Science Special News

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Is the Bosnian Pyramid natural ?

A British archaeologist on Friday rejected claims that a hill in central Bosnia is a man-made structure that many local residents insist is a pyramid. Professor Anthony Harding, who is president of the European Association of Archaeologists, visited Visocica hill and said the formation was natural. Not any evidence at all has been found to support the claim the site would be an archaeological site, he said.No pyramids are known in Europe, and there are no records of any ancient civilization on the continent ever attempting to build one.The pyramid theory was launched by an amateur researcher last year but it has been disputed by a number of local and international experts, who claim that at no time in Bosnia's history did the region have a civilization able to build monumental structures. They say the hill is simply a strange natural formation.Nevertheless, Semir Osmanagic, the amateur Bosnian archaeologist who has been investigating Latin American pyramids for 15 years, organized excavations to Visocica, about 20 miles northwest of Sarajevo, in April.His team _ made up mostly of volunteers, found that the 2,120-foot hill has 45-degree slopes pointing toward the cardinal points and a flat top. Under layers of dirt, workers discovered a paved entrance plateau, entrances to tunnels and large stone blocks.Egyptian geologist Aly Abd Alla Barakat, who arrived in May to check on Osmanagic's claims said the structure is "man made'' and worth investigating.

"My opinion is that this is a type of pyramid, probably a primitive pyramid,'' said Barakat, a geologist from the Egyptian Mineral Resource Authority.However, Harding, who said he visited the site briefly on Thursday and looked at the same stone blocks Barakat said were man made, said on Friday they were a natural formation."I've seen the site, in my opinion it is entirely natural,'' he told reporters in Sarajevo. Harding did not visit other sites in the area which Osmanagic and Barakat say are further evidence of the existence of pyramids in Bosnia, such as a tunnel leading to the top of Visocica or a stone pavement made of geometrically regular shaped pieces.Harding said that although he had not seen the stone pavement, by looking at photographs, "I would not believe it to be archaeological. It looks to me as a natural stone pavement.'' He did not visit the tunnel either.

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'Mind over matter' becomes a reality

Sitting stone still under a skull cap fitted with a couple dozen electrodes, American scientist Peter Brunner stares at a laptop computer. Without so much as moving a nostril hair, he suddenly begins to compose a message -- letter by letter -- on a giant screen overhead. "B-O-N-J-O-U-R" he writes with the power of his mind, much to the amazement of the largely French audience of scientists and curious onlookers gathered at the four-day European Research and Innovation Exhibition in Paris, which opened Thursday. Brunner and two colleagues from the state-financed Wadsworth Center in Albany, New York were demonstrating a "brain computer interface (BCI)," an astounding technology which digitalizes brain signals emitted as electrical impulses -- picked up by the electrodes -- to convey intent. While no spoons were bent, this was definitely mind over matter.

Without recourse to nerves or muscles, BCI "can provide communication and control to people who are totally paralyzed" and unable to unable to speak or move, explains researcher Theresa Sellers, also from Wadsworth. Dr. Sellers estimates there are some 100 million potential users of BCI technology worldwide, including 16 million sufferers of cerebral palsy, a degenerative brain disease, and at least five million victims of spinal cord injury. Another 10 million people have been totally paralyzed by brainstem strokes, she said.

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Tracking Bigfoot in the wilds of Clarence

When professional Bigfoot hunters showed up to Hans Mobius' Clarence farm Friday, they immediately found clues they said gave the recent sighting credibility. "Something very large had bedded itself for the night," said Tom Biscardi, chief executive officer of Searching for Bigfoot Inc., as he pointed to a trampled part of a thicket on the Mobius farm. "It's too big to be a deer, and look at the space above it," he said, gesturing to a gap in the thicket canopy. "You think there's room for something big to stand up there?" Biscardi and his crew drove directly to Clarence from Menlo Park, Calif., when they learned about the Mobius sighting. Biscardi said he makes such travel plans only when a sighting is credible. "What intrigued me about this case is Hans is not just a kid - he's not a jokester," he said. The Bigfoot investigators aren't in it for the joke. They use expensive equipment like motion sensitive infrared scanners, infrared scopes and recorded Bigfoot calls. The four-person professional team also got some local help.

Natalie Nowak, 19, and Meaghan Barone, 20, are both neighbors of Mobius. The two sought out the team when they heard Bigfoot might inhabit the woods near their homes. "We saw on the news that some Bigfoot hunters were coming into town, so we drove around looking for their van," Barone said. "It's like a real-life "Blair Witch Project.' "

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Who killed the dodo ?

For such an iconic animal, it seems strange that we know next to nothing about the dodo - except, of course, that it is dead. We don't know how it lived, what it ate, how many eggs it sat on or even whether it was fat or thin. But that could all change with a scientific expedition just begun in Mauritius, the remote island in the Indian Ocean where the dodo lived for millions of years before being driven to extinction in the late 17th century, just 80 years after it was sighted by European sailors.British and Dutch scientists have joined forces to excavate a unique dodo burial ground where the bones of hundreds and possibly thousands of birds have been preserved in marshland for more than 10,000 years. It will be the first time scientists have had access to well-preserved dodo remains that have remained untouched. At last, some light maybe shed on a mysterious and emblematic creature that has come to epitomise how easy it is for man to wipe out a species.The Mare aux Songes area of Mauritius was once a dry coastal forest which later became marshland.

Last year scientists said they thought the site contained a mass of bones from a rich variety of animals - giant tortoises, dodos and other extinct birds and reptiles - all of which long pre-date the arrival of the first humans to inhabit Mauritius in 1598. "The discovery is of huge importance and will give us a new understanding of how dodos lived," explained Julian Hume, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Natural History Museum in London who has helped to organise the expedition.

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Japan's legendary Holy Grail

Dan Brown's novel "The Da Vinci Code" and the film of the same name currently performing box office miracles around the world, center around the premise that the Holy Grail wasn't some sort of cup, but the direct blood descendant of Jesus Christ. But Japan has a Holy Grail connection of its own that it also wrapped in mystery. The military standard used by 17th century Japanese Christian Amagusa Shiro during a Christian rebellion against the Shogun is preserved in Kumamoto's Amagusa Kurisuchian Museum in Hondo, Kumamoto Prefecture."This standard is, along with the standard of the Western European crusaders and the flag of Joan of Arc, regarded as one of the three great flags of Christendom. The Holy Grail is in the center of the flag, while above it is bread to symbolize the body of Christ. Written on the flag is the Latin acronym INRI (Iesus Nazarenus Indaeorum -- Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews)," a Kumamoto historian tells Weekly Playboy, which says that Amagusa Shiro's decision to use the Holy Grail as his standard entitles him to claim to be the direct descendant of Christ."That's going a bit far," the historian says. "But the flag is said to have been made by Goemon Yamaguchi, the only survivor of the Shimabara Rebellion. Without him, nobody would ever have known about Amagusa Shiro."The Shimabara Rebellion occurred in 1637. Then 16-year-old Amagusa gathered 37,000 Christians who, in a last-ditch effort to save their religion, took on the 124,000-force mustered by the Shogunate, which was hell-bent on ridding Japan of Christianity. The Christians were, with the exception of Yamaguchi, brutally slaughtered.

Weekly Playboy notes that early in the 17th century, a Portuguese priest called Marcos predicted that the Messiah would be born in Japan. Being in the right time and place, Amagusa, the son of a masterless samurai Christian, was suddenly deified."Christian samurai duped people into believing Shiro was the Second Coming. They told people he could walk on water from one island to another. They also said that all he needed to do was extend his arm and a dove would fly down and lay an egg in his palm. Breaking the egg open would reveal a Christian scripture. The Christian samurai who organized the Shimabara Rebellion used Shiro by claiming he was the Messiah and getting ordinary folk to join their fight," the historian says. Though Amagusa Shiro was also cut down in the rebellion, he left plenty of mystery in his wake.

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Anti-aging molecule discovered

A team of South Korean scientists on Sunday claimed to have created a "cellular fountain of youth," or a small molecule, which enables human cells to avoid aging and dying. The team, headed by Prof. Kim Tae-kook at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, argued the newly-synthesized molecule, named CGK733, can even make cells younger. The findings were featured by the Britain-based Nature Chemical Biology online early today and will be printed as a cover story in the journal's offline edition early next month. "All cells face an inevitable death as they age. On this path, cells became lethargic and in the end stop dividing but we witnessed that CGK733 can block the process," Kim said. "We also found the synthetic compound can reverse aging, by revitalizing already-lethargic cells. Theoretically, this can give youth to the elderly via rejuvenating cells," the 41-year-old said.

Kim expected that the CGK733-empowered drugs that keep cells youthful far beyond their normal life span would be commercialized in less than 10 years. Other researchers here heaped praises on the discovery but they were cautious about the practical therapeutic application of the new substance. ``Obviously, it is an innovative finding. But we need to see whether or not CGK733 could really rejuvenate cells inside human bodies without generating side effects," Prof. Kim Sung-hoon at Seoul National University said. Prof. Kim Tae-kook, however, is confident about the commercial viability of CGK733, believing the efficiency of the material was created using state-of-the-art magnetic nano-probe technology. ``We have the magnet-associated technology to identify molecular targets inside living cells, which allowed us to examine the mechanisms of CGK733 directly," Kim said.

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Search for India's ancient city

Archaeologists working on India's south-west coast believe they may have solved the mystery of the location of a major port which was key to trade between India and the Roman Empire - Muziris, in the modern-day state of Kerala. For many years, people have been in search of the almost mythical port, known as Vanchi to locals. Much-recorded in Roman times, Muziris was a major centre for trade between Rome and southern India - but appeared to have simply disappeared. Now, however, an investigation by two archaeologists - KP Shajan and V Selvakumar - has placed the ancient port as having existed where the small town of Pattanam now stands, on India's south-west Malabar coast. "It is the first time these remains have been found on this coast," Dr Sharjan told BBC World Service's Discovery programme. "We believe it could be Muziris." Pattanam is the only site in the region to produce architectural features and material contemporary to the period. "No other site in India has yielded this much archaeological evidence," said Dr Roberta Tomba, of the British Museum. "We knew it was very important, and we knew if we could find it, there should be Roman and other Western artefacts there - but we hadn't been able to locate it on the ground."

Until recently, the best guesses for the location of Muziris centred on the mouth of the Periyar river, at a place called Kodungallor - but now the evidence suggests a smaller town nearby, Pattanam, is the real location. Drs Shajan and Selvakumar now meet locals on a regular basis as they continue their work, with some older people in particular remembering picking up glass beads and pottery after heavy rains. Undoubtedly, they told Discovery, the many pieces of amphora are from the Mediterranean - a key to establishing Pattanam as the place where Muziris once stood. "These amphora are so common," Dr Shajan said. "We have hundreds of shards of Mediterranean pottery."

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