Archaeologists working high in the Peruvian Andes have discovered the oldest celestial observatory in the Americas — a 4,200-year-old structure marking the summer and winter solstices that is as old as the stone pillars of Stonehenge. The observatory was built on the top of a 33-foot-high pyramid with precise alignments and sight lines that provide an astronomical calendar for agriculture, archaeologist Robert Benfer of the University of Missouri said. The people who built the observatory — three millennia before the emergence of the Incas — are a mystery, but they achieved a level of art and science that archaeologists say they did not know existed in the region until at least 800 years later. Among the most impressive finds was a massive clay sculpture — an ancient version of the modern frowning ‘sad face’ icon — flanked by two animals. The disk, protected from looters beneath thousands of years of dirt and debris, marked the position of the winter solstice. ‘It’s really quite a shock to everyone … to see sculptures of that sophistication coming out of a building of that time period,’ said archaeologist Richard Burger of Yale University’s Peabody Museum of Natural History, who […]
Giant structures stretching more than a billion light years across have been revealed by two new maps of the distribution of galaxies in the universe. The updated atlases lend more support to the idea that the universe is dominated by dark matter and dark energy. Both studies used data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to gather the colour and position in the sky of more than a million galaxies. But in order to understand galaxy distribution in three dimensions, researchers must also know the distance between each galaxy and the Earth. That can be done by collecting a spectrum for each and every galaxy to see how the expansion of the universe stretches its light waves on the way to Earth, but is very time consuming and expensive. So the teams that produced the new maps sidestepped that process by finding automatic ways to assign distances to hundreds of thousands of galaxies without having to collect all those spectra. They looked at a class of bright, very old galaxies – called luminous red galaxies – which have well known true colours. Distortions in their colour are therefore easily measured, meaning their distances from Earth can be […]
Climate models predict that global warming will upset the delicately balanced atmospheric circulation that controls global climate and weather patterns. Now scientists are finding evidence that man-made greenhouse gas emissions may already be tipping the equilibrium, which could have severe repercussions, including altered weather patterns and a decline in important fishing grounds. A key feature of Earth’s atmospheric circulation is a steady flow of tropical air known as the Walker circulation. Warm air rises over the equatorial western Pacific and cools and sinks in the east. This sets up a flow of air over the ocean from high pressure in the east to low pressure in the west. The winds push water from east to west, which causes an upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich water in the eastern Pacific. Simple climate theories predict that global warming will weaken this circulation. But is it actually happening? A team led by climate scientist Gabriel Vecchi of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration examined historical weather records from the equatorial Pacific Ocean dating back to 1861. They found that the difference in pressure between the east and west Pacific has declined since that time, suggesting a weakening Walker circulation. Vecchi’s […]
Pundits and politicians of all stripes are quick to offer their wisdom on what fuels Islamist terrorism. It just so happens that much of what they say is wrong. Poverty doesn’t produce terrorists, a solution to the Israel-Palestine problem isn’t a cure-all, and young Muslim men aren’t the most likely to turn to terror. If we are going to fight a war on terror, the least we can do is understand who we are fighting. ‘Fixing the Israel-Palestinian Problem Will Make Terrorism Go Away’ Hardly. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is important, but it is by no means the only issue inspiring the ideology of global jihad. There are several pivotal conflicts around the world that animate militant Islamist ideology, from the Caucasus and the Balkans to the Southern Philippines and the intractable Kashmir conflict. Militant Islamists also see a connection between their local issues and global politics. To them, Muslims are victims in every conflict and the West is responsible for Muslim suffering and powerlessness. That is to say nothing of the fact that the significance of each regional conflict varies from one jihadi group to the next. For Algerian jihadists, their war, provoked by the refusal of […]
In a new poll comparing President Bush’s job performance with that of his predecessor, a strong majority of respondents said President Clinton outperformed Bush on a host of issues. The poll of 1,021 adult Americans was conducted May 5-7 by Opinion Research Corp. for CNN. It had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. Respondents favored Clinton by greater than 2-to-1 margins when asked who did a better job at handling the economy (63 percent Clinton, 26 percent Bush) and solving the problems of ordinary Americans (62 percent Clinton, 25 percent Bush). (Watch whether Americans are getting nostalgic for the Clinton era — 1:57) On foreign affairs, the margin was 56 percent to 32 percent in Clinton’s favor; on taxes, it was 51 percent to 35 percent for Clinton; and on handling natural disasters, it was 51 percent to 30 percent, also favoring Clinton. Moreover, 59 percent said Bush has done more to divide the country, while only 27 percent said Clinton had. When asked which man was more honest as president, poll respondents were more evenly divided, with the numbers — 46 percent Clinton to 41 percent Bush — […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
