In 1901, divers retrieved a complex mechanism from a Roman merchant shipwreck dated to the 1st century BC. It appeared to be an ancient astronomy calculator that also made references to Greek games, from which the modern Olympic Games have been inspired, and which took place every four years. Now, the discovery of an inscription describing the ancient mechanism reveals the names of the competitions that used to take place during the Olympic cycle in several city-states belonging to the Greek civilization."It's a surprise to find this on what we thought was an astronomical instrument," said science historian Alexander Jones of the New Y... [read more >>] Now, you can find out how old the American obsession for gold is. A new research published in the "Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences" reveals it: a 4,100-year-old nine-bead Peruvian necklace represents the oldest known gold artifact in the Americas. The artifact was discovered in a burial pit near Lake Titicaca, associated with an adult jawbone. The previously oldest known gold artifacts in Americas came also from the Peruvian Andes and were 3,500 to 3,410-year-old. This oldest gold was dug close to the ancient settlement of Jiskairumoko, 5,300 years old. "The beads were hammered from gold nuggets and suggest the development of an... [read more >>] For over 7 centuries, the tightly woven linen strip, displaying the vague image of a bearded man, has been worshiped as the burial shroud of Jesus. Texts signal the existence of the shroud since the first century. Two decades ago, radiocarbon dating showed that the Shroud of Turin had been just a medieval hoax. It is a morbid interest mixing science and religion. And the religious part does not want to give up. Now, the Oxford team that made the analysis wants to update the results based on subsequent technical advances. Those opposing the hoax variant can't wait. "Now that we're 20 years later, the technology certainly has impro... [read more >>] Don't be fooled by the humble size of a mouse or rat because their extinct relatives were bigger than cows. And now, the largest rodent ever has been discovered: a one tonne Josephoartigasia monesi, as big as a big bison bull, which lived 2 million years ago.The impressive skull of 53 cm (1.8 ft) in length was encountered in a broken boulder on the coast of Uruguay by Andrés Rinderknecht of the Uruguayan National Museum of Natural History and Anthropology, and Ernesto Blanco of the [img=2]Uruguayan Institute of Physics. Based on the skull's size, Josephoartigasia could have weighed about 1,000 kg (2.200 pounds), turning it into th... [read more >>] Mummies can go far beyond the era of the ancient pharaohs. Even to the dinosaur era. Researchers have just revealed the discovery of an amazingly preserved "dinosaur mummy", containing a lot of tissues and bones inside skin wrapping, including well preserved tendons and ligaments, which are seldom discovered nowadays, when most dinosaur remains that are found are only scattered bones. The discovery of the 67-million-year-old duck-billed dinosaur has already changed concepts regarding how the dinosaurs' skin looked like and how rapid they were."We're looking at a 3-D skin envelope. In many places it's complete and intact-aroun... [read more >>] Today the largest living arthropod is the Japanese spider crab, Macrocheira kaempferi, which has a leg span of up to 4 m (13 ft) (but the body is just 37 cm (15 in) long) and a weight of up to 20 kg (44 pounds). (Arthropods are invertebrates with an exoskeleton and articulated limbs, like spiders, insects, crustaceans and millipedes). But this is a dwarf compared to giant fossil sea scorpions. In a new research published in the journal Biology Letters, scientists describe the largest sea scorpion found yet, based on a fossil claw.The 18-in (46-cm) claw probably had an owner with a body 8-ft (2.46-m) long! Sea scorpions are believed to be t... [read more >>] Those fascinated by the ancient Egypt have been waiting for this moment for 85 years, since the discovery of the famous mummy of the 19-year-old "Boy Pharaoh" by Howard Carter: as from yesterday the public can see the 3,000-year-old face of Tutankhamon in his tomb in the famous Valley of the Kings.The mummy has a shriveled leathery black face and body and it is exposed in a climate-controlled glass box, but only the face and feet are exposed under the linen wrapping."The golden boy has magic and mystery, and therefore every person all over the world will see what Egypt is doing to preserve the golden boy, and all of them I am sure will come... [read more >>] It is the symbol of the huge carnivorous dinosaurs. Yet just one previous possible T. rex footprint has been found so far, in New Mexico, in 1983 and made public in 1994. Now, a second T-rex footprint could have been found by Dr Phil Manning, from the Manchester Museum, University of Manchester. The metre-square, three-toed track was encountered in 2006 in the Hell Creek Formation, located in the Badlands of Montana, US, an arid landscape where some of the best dinosaur fossils have been discovered so far. "Finding dinosaur trackways is an important addition to our understanding of how the great beasts lived more than 65 million years ago. ... [read more >>] They are as mysterious as the European Atlantis: the submerged stones lying just below the waves splashing on the island of Yonaguni Jima could be the ruins of a Japanese Atlantis, an ancient unknown city sunk by a powerful earthquake about 2,000 years ago. Its main defender is Masaaki Kimura, a marine geologist at the University of the Ryukyus in Japan, who has been investigating the structure for over 15 years."Each time I return to the dive boat, I am more convinced than ever that below me rest the remains of a 5,000-year-old city. The largest structure looks like a complicated, monolithic, stepped pyramid that rises from a depth of 25 m... [read more >>] Columbus may have been proud to discover the New World in 1492, but we clearly know that he was not the first European to have stepped on American land. 500 years before, a group of blond Scandinavians had done it. It happened during the Viking era, when these sailors-warriors were roaming northern Africa, eastern Europe and the Middle East. Now the story becomes even more intricate. America, the West coast more precisely, would have been discovered by Marco Polo two centuries before Christopher Columbus set foot on the Antilles, according to a chart of the Library of the Congress in Washington investigated since 1943 by the FBI.This docume... [read more >>] | 
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