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A 1.5 mile-wide asteroid is expected to make its closest approach to Earth on Christmas Eve. Asteroid 2003 SD220, also known as asteroid 163899, will pass our planet from 6.7 million miles (11 million km) away - 28 times farther than the moon. Despite its huge distance, reports have circulated the asteroid could cause earthquakes and trigger volcanoes on Earth. But experts have dismissed these claims, saying that there is no scientific evidence to back up these theories. Nasa says the space rock will make a return to Earth in 2018, but it will pose no threat to our planet...

Pokhara, the second largest town of Nepal, has been built on massive debris deposits, which are associated with strong medieval earthquakes. Three quakes, in 1100, 1255 and 1344, with magnitudes of around Mw 8 triggered large-scale collapses, mass wasting and initiated the redistribution of material by catastrophic debris flows on the mountain range. An international team of scientists led by the University of Potsdam has discovered that these flows of gravel, rocks and sand have poured over a distance of more than 60 kilometers from the high mountain peaks of the Annapurna massif downstream. Christoff Andermann from the GFZ German...

A geology team has contradicted claims that bluestones were dug by Bronze Age man from a west Wales quarry and carried 240 miles to build Stonehenge. In a new twist, Open University geologists say the stones were in fact moved to Salisbury Plain by glaciers. Last year archaeologists said the stones came from the Preseli Hills. Recent research in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology suggests the stones were ripped from the ground and moved by glaciers during the Ice Age. Geologists from the Open University first claimed in 1991 that the bluestones at one of Britain's best-known historic landmarks had...

Every bird alive today can trace its ancestry to creatures that lived about 95 million years ago on a chunk of land that split off from the supercontinent Gondwana, a new study suggests. The new family tree, compiled using information from fossils and from genetic analyses of modern birds, also reveals that this lineage underwent a major burst of evolution after an asteroid slammed into Earth about 66 million years ago and killed off the rest of their dinosaurian kin. "This is one of the most comprehensive studies that attempts to date when these evolutionary divergences happened," says Luis Chiappe,...

New research led by the American Museum of Natural History reveals that the evolution of modern birds was greatly shaped by the history of our planet's geography and climate. The DNA-based work, published today in the journal Science Advances, finds that birds arose in what is now South America around 90 million years ago, and radiated extensively around the time of the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event that killed off the non-avian dinosaurs. The new research suggests that birds in South America survived this event and then started moving to other parts of the world via multiple land bridges while diversifying during...

...The analyses revealed that the glass originate from the same glass workshops in Egypt that supplied the glass that the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun took with him to his grave in 1323 BC... Globalisation in the Bronze Age Twenty-three glass beads from Denmark were analysed using plasma-spectrometry. Without destroying the fragile beads, this technique makes it possible to compare the chemical composition of trace elements in the beads with reference material from Amarna in Egypt and Nippur in Mesopotamia, about 50 km south east of Baghdad in Iraq. The comparison showed that the chemical composition of the two sets of trace...

Contact: Dr. Paul Nicholson NicholsonPT@cardiff.ac.co.uk 44-292-087-4582 Cardiff University Ancient Egyptian glassmaking recreated 3000-year-old furnace rebuilt by archaeologist The reconstructed kiln built by Dr. Paul Nicholson of Cardiff University and Dr. Caroline Jackson of Sheffield University. A team led by a Cardiff University archaeologist has reconstructed a 3,000-year-old glass furnace, showing that Ancient Egyptian glassmaking methods were much more advanced than previously thought. Dr Paul Nicholson, of the University’s School of History and Archaeology, is leader of an Egypt Exploration Society team working on the earliest fully excavated glassmaking site in the world. The site, at Amarna, on the banks of...

An international team of experts, including researchers from the Camborne School of Mines, have found evidence of a large and abrupt cooling of the Earth's temperature during the Jurassic Period, which lasted millions of years. The scientists found that the cooling coincided with a large-scale volcanic event -- called the North Sea Dome -- which restricted the flow of ocean water and the associated heat that it carried from the equator towards the North Pole region. The team suggest that it is this volcanic event, preventing the ocean flow, rather than a change in CO2 in the atmosphere (which causes...

It has often been cited as one of the classic examples of how changes in climate have shaped human history. Circa the year 985, Erik the Red led 25 ships from Iceland to Greenland, launching a Norse settlement there and giving the vast ice continent the name "Greenland." Within just a few decades, the Norse -- sometimes also dubbed Vikings -- would make it to Newfoundland as well. They maintained settlements of up to a few thousand people in southwest Greenland for several centuries, keeping livestock and hunting seals, building churches whose ruins still stand today, and sending back valuable...

TORONTO — Dark matter inspires many strange theories, but until now few have involved giant lizards and the origins of humanity. If physicist Lisa Randall’s theory is correct, however, there is a clear link between dark matter, the great unknown majority of universal stuff and the extinction of the dinosaurs, which cleared the path for the rise of mammals, including that special species, homo sapiens. Roughly, her idea is that the rotation of a vast disc of dark matter through our solar system dislodged an asteroid from a weak and distant orbit, and sent it hurtling toward Earth, where it...

Explanation: Dwarf planet Ceres is the largest object in the Solar System's main asteroid belt with a diameter of about 950 kilometers. Exploring Ceres from orbit since March, the Dawn spacecraft's camera has revealed about 130 or so mysterious bright spots, mostly associated with impact craters scattered around the small world's otherwise dark surface. The brightest one is near the center of the 90 kilometer wide Occator Crater, seen in this dramatic false color view combining near-infrared and visible light image data. A study now finds the bright spot's reflected light properties are probably most consistent with a type of...

A NASA engineer has proposed a method to efficiently build a Death Star, and it's not the way the Empire would have done it. Instead of constructing the massive weapon from nothing, by shooting materials out from a planet, an asteroid could be used to provide all of the essential building blocks. The Empire is doing things the hard way; using an asteroid to build a Death Star would require much less work, as metals and organic compounds would already be there.

Land-ice Bridge, New Research Suggests -- Research by a Valparaiso University geography professor and his students on the creation of Kankakee Sand Islands of Northwest Indiana is lending support to evidence that the first humans to settle the Americas came from Europe, a discovery that overturns decades of classroom lessons that nomadic tribes from Asia crossed a Bering Strait land-ice bridge. Valparaiso is a member of the Council on Undergraduate Research. Dr. Ron Janke began studying the origins of the Kankakee Sand Islands – a series of hundreds of small, moon-shaped dunes that stretch from the southern tips of Lake...

Research Casts New Light on History of North America Research by a Valparaiso University geography professor and his students lends support to evidence the first humans to settle the Americas came from Europe, rather than crossing a Bering Strait land-ice bridge. Valparaiso’s research shows the Kankakee Sand Islands – a series of hundreds of small dunes in the Kankakee River area of Northwest Indiana and northeastern Illinois – were created 14,500 to 15,000 years ago and that the region could not have been covered by ice as previously thought. Newswise — Research by a Valparaiso University geography professor and his...

The iconic Stonehenge in the UK is one of the most famous prehistoric monuments in the world, but it is not the only stone formation of its kind. Similar stone alignments have been found throughout England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales… and now, it seems, in Lake Michigan. According to BLDGBLOG, in 2007, Mark Holley, professor of underwater archeology at Northwestern Michigan College, discovered a series of stones arranged in a circle 40 feet below the surface of Lake Michigan. One stone outside the circle seems to have carvings that resemble a mastodon—an elephant-like animal that went extinct about 10,000 years...

An archaeologist says it remains a mystery how a circle of stones initially arrived at the floor of Michigan's Grand Traverse Bay. Underwater archeologist Mark Holley said while he first discovered the underwater stones in 2007, no one has been able to prove whether the rocks were placed there by nature or by mankind, the Chicago Tribune reported Sunday. "The first thing I said when I came out of the water was, 'Oh no, I wish we wouldn't have found this,'" Holley said of his discovery. "This is going to invite so much controversy that this is where we're going...

This remarkable seal or bulla of the Judean King Hezekiah was discovered by Efrat Greenwald at the Ophel, an ancient dump beside the wall that surrounds Jerusalem's Old City. This bulla was found with 33 additional bullae, many pottery sherds and figurines in Area A of the 2009 excavation season supervised by Hagai Cohen-Klonymus of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. This is the first seal impression of an Israelite or Judean king ever exposed in situ in a scientific archaeological excavation. Initial inspection failed to recognize the seal's importance and it was put in storage. Recently the bulla was identified by...

A University of Montana professor who studies astrophysics has discovered how water ions escape from Saturn's environment... UM Professor Daniel Reisenfeld is a member of the Cassini research team... One of the instruments on Cassini measures the planet's magnetosphere - the charged particles, known as plasma, that are trapped in the space surrounding Saturn by its magnetic field. One of Cassini's past discoveries is that Saturn's plasma comprises water ions, which are derived from Saturn's moon Enceladus, which spews water vapors from its Yellowstone-like geysers. Knowing that the water ions would not be able to accumulate indefinitely, the team of...

Mount Etna, the volcano on the Italian island of Sicily, has erupted in spectacular fashion for the first time in two years. Etna sent a plume of fire and ash into the sky, several kilometres high.

A planet discovered last year sitting at an unusually large distance from its star - 16 times farther than Pluto is from the sun - may have been kicked out of its birthplace close to the star in a process similar to what may have happened early in our own solar system's history. Images from the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) in the Chilean Andes and the Hubble Space Telescope show that the star has a lopsided comet belt indicative of a very disturbed solar system, and hinting that the planet interactions that roiled the comets closer to the star might...