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Reservoirs in the heart of an ancient Maya city were so polluted with mercury and algae that the water likely was undrinkable. Researchers from the University of Cincinnati found toxic levels of pollution in two central reservoirs in Tikal, an ancient Maya city that dates back to the third century B.C. in what is now northern Guatemala. UC's findings suggest droughts in the ninth century likely contributed to the depopulation and eventual abandonment of the city. "The conversion of Tikal's central reservoirs from life-sustaining to sickness-inducing places would have both practically and symbolically helped to bring about the abandonment of...

On the night of July 4, the full moon will pass through part of Earth’s shadow, creating a lunar eclipse that will be visible across North America and South America. This will be the first lunar eclipse visible from this part of the world since 2019. People in some places in Africa and western Europe will also be able to see part of the eclipse. The eclipse will be the perfect celestial event for those across the United States staying up late after Independence Day fireworks, as long as clouds don’t interfere. In a penumbral lunar eclipse, the moon passes...

Villagers in what is today Israel were the first to cultivate olive trees, an international study that pooled data from countries surrounding the Mediterranean Sea has concluded. This start of olive domestication apparently began in the Galilee around 7,000 to 6,500 years ago, the team estimates. Olives and especially olive oil were staples of ancient economies around the Mediterranean Basin: The oil was used for cooking, lighting as well as medicinal and ritual purposes. But so far there has been little agreement among researchers as to where and when people first domesticated the plant. Dating estimates have ranged from more...

Scientists in the United Kingdom have discovered a rare bone, called the os cordis, in chimpanzees with a common heart condition. The implications of this finding could extend to humans, who share a close genetic relationship to chimps. Cattle, buffalo, and sheep have it. So do otters, camels, and dogs. Primates, not so much—at least that’s what scientists thought. The os cordis, a small bone found in the hearts of certain animals, is also present in some chimpanzees, according to research published today in Scientific Reports. It’s the first time os cordis has been detected in a great ape species....

Surely, Timothy Litzenburg is a wealthy man. As one of the lead plaintiffs' attorneys suing Monsanto over the alleged (but factually incorrect) claim that its product Roundup (glyphosate) causes cancer, he likely has had several nice paydays in recent years as the company has been slammed with one jackpot verdict after another. Lawsuits have cost its parent company, Bayer, billions of dollars. The trouble with money, however, is that no matter how much you have, you never really have enough. You always want more. Litzenburg wanted more, too, and he knew just how to do it. After seeing how easy...

How to tell if your phone has Covid 19 installed AND HOW to remove it:Step 1. Go to SettingsStep 2. Click on GOOGLE If you see COVID 19 at the top of the list you have it on your phone.  How to remove it? Step 1.   Click on PLAY STORE and then SETTINGS and change to DO NOT AUTOUPDATE APPS. Then go to your main screen and go to step 2. Step 2.   Go to Settings then go to SECURITY AND LOCATION under Settings and shut off "FIND MY DEVICE". Step 3.   This is the most important part. Make sure your phone...

The Doctor Is In: Scott Atlas and the Efficacy of Lockdowns, Social Distancing, and Closings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZqGSnVt8c8&feature=emb_rel_end

An experimental Covid-19 vaccine being developed by the drug giant Pfizer and the biotech firm BioNTech spurred immune responses in healthy patients, but also caused fever and other side effects, especially at higher doses. The first clinical data on the vaccine were disclosed Wednesday in a paper released on MedRXiv, a preprint server, meaning it has not yet been peer-reviewed or published in a journal. The Pfizer study randomly assigned 45 patients to get one of three doses of the vaccine or placebo. Twelve receive a 10 microgram dose, 12 a 30 μg dose, 12 a 100 μg dose, and...

Explanation: What created this unusual planetary nebula? NGC 7027 is one of the smallest, brightest, and most unusually shaped planetary nebulas known. Given its expansion rate, NGC 7027 first started expanding, as visible from Earth, about 600 years ago. For much of its history, the planetary nebula has been expelling shells, as seen in blue in the featured image. In modern times, though, for reasons unknown, it began ejecting gas and dust (seen in red) in specific directions that created a new pattern that seems to have four corners. These shells and patterns have been mapped in impressive detail by...

Free to Choose Medicine (FTCM) is a policy proposal that would lower the cost of pharmaceutical drugs while expediting approval of potentially life-saving treatments. In short, FTCM would relieve needless pain and suffering and save lives. So, why is the government anti-FTCM? FTCM allows health care choices to be made by patients and doctors, not the federal government. In the drug approval process, after Phase I safety testing, and at least one Phase II efficacy test, drugs that are awaiting approval in the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) drug approval pipeline would be available to patients via a Free to...

Meanwhile, the Doppler discovery of extrasolar planets orbiting very close to their parent stars has raised a different problem. Many of the planets are so close to their stars (<0.1 AU), and so hot, that they cannot be supposed to have formed where we now observe them. By inference, they could have formed at larger distances (several AU) and then migrated inwards. What would cause this inward migration? As with the solar system case, the root cause may be an exchange of angular momentum with material surrounding the planets at their formation. In particular, if the extrasolar planets formed in...

Eighteen rogue planets that seem to have broken all the rules about being born from a central, controlling sun may force a rethink about how planets form, astronomers said on Thursday... "The formation of young, free-floating, planetary-mass objects like these is difficult to explain by our current models of how planets form," Zapatero-Osorio said... They are not linked to one another in an orbit, but do move together as a cluster, she said... Many stars in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, may have formed in a similar manner to the Orion stars, she said. So there could be similar,...

MYSTERY surrounds why an anti-malaria drug is not being tested as a Covid-19 treatment in combination with zinc, which doctors say is crucial for efficacy. As we reported recently, President Trump revealed he was taking hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) alongside zinc after reports that many doctors are doing the same to help ward off Covid-19. Criticism of the President rose sharply after a non-randomised study published in the Lancet said that HCQ provided no benefit to hospitalised Covid-19 patients while being linked to increased deaths. What the mainstream media did not point out is that the Lancet study failed to test HCQ with zinc. Other experts...

Keep in mind, no studies have been done to demonstrate that either a cloth mask or the N95 mask has any effect on transmission of the COVID-19 virus. Now that we have established that there is no scientific evidence necessitating the wearing of a face mask for prevention, are there dangers to wearing a face mask, especially for long periods? Several studies have indeed found significant problems with wearing such a mask. This can vary from headaches, to increased airway resistance, carbon dioxide accumulation, to hypoxia, all the way to serious life-threatening complications. While most agree that the N95 mask...

This Wednesday June 24, Dr Didier Raoult, the esteemed professor of infectious diseases at the IHU-Marseille, presented a shock testimony at a special commission, in the context of the “information mission about the impact and the consequences of the coronavirus epidemic, in all its dimensions,” by the French national assembly. Professor Raoult’s testimony seemed to be feared by the president of the commission, MP Brigitte Bourguignon, from President Macron’s ruling party, who warned that the audition was not to be a TV series or a popular tribunal. There were important aspects that were not covered in this testimony. For...

Explanation: What are those spots on Jupiter? Largest and furthest, just right of center, is the Great Red Spot -- a huge storm system that has been raging on Jupiter possibly since Giovanni Cassini's likely notation of it 355 years ago. It is not yet known why this Great Spot is red. The spot toward the lower left is one of Jupiter's largest moons: Europa. Images from Voyager in 1979 bolster the modern hypothesis that Europa has an underground ocean and is therefore a good place to look for extraterrestrial life. But what about the dark spot on the upper...

What gives? A lot of new cases with a low death toll?

A spike in Covid-19 cases a few weeks after the protest and riots - who would've thunk it? https://twitter.com/RealJamesWoods/status/1277298670514270209

The object found was a large lead ingot or 'pig' (about half a metre long, weighing 63 kilograms). The 'writing' reported by Mr Jones was a cast Latin inscription confirming that it was Roman and about 2,000 years old... The exploitation of Britain's natural resources was one of the reasons cited by Roman authors for the invasion of Britain by the Emperor Claudius in AD 43... Lead ore or galena contains silver as well as lead, and both were valuable commodities for the Romans. Less than a hundred lead ingots of this type are known from the mines of Roman...

New emerging DNA evidence suggests that living Greeks are indeed descendants of the ancient Mycenaeans, who ruled mainland Greece and the Aegean Sea from 1,600 BC to 1,200 BC. The proof comes from a study in which scientists analyzed the genes from the teeth of 19 people across various archaeological sites within mainland Greece and Mycenae. A total of 1.2 million letters of genetic code were compared to those of 334 people across the world. Genetic information was also compiled from a group of thirty modern Greek individuals in order to compare it to the ancient genomes. This allowed researchers...