July 1, 2006, 8:20 AM CT

Brazil 1822

How did Brazil look like in 1822?

The Portuguese royal court fled Europe in 1808 for Brazil so as to avoid the advancing armies of Napoleon. In 1816 after Queen Maria I's death the Prince Regent became King João VI of Portugal, but he remained in exile, establishing an absolutist monarchy.

An independence movement gathered some momentum, despite scientific, literary, artistic and military successes generated under the King's patronage. An uprising was suppressed in 1817 but the desire for a republic continued.........

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June 29, 2006, 9:30 PM CT

Historic Discovery At Ancient Site

Digging on a remote hilltop in Italy, a Florida State University classics professor and her students have unearthed artifacts that dramatically reshape our knowledge of the religious practices of an ancient people, the Etruscans.

"We are excavating a monumental Etruscan building evidently dating to the final years of Etruscan civilization," said Nancy Thomson de Grummond, the M. Lynette Thompson Professor of Classics at FSU and director of the university's archaeology programs in Italy. Within the building, de Grummond's team located in early June what appears to be a sacrificial pit and a sanctuary -- finds remarkable for the wealth of items they are yielding that appear to have been used in religious rituals.

Nearly every summer since 1983, de Grummond has taken groups of FSU students into Italy's Tuscany region to participate in archaeological digs at Cetamura del Chianti, a site once inhabited by the Etruscans and ancient Romans. In the final days of this year's program, de Grummond and her students unearthed what she calls "the most thrilling" find she has seen in 23 years at Cetamura.

She explained that the Etruscans, who once ruled most of the Italian peninsula, were conquered and absorbed by the Romans in the second and first centuries B.C.E. ("Before the Common Era"). Previous to that time, however, they were a highly advanced civilization that constructed roads, buildings and sewer systems and developed the first true cities in Europe. They also built large, complex religious sanctuaries -- which may have been the purpose served, in part, by the Cetamura structure.........

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June 26, 2006, 10:49 PM CT

Two Abrupt Global Climate Shifts

For the first time, glaciologists have combined and compared sets of ancient climate records trapped in ice cores from the South American Andes and the Asian Himalayas to paint a picture of how climate has changed - and is still changing - in the tropics.

Their conclusions mark a massive climate shift to a cooler regime that occurred just over 5,000 years ago, and a more recent reversal to a much warmer world within the last 50 years.

The evidence also suggests that most of the high-altitude glaciers in the planet's tropical regions will disappear in the near future. The paper is included in the current issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

Lastly, the research shows that in most of the world, glaciers and ice caps are rapidly retreating, even in areas where precipitation increases are documented. This implicates increasing temperatures and not decreasing precipitation as the most likely culprit.

The scientists from Ohio State University's Byrd Polar Research Center and three other universities combined the chronological climate records retrieved from seven remote locations north and south of the equator. Cores drilled through ice caps and glaciers there have captured a climate history of each region, in some cases, providing annual records and in others decadal averages.........

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June 22, 2006, 6:09 PM CT

Earliest Hominid: Not A Hominid At All?

Are we really looking at a human fossil or that of an ape? A team of International scientists says that the earliest known hominid fossil, which dates to about 7 million years ago, is actually some kind of ape. These researchers from the University of Michigan say that scientists should rethink whether we actually descended from apes resembling chimpanzees, which are considered our closest relatives.

U-M anthropologist Milford Wolpoff and his colleagues examined images and the original paper published on the discovery of the Toumaï cranium (TM 266) or Sahelanthropus tchadensis, as well as a computer reconstruction of the skull. Two other colleagues were actually able to examine the skull, Wolpoff said, in addition to the images and the computer reconstruction.

The research team concluded that the cranium did not sit atop the spine but in front of it, indicating the creature walked on all fours like an ape. Hominids, he said, are distinguished from all other primates by walking upright. Hominids are everything on the line leading to humans after divergence with chimpanzees. Upright bipedalism is the single best way of identifying which fossils are hominids.

Scientists also examined the canine teeth and found that they were not clearly human or ape-like, but rather like most other canine fossils from the Miocene era.........

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June 16, 2006, 0:02 AM CT

Fossils Depict Aquatic Origins Of Near-modern Birds

Five fossil specimens of a near-modern bird found in the Gansu Province of northwestern China show that early birds likely evolved in an aquatic environment, as per a research studyreported today in the journal Science. Their findings suggest that these early modern birds were much like the ducks or loons found today. Gansus yumenesis, which lived some 105 to 115 million years ago during the Early Cretaceous period, took modern birds through a watery path out of the dinosaur lineage.

The report was co-authored by Peter Dodson of the University of Pennsylvania and his former students Hai-lu You of the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, Jerald Harris of Dixie State College of Utah and Matthew Lamanna of Carnegie Natural History Museum in Pittsburgh.

"Gansus is very close to a modern bird and helps fill in the big gap between clearly non-modern birds and the explosion of early birds that marked the Cretaceous period, the final era of the Dinosaur Age," said Peter Dodson, professor of anatomy at Penns School of Veterinary Medicine and professor in Penns Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. "Gansus is the oldest example of the nearly modern birds that branched off of the trunk of the family tree that began with the famous proto-bird Archaeopteryx".........

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June 13, 2006, 11:33 PM CT

Excavation Of Home Of UNC Founder

Artifacts suggest that the South Carolina site that archaeology students and faculty from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have been excavating was indeed the home of UNC founder William R. Davie, but contradict the local lore that Union troops burned the house in 1865.

The excavation uncovered parts of the foundation, which the scientists used to determine the dimensions of the house. "It was 40 feet wide, and from chimney to chimney, about 45 feet long. For the early 1800s, that's a pretty big house," said Dr. R.P. Stephen Davis, associate director of the university's Research Labs of Archaeology and an adjunct professor of anthropology in UNC's College of Arts and Sciences.

"Those house dimensions, in combination with the artifacts that we found there - some very expensive table wares, for instance - lead us to confidently assert that it is William R. Davie's home," said Dr. Brett Riggs, staff archaeologist in the Research Labs of Archaeology, also in the College of Arts and Sciences. Remnants of table wares found at the site include Chinese export porcelain and English porcelain with painted decorations.

But the scientists and their undergraduate collaborators did not find the key evidence that would suggest a fire. "We would expect masses of charcoal and burned window glass, and we just didn't encounter that," Riggs said. "It's possible that such evidence was obliterated, but we really doubt it".........

Posted by: William      Permalink         Source

June 13, 2006, 11:29 PM CT

Exinct Animal Captured On Video

The first images of a live specimen of a small, furry animal once believed to have gone extinct more than 11 million years ago have been captured during a Southeast Asian expedition led by a retired Florida State University researcher.

The remarkable video and photos shot by David Redfield, a professor emeritus of FSU's science education faculty, and Thai wildlife biologist Uthai Treesucon are being hailed as historic images documenting a true "living fossil," the Laotian rock rat.

The Laotian rock rat is so called for its only known habitat -- limestone outcroppings in Central Laos -- and the appearance of the animal's head and face, which sport long whiskers and beady eyes like those of a rat. (To view photographs and video of the Laotian rock rat, visit www.rinr.fsu.edu/rockrat.).

Redfield's video shows a docile, squirrel-sized animal covered with dark, dense fur and bearing a long tail that's not as bushy as that of a typical squirrel. Perhaps the most striking observation is how the animal walks -- like a duck. Clearly not adapted to climbing trees, the rock rat exhibits a duck-like waddle with its hind feet splayed out at an angle to its body.

An avid but otherwise amateur wildlife observer, Redfield has traveled the world since retiring in 1988 from a career in teaching and research at FSU. A passion for bird watching in the 1990s segued into an interest in seeing some of the world's rare mammals in their native habitats. When he learned about the discovery of the Laotian rock rat last year -- and that no one had seen a live specimen -- Redfield set out on a personal quest to accomplish the feat.........

Posted by: Ashley      Permalink         Source

June 13, 2006, 0:09 AM CT

Best Done Close to the Evolutionary Home

Some aspects of evolution are like the real estate business in that it's all about location, location, location! Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the DOE Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) have shown that when it comes to comparing evolutionarily conserved DNA sequences that regulate the expression of genes, more closely related species are best.

"While one can compare distant vertebrates to humans and identify sequences that are highly evolutionarily conserved, such elements are few and far between," said Len Pennacchio, a geneticist with Berkeley Lab's Genomics Division and the head of JGI's genome analysis program. "In contrast, by comparing species that are more closely related, such as other mammals, we can find much more DNA sequence alignment." .

Pennacchio and Shyam Prabhakar are the principal authors of a paper that appears in the recent issue of the publication Genome Research, which presents the results of a comparative genomics study that quantified the advantages of staying close to the evolutionary home. Other co-authors of the paper were Francis Poulin, Malak Shoukry, Veena Afzal, Edward Rubin and Olivier Couronne.

When Mother Nature develops something that works, she tends to stick with it. Hence sequences of DNA that serve as protein-coding genes or enhancers that regulate the expression of those genes have been conserved through thousands of years of evolution. Gene hunters have capitalized on this tendency by comparing the DNA of different species to identify genes and determine their functions. For example, the genome of the Fugu fish contains essentially the same genes as the human genome but carries them in approximately 400 million bases as compared to the three billion bases that make up human DNA.........

Posted by: William      Permalink         Source

June 11, 2006, 9:17 AM CT

Devil or Angel

An extraordinary compilation where the paradigmatic struggle between observation and vision so crucial to the Fantastic is constantly played out. By the time of the early Enlightenment, the Bestiary, like its more recnent relative the Encyclopedia, participates in the totalizing intent of a catalogue whose purpose is the scientific understanding of the world.

Empirical observation banishes from these increasingly imposing tomes any creatures that have not been observed in their environment. So the unicorn and the dragon, the griffon and the sea serpent, and all their relations take refuge in the annals of folklore, until the fantastic and its adjudant, surrealism, release them once more into literary discourse from the prisons where rational inquiry had consigned them.........

Posted by: William      Permalink         Source

June 11, 2006, 9:13 AM CT

The Oldest Portrait On Record

A DRAWING discovered by a potholer on the wall of a cave in the west of France appears to be the oldest known portrait of a human face.

The 27,000-year-old work was found by a local pensioner, Gerard Jourdy, in the Vilhonneur grotto near Angoulême.

Drawn with calcium carbonate, and using the bumps in the wall to give form to the face, it features two horizontal lines for the eyes, another for the mouth and a vertical line for the nose. "The portrait of this face is unique," said Jean Airvaux, a researcher at the French Directorate of Cultural Affairs. "We have other drawings, but they are more recent. Here, it could be the oldest representation of a human face."........

Posted by: William      Permalink         Source

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