“Most research in physics is continuations of things that have gone before,” said Wilczek, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This, he said, was “kind of outside the box.”

Wilczek’s idea met with a muted response from physicists. Here was a brilliant professor known for developing exotic theories that later entered the mainstream, including the existence of particles called axions and anyons, and discovering a property of nuclear forces known as asymptotic freedom (for which he shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 2004). But perpetual motion, deemed impossible by the fundamental laws of physics, was hard to swallow. Did the work constitute a major breakthrough or faulty logic? Jakub Zakrzewski, a professor of physics and head of atomic optics at Jagiellonian University in Poland who wrote a perspective on the research that accompanied Wilczek’s publication, says: “I simply don’t know.”

Now, a technological advance has made it possible for physicists to test the idea. They plan to build a time crystal, not in the hope that this perpetuum mobile will generate an endless supply of energy (as inventors have striven in vain to do for more than a thousand years) but that it will yield a better theory of time itself. Continue, Simons Foundation

Archaeologists working on the site now believe they have uncovered the remains of a family crypt having found bones from three fully grown adults, four infants and a skull.

The exciting discovery comes one month after experts ­excavated the burial site of a medieval knight – affectionately christened Sir Eck – within the grounds of the new Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation (ECCI) at High School Yards, off Infirmary Street.

Carvings of the Calvary Cross on an elaborate sandstone tomb and an ornate sword found beside the remains led archaeologists to believe it was the burial plot of a high-status individual such as a knight or nobleman.

Archaeologist Ross ­Murray, of city-based Headland Archaeology, who first uncovered the grave, said: “This site just keeps on getting more and more interesting – it is turning out to be a real treasure trove of archaeology. We just can’t seem to stop finding skeletons and bones. These new finds look likely to be the possible relations of the suspected medieval knight we found earlier this year.

An elaborately decorated sandstone slab with the telltale markings of a member of the nobility – Credit: Scotsman

“The skull of the skeleton found immediately beneath the location of the knight looks like that of a female and the remains found on the other side of the ornate slab belong to an infant from the same period.”

The fruitful dig centres on the site of three historic former buildings: Old High School founded in the 1700s, the 16th-century Royal High School and Blackfriars Monastery, established in 1230 by Alexander II and destroyed during the ­Reformation.

It has been described as one of Edinburgh’s most significant recent archaeological finds. Once complete in the summer, the ECCI will open as an ­innovation and skills hub for the University of Edinburgh.

The car park has been demolished to make way for a rainwater-harvesting tank, – one of a host of low-carbon measures designers hope will help create a sustainable construction – which is expected to achieve a green building rating of ­“outstanding”.

In February, a skeleton found beneath a Leicester car park was confirmed as that of English king Richard III.

Author: David O’Leary | Source: Scotsman [April 25, 2013]

The discovery was found during routine excavation work at the archaeological site of Tell Abu-Seifi, located east of the Suez Canal and south of Qantara East.

The industrial area includes of a number of workshops for clay and bronze statues, vessels, pots and pans as well as a collection of administrative buildings, store galleries and a whole residential area for labours. Amphora, imported from south of Italy, was also unearthed.

“It is a very important discovery that highlights Egypt’s economical and commercial relation with its neighbouring countries on the Mediterranean Sea,” MSA Minister Mohamed Ibrahim told Ahram Online. He added that it also gives a complete idea of the Egyptian labours’ daily life.

For his part, Mohamed Abdel Maqsoud, supervisor of the excavation mission, pointed out that among the newly discovered objects is a very important Roman engraving that provides detailed information on the military importance of Tell Abu-Seifi and the army divisions in this area.

The fully furnished Graeco-Roman industrial area discovered on Thursday in Tell Abu-Seifi area, east of Egypt’s Suez Canal – Credit: Ahram

Tell Abu-Seifi is one of the most important historical military sites of Egypt on the Al-Bilozi Nile branch, where three Ptolemaic and Roman military castles are located.

The archaeological site of Tell Abu-Seifi is found on Egypt’s eastern gate, where a great military group was once located, Abdel Maqsoud told Ahram Online in a telephone interview.

The newly discovered engraving shows how and where soldiers were divided and distributed in different locations inside the castles, he explained.

A collection of bronze coins dated to the eras of King Ptolemy II and IV were also unearthed as well as terracotta (burned clay) statues of the god of war Bes.

This discovery came within the framework of routine excavations along the Belozi Nile branch, which is now non-existant, to discover the Horus Ancient Military Road once used by King Ahmose to expel the Hyksos.

Abdel Maqsoud pointed out that Egypt’s MSA is applying a new training system for junior archaeologists and approximately 200 have joined the excavation mission to train them in excavations and restorations.

Until now, our mission has trained 600 archaeologists in five years, Abdel Maqsoud concluded.

Author: Nevine El-Aref | Source: Ahram Online [April 24, 2013]

Bruno Escribano and colleagues explain that scientists know surprisingly little about brinicles, which are hollow tubes of ice that can grow to several yards in length around streamers of cold seawater under pack ice. That’s because brinicles are difficult to study. The scientists set out to gather more information on the topic with an analysis of the growth process of brinicles.

They are shown to be analogous to a “chemical garden,” a standby demonstration in chemistry classes and children’s chemistry sets, in which tubes grow upward from metal salts dropped into silicate solution. But brinicles grow downward from the bottom of the ice pack.

The analysis concluded that brinicles provide an environment that could well have fostered the emergence of life on Earth billions of years ago, and could have done so on other planets. “Beyond Earth, the brinicle formation mechanism may be important in the context of planets and moons with ice-covered oceans,” the report states, citing in particular two moons of Jupiter named Ganymede and Callisto. The article appears in ACS’ journal Langmuir.

Source: American Chemical Society [April 24, 2013]

The oldest ruins at the site date to 9,000 years ago, the Israel Antiquities Authority said, but it was still inhabited thousands of years later. The location was excavated in a salvage dig ahead of the construction of new train tracks from Haifa to Carmiel.

The findings include the most complete buildings from that time discovered so far in Israel, and some of the oldest evidence of organized legume agriculture in the Middle East, archaeologists Yitzhak Paz and Yaakov Vardi said in a statement.

The objects discovered at the site also show that residents traded with faraway cultures, they said.

A prehistoric stone fertility object in the shape of a phallus, found on the route of a planned rail line in
northern Israel – Credit: Israel Antiquities Authority

“The large number of tools made from obsidian, which is not found in Israel, shows trade ties with Turkey, Georgia and other areas as long ago as this period,” read the statement, released earlier this month.

The fertility objects, like the small stone phallus, “also represented the fertility of the land,” they said. The archaeologists link those findings to a civilization that existed in what is now Israel between 5500 and 4500 BCE.

The civilization, known as the Wadi Rabbah culture, was named for the first site at which it was discovered northeast of Tel Aviv in the 1950s.

Author: Matti Friedman | Source: The Times of Israel [March 26, 2013]

If further analysis proves the study correct, the remains belong to the first known such hybrid, providing direct evidence that humans and Neanderthals interbred.

The present study focuses on the individual’s jaw – unearthed at a rock-shelter called Riparo di Mezzena in the Monti Lessini region of Italy. Both Neanderthals and modern humans inhabited Europe at the time.

Co-author Silvana Condemi, an anthropologist and CNRS research director at the University of Ai-Marseille, told Discovery News that from the morphology of the lower jaw, the face of the individual may have looked somehow intermediate between classic Neanderthals, who had a rather receding lower jaw (no chin), and the modern humans, who have a projecting lower jaw with a strongly developed chin.

The mandible from Mezzena. show more Frontal view : A, internal view : B, lateral view: C, superior view : D), inferior view – Credit: doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0059781.g001 Silvana Condemi, Aurelien Mounier, Paolo Giunti, Martina Lari, David Caramelli, Laura Longo

She and her colleagues studied the remains via DNA analysis and 3D imaging and compared the results with the same features from Homo sapiens.

The genetic analysis showed that the individual’s mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is Neanderthal and since this DNA is transmitted from a mother to her child, they conclude that it must have been a female Neanderthal who mated with a male Homo sapiens.

Condemi and her colleagues wrote that it supports the theory of a slow process of replacement of Neanderthals by the invading modern humans.

The research team also hinted that the modern humans may have raped female Neanderthals.

The paper has been published in PLoS ONE.

Source: ANI [March 28, 2013]

A small team of archaeologists working from satellite images hinting at a buried structure have uncovered the corner of a monumental complex with rows of rooms around a large courtyard, believed to be about 4,000 years old.

“The size is breathtaking,” says Jane Moon, a University of Manchester archaeologist who heads the expedition. Ms. Moon says the walls of the structure are almost nine feet thick, indicating that the building was of great importance or indicated great wealth.

The discovery is even more significant because of its location more than 10 miles from Ur, on what would then have been the banks of the Euphrates River – the first major archaeological find that far from the city.

Ruins of Ur, Southern Iraq – Credit: Wikipedia/M.Lubinsk

Ur, the last capital of the Sumerian empire, was invaded and collapsed in about 2000 BC before being rebuilt. The city was dedicated to the moon god and is famous for its ziggurat (a stepped temple). Many believe it is the birthplace of the prophet Abraham, known as the father of monotheistic religion.

Modern methods
The last major excavation at Ur was performed by a British-American team led by Sir Charles Leonard Woolley in the 1920s and the 1930s. After the 1950s revolution, which toppled Iraq’s monarchy, a nearby military air base put the area off limits to foreign archaeologists for the next half century.

“What Woolley found were these tremendous monumental buildings, but it’s difficult to tell a coherent story about them because they were restored again and again and again, and what you see is neo-Babylonian, 7th century BC – very much later,” says Moon. “He wasn’t able to see what they were really used for and that’s where I’m hoping our modern methods might be able to say something.”

At Ur, Woolley also discovered a spectacular treasure trove that rivals King Tut’s tomb. At least 16 members of royalty were buried at Ur with elaborate gold jewelry, including a queen’s headdress made of gold leaves and studded with lapis lazuli. Other objects included a gold and lapis lyre, one of the first known musical instruments.

In the 1930s, the treasures were split between the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania, which funded Woolley’s work, and the newly created Iraq museum.

Moon says it’s impossible to tell whether the new site might contain similar finds.

“Ultimately we’re not looking for objects we’re looking for information.… I guess it’s always a possibility. In archaeology you can always be surprised.”

A learning opportunity
She says modern methods, such as examining very thin slices of soil hardened with resin under a microscope, can shed light on details like whether there were carpets on the floor or whether a surface was used for cutting. Putting samples of earth through a wet sieving machine can provide information about climate and agriculture by revealing bone fragments from rodents or lizards.

“You can really look at the ancient economy and that’s the kind of thing they couldn’t do when they last found big buildings like this,” says Moon, who last worked in Iraq in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq War, documenting archaeological sites in the north before they were submerged by Saddam Hussein’s dam-building projects.

Her team, which has struggled for both funding and visas, consists of six British archaeologists, an Iraqi archaeologist, and two Iraqi trainees. It is funded mostly by a Swiss benefactor, with participation by the British Institute for the Study of Iraq, the successor to an organization founded in 1932 in honor of Gertrude Bell. “Miss Bell,” as she is still known in Iraq, was the British administrator of Iraq after World War II and the founder of the Iraq Museum.

A law passed in 1932 bars archaeologists from removing antiquities from the country, but Moon believes making the knowledge about the antiquities available is as important as the objects themselves. “There’s always been a sense of taking the intellectual property away,” she says, adding that all the information, including drawings, was being done electronically to make it easier to compile and to share.

“We want to make this as public as possible so we can give this information to anyone who wants it. We have no reason to hang on to it and we have the means to spread it around, so that’s what we’re doing,” she says.

Author: Jane Arraf | Source: The Christian Science Monitor [March 27, 2013]

Some of the prehistoric predators – animals known collectively as the early pseudosuchians – likely preyed on certain dinosaurs, which later evolved some of impressive characteristics of the ancient pseudosuchians. Those included features like sturdy body armour and strong tails for whacking enemies.

“It is likely, therefore, that dinosaurs prospered to some extent as a result of the extinction of most pseudosuchians and many other groups at the end of the Triassic,” says co-author Richard Butler, a palaeontologist at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität.

He adds that some evidence suggests dinosaurs “had better locomotor and breathing systems than pseudosuchians,” so they thrived in the Jurassic after the mass extinction.

As for what caused that die-off, researchers suspect an enormous burst of volcanic activity, as part of the Atlantic Ocean’s formation, led to dramatic increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide and rapid global warming.

Pseudosuchians such as Longosuchus meani had features like sturdy body armour and strong tails for whacking enemies – Credit: Nobu Tamura/Wikimedia Commons

For the latest study, published in Biology Letters , Butler and colleague Olja Toljagić assessed changes in pseudosuchians that occurred during the critical Late Triassic and Early Jurassic periods.

The study shows that during the extinction event 201 million years ago, these animals declined rapidly, with only one lineage surviving into the Jurassic. Some of the animals evolved into ancestors of today’s alligators and crocodiles. Another lineage, referred to as the “bird-line archosaurs”, consisted of the non-avian dinosaurs and their species that later evolved into modern birds.

Luck, in part, helps to explain why some animals died, while others survived.

“Selectivity of mass extinction events is sometimes linked with body size, ecological constraints and competition, while other times it could be related to just pure luck of the survivors,” explains Toljagić.

Rise of new archosaurs
Stephen Brusatte, a palaeontologist at the University of Edinburgh, previously studied how crocodile-line archosaurs changed during the Triassic and across the Triassic-Jurassic boundary.

Brusatte says that the recent study by Butler and Toljagić is important “because we really need to understand what happens at mass extinction events in order to better understand how our own world may change in the face of warming temperatures.”

“Many early relatives of crocodiles flourished during the Triassic, but many of them were killed off at or near the Triassic,” he says.”After they were killed, whole different groups of crocodile-line archosaurs had a chance to rise in their place, and it was this dramatic moment that was the root of the diversification of the lineages leading to living crocodiles.”

More than anything, he says, this study shows what can happen during and after mass extinction events.

“Extinctions often reset the evolutionary clock,” he concludes.

Non-avian dinosaurs appear to have benefited, at least in part, from one extinction event, but they bit the dust during another. Mammals then seem to have benefited when the dinosaurs died out.

It remains to be seen which mammals – including humans – will survive the next big extinction event. The current biodiversity crisis has already resulted in drastic population drops for some species and the extinction of others.

Author: Jennifer Viegas | Source: Discovery News [March 26, 2013]

The fossil findings, described in the March 26 issue of the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, represent the oldest evidence of these iconic tuxedo-clad seabirds in Africa, predating previously described fossils by 5 to 7 million years.

Co-authors Daniel Thomas of the National Museum of Natural History and Dan Ksepka of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center happened upon the 10-12 million year old specimens in late 2010, while sifting through rock and sediment excavated from an industrial steel plant near Cape Town, South Africa.

Jumbled together with shark teeth and other fossils were 17 bone fragments that the researchers recognized as pieces of backbones, breastbones, wings and legs from several extinct species of penguins.

Only one penguin species lives in Africa today — the endangered black-footed penguin, or Spheniscus demersus. But newly found fossils confirm that as many as four penguin species coexisted on the continent in the past – Credit: Daniel Thomas

Based on their bones, these species spanned nearly the full size spectrum for penguins living today, ranging from a runty pint-sized penguin that stood just about a foot tall (0.3 m), to a towering species closer to three feet (0.9 m).

Only one penguin species lives in Africa today — the black-footed penguin, or Spheniscus demersus, also known as the jackass penguin for its loud donkey-like braying call. Exactly when penguin diversity in Africa started to plummet, and why, is still unclear.

Gaps in the fossil record make it difficult to determine whether the extinctions were sudden or gradual. “[Because we have fossils from only two time periods,] it’s like seeing two frames of a movie,” said co-author Daniel Ksepka. “We have a frame at five million years ago, and a frame at 10-12 million years ago, but there’s missing footage in between.”

Humans probably aren’t to blame, the researchers say, because by the time early modern humans arrived in South Africa, all but one of the continent’s penguins had already died out.

A more likely possibility is that rising and falling sea levels did them in by wiping out safe nesting sites.

Although penguins spend most of their lives swimming in the ocean, they rely on offshore islands near the coast to build their nests and raise their young. Land surface reconstructions suggest that five million years ago — when at least four penguin species still called Africa home — sea level on the South African coast was as much as 90 meters higher than it is today, swamping low-lying areas and turning the region into a network of islands. More islands meant more beaches where penguins could breed while staying safe from mainland predators.

But sea levels in the region are lower today. Once-isolated islands have been reconnected to the continent by newly exposed land bridges, which may have wiped out beach nesting sites and provided access to predators.

Although humans didn’t do previous penguins in Africa in, we’ll play a key role in shaping the fate of the one species that remains, the researchers add.

Numbers of black-footed penguins have declined by 80% in the last 50 years, and in 2010 the species was classified as endangered. The drop is largely due to oil spills and overfishing of sardines and anchovies — the black-footed penguin’s favorite food.

“There’s only one species left today, and it’s up to us to keep it safe,” Thomas said.

Source: National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) via EurekAlert! [March 26, 2013]

The Katabatic winds howl around Antarctica’s gale thrashed coast. But once its green valley’s were filled with thriving Glossopteris Pine and Beach forests. How do we know this? “Scott of the Antarctic” was the first to discover telltale fossils on the Beardmore Glacier in 1912. Since then petrified tree stumps and leaves; bones of dinosaurs and marsupials; and fossil rich coal has been discovered in the now hostile environment.

According to classic geology, this previous lush environment thrived millions of years ago in the Permian age. The shifting Antarctic continent, inexorably plodding at millimetres per year, gradually moved into icy hibernation. The flora and fauna were iced over and slowly fossilized, just as in Greenland!

But wait! This formation of a three kilometre thick ice sheet is no meagre feat. Antarctica contains ninety percent of the world’s ice, yet some of Antarctica’s valleys are the driest places on earth. Antarctica is technically considered a desert. Incredibly little snow falls in the interior (five centimetres per year rain equivalent) where the ice sheet is considerably thicker. Katabatic snow storms occur only on the coast where there is thinner ice. Is this a contradiction? Nevertheless, classic Geologists argue that, eons of time can explain away these ice sheet anomalies. Continue article, click here