Saturday, February 28, 2015
A rare, intact Roman tombstone was unearthed this week by archaeologists digging ahead of construction of a parking lot in Cirencester, in western England.
Made from Cotswold limestone, the 1,800-year-old inscribed stone was found in a grave -- directly above an adult skeleton.
The likely association of the gravestone with the human remains makes the discovery unique, said Neil Holbrook, chief executive of Cotswold Archaeology.
Ancient Roman Fort Was Designed for Celestial Show
“It’s the sort of thing archaeologists only find in places like Pompeii,” Holbrook told reporters.
Found lying on its front, the tombstone revealed fine decorations and five lines of Latin inscription when it was turned over. It read: “D.M. BODICACIA CONIUNX VIXIT ANNO S XXVII.”
“Our preliminary translation of the inscription is: To the spirits of the departed/Bodicacia/faithful wife/died aged 27,” Ed McSloy, Cotswold Archaeology’s finds expert, told Discovery News.
The archaeologists believe the name of the young woman is either Bodicacia or Bodica. However, it's also possible that two names are hidden within the inscription: Bodus, referring to a man, and Cacia, pointing to a woman.
Pompeii Couple Reunited in Marble Inscription
“Bodica/Bodicacia/Bodus all would be Latinized versions of Celtic names, though Cacia could be fully Roman,” McSloy said.
He noted that the root of the name Bodica, as well as its variations, is very likely to be the same as that of Boudicca (Boadicea), the rebel queen of the Iceni, a British tribe, who unsuccessfully attempted to defeat the Romans.
As the name Bodiccia/Bodica/Bodus has a Celtic origin, archaeologists believe the individual was British, and perhaps local to Cirencester.
Ancient Roman Jewelry Found Under Shop
“Analysis of the bones should confirm whether this person was local to the area,” McSloy said. "It should also be possible to determine gender, age at death, and provide evidence for diet and disease."
The inscription made it possible to date the tomb to the second century A.D., when Cirencester, known by the Romans as Corinium, was the second-largest city in Britain after London.
“The abbreviated use of D.M. (Dis Manibis -- ‘to the spirits of the departed’) is used after the end of the first century A.D.,” McSloy said.
“Also, the style and quality of the lettering seems more appropriate to the second rather than the third century,” he added.
Ancient Greek Tombstones Served as Therapy
Other clues might come from the title “Coniunx” (faithful wife), which is sometimes used in association with freed slaves.
“There is a possibility that Bodiccia/Bodica/Bodus may have started life as a slave,” McSloy said.
Around 200 inscribed tombstones have been found from Roman Britain, but this is the only one thought to record the person found beneath.
It is also the first example of a tombstone -- from Roman Britain, at least -- depicting the Roman god Oceanus on the pediment, which is the decorated, triangular portion at the top of the stone.
Gladiator Chews Out Ref From Grave
Oceanus, the divine personification of the sea in the classical world, is portrayed with a long mustache, stylized long hair, and crab-like pincers above the head.
“In a funerary context it may symbolise the long ‘watery’ voyage to the afterlife,” McSloy said. "Interestingly, there is some damage to the face of Oceanus, possibly due to deliberate defacement."
The archaeologists, who have been working at the site for the past two months unearthing 55 ancient Roman graves, have now moved the tombstone and the remains to a lab for further studies and analysis.
http://news.discovery.com/history/archaeology/rare-intact-roman-tombstone-found-in-england-150227.htm#mkcpgn=rssnws1
Friday, February 27, 2015
what travels faster than the speed of light? 2015
http://www.businessinsider.com/what-can-travel-faster-than-the-speed-of-light-2015-2
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
Tuesday, February 24, 2015
Monday, February 23, 2015
Sunday, February 22, 2015
Saturday, February 21, 2015
Thursday, February 19, 2015
Humans and many other animals tend to evolve larger body sizes over time, suggests an extensive new study that provides strong evidence for a theory known as “Cope’s Rule.”
Cope’s Rule holds that there is active selection for increasing body size in nature. The new study, published in the journal Science, finds this to be true. It appears that evolution follows certain rules and can, at least to some extent, be predicted.
“We’ve known for some time now that the largest organisms alive today are larger than the largest organisms that were alive when life originated or even when animals first evolved,” co-author Jonathan Payne, a paleobiologist at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences, said in a press release.
PHOTOS: Evolution Controversies: A History
This is not to say that huge animals didn’t existed in the past. The gigantic dinosaur Dreadnoughtus, for example, measured 85 feet long and weighed about 65 tons. The point is that, as many animal lineages evolve, there is a tendency toward larger sizes, particularly if food resources, the environment and other factors remain relatively stable.
The effect has been dramatic for animals like horses. As seen in the accompanying image, the earliest horses were much smaller than those alive today. Humans, in general, are also growing larger. In Britain, for example, the average height of a 21-year-old man increased from 5’5” in the 1870s to 5’10” as of the 1970s, according to researchers from the University of Essex and the National University in Canberra.
For the latest study, Payne and his team tested out Cope’s Rule on marine animals. The scientists compiled a dataset that included adult body size measurements for individual species within more than 17,000 groups, or genera, of marine animals spanning five major phyla: Arthropods, Brachiopods, Chordates, Echinoderms and Mollusks.
“Our study is the most comprehensive test of Cope’s Rule ever conducted,” said lead author Noel Heim of Stanford University. “Nearly 75 percent of all of marine genera in the fossil record and nearly 60 percent of all the animal genera that ever lived are included in our dataset.”
VIDEO: Evolution Is Happening Right Before Your Eyes
Analysis of the massive dataset revealed that, over the past 542 million years, the mean size of marine animals has increased 150-fold.
“That’s the size difference between a sea urchin that is about 2 inches long versus one that is nearly a foot long,” Heim explained. “This may not seem like a lot, but it represents a big jump.”
The researchers additionally found that the increase in body size, which has occurred since animals first appeared in the fossil record around 550 million years ago, is not due to every animal lineage steadily growing bigger. It’s instead due to the diversification of groups of organisms that were already larger than other groups early in the history of animal evolution.
“That’s also something we didn’t know before,” Payne said. “For reasons that we don’t completely understand, the classes with large body size appear to be the ones that over time have become differentially more diverse.”
BLOG: Some Spiders Grow Bigger in Urban Areas
They suspect this is because of advantages associated with a larger size, such as the ability to move faster, to burrow more deeply and efficiently in sediment or to capture larger prey.
“It’s really a story of the survival and diversification of big things relative to small things,” Heim said.
Small things aren’t all staying small either. Yet another recent study found that certain spiders are growing bigger in urban areas.
There’s no need to fear monster-sized ants, termites or other such things in our lifetimes, though. Growth within a species — if it happens at all — occurs slowly and over many generations.
VIDEO: Evolution Punishes The Selfish
The real question now is, if evolution follows certain rules and can be predicted, what other rules does it follow?
As Payne said, “The discovery that body size often does evolve in a directional way makes it at least worth asking whether we’re going to find directionality in other traits if we measure them carefully and systematically.”
http://news.discovery.com/animals/humans-other-animals-are-evolving-larger-bodies-150219.htm#mkcpgn=rssnws1
A NASA spacecraft speeding toward an epic flyby of Pluto on July 14 has beamed home its first good looks at two moons of the dwarf planet.
The New Horizons probe captured images of Nix and Hydra, two of Pluto's five known satellites, from Jan. 27 through Feb. 8, at distances ranging from 125 million miles to 115 million miles (201 million to 186 million kilometers), NASA officials said. The photos have been spliced together to create a short movie showing Nix and Hydra circling Pluto.
ANALYSIS: Pluto and Moon Charon May Share Same Atmosphere
NASA released the new footage Wednesday (Feb. 18), 85 years to the day after American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. [Photos from NASA's New Horizons Pluto Probe]
"It’s thrilling to watch the details of the Pluto system emerge as we close the distance to the spacecraft’s July 14 encounter," New Horizons science team member John Spencer, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement. "This first good view of Nix and Hydra marks another major milestone, and a perfect way to celebrate the anniversary of Pluto’s discovery."
New Horizons team members discovered Nix and Hydra in 2005 using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Scientists think both moons are between 25 miles and 95 miles (40 to 153 km) wide; New Horizons should nail down their sizes when it zooms through the Pluto system this summer.
NEWS: New Horizons Spies Pluto's Tiny Moon Hydra
Hydra is Pluto’s outermost known moon and circles the dwarf planet every 38 days, at a distance of about 40,200 miles (64,700 km). Nix lies 30,260 miles (48,700 km) from Pluto and completes one orbit every 25 days.
Two other Pluto moons, Styx and Kerberos, are smaller than Nix and Hydra, and are too faint to show up in the latest New Horizons images, NASA officials said. The dwarf planet's other known moon, Charon, blends into Pluto in the photos, creating a fuzzy white blob. (Charon is about 750 miles, or 1,207 km, in diameter — about half as wide as Pluto itself.)
The new photos were captured by New Horizons' Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), to help improve team members' understanding of the orbits of Nix and Hydra. The right-hand images have been processed to remove the Pluto-Charon glare and that of background stars, making Nix and Hydra easier to see, NASA officials said.
The streak extending to the right of Pluto and Charon is a result of overexposure, they added. (LORRI took the photos in a special mode that sacrifices resolution to boost sensitivity.)
ANALYSIS: Can We Call Pluto and Charon a 'Binary Planet' Yet?
The $700 million New Horizons mission launched in January 2006, tasked with lifting the veil on faraway, mysterious Pluto. On July 14, New Horizons will come within 8,500 miles (13,600 km) of the dwarf planet's surface.
That highly anticipated flyby may not mark the end of the probe's deep-space work. Mission team members want to send New Horizons on to explore a second body in the Kuiper Belt, the ring of icy objects beyond Neptune that Pluto calls home. If NASA funds this extended mission, the additional flyby would take place in 2019.
More from SPACE.com:
Pluto's Moons Nix and Hydra Spotted By NASA Probe | VideoPhotos of Pluto and Its MoonsPluto / Charon Wobbly Dance Proves It's A Double Planet | Video
Originally published on Space.com. Copyright 2015 SPACE.com, a Purch company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
http://news.discovery.com/space/plutos-tiny-moons-spied-by-incoming-nasa-probe-150219.htm#mkcpgn=rssnws1
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
Tuesday, February 17, 2015
Monday, February 16, 2015
King Richard III was killed by a sword thrust from the base of the neck all the way up into his head, according to researchers at the University of Leicester who have located a major injury in the interior surface of the skull.
Guy Rutty of East Midlands Forensic Pathology Unit, based at the University of Leicester, spotted the fatal wound while examining the skull of the last Plantagenet king. At that moment, video producer Carl Vivian was chronicling the investigation for a University of Leicester series of films.
“During filming, professor Rutty noted a small traumatic lesion on the interior surface of the cranium,” osteologist Jo Appleby said.
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Rutty linked that lesion to marks on the vertebra and an injury to the base of the skull.
“I was able to put the three injuries together on pathological grounds and we all realised I had identified the potential lethal injury to King Richard III,” Rutty said.
Lining up with one another, the three injuries provided evidence for the direction of the blow and the depth to which the weapon had penetrated the skull.
The sharp force trauma was probably inflicted by a sword or the top spike of a bill or halberd.
Video: Decapitated Gladiators Found in England?
The blow would have caused hemorrhage, injury to the brain or air embolus, leading to death within a short time.
Depicted by William Shakespeare as a bloodthirsty usurper, Richard ruled England from 1483 to 1485. He was killed in 1485 in the Battle of Bosworth, which was the last act of the decades-long fight over the throne known as War of the Roses. England’s last king to die in battle, he was defeated by Henry Tudor, who became King Henry VII.
The king’s twisted skeleton was found in 2012 under a car park by archaeologists from the University of Leicester.
All Hail King Richard! Details of Elaborate Burial Unveiled
The 500-year-old skeleton, showing severe spinal scoliosis, has been widely examined by researchers.
Mitochondrial DNA showed a match between Richard and two of his living relatives, confirming that the bones are indeed those of the king. Further analysis shed light on his diet and disease, and even provided a blow-by-blow account pf his final moments.
“Using modern forensic examination, we have discovered that Richard’s skeleton sustained 11 wounds at or near the time of his death — nine of them to the skull, which were clearly inflicted in battle,” Sarah Hainsworth, professor of materials engineering at the University of Leicester, said.
This Is What Killed Richard III
“The injuries to the head suggest he had either removed or lost his helmet. The other two injuries that we found were to a rib and his pelvis,” she added.
According to the researchers, the head trauma confirms some near-contemporary accounts of the battle, which reported the king abandoned his horse after it became stuck in a mire and was killed while fighting his enemies.
In 2015, the curtain will finally come down on the last Plantagenet king. King Richard III will be finally reburied in Leicester Cathedral on March 26 at the end of a seven-day program of events in Leicester and Leicestershire to honor him.
Image: The potential killer blow to King Richard III. Credit: University of Leicester.
http://news.discovery.com/history/archaeology/richard-iii-killed-by-sword-thrust-upwards-into-neck-150212.htm#mkcpgn=rssnws1
Sunday, February 15, 2015
Saturday, February 14, 2015
Friday, February 13, 2015
Thursday, February 12, 2015
Wednesday, February 11, 2015
Gizmodo: The Fascinating Engineering Details of the Titanic From a 1909 Journal.
Gizmodo: The Fascinating Engineering Details of the Titanic From a 1909 Journal. http://google.com/newsstand/s/CBIw3bqd2SA
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
how-to-develop-the-situational awareness of jason bourne
http://www.artofmanliness.com/2015/02/05/how-to-develop-the-situational-awareness-of-jason-bourne/
Monday, February 9, 2015
Gizmodo: This Guy Went Around the World In 80 Days The First Time He Traveled.
Gizmodo: This Guy Went Around the World In 80 Days The First Time He Traveled. http://google.com/newsstand/s/CBIw2om_vSA
Fitness Is Like LEGO: You Build It Brick By Brick
Fitness Is Like LEGO: You Build It Brick By Brick http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/vip/~3/wbYMui2VgoA/fitness-is-like-lego-you-build-it-brick-by-brick-1684283107
Friday, February 6, 2015
Inspire Me Today: The Secret To True Leadership
Inspire Me Today: The Secret To True Leadership. http://google.com/newsstand/s/CBIwroTs9Bo
Four Phrases We All Say, but Should Remove From Our Vocabularies
Four Phrases We All Say, but Should Remove From Our Vocabularies http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/vip/~3/pUIScJRWvpE/four-phrases-we-all-say-but-should-remove-from-our-voc-1684047793
Smithsonian.com: How Sticks and Shell Charts Became a Sophisticated System for Navigation
Smithsonian.com: How Sticks and Shell Charts Became a Sophisticated System for Navigation. http://google.com/newsstand/s/CBIwi764syA
Smithsonian.com: Ancient Scrolls Blackened by Vesuvius Are Readable at Last.
Smithsonian.com: Ancient Scrolls Blackened by Vesuvius Are Readable at Last. http://google.com/newsstand/s/CBIwiKmpriA
7-words-the-happiest-people-use-at-work
http://www.inc.com/john-brandon/7-words-the-happiest-people-use-at-work.html
7-c-s-that-will-help-you-communicate-better
http://www.inc.com/peter-economy/the-7-c-s-that-will-help-you-communicate-better.html?cid=readmore
Thursday, February 5, 2015
NOVA: Megatsunami May Not Have Wiped Out Europe’s First Great Civilization—So What Did?
NOVA: Megatsunami May Not Have Wiped Out Europe’s First Great Civilization—So What Did? http://google.com/newsstand/s/CBIwwfPZ8Ro
Find Your “Theme” To Make Better Decisions and Shape Your Goals
Find Your “Theme” To Make Better Decisions and Shape Your Goals http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/vip/~3/xdBE9j0UEZY/find-your-theme-to-make-better-decisions-and-shape-yo-1683590962
Wednesday, February 4, 2015
Tuesday, February 3, 2015
Scientists Identify a “DNA Clock” That May Help Predict Mortality.
Smithsonian.com: Scientists Identify a “DNA Clock” That May Help Predict Mortality. http://google.com/newsstand/s/CBIwyqPWsiA
How to Move Past the Blame Game and Start Fixing Your Problems
How to Move Past the Blame Game and Start Fixing Your Problems http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/vip/~3/KSq2acbqyRI/how-to-move-past-the-blame-game-and-start-fixing-your-1683469613
"Study Less, Study Smart": The Best Ways to Retain More in Less Time
"Study Less, Study Smart": The Best Ways to Retain More in Less Time http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/vip/~3/Iyykw0Gw9eA/study-less-study-smart-the-best-ways-to-retain-more-1683362205
Work on a Specific Skill for One to Three Days to Practice Effectively
Work on a Specific Skill for One to Three Days to Practice Effectively http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/vip/~3/nlhynC0yYPU/work-on-a-specific-skill-for-one-to-three-days-to-pract-1683460259
Monday, February 2, 2015
Sunday, February 1, 2015
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