimens, Horner said. It would also keep away poachers and commercial fossil hunters who work in the area, but prefer rare fossils. Horner wants a large number of fossils so he can compare variations between skeletons and changes during growth.

The Psittacosaurus dinosaur, also known as a "parrot lizard," was a plant-eater that lived about 120 million years ago in the Early Cretaceous Period, Horner said. It was an ancestor of horned dinosaurs like the triceratops.........

Posted by: William      Permalink         Source

September 14, 2006, 6:29 PM CT

A last refuge for neanderthals?

The completion of a 7-year excavation of a site in southern Spain provides some evidence that neanderthals may have lived for thousands of years longer than was previously thought.

Clive Finlayson led the international team of palaeoanthropologists, which discovered 103 neanderthal artifacts, including spear points and knives, while excavating Gorham's Cave near the Rock of Gibraltar. Most of these artifacts have been dated to about 28,000 years before present (BP), and some are dated as late as 24,000 years BP.

The study, reported in an advance online publication at Nature, led Finlayson and his team to conclude that an isolated population of neanderthals lived in the region surrounding Gorham's cave until about 28,000 years BP. This is the latest recorded date yet for neanderthals, and is at least 2,000 years later than prior estimates. It again raises the possibilty that early modern humans and neanderthals interbred.

The findings hint at a scenario in which neanderthals sought refuge in the southern-most point of the Iberian peninsula at a time when they had been wiped out from the rest of Europe, and when modern humans were expanding across the continent. Finlayson, an evolutionary biologist at the Gibraltar Museum, speculates that neanderthals were driven south because of climatic changes to which they could not adapt quickly enough.........

Posted by: William      Permalink         Source

September 14, 2006, 6:07 PM CT

Trails for Characterizing Human Predecessors

The genomic DNA sequencing of an extinct Pleistocene cave bear species--the kind of stuff once reserved for science fiction--has been logged into scientific literature thanks to researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI). This study, reported in the June 2 online edition of the journal Science, has set the research community's sights on traveling back in time through the vehicle of DNA sequencing to reveal the story of other extinct species, including our nearest relatives, the Neandertals.

Until now, scientists have been stymied in attempts to sequence genomes of extinct species. The DOE JGI researchers overcame a number of of the difficulties normally linked to recovery of DNA from ancient samples. DNA starts degrading at death, while microbes attack the decaying carcass to utilize the nutrients present in the dead organism as an energy source. What remains and confounds the efforts to sequence and characterize these artifacts is an overabundance of microbial contaminants along with the occasional DNA fingerprints contributed unwittingly by the modern fossil hunters or lab workers.

"Among the limitations of prior ancient DNA studies was that they were restricted to mitochondrial DNA sequences," said Eddy Rubin, DOE JGI director, in whose laboratory the work was conducted. "While mitochondria are great for learning about evolutionary relationships between species, to understand the functional differences between extinct and modern species we really need genomic DNA, and nobody has been able to purify and sequence large quantities of DNA from these old samples.........

Posted by: William      Permalink         Source

September 11, 2006, 10:17 PM CT

Solar Flares

Solar flares are tremendous explosions on the surface of our Sun, releasing as much energy as a billion megatons of TNT in the form of radiation, high energy particles and magnetic fields. The Sun's magnetic fields are known to be an extremely important factor in producing the energy for flaring and when these magnetic fields lines clash together, dragging hot gas with them, an enormous maelstrom of energy is released. This boiling cauldron of plasma is ejected at huge speeds into the solar system and high energy particles, such as protons, can arrive at Earth within tens of minutes, to be followed a few days later by Coronal Mass Ejections, huge bubbles of gas threaded with magnetic field lines, which can cause major magnetic disturbances on Earth, sometimes with catastrophic results. Whilst scientists understand the flaring process very well they cannot predict when one of these enormous explosions will occur. The Solar-B mission, designed and built by teams in the UK, US and Japan, will investigate the so called 'trigger phase' of these events.

"Solar flares are fast and furious they can cause communication black-outs at Earth within 30 minutes of a flare erupting on the Sun's surface. It's imperative that we understand what triggers these events with the ultimate aim of being able to predict them with greater accuracy" said Prof. Louise Harra, the UK Solar-B project scientist based at University College London's Mullard Space Science Laboratory [UCL/MSSL].........

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September 9, 2006, 9:50 AM CT

Modern Humans Odd Man Out

Could it be that in the great evolutionary "family tree," it is we Modern Humans, not the brow-ridged, large-nosed Neandertals, who are the odd uncle out?.

New research reported in the August, 2006 journal Current Anthropology by Neandertal and early modern human expert, Erik Trinkaus, Ph.D., professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, suggests that rather than the standard straight line from chimps to early humans to us with Neandertals off on a side graph, it's equally valid, perhaps more valid based on the fossil record, that the line should extend from the common ancestor to the Neandertals, and Modern Humans should be the branch off that.

Trinkaus has spent years examining the fossil record and began to realize that maybe scientists have been looking at our ancient ancestors the wrong way.

Trinkaus identified fossil traits which seemed to be genetic markers - those not greatly influenced by environment, life ways and wear and tear. He was careful to examine traits that appear to be largely independent of each other to avoid redundancy.

"I wanted to see to what extent Neandertals are derived, that is distinct, from the ancestral form. I also wanted to see the extent to which modern humans are derived relative to the ancestral form," Trinkaus says. "What I came up with is that modern humans have about twice as a number of uniquely derived traits than do the Neandertals.........

Posted by: William      Permalink         Source

September 9, 2006, 7:53 AM CT

Ground movement risks identified

Ground movements are responsible for hundreds of deaths and billions of Euros annually, and the threat they pose is increasing due to urbanisation and land use. ESA's GMES Service Element Programme is backing a project, Terrafirma, to help mitigate these risks.

To address these issues, Terrafirma is providing a Pan-European ground motion hazard information service to detect and monitor ground movements in relation to building stability, subsidence and ground heave, landslides, seismic activity and engineered excavations.

For over 15 years, Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (InSAR) has been providing ground deformation data at centimetre precision. In the past five years, however, new ways of processing satellite radar images have been developed using Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI) that allow ground movements over wide areas to be detected and monitored with even greater sensitivity.

Recent statistics show that 50% of the world population already live in cities, and megacities (over 10 million) are now commonplace. As the trend toward urbanisation continues, most major towns will undergo construction to accommodate new developments for newcomers.

New construction requires solid foundations to avoid costly planning mistakes, and underground works and metro-tunnelling have some surface effect that needs remediation and monitoring. The Terrafirma services can provide information to locate low-risk foundation sites and help save money on the remediation of existing structures.........

Posted by: Tyler      Permalink         Source