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It was ten stories tall, and wider at the base than the Empire State Building. And nearly a thousand years ago, it was the centerpiece of the continent's largest city north of Mexico. Today, the search to determine how native engineers built Monk's Mound -- North America's biggest prehistoric earthen structure -- has turned up some new and crucial, but very small, clues: the seeds and spores of ancient plants. An aerial view of Monks Mound, the largest prehistoric earthwork in North America. Researchers studying the giant platform mound at the heart of the settlement of Cahokia have studied its...

The bones of men who may have witnessed the tumultuous events of 1066 in Westminster Abbey, when one king was buried and two were crowned in a year, have been discovered along with the skeleton of a three-year-old child buried under Victorian drainage pipes just outside the wall of Poet's Corner... The skeleton, too small and poorly preserved to determine the sex without further scientific tests, appears to have been a person of some status, since he or she was buried in a wooden coffin, unlike some of the monks buried nearby. The child was far too young to be...

The human cerebral cortex contains 16 billion neurons, wired together into arcane, layered circuits responsible for everything from our ability to walk and talk to our sense of nostalgia and drive to dream of the future. In the course of human evolution, the cortex has expanded as much as 1,000-fold, but how this occurred is still a mystery to scientists. Now, researchers at UC San Francisco have succeeded in mapping the genetic signature of a unique group of stem cells in the human brain that seem to generate most of the neurons in our massive cerebral cortex. The new findings,...

Most of us have spent our lives feeling pressured by the notion that we need to drink at least eight glasses of water a day in order to avoid dehydration and stay healthy. But according to American paediatrician Aaron E. Caroll from Indiana University, there's absolutely no science to back this up, and there never was. Caroll has already co-written a widely cited research paper and book debunking common health myths - primarily the idea that all humans need to drink eight 8-ounce (237 mL) glasses of water a day - but the rumour just won't go away, with an...

The shipwreck dates to circa 65 B.C., and was discovered by Greek sponge fishermen in 1900 off the southwestern Aegean island of Antikythera. They salvaged 36 marble statues of mythological heroes and gods; a life-sized bronze statue of an athlete; pieces of several more bronze sculptures; scores of luxury items; and skeletal remains of crew and passengers. The wreck also relinquished fragments of the world’s first computer: the Antikythera Mechanism, a geared mechanical device that encoded the movements of the planets and stars and predicted eclipses... The project is the first-ever systematic excavation of this shipwreck, relying on the precise...

Explanation: Separated by about 14 degrees (28 Full Moons) in planet Earth's sky, spiral galaxies M31 at left, and M33 are both large members of the Local Group, along with our own Milky Way galaxy. This narrow- and wide-angle, multi-camera composite finds details of spiral structure in both, while the massive neighboring galaxies seem to be balanced in starry fields either side of bright Mirach, beta star in the constellation Andromeda. Mirach is just 200 light-years from the Sun. But M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, is really 2.5 million light-years distant and M33, the Triangulum Galaxy, is also about 3 million...

New research led by Dr Hauke Marquardt of the University of Bayreuth, Germany, suggests the existence of a previously unknown superviscous layer inside our planet: part of the lower mantle where the rock gets 3 times stiffer. Such a layer may explain why tectonic plate slabs seem to pool at 930 miles (1,500 km) under Indonesia and South America’s Pacific coast. “The Earth has many layers, like an onion. Most layers are defined by the minerals that are present. Essentially, we have discovered a new layer in the Earth. This layer isn’t defined by the minerals present, but by the...

Explanation: Image Credit: Explanation: A mountainous region informally known as Tartarus Dorsa sprawls some 530 kilometers (330 miles) across this Plutonian landscape. Recently downloaded from New Horizons, it combines blue, red, and infrared image data in an extended color view captured near the spacecraft's close approach to Pluto on July 14. Shadows near the terminator, the line between Pluto's dim day and night, emphasize a rough, scaly texture. The stunning image resolves details on the distant world about 1.3 kilometers (0.8 miles) across. Refering to a part of Hades in ancient Greek mythology, Tartarus Dorsa borders Tombaugh Regio to the...

Explanation: Stars are forming in dark, dusty molecular cloud LDN 988. Seen near picture center some 2,000 light-years distant, LDN 988 and other nearby dark nebulae were cataloged by Beverly T. Lynds in 1962 using Palomar Observatory Sky Survey plates. Narrowband and near-infrared explorations of the dark nebula reveal energetic shocks and outflows light-years across associated with dozens of newborn stars. But in this sharp optical telescopic view, the irregular outlines of LDN 988 and friends look like dancing stick figures eclipsing the rich starfields of the constellation Cygnus. From dark sky sites the region can be identified by eye...

From the “department of global roasting” and the UNIVERSITY OF ALASKA FAIRBANKS, where great ideas like this one are formed at Halloween parties, (yes really, see PR) comes this claim:UAF model used to estimate Antarctic ice sheet meltingTo see how burning up the Earth’s available fossil fuels might affect the Antarctic ice sheet, scientists turned to a computer program developed at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute. The ice would disappear, they found, and that conclusion is making headlines across the world.UAF’s Parallel Ice Sheet Model “was the perfect tool to find out whether human emissions are sufficient to...

Edelman, the world’s largest public relations company, has decided not to continue working with certain environmentally unfriendly companies after receiving negative publicity, the Guardian reports. Edelman was recently criticized for working with fossil fuel companies and fake front groups that supported a Canadian pipeline project. They have since decided to stop working with coal producers, since they’re the biggest contributors to climate change, and groups that try to “greenwash” the truth and spread misinformation. Edelman, which grew 8.5% in the 2014-2015 fiscal year according to PR Week, lost a good number of big clients when it made clear its position...

SALEM, N.H. — Using the astronomical chart on a table in the covered tower, visitors aim their gaze along worn arrows to huge, upright stones hundreds of feet away. Beyond each slab of granite, clearings stretch the eye to the horizon on a dazzling day in late summer New Hampshire. On Wednesday's autumnal equinox, people will flock to the woods near the Massachusetts state line, watch the sun rise or fall over the massive chunks of granite and decide for themselves whether they're standing amid relics of ancient history or pure hooey.

BERLIN (AP) — The "Made in Germany" label has stood for precision and reliability for decades, but since Volkswagen admitted to cheating on U.S. car emissions tests, many are questioning whether the automaker's problems could taint the rest of the country. It's the second serious blow to a major German company's reputation in six months, following the tragic crash of a Germanwings jet that killed 150 people. Parent company Lufthansa has faced questions over why it failed to identify the psychological issues suffered by the pilot who intentionally flew the plane into a French mountain. Will such crises tarnish the...

Following Kitzmiller v. Dover, an Excellent Decade for Intelligent Design Evolution News & Views September 25, 2015 3:12 AM | Permalink Tomorrow marks the tenth anniversary of opening of arguments in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case that resulted in the most absurdly hyped court decision in memory. In 2005, did an obscure Federal judge in Dover, Pennsylvania, at last settle the ultimate scientific question that has fascinated mankind for millennia? Of course not. The decision by Judge John Jones established nothing about intelligent design -- far from being the "death knell" sometimes claimed by Darwin defenders. For a definitive take,...

As if life wasn't hard enough during the last Ice Age, a new study has found Australia's first human inhabitants had to contend with giant killer lizards. Researchers working in Central Queensland were amazed when they unearthed the first evidence that Australia's early human inhabitants and giant apex predator lizards had overlapped

Israeli archaeologists had hoped to finally uncover the mystery of the ancient tomb of the Maccabees -- but they have been thwarted once again. Archaeological authorities said Monday they had carried out another excavation at a site near Modiin northwest of Jerusalem to determine "once and for all" whether the tomb was indeed there. The tomb of the family that led the Jewish revolt against the Greek dynasty of the Seleucids in the 2nd century BC is believed to have been among ancient Judea's most impressive structures. "We exposed again the base of what survived from this magnificent building --...

Explanation: Does the Sun return to the same spot on the sky every day? No. A better and more visual answer to that question is an analemma, a composite image taken from the same spot at the same time over the course of a year. The featured weekly analemma was taken despite cold temperatures and high winds near the Concordia Station in Antarctica. The position of the Sun at 4 pm was captured on multiple days in the digital composite image, believed to be the first analemma constructed from Antarctica. The reason the image only shows the Sun from September...

Explanation: What are those streaks of light in the sky? First and foremost, the arching structure is the central band of our Milky Way galaxy. Visible in this galactic band are millions of distant stars mixed with numerous lanes of dark dust. Harder to discern is a nearly vertical beam of light rising from the horizon, just to the right of the image center. This beam is zodiacal light, sunlight scattered by dust in our Solar System that may be surprisingly prominent just after sunset or just before sunrise. In the foreground are several telescopes of the Bosque Alegre Astrophysical...

Explanation: Dust lanes seem to swirl around the core of Messier 96 in this colorful, detailed portrait of the center of a beautiful island universe. Of course M96 is a spiral galaxy, and counting the faint arms extending beyond the brighter central region, it spans 100 thousand light-years or so, making it about the size of our own Milky Way. M96, also known as NGC 3368, is known to be about 35 million light-years distant and a dominant member of the Leo I galaxy group. The featured image was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The reason for M96's asymmetry...

Explanation: Do some surface features on Enceladus roll like a conveyor belt? A leading interpretation of images taken of Saturn's most explosive moon indicate that they do. This form of asymmetric tectonic activity, very unusual on Earth, likely holds clues to the internal structure of Enceladus, which may contain subsurface seas where life might be able to develop. Pictured above is a composite of 28 images taken by the robotic Cassini spacecraft in 2008 just after swooping by the ice-spewing orb. Inspection of these images show clear tectonic displacements where large portions of the surface all appear to move all...