October 19, 2009, 6:48 AM CT

Fracture zones endanger tombs

Ancient choices made by Egyptians digging burial tombs may have led to today's problems with damage and curation of these precious archaeological treasures, but photography and detailed geological mapping should help curators protect the sites, as per a Penn State researcher.

"Previously, I noticed that some tomb entrances in the Valley of Kings, Luxor, Egypt, were aligned on fracture traces and their zones of fracture concentration," said Katarin A. Parizek, instructor in digital photography, department of integrative arts. "From my observations, it seems that tomb builders may have intentionally exploited these avenues of less resistant limestone when creating tombs".

Fracture traces are the above-ground indication of underlying zones of rock fracture concentrations. They can be between 5 and 40 feet wide, but average about 20 feet and can be as long as a mile. Lineaments are similar geological features that exceed one mile in length. Geologists suggest that fracture traces are good locations for drilling water wells and probably the highly fractured rock made it easier for the Egyptians to dig tombs.

Working with Richard R. Parizek, professor of geology and geoenvironmental engineering, Parizek has now looked at 33 of the 63 known tombs in the Valley of Kings. She reports her results today (Oct. 18) at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Portland, Or......... Posted by: William      Read more         Source

October 15, 2009, 7:40 PM CT

New insights to ancient language

New technologies and academic collaborations are helping scholars at the University of Chicago analyze hundreds of ancient documents in Aramaic, one of the Middle East's oldest continuously spoken and written languages.

Members of the West Semitic Research Project at the University of Southern California are helping the University's Oriental Institute make very high-quality electronic images of nearly 700 Aramaic administrative documents. The Aramaic texts were incised in the surfaces of clay tablets with styluses or inked on the tablets with brushes or pens. Some tablets have both incised and inked texts.

Discovered in Iran, these tablets form one of the largest groups of ancient Aramaic records ever found. They are part of the Persepolis Fortification Archive, an immense group of administrative documents written and compiled about 500 B.C. at Persepolis, one of the capitals of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Archaeologists from the Oriental Institute discovered the archive in 1933, and the Iranian government has loaned it to the Oriental Institute since 1936 for preservation, study, analysis and publication.

The Persepolis texts have started to provide scholars with new knowledge about Imperial Aramaic, the dialect used for international communication and record-keeping in a number of parts of the Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian empires, including parts of the administration at the imperial court of Persepolis. These texts have even greater value because they are so closely connected with documents written in other ancient languages by the same administration at Persepolis......... Posted by: William      Read more         Source

October 15, 2009, 5:47 PM CT

Giant Impact Near India May Have Doomed Dinosaurs

A mysterious basin off the coast of India could be the largest, multi-ringed impact crater the world has ever seen. And if a newly released study is right, it may have been responsible for killing the dinosaurs off 65 million years ago.

Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University and a team of scientists took a close look at the massive Shiva basin, a submerged depression west of India that is intensely mined for its oil and gas resources. Some complex craters are among the most productive hydrocarbon sites on the planet. Chatterjee will present his research at this month's Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Portland, Oregon.

"If we are right, this is the largest crater known on our planet," Chatterjee said. "A bolide of this size, perhaps 40 kilometers (25 miles) in diameter creates its own tectonics".

By contrast, the object that struck the Yucatan Peninsula, and is usually thought to have killed the dinosaurs was between 8 and 10 kilometers (5 and 6.2 miles) wide.

It's hard to imagine such a cataclysm. But if the team is right, the Shiva impact vaporized Earth's crust at the point of collision, leaving nothing but ultra-hot mantle material to well up in its place. It is likely that the impact enhanced the nearby Deccan Traps volcanic eruptions that covered much of western India. What's more, the impact broke the Seychelles islands off of the Indian tectonic plate, and sent them drifting toward Africa......... Posted by: William      Read more         Source

October 14, 2009, 7:03 AM CT

Thousands of bones unearthed reveal dino stomping ground

Imagine the gruesome sound of bones snapping as a thirsty, 30-ton dinosaur tramples a heap of fresh carcasses on his way to a rapidly shrinking lake.

That's the scene revealed by a painstaking analysis of thousands of bones unearthed near Moab, Utah by geologists from Brigham Young University.

So far the scientists have identified 67 individual dinosaurs representing 8 species and they have only scratched the surface of this diverse quarry. Mysteriously, nearly all of the 4,200 bones recovered so far are fractured, as published in the scientific journal Palaeo.

"Eventhough enough bones were recovered to assemble several complete dinosaurs, the vast majority of bones are broken to bits and pieces, just pulverized," said BYU professor Brooks Britt, main author on the study.

The scientists reconstructed how the bones got there and why they are in such bad shape.

The quarry, located immediately west of Arches National Park, contains dinosaurs of all sizes and ages, indicating a massive die-off event. The location of this dense cluster of bones near the shore of an ancient lake bed suggests a drought was the cause.

Yet the biggest puzzle was the cause of all the fractures. A closer look revealed that most of the breaks were angled "greenstick" fractures that occur in fresh bones......... Posted by: William      Read more         Source

October 13, 2009, 8:05 AM CT

Elusive 'Persistent Current' That Flows Forever

Physicists at Yale University have made the first definitive measurements of "persistent current," a small but perpetual electric current that flows naturally through tiny rings of metal wire even without an external power source.

The team used nanoscale cantilevers, an entirely novel approach, to indirectly measure the current through changes in the magnetic force it produces as it flows through the ring. "They're essentially little floppy diving boards with the rings sitting on top," said team leader Jack Harris, associate professor of physics and applied physics at Yale. The findings are reported in the October 9 issue of Science.

The counterintuitive current is the result of a quantum mechanical effect that influences how electrons travel through metals, and arises from the same kind of motion that allows the electrons inside an atom to orbit the nucleus forever. "These are ordinary, non-superconducting metal rings, which we typically think of as resistors," Harris said. "Yet these currents will flow forever, even in the absence of an applied voltage".

Eventhough persistent current was first theorized decades ago, it is so faint and sensitive to its environment that physicists were unable to accurately measure it until now. It is not possible to measure the current with a traditional ammeter because it only flows within the tiny metal rings, which are about the same size as the wires used on computer chips......... Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

October 13, 2009, 8:03 AM CT

Possible role of urate in slowing Parkinson's disease progression

By examining data from a 20-year-old clinical trial, a research team based at the MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases (MGH-MIND) and Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), has found evidence supporting the findings of their 2008 study that elevated levels of the antioxidant urate may slow the progression of Parkinson's disease. The report which will appear in the December 2009 Archives of Neurology and has been released online analyzed blood and cerebrospinal fluid samples from participants in a 1980s trail of potential Parkinson's medications, confirming the prior study's findings in a totally different group of patients.

"These results were critically important. Only now we can be reasonably sure that the slower rate of progression in patients with higher concentrations of urate is real and not a chance occurrence," says Alberto Ascherio, MD, DrPh, of HSPH, the newly released study's main author.

Parkinson's disease characterized by tremors, rigidity, difficulty walking and other symptoms is caused by destruction of brain cells that produce the neurotransmitter dopamine. The 2008 study, which investigated the observation that healthy people with elevated but still normal urate levels have a reduced risk of developing Parkinson's, found an association between higher blood urate levels and slower disease progression in 800 participants from a prior clinical trial......... Posted by: Sean      Read more         Source

October 13, 2009, 8:01 AM CT

New Fossil Mammal

Paleontologists in the U.S. and China have discovered a new species of mammal that lived 123 million years ago in what is now the Liaoning Province in China. The newly discovered chipmunk-sized animal, named Maotherium asiaticus, was found in the famous fossil-rich beds of the Yixian Formation in China.

The fossil mammal, reported in this week's issue of the journal Science, offers an important clue to how the mammalian middle ear evolved. It represents an intermediate stage in the evolutionary process of how modern mammals acquired a middle ear structure.

Hearing is an important sensory function for humans, whether for listening to an interesting conversation or to beautiful music, says Zhe-Xi Luo, a paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pa., and an author of the Science paper. For mammals as a whole, Luo says, hearing is an evolutionary adaptation vital for survival.

"With a tiny and intricate middle ear structure, mammals have more sensitive hearing in a wider range of sounds than other vertebrates," says H. Richard Lane, program director in the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Division of Earth Sciences. "This sensitive hearing was crucial for mammals to develop nocturnal adaptations and to survive in dinosaur-dominated times"......... Posted by: William      Read more         Source

October 12, 2009, 7:14 AM CT

Banded rocks reveal earth secrets

The strikingly banded rocks scattered across the upper Midwest and elsewhere throughout the world are actually ambassadors from the past, offering clues to the environment of the early Earth more than 2 billion years ago.

Called banded iron formations or BIFs, these ancient rocks formed between 3.8 and 1.7 billion years ago at what was then the bottom of the ocean. The stripes represent alternating layers of silica-rich chert and iron-rich minerals like hematite and magnetite.

First mined as a major iron source for modern industrialization, BIFs are also a rich source of information about the geochemical conditions that existed on Earth when the rocks were made. However, interpreting their clues requires understanding how the bands formed, a topic that has been controversial for decades, says Huifang Xu, a geology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

A study appearing today (Oct. 11) as an advance online publication in Nature Geoscience offers a new picture of how these colorful bands developed and what they reveal about the composition of the early ocean floor, seawater, and atmosphere during the evolution of the Earth.

Prior hypotheses about band formation involved seasonal fluctuations, temperature shifts, or periodic blooms of microorganisms, all of which left a number of open questions about how BIFs dominated the global marine landscape for two billion years and why they abruptly disappeared 1.7 billion years ago......... Posted by: Tyler      Read more         Source

October 12, 2009, 7:12 AM CT

Radio Tomographic Imaging Indoor Test

University of Utah engineers showed that a wireless network of radio transmitters can track people moving behind solid walls. The system could help police, firefighters and others nab intruders, and rescue hostages, fire victims and elderly people who fall in their homes. It also might help retail marketing and border control.

"By showing the locations of people within a building during hostage situations, fires or other emergencies, radio tomography can help law enforcement and emergency responders to know where they should focus their attention," Joey Wilson and Neal Patwari wrote in one of two new studies of the method.

Both researchers are in the university's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Patwari as an assistant professor and Wilson as a doctoral student.

Their method uses radio tomographic imaging (RTI), which can "see," locate and track moving people or objects in an area surrounded by inexpensive radio transceivers that send and receive signals. People don't need to wear radio-transmitting ID tags.

One of the studies which outlines the method and tests it in an indoor atrium and a grassy area with trees is awaiting publication soon in IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, a journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers......... Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

October 12, 2009, 7:06 AM CT

Geodesic Carbon Nanodomes

Scientists analyzing the assembly of graphene (sheets of carbon only one atom thick) on a surface of iridium have observed that the sheets grow by first forming tiny carbon domes. The discovery offers new insight into the growth of graphene layers and points the way to possible methods for assembling components of graphene-based computer circuits.

Paolo Lacovig, Monica Pozzo, Dario Alf, Paolo Vilmercati, Alessandro Baraldi, and Silvano Lizzit at institutions in Italy, the UK and USA report their discovery in a paper appearing October 12 in the journal Physical Review Letters The researchers' spectroscopic study suggests that graphene grows in the form of tiny islands built of concentric rings of carbon atoms. The islands are strongly bonded to the iridium surface at their perimeters, but are not bonded to the iridium at their centers, which causes them to bulge upward in the middle to form minuscule geodesic domes. By adjusting the conditions as the carbon is deposited on the iridium, the scientists could vary the size of the carbon domes from a few nanometers to hundreds of nanometers across.

Investigating the formation of graphene nanodomes helps physicists to understand and control the production of graphene sheets. In combination with methods for adjusting the conductivity of graphene and related materials, physicists hope to replace electronics made of silicon and metal with tiny, efficient carbon-based chips......... Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source