|  Viking Graves Yield Grisly Find: Sacrificed Slaves  | Viking graves in Norway contain a grisly tribute: slaves who were beheaded and buried along with their masters, new research suggests. In Flakstad, Norway, remains from 10 ancient people were buried in multiple graves, with two to three bodies in some graves and some bodies decapitated. "We propose that the people buried in double and triple burials might have come from very different strata of society, and that slaves could have been offered as grave gifts in these burials," study co-author Elise Naumann, an archaeologist at the University of Oslo in Norway, wrote in an email. Though some thralls were treated well, many were forced to endure backbreaking physical labor, Naumann said.
| Read More » Kraken Rises: New Fossil Evidence Revives Sea Monster Debate  | DENVER — Did a giant kraken troll the Triassic seas, crushing ichthyosaurs and arranging their bones into pleasing patterns? "This was extremely good luck," said Mark McMenamin, a paleontologist at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts who presented his findings here Wednesday (Oct. 30) at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America (GSA). "A kraken isn't really necessary," said David Fastovsky, a paleontologist at the University of Rhode Island who attended McMenamin's GSA presentation and penned a response to the evidence for the Paleontological Society. The bones of one of these ichthyosaurs were found in a strange linear pattern.
| Read More » Wanted: Volunteers for Yearlong Mock Mars Mission in Canadian Arctic  | If you're ready to take a timeout from your life and spend a year living in the Arctic on a simulated Mars mission, the Mars Society wants to hear from you. The non-profit group, which advocates for manned exploration of the Red Planet, has released its requirements for the six volunteers who will be expected to spend 12 months at the society's Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station on Canada's Devon Island, which is about 900 miles (1,450 kilometers) from the North Pole, beginning in July 2014. "Dedication to the cause of human Mars exploration is an absolute must, as conditions are likely to be very difficult and the job will be very trying," Mars Society officials said in a description of the simulated mission, which is called Mars Arctic 365. Human Mars exploration generated a lot of headlines last year when the Netherlands-based non-profit Mars One proposed a one-way trip to the Red Planet that would land in 2023.
| Read More » Cosmic Lights: Bright Venus, Solar Eclipse Dominate Sky This Week  | Venus reaches maximum elongation from the sun Friday (Nov. 1) evening, and the moon passes directly in front of the sun, creating a solar eclipse Sunday morning. On Friday, Venus reaches a point as far from the sun in our sky as it can get. Because Venus is closer to the sun than the Earth, it never strays very far from the sun in the sky. Have you seen Venus lately?
| Read More » Finned Monster Chomped Heads Off Ancient Amphibians  | Diplocaulus, the boomerang-head, was a truly strange amphibian with an impractically wide, bony skull. "It's just so weird," said study researcher Robert Bakker, the curator of paleontology at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. Bakker and his colleagues discovered the Dimetrodon and Diplocaulus interaction in the Craddock bone bed in Baylor County, Texas.
| Read More » Hurricane Sandy Exposes Jersey's Marsh Mistakes  | When Hurricane Sandy's powerful storm tide pummeled New Jersey, 70 percent of the state's old submerged marshes flooded, researchers reported Monday (Oct. 28) at the Geological Society of America's annual meeting in Denver. About 25 percent of those marshes were developed, and two-thirds of that development took place between 1995 and 2007, said Joshua Galster, a geomorphologist at Montclair State University in New Jersey. "A lot of these areas were being developed when we really should have known better," Galster said. Before Hurricane Sandy hit, Galster and students at Montclair State University had compiled a database of all the former submerged marshes and swamplands in New Jersey and Delaware.
| Read More » Maine's Volcanoes (Yes, Maine) Among World's Biggest  | DENVER — Maine has supervolcanoes. Wait, Maine has volcanoes? Yes, and their eruptions could have been among the biggest ever on Earth, geoscientist Sheila Seaman reported here Tuesday (Oct. 29) at the Geological Society of America's annual meeting. "Long before there were these things called supervolcanoes, we've known about giant, big, horrific silicic volcanic eruptions," said Seaman, of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
| Read More » 'Smart Glasses' Could Help Blind People Navigate  | A pair of "smart glasses" might help blind people navigate an unfamiliar environment by recognizing objects or translating signs into speech, scientists say. Now, researchers from Oxford University in England are developing a set of sophisticated glasses that use cameras and software to detect objects and display them on the lenses of glasses. The team recently won an award from the Royal Society to continue this work. "The Royal Society's Brian Mercer Innovation award will allow us to incorporate this research into our glasses to help sight-impaired people deal with everyday situations much more easily."
| Read More » US Preterm Birth Rate Lowest in 15 Years A baby is considered preterm if he or she is born before 37 weeks of pregnancy. The country's preterm birth rate peaked in 2006 (at 12.8 percent), but has declined each year since, resulting in an estimated 176,000 fewer babies born preterm over the six-year period, according to the March of Dimes, the charity organization that released the report. The March of Dimes also gave each state a grade based on how much progress the state had made towards the 2020 preterm birth rate goal of 9.6 percent — an annual "report card" that the organization started in 2008. "I think California is an important example here," said Dr. Edward McCabe, chief medical officer of the March of Dimes. Read More » Promising Comet ISON Gives Perplexing Performance En Route to Sun  | With just one month to go before its dramatic solar rendezvous, skirting to within a hairbreadth of the surface of the sun, Comet ISON continues to befuddle observers with its performance en route to the sun. Time Running Out
| Read More » Science in Space: Contest Selects Experiments Headed for Space Station  | Calling all citizen scientists! The nonprofit organization that manages American-led research aboard the International Space Station announced the winners of its public contest to design experiments to send to the orbiting outpost. The Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS) held a month-long contest, called "What Would You Send to the ISS?" to cultivate interest in the orbiting laboratory, and to solicit ideas for how to use the facility to benefit humans on Earth. The grand prize winner, Elizabeth MacDonald, proposed flying a geo-tagged video camera to the International Space Station to record real-time images of the northern and southern lights. The aurora images could be posted on the Aurorasaurus website, a citizen science project that aims to build accurate, easy-to-use and real-time maps of aurora sightings.
| Read More » Lasers Zap Tiny Holes in Heads of Flies to Expose Brains  | Using lasers, scientists can now surgically blast holes thinner than a human hair in the heads of live fruit flies, allowing researchers to see how the flies' brains work. Surgically preparing small live animals for such "intravital microscopy" is often time-consuming and requires considerable skill and dexterity. Now, Supriyo Sinha, a systems engineer at Stanford University in California, and his colleagues have developed a way to prepare live animals for such microscopy that is both fast — taking less than a second — and largely automated.
| Read More » Brain-Machine Interface Puts Anesthesia on Autopilot A new brain-machine interface could replace human administration of anesthetics to patients in a medically induced coma. The machine monitors a patient's brain activity and automatically delivers just the right amount of anesthetic to keep the patient in a coma — thus reducing the amount of anesthetic needed and preventing an overdose, researchers say. Doctors maintain these comas, which often last for several days, by monitoring a patient's electroencephalogram (EEG) brain activity and delivering a precise dose of anesthetic. In contrast, the brain-machine interface puts the process on autopilot. Read More » | |
