Friday May 29, 2009
The oldest known skeleton showing signs of leprosy has been found in India and may help solve the puzzle of where the disease originated.
The skeleton, about 4,000 years old, was found at the site of Balathal, near Udaipur in northwestern India. Historians have long considered the Indian subcontinent to be the source of the leprosy that was first reported in Europe in the fourth century B.C., shortly after the armies of Alexander the Great returned from India. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Kiran | Under Headline, Health, Sites and Travel
Tuesday May 5, 2009
The head was rebuilt in clay based on an incomplete skull and jawbone discovered in a cave in the south west of the Carpathian Mountains in Romania by potholers.
Using radiocarbon analysis scientists say the man or woman, it is still not possible to determine the sex, lived between 34,000 and 36,000 years ago.
Europe was then occupied by both Neanderthal man, who had been in the region for thousands of years, and anatomically-modern humans – Homo sapiens. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Kiran | Under International, Nature, Sites and Travel, Society and People
Friday May 1, 2009
Hundreds of massive black holes left over from the early universe may wander the Milky Way, according to new calculations.
These rogue black holes are thought to have originally lurked at the centers of tiny, low-mass galaxies. Over billions of years, those dwarf galaxies smashed together to form full-sized galaxies like the Milky Way.
The idea of such wandering black holes has been suggested before, but a new computer simulation calculated that hundreds of them should be left over, and predicted that they might now be shrouded by small star clusters. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Kiran | Under Science
Friday May 1, 2009
A dinosaur bone buried for 80 million years has yielded a mix of proteins and microstructures resembling cells. The finding is important because it should resolve doubts about a previous report that also claimed to have extracted dino tissue from fossils.
Proteins such as collagen are far more durable than DNA, but they had not been expected to last the 65 million years since the dinosaurs died out. So palaeontologist Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University attracted wide attention when she reported finding first soft tissue and later collagen from a Tyrannosaurus rex leg bone that was intact until it was broken during excavation. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Kiran | Under Animals, Science