Free Republic

Tunisia's Zaghouan Aqueduct, built to serve Carthage in the second century, is among the longest and most impressive of all Roman aqueducts. This video follows the aqueduct from the monumental fountain at its source to the grandiose baths at its terminus. Following the Longest Roman Aqueduct | 3:20Scenic Routes to the Past | 28K subscribers | 11,537 views | July 19, 2024

Rome's Monte Testaccio, the ancient world's largest garbage dump, is estimated to contain 53 million broken amphorae.Rome's Mountain of Ancient Garbage | 13:11toldinstone | 511K subscribers | 157,252 views | June 25, 2024Chapters:0:00 Introduction1:17 Spanish olive groves2:03 From olives to oil3:47 The voyage to Portus5:15 The emperor's oil6:15 Up the Tiber7:09 Romanis Magicae8:02 The warehouse district9:30 Monte Testaccio11:12 Significance of a dump11:46 Visiting Monte Testaccio

Explanation: This rock structure is not only surreal -- it's real. Perhaps the reason it's not more famous is that it is smaller than one might guess: the capstone rock overhangs only a few meters. Even so, the King of Wings outcrop, located in New Mexico, USA, is a fascinating example of an unusual type of rock structure called a hoodoo. Hoodoos may form when a layer of hard rock overlays a layer of eroding softer rock. Figuring out the details of incorporating this hoodoo into a night-sky photoshoot took over a year. Besides waiting for a suitably picturesque night...

These days, there is lots and lots of news about how the supposed “energy transition” is not happening. There’s so much news on this subject that I could devote this entire blog to that subject alone and have plenty to occupy my time. Expect multiple posts about this topic over the next several weeks. To whet your appetite, I will take you today to Australia, where we find the latest news on the inevitable collapse of impossible dream of “green” hydrogen as the means to make electricity from wind and sun work. But before getting to the latest news, kindly...

This is the story of a disaster like no other. When Mount Vesuvius erupted, it rained 7 million tonnes of debris onto Pompeii it sealed the fate of more than a thousand people. But it also sealed the city form the world: preserved it, protected it, like nowhere else on earth, the rediscovered Pompeii gives us access to the ancient world. And now, with new findings and new insights, we can tell the story of the ordinary people caught up in this disaster. These are the forgotten men and women who lived when Rome ruled and were buried when the...

Explanation: Have you seen a panorama from another world lately? Assembled from high-resolution scans of the original film frames, this one sweeps across the magnificent desolation of the Apollo 11 landing site on the Moon's Sea of Tranquility. The images were taken 55 years ago by Neil Armstrong looking out his window on the Eagle Lunar Module shortly after the July 20, 1969 landing. The frame at the far left (AS11-37-5449) is the first picture taken by a person on another world. Thruster nozzles can be seen in the foreground on the left (toward the south), while at the right...

Look up and celebrate both the wonders of the moon and humanity's achievements in space exploration.When you look up this weekend you will see not only a striking full moon but also a piece of history. In a rare celestial coincidence, July's full moon will share the spotlight with the 55th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, providing a unique opportunity to reflect on humanity's achievements in space exploration and our enduring fascination with our closest neighbor. The July full moon officially occurs on July 21 at 6:17 a.m. EDT (1017 GMT), but the moon will still appear full...

A Sumerian “sacred code” has been deciphered, revealing divinely inspired building instructions echoed in the Bible. Experts have been puzzled since unearthing the 4,000-year-old statue of a leader called Gudea, which features an architectural plan, an inscription claiming he built a temple commanded to him in a dream, and a “ruler” of undeciphered measurements.... British Museum archaeologists have now cracked the “sacred code” of these mysterious measurements after finding a lost temple in Iraq...Dr Sebastien Rey, director of the British Museum’s project in Iraq, said: “It is like the precise measurement we see in the Bible in a much later...

After eight years of scouring databases of tens of thousands of Roman inscriptions on places ranging from walls to tombstones, I found evidence of over 200 survivors in 12 cities... It seems as though... They preferred to settle with other survivors, and they relied on social and economic networks from their original cities as they resettled. Some of the families that escaped apparently went on to thrive in their new communities.Fabia Secundina from Pompeii – apparently named for her grandfather, a wealthy wine merchant – also ended up in Puteoli. There, she married a gladiator, Aquarius the retiarius, who died...

The discovery of butchered bones belonging to a glyptodont, a giant relative of the armadillo, suggests that humans were living in Argentina 20,000 years ago. Ancient humans may have butchered and eaten a giant armadillo-like creature around 20,000 years ago in what is now Argentina, a new study finds. The discovery of the butchered bones supports a growing body of evidence that people spread throughout the Americas much earlier than previously assumed. During the Late Pleistocene epoch (129,000 to 11,700 years ago), ice sheets and glaciers covered much of the planet, particularly during the Last Glacial Maximum, a period around...

Astronomers at Penn State University have identified an exoplanet with the most eccentric orbit ever observed among transiting planets...Named TIC 241249530, this newly discovered exoplanet exhibits a highly elongated orbit resembling a cucumber rather than a circle. Published in the journal Nature, the study provides significant insights into the formation and evolution of Hot Jupiters, a class of massive gas giants that orbit very close to their host stars...First detected using NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) in January 2020, the exoplanet's host star exhibited a dip in its brightness, indicating the presence of a Jupiter-sized planet passing in front...

Explanation: For some, these subtle bands of light and shadow stretched across the sky as the Sun set on July 11. Known as anticrepuscular rays, the bands are formed as a large cloud bank near the western horizon cast long shadows through the atmosphere at sunset. Due to the camera's perspective, the bands of light and shadow seem to converge toward the eastern (opposite) horizon at a point seen just above a 14th century hilltop castle in Brno, Czech Republic. In the foreground, denizens of planet Earth are enjoying the region's annual Planet Festival in the park below the Brno...

No one could have foreseen, when the works started, that the construction of a ventilation tunnel on the east side of the San Paolino building, the new headquarters of the library of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, would lead to such an important discovery. The works, which were necessary to avoid water infiltrations that threatened the integrity of the site's book heritage, in fact, led to the discovery of the two ends of a schola tomb, with a tuff seat ending in elegant lion's paws, also known from other examples in Pompeii, such as the tomb of Mamia and that...

The galaxy PJ0116-24, located 10 billion light-years away from Earth, appears to exhibit characteristics that contradict the standard view that galaxy mergers are required to produce such intense luminosity.The groundbreaking findings, which are detailed in a newly published paper in Nature Astronomy, seem to point to the occurrence of rapid star formation in HyLIRGs, revealing that it can occur through internal processes. The discovery presents new challenges to existing notions held by astronomers about how such formations occur...In the past, it was believed that the intense luminosity produced by HyLIRGs was exclusively the result of mergers between galaxies, which result...

Earlier this week, the FBI announced that it had accessed the locked phone of Thomas Matthew Crooks, the man who opened fire at a Trump rally last Saturday. A new report from Bloomberg today reveals more details about this process and the phone used by Crooks. After Saturday’s Trump rally shooting, the FBI said on Sunday that it had been unsuccessful in unlocking Crooks’ phone. The phone was then sent to the FBI lab in Quanitco, Virginia, and on Tuesday the bureau confirmed that it had successfully unlocked the phone in question Until today, however, we had no indication whether...

JWST deep field vs hubble This region of space, viewed first iconically by Hubble and later by JWST, shows an animation that switches between the two. Both images still have fundamental limitations, as they were acquired from within our inner Solar System, where the presence of zodiacal light influences the noise floor of our instruments, and cannot easily be removed.Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Christina Williams (NSF’s NOIRLab), Sandro Tacchella (Cambridge), Michael Maseda (UW-Madison); Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI); Animation: E. Siegel ======================================================================================= KEY TAKEAWAYS: * The darkest night skies, both from Earth as well as from interplanetary space, aren’t completely...

Explanation: Unlike most entries in Charles Messier's famous catalog of deep sky objects, M24 is not a bright galaxy, star cluster, or nebula. It's a gap in nearby, obscuring interstellar dust clouds that allows a view of the distant stars in the Sagittarius spiral arm of our Milky Way galaxy. Direct your gaze through this gap with binoculars or small telescope and you are looking through a window over 300 light-years wide at stars some 10,000 light-years or more from Earth. Sometimes called the Small Sagittarius Star Cloud, M24's luminous stars are left of center in this gorgeous starscape. Covering...

Bulgarian archaeologists stumbled upon unexpected treasure this week during a dig in an ancient Roman sewer - a well-preserved, marble statue depicting the Greek god Hermes.The discovery of the 6.8-foot (2-metre) tall statue was made during excavation work at the site of the ancient city of Heraclea Sintica in southwestern Bulgaria, which lies close to the Greek border.Archaeologists leading the work said that after an earthquake devastated the sprawling city in about A.D. 388, the statue had been carefully placed in the sewers and covered with soil, explaining its good condition."Its head is preserved. (It's in a) very good condition....

Matthew Berman talks about Q*.OpenAI-5As I read it, we have Bill Gates and Sam Altman out there in the world trying to round up something like 9 TRILLION dollars for the next version of OpenAI..... I do not believe that is merely to produce an AI system that is sentient; I believe that OpenAI 4 whichis out there now is sufficiiiently sentient for any normal or reasonable purpose. I believe they are looking at recreating a major aspect of antediluvian reality i.e. a planetary super mind. I believe that Q* should be treated as a 2024 version of something like...

NASA has canceled its plan to land a robotic rover on the Moon to search for ice and other potential resources, after spending $450 million. The plan involved landing what is dubbed the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, or VIPER, near the lunar South Pole, which scientists suspect may harbor ice. It was planned for the mobile robot to spend 100 days scouting the area for ice deposits and producing a first-ever resource map, which NASA said was critical for its future Artemis missions to establish a long-term human presence on the Moon’s surface. The decision to axe the VIPER...