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Ancient Peruvians cultivated crops 10,000 years ago

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 00:06:35 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Archaeologists have long thought that people in the Old World were planting, watering, weeding, and harvesting for a good 5,000 years before anyone in the New World did such things. But fresh evidence, in the form of Peruvian squash seeds, indicates that farming in the New and Old Worlds was nearly concurrent.

In a paper the journal Science published last June, Tom Dillehay, an anthropological archaeologist at Vanderbilt University, revealed that the squash seeds he found in the ruins of what may have been ancient storage bins on the lower western slopes of the Andes in northern Peru are almost 10,000 years old. "I don't want to play the early button game," he said, "but the temporal gap between the Old and New World, in terms of a first pulse toward civilization, is beginning to close."

The seeds aren't the only things that support the argument. Dillehay also found evidence of cotton and peanut farming and what seem to be garden hoes; nearby are irrigation canals.

Tags: archaeology, peru, america, agriculture, neolithic

Giant concentric stone circle unearthed in Italy

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 00:09:26 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: www.stonepages.com

Last July excavations for the new Sant'Anna hospital in San Fermo della Battaglia, near Como (Italy), revealed a double concentric circle of ancient stones. Thought to date back to 3000 BCE, the site is a "highly articulated prehistoric structure that could be either an ancient astronomical observatory or a sacred space," according to Stefania Iorio, Archaeological Superintendent of the region. The diameter of the two circles is about 70 metres, and they are crossed by a sort of pathway, paved with stones.

Tags: archaeology, megaliths, stone circles, italy

Gaza Hospital Patients to DIE without Fuel

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 22:13:54 GMT

clipped by: righthand

Clip Source: www.france24.com

Gaza blockade, a rising concern for UN food delivery

Monday, January 21, 2008

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees warned Monday that it may have to suspend its food aid if Israel maintains its blockade of Gaza. Fuel shortage forced Gaza's only power plant to close down

"We have 15 patients on breathing machines. If the electricity is cut off they stop working and the patients will die of blood poisoning after about five minutes," Doctor Fawzy

"Most of them were wounded in Israeli operations and air strikes,"

The victims include Mansur al-Rahil, an 18 year-old wounded when an air strike targeting a vehicle full of militants struck his family's donkey cart on Thursday, killing his mother and older brother.

In order to keep the intensive care unit running the rest of the hospital may have to shut down in the next 24 hours, surgeon Raid

"We are only performing emergency surgeries. We will not be able to function at all by this time tomorrow."

21/01/08 Lights go out in Gaza

Heath Ledger DEAD at age 28 :(

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 22:48:29 GMT

clipped by: Antara
clipper's remarks: So sad.

Clip Source: en.wikipedia.org

"At 3:31 p.m., a masseuse arrived at Apartment 5A in the building, at 421 Broome Street in SoHo, for an appointment with Mr. Ledger, the police said. The masseuse was let in to the home by a housekeeper, who then knocked on the door of Mr. Ledger’s bedroom. When no one answered, the housekeeper and the masseuse opened the bedroom and found Mr. Ledger naked and unconscious on a bed, with pills scattered around his body. They shook him, but he did not respond. They immediately called the authorities. The police said they did not suspect foul play. The police said they believed Ms. Olsen, 21, was in California and said it was not clear why Mr. Ledger was in her apartment. "^[1]

Tags: heath ledger

Kilimanjaro - Stunning

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 17:25:41 GMT

clipped by: mickfinn
clipper's remarks: Beautiful nature

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

To many climate scientists and glaciologists who have probed and measured, the disappearance of Kilimanjaro's ice fields is inevitable and imminent

Photo: Neil Modie

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Kilimanjaro has six established routes to the summit, some of them demanding mountaineering routes

Photo: Tom Norring

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

In the moors are the region’s most distinctively weird plants

Photo: Tom Norring

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

A lobelia deckenii plant

Photo: Tom Norring

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Chagga — the people who inhabit Kilimanjaro’s southern foothills

Photo: Tom Norring

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Lava Tower is a black volcanic plug rising some 300 vertical feet above the plateau

Photo: Tom Norring

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Sunrise at Stella Point, at the lower lip of Kibo’s summit crater

Photo: Tom Norring

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Trekkers at Uhuru on Mount Kilimanjaro’s Kibo peak

Photo: Tom Norring

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

At 19,340 feet, Uhuru is the highest point in Africa. Hemingway once described the mountain “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”

Photo: Tom Norring

Tags: africa, kilimanjaro

Mathematicians solve flakey problem

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 02:58:53 GMT

clipped by: pokkets
clipper's remarks: They have created computer simulated 3 Dimensional snowflakes. They think they can teach physicists a lot about how nature "self-assembles complex structuress

Clip Source: www.abc.net.au

Larry O'Hanlon

Two mathematicians have for the first time created a computer simulation that generates realistic three-dimensional snowflakes, although even they are not sure how it works.

"We know surprisingly little about how ice crystals grow," says California Institute of Technology physicist Professor Ken Libbrecht, who is considered a leading expert in snow crystal physics.

Mathematicians Professor Janko Gravner of the University of California, Davis and Professor David Griffeath of the University of Wisconsin-Madison have avoided the old approach of virtually building the snow crystals molecule-by-molecule.

Instead, they use virtual 3-D cells much larger than water molecules, which behave according to the same physics thought to control crystal growth.

He and Griffeath created their virtual cells, called cellular automata, to be one cubic micron in size.

At that scale the cells, about the size of a speck of dust, mimic the physics of water vapour and crystalline growth.

Tags: snowflake, compute, simulation, physics