Science Special News

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Towers point to ancient Sun cult

Submitted by Waspie Dwarf: The oldest solar observatory in the Americas has been found, suggesting the existence of early, sophisticated Sun cults, scientists report. It comprises of a group of 2,300-year-old structures, known as the Thirteen Towers, which are found in the Chankillo archaeological site, Peru. The towers span the annual rising and setting arcs of the Sun, providing a solar calendar to mark special dates. The study is published in the journal Science. Clive Ruggles, professor of archaeoastronomy at Leicester University, UK, said: "These towers have been known to exist for a century or so. It seems extraordinary that nobody really recognised them for what they were for so long. "I was gobsmacked when I saw them for the first time - the array of towers covers the entire solar arc." The Thirteen Towers of Chankillo run from north to south along the ridge of a low hill within the site; they are relatively well-preserved and each has a pair of inset staircases leading to the summit. The rectangular structures, between 75 and 125 square metres (807-1,345 sq ft) in size, are regularly spaced - forming a "toothed" horizon with narrow gaps at regular intervals. About 230m (750ft) to the east and west are what scientists believe to be two observation points.

From these vantages, the 300m- (1,000ft-) long spread of the towers along the horizon corresponds very closely to the rising and setting positions of the Sun over the year. "For example," said Professor Ruggles, "if you were stood at the western observing point, you would see the Sun coming up in the morning, but where it would appear along the span of towers would depend on the time of the year." "So, on the summer solstice, which is in December in Peru, you would see the Sun just to the right of the right-most tower; for the winter solstice, in June, you would see the Sun rise to the left of the left-most tower; and in-between, the Sun would move up and down the horizon." This means the ancient civilisation could have regulated a calendar, he said, by keeping track of the number of days it took for the Sun to move from tower to tower.

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Skunk ape tracker seeks to protect

North America's Pacific Northwest has Bigfoot. The Himalaya region of Nepal and Tibet has the Yeti.But in Florida's swamps, Dave Shealy is on the lookout for the skunk ape, hoping to prove the smelly creature does actually exist and win it government protection.Shealy, 43, claims he saw his first skunk ape -- a creature similar to an orangutan or gorilla but with a foul odor -- in 1974 and has been searching for more ever since."All of a sudden there was this big, hairy creature walking like a man through the marsh," said Shealy while on a cigarette break from fixing a water pump at his Trail Lakes Campground, some 70 miles west of Miami."I didn't see another one until the summer of 1997."Shealy claims three sightings of the skunk ape and boasts to be the world's leading researcher of the mystery creature.

He also runs a small roadside shop stocking skunk ape memorabilia like T-shirts, rudimentary clay models, and a DVD film he has made about his work.He is not alone in his belief in the skunk ape. There was a wave of sightings in the 1970s, all describing the creature as about seven feet tall, weighing about 300 pounds (136 kgs), and bringing a foul odor as it emerged from the swamp.

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Lunar eclipse wows sky watchers

Sky watchers across the world have been enjoying the first total lunar eclipse in more than three years. The eclipse began at 2018 GMT, with the Moon totally immersed in the shadow of the Earth between 2244 and 2358 GMT. During "totality" the Moon took on a reddish hue; the only light reaching its surface by this stage had been filtered through Earth's atmosphere. The eclipse was visible from the whole of Europe, Africa, South America, and eastern parts of the US and Canada. The copper-red Moon was visible across large areas of the UK thanks to clear skies. Robin Scagell, from the Society for Popular Astronomy, said that it was "one of the best lunar eclipses from Britain for years". "It was fascinating to watch the Moon's graceful movement through the shadow of the Earth and check its coppery glow," he said. The last total eclipse visible from the UK was back in May 2004, but it was obscured by cloudy skies. Lunar eclipses occur when the Sun, Earth and Moon are in a near-perfect line in space. The Moon travels through the long cone-shaped shadow that the Earth casts in space. At totality, the only light reaching the Moon's surface has been refracted through the Earth's atmosphere.

The appearance of the lunar surface varies according to how much dust is in the Earth's upper atmosphere. For example, following major volcanic eruptions, the Moon appears to be a deep red and almost invisible. As there have not been any recent sizeable eruptions, astronomers had predicted that the Moon would be bathed in a bright orange light. In Belgium, about 200 people gathered at the Mira observatory in Grimbergen to witness the eclipse.

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UFO technology to combat climate change ?

Submitted by Kratos: A former Canadian defense minister is demanding governments worldwide disclose and use secret alien technologies obtained in alleged UFO crashes to stem climate change, a local paper said Wednesday. "I would like to see what (alien) technology there might be that could eliminate the burning of fossil fuels within a generation ... that could be a way to save our planet," Paul Hellyer, 83, told the Ottawa Citizen.Alien spacecrafts would have traveled vast distances to reach Earth, and so must be equipped with advanced propulsion systems or used exceptional fuels, he told the newspaper.Such alien technologies could offer humanity alternatives to fossil fuels, he said, pointing to the enigmatic 1947 incident in Roswell, New Mexico -- which has become a shrine for UFO believers -- as an example of alien contact."We need to persuade governments to come clean on what they know.

Some of us suspect they know quite a lot, and it might be enough to save our planet if applied quickly enough," he said.Hellyer became defense minister in former prime minister Lester Pearson's cabinet in 1963, and oversaw the controversial integration and unification of Canada's army, air force and navy into the Canadian Forces.He shocked Canadians in September 2005 by announcing he once saw a UFO.

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Albino millipedes discovered in Grand Canyon

Two albino millipedes have come out of their cavernous hiding places to represent an entirely new genus of these leggy organisms. Scientists spotted the millipedes in caves on opposite sides of the Grand Canyon. One species was found in a cave on the South Rim and the other in two caves on the North Rim. "We knew the millipedes likely represented two distinct species because the two populations were separated by the Grand Canyon," said biologist J. Judson Wynne, a cave expert at Northern Arizona University who also works for the U.S. Geological Survey. "The fact these two species belong to an entirely new genus was a great surprise to us."Wynne made the discovery with Kyle Voyles, a cave expert with the Bureau of Land Management.A genus is a major subdivision within a family of living things that typically includes more than one species.

Before they ever ended up in the caves, these millipedes were ready for a life of constant darkness, high humidity and scarce food. They lack functional eyes, which would be useless in the blackout conditions, and have no pigment since there is no need for protection from the sun's rays. Instead the cave critters have lots of legs and feelers for finding the rare speck of food washed into the cave from above.

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Tarot cards help $6.8M lotto win

When a psychic reveals whether you will live happily ever after, think of Judy Mayer before you dismiss it all as a bunch of baloney. Even though Mayer's good fortune wasn't forecast in a crystal ball, she has more than six million reasons to put her faith in the wisdom of tarot card readings. The Winnipegger won $6.8 million in last Wednesday's Lotto 6-49 draw using five of six numbers she obtained during a reading in 2005. "She didn't tell me I was going to win a substantial amount of money. Sometimes they hit on the right things, sometimes they don't," Mayer, 56, said yesterday after claiming Manitoba's latest multi-million dollar lottery jackpot. In her purse, Mayer carries the psychic's business card on which her numbers are scribbled. Further luck was involved but it was Mayer's doing. For reasons she was unable to explain, she changed the sixth number given to her -- 45 -- to 46. Numbers drawn were 5, 6, 17, 21, 31 and 46.

"Over the years we've had people pick their (winning) numbers a lot of different ways. Tarot cards, I can't recall anybody," said John Matheson of Western Canada Lottery Corp. Mayer's fortune was "in the cards," a press release quipped.

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Seeking life on Europa

As NASA develops its next "flagship" mission to the outer solar system, Jupiter's enigmatic moon Europa should be the target, says Arizona State University professor Ronald Greeley. Although Europa lies five times farther from the Sun than Earth, he notes it may offer a home for life.Greeley, a Regents' Professor, heads the Planetary Geology Group in ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration. He presented the Europa proposal Feb. 18 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco."Europa is unique in our solar system," says Greeley. "It's a rocky object a little smaller than our Moon, and it's covered with a layer of water 100 miles deep." This holds more water than all the oceans on Earth, he explains. Greeley adds that Europa also has the two other basic ingredients of life -- organic chemistry and a source of energy.Scientists have identified four candidate worlds beyond Earth that might contain life, either now or in the past, Greeley says. These four are Mars, Saturn's moons Titan and Enceladus, and Jupiter's moon Europa.Mars is the target of numerous ongoing missions, and NASA's Cassini spacecraft is studying both Titan and Enceladus at present. Cassini's results, however, show that Titan and Enceladus have temperatures hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit below zero and may not hold any liquid water.

NASA's Galileo mission surveyed Europa in the late 1990s. Greeley notes the mission found that Europa's surface ice was mixed with organic minerals that came up from the solid rocky part of the moon or were deposited by meteorite and comet impacts at the surface. Yet Galileo's results raised more questions than answers."We know Europa's surface is frozen," Greeley says. "But we don't know if it's frozen all the way down, or if there's an ocean under an ice shell."The ice thickness is a key question, notes Greeley."Ultimately, we want to get down through that ice shell and into the ocean where any action is," he says. "So it matters whether the ice is 10 yards thick, or 10 miles or more. The data we have today will never answer that question."

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Earliest gospels acquired by Vatican

The world's oldest known copy of the Gospel of Saint Luke, containing the earliest known Lord's Prayer, and one of the oldest copies of the Gospel of Saint John have been acquired by the Vatican, according to reports from Rome. A nonsectarian New York nonprofit, Pave the Way, helped facilitate the acquisition.Now stored in the Vatican's Library, the documents are for the first time available for scholarly review. In the future, excerpts may be put on display for the general public. Collectively known as the Bodmer Papyrus XIV-XV, the documents date to 175-225 A.D. and consist of 51 leaves from a manuscript that originally consisted of 72 leaves folded in the middle to form a single quire, according to Father Richard Donahoe, rector of the Cathedral of St. Paul in Birmingham, Alabama, who also helped with the acquisition."The papyrus authenticates that which has been passed down over the millennia," Fr. Donahoe told Discovery News.He believes it is even possible the texts may have been copied from the original gospels. Many of the earliest Biblical texts are in the possession of private collectors. In this case, the materials were found, along with other papyri, in 1952 at Pabau, Egypt, near the ancient Dishna headquarters of the Pachomian order of monks. The papyrus was mysteriously smuggled to Switzerland, where collector Martin Bodmer purchased it.

To fund the construction of a library, the Martin Bodmer Foundation contacted the auction house Christie's about a sale. Gary Krupp, founder of Pave the Way, Donahoe and others learned of the sale and, with the Vatican's help, sought a buyer who could purchase the papyrus for the Vatican. Frank J. Hanna III , CEO of an investment management company and co-chairman of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence, agreed to be the buyer. Hanna privately purchased the documents for an undisclosed, "significant" price.

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How did the Vikings navigate on cloudy days ?

Vikings navigated the oceans with sundials aboard their Norse ships. But on an overcast day, sundials would have been useless. Many researchers have suggested that the on foggy days, Vikings looked toward the sky through rock crystals called sunstones to give them direction. No one had tested the theory until recently.A team sailed the Arctic Ocean aboard the Swedish icebreaker Oden and found that sunstones could indeed light the way in foggy and cloudy conditions. Would have worked Crystals such as cordierite, calcite or turmaline work like polarizing filters, changing in brightness and color as they detect the angle of sunlight. From these changes, Vikings could have accurately determined where the polarized sky light was coming from and pinpointed the direction of the sun, said biophysicist Gabor Horvath."Under foggy or cloudy conditions a Viking navigator could have guessed the position of the sun hidden by clouds or fog by determining the sky light polarization in two celestial points ... and could have guessed the position of the invisible sun," said Horvath, of Eotvos University in Budapest. "Although all these are pure hypotheses, researchers can test the scientific possibility of such a polarimetric navigation."

In previous studies Horvath and colleagues demonstrated that Vikings might have required some kind of device, other than just the naked eye, to accurately guess the position of the sun on cloudy days. Their latest findings, published in the April issue of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A, suggest that if Vikings were to have sunstones onboard, the Norsemen could have used them to determine where to go.