Amazing Maya Facade Exposed in Guatemala

A stucco relief that dates to the 590s was
found in the ancient Maya city of Holmul.
Credit: Holmul Archaeological
Project/PACUNAM

Amazing Maya Facade Exposed in Guatemala
Aug 8, 2013 | Live Science | Megan Gannon

An enormous, elaborately decorated Maya façade has been uncovered in Guatemala on the outside of a mysterious ancient building that archaeologists are trying to explore.

Grave robbers came close to finding the 26-foot-long (8 meters) and 6.5-foot-high (2 m) stucco relief before archaeologists got there. The 1,400-year-old carvings were discovered last month as excavators dug up a tunnel left open by looters at the site of Holmul — an ancient Maya city in the Peten region of Guatemala.

The frieze decorates the outside of a huge multi-roomed rectangular building where a team of archaeologists led by Francisco Estrada-Belli, who teaches at Tulane University, found a burial last year containing the remains of one person, 28 ceramic vessels and a wooden funerary mask. Much of the building is still buried under the rubble of another 65-foot-high (20 m) structure that was later constructed on top of it. So far, only the roof, one corner and part of the stairway have been uncovered in recent excavations.

Bigger Maya buildings can be found at other sites like Copan and Xultun, but the structure at Holmul stands out for its preservation, the complexity of the iconography and the abundance of inscriptions, Alex Tokovinine, a Maya epigrapher at Harvard who is working on the project at Holmul, explained in an email.

The elaborate carvings bear traces of their original hues.
Credit: Holmul Archaeological Project/PACUNAM

"It features two previously unknown gods and at least five previously unknown rulers or deified ancestors," Tokovinine wrote. "And who knows what the rest of the building holds?

The well-preserved frieze has rare traces of polychrome red paint, with some details in blue, green and yellow. The carving also shows human figures, perhaps deified rulers, some of them wearing elaborate bird headdresses and jade jewelry.

The inscriptions, meanwhile, reveal that the monumental artwork was commissioned by the ruler of Naranjo, a powerful kingdom to the south of Holmul, likely during the 590s, the researchers say. A king named "Ajwosaj Chan K’inich — one of the greatest Naranjo rulers — is credited in the text with restoring the local ruling line and patron deities, the researchers say.

"The new inscription provides the first glimpse of the remarkable extent of Ajwosaj’s political and religious authority," Tokovinine said in a statement. "It also reveals how a new order was literally imprinted on a broader landscape of local gods and ancestors."

The team plans to return to the site next year to continue exploring the building and to preserve the fragile façade.

"The site is constantly guarded, but the main enemies there are the rainy season and tree roots," Tokovinine told LiveScience.

Changes in temperature and humidity also threaten to damage the paint of the façade, and tree roots growing between the stucco of the frieze and the stone masonry of the roof could damage the carving, Tokovinine said. If nothing is done, he added, "It will just fall off the walls in hundreds of small fragments."

"Unfortunately, there was no time for any extensive conservation intervention nor for a detailed digital 3D scanning of the frieze," he added. "Hopefully, it will all get done next dry season or even sooner."

Follow Megan Gannon on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com

Ancient City of Angkor Much Bigger Than Thought

Aerial view of Angkor Wat, showing the moat and causeway
and the central tower surrounded by four smaller towers
CREDIT: Alexey Stiop | Shutterstock.com

Ancient City of Angkor Much Bigger Than Thought
July 8, 2013 | Live Science | Tia Ghose

Angkor, the ancient capital of the Khmer Empire, has been mapped for the first time using laser light.
The technique called LIDAR, which uses billions of reflected light beams to map the topography below a thick forest canopy, revealed that the city was even more massive than previously thought.

The new analysis "shows there were hundreds, if not thousands of settlements, mounds, ponds, roads and urban blocks which actually organized a quite dense city," said study co-author Christophe Pottier, an archaeologist and co-director of the Greater Angkor Project. "This area of dense occupation was much bigger than what we were expecting." [See Images of Angkor Wat, New Temple City]

The findings were published today (July 8) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Ancient empire

Angkor is located in modern-day Cambodia, and for several centuries, was the capital city of the Khmer Empire. The city and its surrounding areas may have housed up to 1 million people and, at its height, was considered the largest city in the world. Angkor flourished until the 15th century, when it was mysteriously abandoned. The crown jewel of the complex, Angkor Wat, is a temple built between A.D. 1113 and 1150 that rises 213 feet (65 meters) into the air and spans 500 acres (200 hectares).

After the city was abandoned, the jungle took over, covering the area in a thick canopy of vegetation. In the past, researchers had tried to study its extent using radar and satellite images. But much of the ancient city's footprint remained hidden.

In 2012, Pottier and his colleagues began mapping the terrain using airborne laser scanning, or LIDAR.  The team used a helicopter and sent out billions of beams of laser light that were able to pass through the tiny spaces between dense jungle canopy to hit the earth below. The reflected beams were then analyzed to determine whether the light bounced off leaves, soil or other features.

The LIDAR uncovered hundreds of bumps on the landscape that ancient inhabitants formed when moving earth to build dikes, dams, huge reservoirs, canals, family ponds and roads. The new map reveals that the city made heavy use of cultivation and water-storing techniques. (Scientists recently discovered a lost Khmer city known only from inscriptions using the same technology.)

In addition, the city's dense core was much larger than thought: about 27 square miles (70 square kilometers), Pottier said. The core alone may have housed 500,000 people, he added.

The new map also sheds light on why the city was abandoned. The city's economy depended on the network of intricate hydraulic systems. But those systems depended heavily on reliable monsoon rains, Pottier said. Other environmental studies have revealed that the monsoons became irregular during the14th and 15th centuries, he said.

That alone may not have caused Angkor's demise, but was probably a factor, Pottier said.

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitterand Google+. Follow LiveScience @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

ALBERTA FLOODING - Canmore Bragg Creek High River Floods Calgary 2013 Flood News BY THE PUBLIC Video

ALBERTA FLOODING - Canmore Bragg Creek High River Floods Calgary 2013 Flood News BY THE PUBLIC Video
June 20, 2013 | BizBOXTV

Editor's note: Cities have nothing to do with nature, they were not built with nature in mind, they have long been built with something else in mind, that being capitalism which nature has no use for. This may be why cities and cemeteries are bound together in concept to hide the kinetics solicited which soon resides.

NASA identifies 28 new asteroid families

© WISE
Astronomers using data from NASA's
Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE)
have identified 28 new families of asteroids
in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter.

NASA identifies 28 new asteroid families
May 30, 2013 | Press Trust India

Washington: Astronomers using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have identified 28 new families of asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter.

The findings are a critical step in understanding the origins of asteroid families, and the collisions thought to have created these rocky clans.

An asteroid family is formed when a collision breaks apart a large parent body into fragments of various sizes. Some collisions leave giant craters. For example, the asteroid Vesta's southern hemisphere was excavated by two large impacts.

Other smash-ups are catastrophic, shattering an object into numerous fragments. The cast-off pieces move together in packs, travelling on the same path around the Sun, but over time the pieces become more and more spread out.

"We're separating zebras from the gazelles," said Joseph Masiero of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and lead author of the study.

"Before, asteroid family members were harder to tell apart because they were travelling in nearby packs. But now we have a better idea of which asteroid belongs to which family," Masiero said in a statement.

The new families were found in millions of infrared snapshots from the asteroid-hunting portion of the WISE all-sky survey, called NEOWISE.

The NEOWISE team looked at about 120,000 main belt asteroids out of the approximately 600,000 known.

They found that about 38,000 of these objects, roughly one third of the observed population, could be assigned to 76 families, 28 of which are new. In addition, some asteroids thought to belong to a particular family were reclassified.

The main asteroid belt is a major source of near-Earth objects (NEOs), which are those asteroids and comets that come within 45 million kilometres of Earth's path around the Sun.

Some near-Earth objects start out in stable orbits in the main asteroid belt, until a collision or gravitational disturbance flings them inward like flippers in a game of pinball.

"NEOWISE has given us the data for a much more detailed look at the evolution of asteroids throughout the solar system," said Lindley Johnson, the programme executive for the Near-Earth Object Observation Programme at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

"This will help us trace [near-Earth asteroids] back to their sources and understand how some of them have migrated to orbits hazardous to the Earth," Johnson said.

The next step for the team is to learn more about the original parent bodies that spawned the families.

The study was published in the Astrophysical Journal.

Euclid's puzzling parallel postulate - Jeff Dekofsky

Euclid's puzzling parallel postulate - Jeff Dekofsky
Mar 26, 2013 | TEDEducation


View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/euclid-s-pu...

Euclid, known as the "Father of Geometry," developed several of modern geometry's most enduring theorems--but what can we make of his mysterious fifth postulate, the parallel postulate? Jeff Dekofsky shows us how mathematical minds have put the postulate to the test and led to larger questions of how we understand mathematical principles.

Lesson by Jeff Dekofsky, animation by The Leading Sheep Studios.

World's largest pyramid discovered - Lost Mayan city of Mirador

World's largest pyramid discovered - Lost Mayan city of Mirador
Mar 9, 2013 | BrasscheckTV

Bigger than downtown Los Angeles

It's the tallest known pyramid in the New World and possibly the biggest pyramid by volume on earth, 2.8 million cubic meters.

For years, it was mistaken for a big hill.

Amazingly, this pyramid was unknown just a few decades ago and is part of collection of ruins covering an area bigger than downtown Los Angeles.

Stories like this are a reminder to take schoolbook archeology with a grain of salt. Not only do we not know all that there is to know, it appears that people trying to get the answers aren't getting much help figuring it out.

New Space Station Camera Snaps First Image of Earth

The “first light” from the new ISERV camera
system, shows the Rio San Pablo
as it empties into the Golfo de
Montijo in Veraguas, Panama.
CREDIT: NASA image by Burgess Howell

New Space Station Camera Snaps First Image of Earth
Mar 6, 2013 | Live Science | Miriam Kramer

A new photo taken from the International Space Station shows an ecologically diverse area of Panama in a new light.

The picture is the first taken by a new Earth-observing tool recently installed on the orbiting science laboratory, and shows the San Pablo River emptying into the Gulf of Montijo, reported NASA's Earth Observatory.

"It is an ecological transition zone, changing from agriculture and pastures to mangrove forests, swamps, and estuary systems," the Earth Observatory wrote.

NASA officials hope that the ISERV Pathfinder camera (short for International Space Station SERVIR Environmental Research and Visualization System) will give scientists on the ground more insight into environmental issues around the globe.

"ISERV's full potential is yet to be seen, but we hope it will really make a difference in people’s lives," principal investigator Burgess Howell of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., told the Earth Observatory. "For example, if an earthen dam gives way in Bhutan, we want to be able to show officials where the bridge is out or where a road is washed out or a power substation is inundated. This kind of information is critical to focus and speed rescue efforts."

Controlled from Marshall, NASA scientists will use positioning software to map exactly where the space station is flying to target and photograph points of interest on the surface of the Earth.

"If there's a good viewing opportunity, the SERVIR team will instruct the camera to take high-resolution photographs at 3 to 7 frames per second, totaling as many as 100 images per pass," reported the Earth Observatory. "With a resolution down to 10 feet (3.2 m) it will be possible to spot fairly small details and objects."

The camera isn't available for this kind of research just yet, however. Engineers are still working out ISERV's kinks before starting in on basic scientific work in a few months.

The International Space Station is about the size of a football field and was built by five different space agencies representing Canada, the United States, Russia, Europe and Japan. The orbiting science laboratory is currently home to Expedition 34's six international astronauts.

3-D printer could create human organs

3-D printer could create human organs
Feb 19, 2013 | RTAmerica


Researchers from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland have created an apparatus that is able to print out embryonic cells. What does this mean for you? Imagine if you are in need of a new kidney or heart, this 3-D printer has the capability of printing what you need in order to continue living a healthy life. For more on this innovative technology Marina Portnaya joins us to discuss the recent developments.

Comet impact did not wipe out prehistoric humans

Image credit: NationalGeograpgic & Science/AAAS

Comet impact did not wipe out prehistoric humans
Feb 1, 2013 | Phenomenica

Comet explosions did not end the prehistoric human culture, known as Clovis, which existed in North America 13,000 years ago, according to a new research.

Researchers from Royal Holloway University, together with Sandia National Laboratories and 13 other universities across the United States and Europe, have found evidence that rebuts the belief that a large impact or airburst caused a significant and abrupt change to the Earth’s climate and terminated the Clovis culture. They argue that other explanations must be found for the apparent disappearance.

Clovis is the name archaeologists have given to the earliest well-established human culture in the North American continent. It is named after the town in New Mexico, where distinct stone tools were found in the 1920s and 1930s.

Researchers argue that no appropriately sized impact craters from that time period have been discovered, and no shocked material or any other features of impact have been found in sediments. They also found that samples presented in support of the impact hypothesis were contaminated with modern material and that no physics model can support the theory.

“The theory has reached zombie status. Whenever we are able to show flaws and think it is dead, it reappears with new, equally unsatisfactory, arguments,” said Professor Andrew Scott from the Department of Earth Sciences at Royal Holloway.

“Hopefully new versions of the theory will be more carefully examined before they are published,” Scott added.

The research was published in the journal Geophysical Monograph Series.

ANI

How to find the true face of Leonardo - Siegfried Woldhek

How to find the true face of Leonardo - Siegfried Woldhek
Jan 13, 2013 | TEDEducation

View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-to-find-the-true-face-of-leonardo-siegfried-wol...

Mona Lisa is one of the best-known faces on the planet. But would you recognize an image of Leonardo da Vinci? Illustrator Siegfried Woldhek uses some thoughtful image-analysis techniques to find what he believes is the true face of Leonardo.

Talk by Siegfried Woldhek.

2013 01 11 Class M1.2 and Class M1.0 Flares HD

2013 01 11 Class M1.2 and Class M1.0 Flares HD
Jan 11, 2013 | Trudi Kay

The Idol Smasher

© Mr. Fish

The Idol Smasher
Dec 31, 2012 | Truthdig | Chris Hedges

Ishmael Reed has spent the last five decades smashing idols—idols of race, idols of capitalism, celebrity idols and the idols of national virtue and greatness. His essays, novels, poems, plays, songs and cartoons routinely shatter the delusions and myths of a nation stubbornly unwilling to confront its past or understand its present. He rips open a history that saw white Europeans exterminate one race and enslave another to create the nation’s prosperity, a past that includes the violent plundering of nations around the globe—Cuba, the Philippines, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan among them—to show us who we have become. He names the corrosive disease of empire. He excoriates what Alexis de Tocqueville called our “perpetual practice of self-applause.” He battles back against the sophisticated forms of propaganda—especially from Hollywood—that perpetuate patriotic fantasies and pander to the dark streams of paranoia, racism and fear that run like electric currents through white society.

Reed’s righteous fury is a heartening antidote to the squeamishness of liberals and the lunacy of the right wing. He says the editors of The New York Times and most other major media outlets “sound like they get their instructions from Julius Streicher [the Nazi propagandist] when it comes to blacks.” He calls the HBO series “The Wire” “a Neo-Nazi portrait of black people” and dismisses the movie “Precious” as a film that “makes D.W. Griffith look like a progressive.”

“Lazy, no-good black people, who are welfare cheats, sitting around eating chicken, and having sex with their children, right out of the Lee Atwater-Paul Ryan playbook,” he said of the portrayals in “Precious” when I reached him by phone at his home in Oakland, Calif. “The wonderful novelist Diane Johnson was right when she said that ‘largely white’ audiences are thrilled by images of black people as dysfunctional. This has become a billion-dollar market which led critics to assert that Black Bogeyman movies sell better than sex, according to the critic C. Liegh McInnis. You even have a critic at The Root website, a post-racial ‘Talented Tenth’ hangout for ‘exceptional blacks,’ praising Quentin Tarantino’s latest sick exercise into racial porn, called ‘Django Unchained,’ ” which I critique at the Wall Street Journal site Speakeasy. This movie is being praised by the same critics who loved ‘The Color Purple’ and ‘Precious,’ probably because it revives Stanley Elkins’ discredited ‘Sambo Thesis.’ ”

Reed has no time for Black Bloc anarchists, whom he calls “alienated, spoiled middle-class white kids from the suburbs” as well as “vandals and thugs.” He calls the Oscar presentation “a white supremacist pageant.” He detests the Clintons, who he reminds us sold out the poor and the working class. Hillary, he says, makes “Eva Peron seem benign.” He predicts more tragedies like the recent Connecticut massacre, noting that many white Americans stockpile assault rifles because they are terrified of black people and that mass shootings in the United States almost always are carried out by estranged white men.

“ ‘The Turner Diaries,’ the book that inspired Timothy McVeigh to bomb the federal building in Oklahoma, and assaults by gunmen including one against the North Valley Jewish Community Center [in Granada Hills, Calif.,] in 1999, are very explicit,” he said not long after we were on a panel together at the Miami Book Festival. “The [novel] tells whites they need guns because if they give up their assault weapons blacks will kidnap white women and Jewish men will be their pimps. This fantasy, however absurd, at least addresses the deepest, unspoken fears of whites. The white power structure looks around at what is happening. It sees we are going down. It is terrified of an uprising by a coalition of whites, blacks, Asian-Americans and Hispanics that elected Obama—even though Obama with his pretty, multicultural face and elegant style and his spouse, who is more militant than he and who for that reason has been silenced, serve the empire. The only problem is that white crazies like [Michele] Bachmann and the others are so blinded by white supremacy that they won’t go along with the script. She [Rep. Bachmann] said that Obama was costing the taxpayers $250 million per day on his trip to India, a lie, when Obama’s taking over 100 CEOs along with him brought back billions in contracts.”

 “The other part of the white public, the underclass and working class, has proven that they will go to any lengths to uphold white supremacy,” he said. “Even when they had no fight in the Civil War, owning no slave assets like the planters, they caused the deaths of 640,000 Americans in order to uphold white supremacy. Then, as now, parts of the white working class, who are anti-union and get drunk on the cheap moonshine of racism, are willing to exercise self-extinction in order to uphold white supremacy.”

“One part of the slavery deal was the patriarchal planter’s ownership of black women’s wombs,” he went on. “Now they [the powerful] are mandating this demand of all women. Yet, white women favored Romney by 14 points. They’re intimidated I think by their husbands, brothers, fathers and employers, which is why they scapegoat the [black] brothers for worldwide misogyny.” 

Read more..

Nazca lines: Mysterious desert drawings form labyrinth

© Unknown

Nazca lines: Mysterious desert drawings form labyrinth
Dec 30, 2012 | Live Science | Tia Ghose

Some of the Nazca Lines, mysterious geoglyphs that span a vast swath of the rugged Peruvian desert, may have once been a labyrinth with a spiritual purpose, a new study suggests.

The new insight, published in the December issue of the journal Antiquity, came because two archaeologists decided to use a decidedly low-tech method to understand the sand drawing's ancient secrets: by walking it.

At the time the Nazca Lines, which span 85 square miles (220 square kilometers), were drawn, "people were not looking at this stuff from the air, they were looking at stuff from the ground level," said Timothy Ingold, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Aberdeen, who was not involved in the study. "To appreciate what they might have meant to ordinary people, then you have to walk them."

While that seems like an obvious first step, in actuality, very few archaeologists have studied the Nazca Lines from that vantage point, because most of the pictures drawn out by the lines are only visible from foothills above or from space.

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The Nazca Lines have been a mystery since they were first discovered in the 1920s by Peruvian archaeologist Toribio Mejía Xesspe. Long-forgotten people from the Nasca culture created the drawings between 200 B.C. and A.D. 500 by brushing away the dark top layer of barren desert to reveal the light, sandy soil underneath, wrote Clive Ruggles, an archaeologist from the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, in an email. The dry, windless climate has preserved most of the carvings - hundreds of depictions of animal shapes such as jaguars and monkeys, as well as geometric designs - to this day.

But just why ancient people created the Nazca Lines has been an enduring mystery: Some archaeologists have suggested it was an alien landing strip, a primitive sun calendar, or an irrigation system.

"There is no simple answer. Different geoglyphs were clearly created over a significant period of time and almost certainly had a variety of meanings and purposes," Ruggles wrote.

Concerns about degradation of the mysterious geoglyphs prevented most traffic through the region since the 1990s. But when Ruggles and Aberdeen colleague Nicholas Saunders came upon a previously undiscovered set of lines north of the Nazca desert in 1984, they wondered whether the geoglyphs might reveal their secrets from a more terrestrial point of view.

Starting in 2007, Ruggles and Saunders spent 150 days walking 932 miles (1,500 kilometers) of the ancient carvings. They found the newly uncovered geoglyph was a single line that radiated out in a mystifying, confusing pattern, with a series of sharp, disorienting turns leading up to a mound whose purpose remains unknown. What's more, the meandering line was in pristine condition, leading the archaeologists to conclude that the paths that were carved out were rarely, if ever, used.

Many labyrinths have a spiritual purpose, so one possibility is that the paths weren't walked at all, but instead were intended for the passage of gods or spirits, Ruggles wrote. For instance, in the 5th century B.C. Herodotus mentions a vast Egyptian labyrinth that served as a mortuary temple, while the Hopi indians saw labyrinths as symbols of Mother Earth.

The researchers note this is still just speculation, Ingold told LiveScience.

"We still have absolutely no idea what these people were doing or what the point of it was," Ingold said.