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The bronze items—three shields and a helmet—were found during excavations at the archaeological site of Ayanis, an ancient citadel and settlement in what is now Van province in eastern Turkey, Culture and Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy announced on social media.Ayanis was a citadel city founded in the seventh century B.C. by the Urartian king Rusa. Urartu was an Iron Age kingdom that extended across parts of what is now eastern Turkey, Armenia, Iran and Iraq.The kingdom, renowned for its mastery of stone, metal and weaponry, was one of the most powerful states in West Asia during the eighth and...

Today, the coelacanth is a fascinating deep-sea fish that lives off the coasts of eastern Africa and Indonesia and can reach up to 2m in length. They are "lobe-finned" fish, which means they have robust bones in their fins not too dissimilar to the bones in our own arms, and are thus considered to be more closely related to lungfish and tetrapods (the back-boned animals with arms and legs such as frogs, emus, and mice) than most other fishes.Over the past 410 million years, more than more than 175 species of coelacanths have been discovered across the globe. During the...

In a couple of weeks, Earth will have a mini-moon for 56.6 days. Welcome to the neighborhood, 2024 PT5. Image credit: Buradaki/Shutterstock.com An asteroid heading towards Earth is set to have an unusual fate: instead of smashing through our planet’s atmosphere, it’s likely to become trapped in orbit and become a mini-moon. It will be a swift visit, however, and is likely to only remain in Earth's gravitational grasp for two months. The asteroid, named 2024 PT5, was discovered on August 7 and measures around 10 meters (33 feet) in diameter. Two astronomers from the Complutense University of Madrid, Carlos...

Did the eruption of Thera cause the Ten Plagues of Egypt, such as the transformation of the Nile into blood?The eruption of the Minoan island of Thera, or Santorini, has popularly been linked to the legend of Atlantis. However, many researchers also attempt to connect it to another famous story: the Ten Plagues. The Bible tells the story of the Ten Plagues of Egypt in the Book of Exodus. Is it possible that the eruption of Thera really could have resulted in these famous Ten Plagues? How the eruption of Thera supposedly explains the Ten Plagues According to advocates of...

Ahram Online reports that archaeologist Ahmed Said El-Kharadly of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) and his colleagues are excavating the military site of Tell Al-Abqain, which is located near the coast of northern Egypt. They have uncovered mudbrick barracks structures dated to the New Kingdom period, between about 1550 and 1070 B.C. "It is an important discovery highlighting the strategic role of [the] Tell Al-Abqain area as a crucial military outpost on the Western military road, protecting Egypt's northwestern borders from potential invasions by Libyan tribes and Sea Peoples," said Mohamed Ismail Khaled, Secretary General of the SCA. The...

Explanation: Orbiting 400 kilometers above Quebec, Canada, planet Earth, the International Space Station Expedition 59 crew captured this snapshot of the broad St. Lawrence River and curiously circular Lake Manicouagan on April 11. Right of center, the ring-shaped lake is a modern reservoir within the eroded remnant of an ancient 100 kilometer diameter impact crater. The ancient crater is very conspicuous from orbit, a visible reminder that Earth is vulnerable to rocks from space. Over 200 million years old, the Manicouagan crater was likely caused by the impact of a rocky body about 5 kilometers in diameter. Currently, there is...

The structure in Quebec, Canada. Image credit: Google Maps Aman browsing Google Maps whilst planning a camping trip in Quebec's Côte-Nord region has potentially discovered the site of an ancient asteroid impact. People have discovered all sorts of oddities while browsing through Google Maps, from "aliens" and camera-hogging cats to the answer to decades old cold cases. In the latest find, Joël Lapointe stumbled across an unusual, roughly spherical structure about 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) across surrounding Marsal Lake in Quebec. Lapointe contacted geophysicist Pierre Rochette of the Centre de recherche en géosciences de l'environnement (CEREGE) in France for help...

Three new species of walnuts have been found above the Arctic Circle, remnants of a time when the North and South Poles were covered in forests. Credit: Florida Museum photo by Jeff Gage =============================================================================== The discovery of extinct walnuts in the Arctic suggests a warmer historical climate with dense forests, extending our knowledge of walnut evolution and geographic spread. Scientists have discovered three new species of extinct walnuts on an island above the Arctic Circle. The fossils were discovered further north than any known walnut species, living or extinct, and represent some of the oldest-known records of this group. A...

The first inhabitants of what is now the United States appeared around 15,000 to 20,000 years ago — a blip in time compared to the annals of some of the earliest places humans lived. Initially, population growth was slow due to the continent’s geographic isolation; significant increases began only after Europeans made their way to the Americas throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. By the 20th century, the U.S. population was experiencing rapid expansion — a trend that has slowed in recent years. Here’s a look at America’s changing population through history, from early prehistoric arrivals to the decline we’re...

...Approximately 4 billion years ago, an asteroid hit Ganymede. Now, a Kobe University researcher has discovered that the Solar system's biggest moon's axis shifted as a result of the impact...the asteroid was around 20 times larger than the one that ended the age of the dinosaurs on Earth...Ganymede is the largest moon in the Solar System, bigger even than the planet Mercury, and is also interesting for the liquid water oceans beneath its icy surface. Like the Earth's moon, it is tidally locked, meaning that it always shows the same side to the planet it is orbiting and thus also...

Scientists have uncovered a vast donut-shaped structure buried thousands of miles beneath our feet. Researchers from the Australian National University used seismic waves generated by earthquakes to peer into the Earth's mysterious molten core. By tracing the path of these waves through the planet, the researchers found a region a few hundred kilometres thick where they travelled two per cent slower than normal.

China has become the first country to gather samples from the far side of the moon and bring them back to Earth in a landmark achievement for the Beijing space programme. A re-entry capsule containing the precious cargo parachuted into a landing zone in the rural Siziwang Banner region of Inner Mongolia on Tuesday after being released into Earth’s orbit by the uncrewed Chang’e-6 probe....The mission’s lander spent two days collecting rock and soil from one of the oldest and largest craters on the moon, the 1,600-mile-wide South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin...

Scientists found that Sedna... had a weird orbit around the sun... hinted that another large mass in the outer solar system was gravitationally pulling on the miniworld...Then, in a 2014 study, astronomers announced that they had detected... 2012 VP113, with an eccentric orbit similar to Sedna's... Since 2016, Brown, Batygin and others... have discovered even more eccentric TNOs — bringing the total to 13...Planet Nine's composition is probably "most like Neptune," ... around 500 astronomical units away from the sun...This far out, it could take between 5,000 and 10,000 years for Planet Nine to complete a single trip around the...

New research indicates that the most recent major collision in our galaxy occurred billions of years later than previously believed.Using data from the Gaia spacecraft, researchers found that the Milky Way's last major galactic collision happened less than three billion years ago, not the eight to 11 billion years previously thought...Newberg, a renowned astrophysicist and Milky Way expert, and Donlon focused on the so-called "wrinkles" in our galaxy, which are formed when other galaxies collide with the Milky Way...By comparing their observations of the wrinkles with cosmological simulations, the team was able to determine that our last significant collision with...

An Egyptian archaeological team discovered the remains of the sixth-century-B.C. structure three years ago during excavations at an archaeological site in the ancient city of Buto, now called Tell Al-Faraeen, in Egypt's Kafr El-Sheikh governorate...Unlike traditional monuments, which typically have a single pylon, the observatory had two pylons facing each other, framing the circular observatory spot and symbolizing akhet, or the horizon where the sun rises. Facing this Akhet was a limestone watchtower that was likely once paired with another and used to observe constellations, Ghonim said.The excavation also uncovered a statue of the falcon-headed god Horus. The depiction of...

new planet-wide electric field that is as fundamental to Earth as gravity has been discovered in a major scientific breakthrough. The ambipolar electric field, which begins 150 miles above the planet, has been described as a “great invisible force” that lifts up the sky and is responsible for the polar winds. The polar winds interact with the jet streams to help drive the majority of weather patterns across the globe. Until now, the field had only been theorised, but a Nasa team, which includes scientists from the University of Leicester, has now sent a rocket into the field and measured...

The longest core of rock ever extracted from beneath Greenland’s thick ice could hold clues about how quickly the island’s frozen covering will melt as the planet warms.Preliminary analysis of the rock and associated sediment suggests that, at some time in the past three million years or so, the material in this core was exposed to air. That means that the ice atop it had melted away, at least temporarily.The work adds to a small but growing cadre of studies that use Greenland’s bedrock to illuminate how unstable the overlying ice has been in the past…Using the latest equipment, the...

A 3,500-year-old jar has been accidentally smashed into pieces by a four-year-old boy during a trip to a museum in Israel. The Hecht Museum in Haifa told the BBC the crockery dated back to the Bronze Age between 2200 and 1500BC - and was a rare artefact because it was so intact. It had been on display near the entrance of the museum without glass, as the museum believes there is "special charm" in showing archaeological finds "without obstructions". The jar was most likely originally intended to be used to carry local supplies, such as wine and olive oil. It...

Explanation: Do underground oceans vent through canyons on Saturn's moon Enceladus? Long features dubbed tiger stripes are known to be spewing ice from the moon's icy interior into space, creating a cloud of fine ice particles over the moon's South Pole and creating Saturn's mysterious E-ring. Evidence for this has come from the robot Cassini spacecraft that orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017. Pictured here, a high resolution image of Enceladus is shown from a close flyby. The unusual surface features dubbed tiger stripes are visible in false-color blue. Why Enceladus is active remains a mystery, as the neighboring moon...

The images are ones you have to see to believe. One of the world's biggest icebergs is stuck spinning in an ocean vortex off the coast of Antarctica.Massive iceberg stuck spinning in ocean vortex off Antarctica | 1:57NEWS CENTER Maine | 104K subscribers | 897,238 views | August 15, 2024