TIA GHOSE, Staff Writer - Live Science
Stephan: Another chapter of the past opens. This is such an exciting time, so much is happening to reveal our history. New technologies allow us to see what was formerly almost impossible to perceive. They are coming on line one after another.
The ancestors of people from across Europe and Asia may have spoken a common language about 15,000 years ago, new research suggests.
Now, researchers have reconstructed words, such as ‘mother,’ ‘to pull’ and ‘man,’ which would have been spoken by ancient hunter-gatherers, possibly in an area such as the Caucusus. The word list, detailed today (May 6) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could help researchers retrace the history of ancient migrations and contacts between prehistoric cultures.
‘We can trace echoes of language back 15,000 years to a time that corresponds to about the end of the last ice age,’ said study co-author Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom.
Tower of Babel
The idea of a universal human language goes back at least to the Bible, in which humanity spoke a common tongue, but were punished with mutual unintelligibility after trying to build the Tower of Babel all the way to heaven. [Image Gallery: Ancient Middle-Eastern Texts]
But not all linguists believe in a single common origin of language, and trying to reconstruct that language seemed impossible. Most researchers thought they could only trace a language’s roots back 3,000 to 4,000 years. (Even […]
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NATALIE WOLCHOVER, - Simons Foundation Science News
Stephan: If this holds up, as it seems likely to do, it represents a genuinely new way of looking at the world, one of those insights from physics that changes everything.
In February 2012, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek decided to go public with a strange and, he worried, somewhat embarrassing idea. Impossible as it seemed, Wilczek had developed an apparent proof of ‘time crystals
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DAISY LUTHER, - Activist Post
Stephan: Like the untested introduction of GMOs into the food supply, we have here revealed another animal experiment -- with us as the lab rates.
Click through to see the graphs, which are very useful.
If we didn’t have enough to worry about in the grocery aisles, with GMOs, toxic additives, and pesticide-soaked foods, we can now add a new concern: nanoparticles.
What exactly is a nanoparticle? As You Sow, a non-profit consumer advocacy group, explains:
Nanomaterials are often heralded as having the potential to revolutionize the food industry – from enabling the production of creamy liquids that contain no fat, to enhancing flavors,improving supplement delivery, providing brighter colors, keeping food fresh longer, or indicating when it spoils. It is reported that nanotechnology is already used in food and food related products, but due to lack of transparency about the issue, concrete information has been difficult to obtain.
Because of their small size, nanoparticles are able to go places in the body that larger particles cannot. Nanoparticles in food or food packaging can gain access via ingestion, inhalation,or skin penetration. When ingested, the nano-sized particles facilitate uptake into cells and can allow them to pass into the blood and lymph where they circulate through the body and reach potentially sensitive target sites such as bone marrow, lymph nodes, the spleen, the brain, the liver, and the heart. Nanoparticles penetrating […]
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Stephan: The cost of 9/11 is only now being understood. Nineteen young terrorists didn't just kill several thousand people, they caused the citizens of the most powerful democracy on earth to voluntarily surrender their civil rights, and to subject themselves to a surveillance state that can only be described as Orwellian.
A former FBI counterterrorism agent acknowledged this week on CNN that every telephone conversation that takes place on American soil ‘is being captured as we speak.
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DAVID KEYS, - The Independent (UK)
Stephan: Another chapter of our past opens.
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, weren’t in Babylon at all – but were instead located 300 miles to the north in Babylon’s greatest rival Nineveh, according to a leading Oxford-based historian.
After more than 20 years of research, Dr. Stephanie Dalley, of Oxford University’s Oriental Institute, has finally pieced together enough evidence to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the famed gardens were built in Nineveh by the great Assyrian ruler Sennacherib – and not, as historians have always thought, by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon.
Dr. Dalley first publicly proposed her idea that Nineveh, not Babylon, was the site of the gardens back in 1992, when her claim was reported in The Independent – but it’s taken a further two decades to find enough evidence to prove it.
Detective work by Dr. Dalley – due to be published as a book by Oxford University Press later this month – has yielded four key pieces of evidence.
First, after studying later historical descriptions of the Hanging Gardens, she realized that a bas-relief from Sennacherib’s palace in Nineveh actually portrayed trees growing on a roofed colonnade exactly as described in classical accounts […]
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