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The 'Gospel of Judas' 4/6/2006 Interview With Father Thomas Williams, Theology Dean ROME, APRIL 6, 2006 (Zenit) - The National Geographic Society has announced its intentions to publish an English translation of an ancient text called "The Gospel of Judas" later this month. The 31-page manuscript, written in Coptic, purportedly surfaced in Geneva in 1983 and has only been translated now. We asked Legionary Father Thomas D. Williams, dean of theology at the Regina Apostolorum university in Rome, to comment on the relevance of the discovery. Q: What is the "Gospel of Judas"? Father Williams: Though the manuscript still must...

'Forensic scientists say they have found the tomb of Spain's much-loved giant of literature, Miguel de Cervantes, nearly 400 years after his death. They believe they have found the bones of Cervantes, his wife and others recorded as buried with him in Madrid's Convent of the Barefoot Trinitarians. Separating and identifying his badly damaged bones from the other fragments will be difficult, researchers say. The Don Quixote author was buried in 1616 but his coffin was later lost. When the convent was rebuilt late in the 17th Century, his remains were moved into the new building and it has taken...

A group of Russian and South Korean researchers has begun their attempt to clone a woolly mammoth, starting by extracting DNA from a spectacularly well-preserved specimen discovered in the Siberian permafrot in 2013. The project is led by Hwang Woo-Suk, a Korean cloning scientist who was the focus of a scandal in 2006 involving fraudulent research on human stem cells. Hwang has had success with animals, however, reportedly creating the world's first cloned dog and several cloned coyotes.

An ancient god has resurfaced in Israel thanks to what archaeologists say is a one-of-a-kind discovery. University of Haifa researchers were digging at what's believed to be an ancient basalt armory outside Sussita—which the Jerusalem Post reports was once the Roman city of Antiochia Hippos—when a ball from a ballista, an ancient missile weapon, appeared two weeks ago. As it was made of limestone rather than basalt, archaeologists suspected it was an enemy missile and turned to a metal detector to search for a coin that might date the projectile. It found something far bigger: a 2,000-year-old bronze mask larger...

Arctic environment during an ancient bout of natural global warmingScientists are unravelling the environmental changes that took place around the Arctic during an exceptional episode of ancient global warming. Newly published results from a high-resolution study of sediments collected on Spitsbergen represent a significant contribution to this endeavour. The study was led by Dr Ian Harding and Prof John Marshall of the University of Southampton’s School of Ocean and Earth Science (SOES), based at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton.Around 56 million years ago there was a period of global warming called the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), during which global sea...

A gladiator's helmet left behind in the ruins of Pompeii is the centrepiece of an exhibition to be unveiled in Melbourne today. The 2,000-year-old bronze helmet is one of 250 items brought together at the Melbourne Museum to illustrate life in the ancient city. Museum manager Brett Dunlop says the helmet survived the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and was recovered 200 years ago. 'A large number of gladiators' helmets and shin guards and shoulder guards were found in what was most likely a storeroom in the gymnasium area,' he said. 'Most definitely the gladiators who were able to would have...

Humans contain 'alien' genes not passed on from our ancestors, researchers have discovered. The say we acquired essential 'foreign' genes from microorganisms co-habiting their environment in ancient times. The study challenges conventional views that animal evolution relies solely on genes passed down through ancestral lines -- and says the process could still be going on. Cambridge researchers say we acquired essential 'foreign' genes from microorganisms co-habiting their environment in ancient times. Horizontal Gene Transfer The transfer of genes between organisms living in the same environment is known as horizontal gene transfer (HGT). It is well known in single-celled organisms and...

This is what most of us know about the death of Julius Caesar, half-remembered from movies and plays: Some soothsayer said, "Beware the Ides of March." A few idealistic Romans decided to win back Rome for the people.Caesar got stabbed by Brutus with a big sword, said "Et tu, Brute?" and died nobly. All of that is wrong.

A team of anthropology researchers has found significant differences in facial features between all seven pre-Columbian peoples they evaluated from what is now Peru -- disproving a longstanding perception that these groups were physically homogenous. The finding may lead scholars to revisit any hypotheses about human migration patterns that rested on the idea that there was little skeletal variation in pre-Columbian South America. Skeletal variation is a prominent area of research in New World bioarchaeology, because it can help us understand the origins and migration patterns of various pre-Columbian groups through the Americas... The recently-published findings may affect a lot...

During August 2014, researchers from the Department of Prehistory, at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, made some spectacular discoveries at the Spanish site of La Almoloya, located in Pliego, Murcia. The site represents the cradle of the Bronze Age "El Argar" civilisation, who dominated the south-eastern part of the Iberian Peninsula. La Almoloya, discovered in 1944 by Emeterio Cuadrado and Juan de la Cierva, is located on a steep sided plateau and dominated an extensive region for over six centuries (from 2,200 to 1,550 BC)... The stone walls of the buildings were covered with layers of mortar, and some areas...

Megan Gannon March 14, 2015The eight eagle talons from Krapina arranged with an eagle phalanx that was also found at the site. (Luka Mjeda, Zagreb) Long before they shared the landscape with modern humans, Neanderthals in Europe developed a sharp sense of style, wearing eagle claws as jewelry, new evidence suggests. Researchers identified eight talons from white-tailed eagles — including four that had distinct notches and cut marks — from a 130,000-year-old Neanderthal cave in Croatia. They suspect the claws were once strung together as part of a necklace or bracelet. "It really is absolutely stunning," study author David Frayer,...

Carabinieri Captain Lorenzo Iacobone said Monday two tourists from California, ages 21 and 25, were picked up Saturday for carving their names eight centimeters (three inches) high into an upper level of the Colosseum. They were freed later but will face trial for aggravated damage to a monument. Iacobone said the young women apologized for the vandalism, but he said such acts "are extremely serious, and no one considers the damage they are creating."

A new intensive survey of the Messak Settafet escarpment, a massive outcrop of sandstone in the middle of the Saharan desert, has shown that stone tools occur "ubiquitously" across the entire landscape: averaging 75 artefacts per square metre, or 75 million per square kilometre. Researchers say the vast 'carpet' of stone-age tools -- extracted from and discarded onto the escarpment over hundreds of thousands of years -- is the earliest known example of an entire landscape being modified by hominins: the group of creatures that include us and our ancestral species. The Messak Settafet runs a total length of 350...

"Mark Twain said boxing is the only sport where a slave, if he's successful, can rub shoulders with royalty," says former heavyweight Mike Tyson, who once knocked out 19 opponents in a row. "Can you imagine that? Just by fighting another human being, he can meet a king, a prince, a queen, eat at the same table with them, be invited to the castle." Or in modern times, make $30 million in one fight, build your own castle, stock it with tigers, and still wake up every morning the pawn of powerful men who make money off your sweat. When...

While 1492 may have been the year Columbus sailed the ocean blue, it also marks the start of a mass swapping of species between the Old World and the New World as Europe began colonizing the Americas. Research published Wednesday from University College of London (UCL) and Leeds University Professor Simon Lewis and UCL Professor Mark Maslin argues that just over 100 years later -- 1610 -- is when those actions dramatically changed the planet Earth. As a result, they say, 1610 deserves to be designated as the start of the Anthropocene Epoch.

For generations, books, films, and TV have warned us of the danger of mummies. In their crypts they are relatively harmless, but when they rise from the dead and start strangling people, as they did in the Cotswolds of south central England in “Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars,” they become a much greater threat. But this problem may shortly be solved, thanks to global warming. The world’s oldest mummies are at risk of disappearing because of man-made climate change, according to a group of Harvard University scientists. Bodies mummified about 7,000 years ago in Chile are starting to...

Archaeologists have made a remarkable - and delicious - discovery in Bavaria, where during an excavation they dug up a 250 year-old pretzel. Silvia Codreanau-Windauer from the Bavarian Bureau for the Conservation of Historic Monuments confirmed that: "this is definitely the oldest pretzel ever found" - although she would give no word on whether it was past its expiration date. Alongside the remains of the pretzel, archaeologists also found the charred remains of a bread roll and a croissant - suggesting that someone missed out on quite the historical breakfast buffet in the 18th century, the period the find has...

How dust from the Sahara is fuelling the Amazon

Scientists flew a plane into high up cirrus clouds and used a sampler that resembled a hair dryer to examine cloud formation © Karl FroydMineral dust that swirls up into the atmosphere from Earth’s surface plays a far more important role in both cloud formation and cloud chemistry than was previously realised. The findings will feed into models of cloud formation and chemistry to help produce more accurate assessments of the role of clouds in climate change.Relatively little is understood about the formation of cirrus clouds, wispy ‘horsetails’ that are made of ice crystals and form at extremely high altitudes...

June 09, 2003Disease DustupDust clouds may carry infectious organisms across oceans By Otto Pohl> Image: ORBITAL IMAGING CORPORATION Photo Researchers, Inc. SANDSTORM blows particulates out from the Sahara Desert in Africa (landmass at right) over the Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean. The storm occurred in February 2001. On February 11, 2001, an enormous cloud of dust whipped out of the Sahara Desert and moved north across the Atlantic, reaching the U.K. two days later. A few days afterward, counties across the island began reporting simultaneous outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease, a viral sickness of livestock (sometimes confused with mad cow...