Some more "sciency" articles that have caught my attention:
Hidden beneath a castle in Halych, western Ukraine, the mysterious room was buried beneath 150 cubic metres of soil and debris.
It is believed the room was covered by a section of wall that collapsed when the castle was bombarded by canons in 1676.
It may also tie in with local legends of a tunnel or network of tunnels beneath the castle.
- "Lost city is discovered in Guatemala after 3,000 YEARS: Mysterious settlement dubbed Los Abuelos was 'one of the most important ceremonial centres' of the Maya civilization"--Daily Mail. The article notes that "[c]overing an area of six square miles (16 sq km), the city, dubbed 'Los Abuelos', may date as far back as 800 BC." According to the article, the city is located in the Maya Biosphere nature reserve (Reserva de Biosfera Maya), about 13 miles from Uaxactun, Guatemala. Of course, it being fashionable to trash Europeans but say nothing critical about other cultures, the article makes a couple odd points. First, talking of when the city was founded, the article states: "To put this into context, 800 BC was the time when people in Britain learned how to use iron for tools, several centuries before the Romans arrived." And the Maya never learned how to make bronze, let alone iron, tools. Another example:
Maya people even engaged in the brutal act of human sacrifice because they though [sic] blood was a potent source of nourishment for their gods – and that they'd get rain and fertile fields in return.
Sadly, some of the humans caught up in such bizarre rituals were the very young, according to skeletal remains at a famous Maya pyramid.
Sadly! One of the reasons that Christianity was welcomed by the natives in Latin America was because the Christian God didn't require brutal human sacrifices.
Researchers from Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi employed Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) technology to penetrate the desert's surface, a tool that allows scientists to peer beneath the dunes without disturbing them.
SAR works by sending out pulses of energy and measuring how much bounces back.
In this case, archaeologists combined SAR data with high-resolution satellite images to scan beneath the desert sands at Saruq Al-Hadid.
The radar detected buried structures and revealed clear signs of metal structures, artifacts, and layers of animal bones in what archaeologists call midden deposits.
By analyzing the radar data with advanced machine learning algorithms, researchers could identify patterns and shapes that pointed to ancient human activity.
While currently inhospitable, the article relates that "the region experienced periods of increased humidity between 6,000 and 5,000 years ago, forming shallow lakes due to significant rainfall events. These lakes supported diverse ecosystems, including flora, fauna, plants and algae — all crucial clues in painting a fuller picture of life in what was once thought uninhabitable."
- "Egyptian archaeologists discover three tombs in Luxor"--AP. Per the article, "Egyptian archaeologists have discovered tombs dating back to the New Kingdom period (1550–1070 B.C.) and identified the names and titles of their owners through inscriptions found within, according to a statement by the tourism and antiquities ministry."
One of the tombs discovered in Luxor on Monday belonged to Amum-em-Ipet, from the Ramesside period, who worked in the estate of Amun. His tomb was mostly destroyed and what remained were depictions of the funeral furniture carriers and a banquet.
Amum-em-Ipet’s tomb begins with a small courtyard leading to an entrance and then a square hall ending with a niche, whose western wall was destroyed.
The other tombs date back to the 18th Dynasty and include one belonging to a man named Baki, who served as a supervisor of the grain silo. Another tomb contains the burial of an individual named “S,” who held multiple roles — he was a supervisor at the Temple of Amun in the oasis, a writer and the mayor of the northern oases.
... But what if these ancestral Africans, from which the vast preponderance of our ancestry comes, were themselves the product of a recent admixture event, and one that left a much more appreciable legacy than the later marginal genetic absorption of mere traces of archaic Neanderthal and Denisovan lineages? Instead of an assimilation, imagine an amalgamation. Perhaps the first modern humans were freaks, a race of hybrid monsters born of what we would today perceive to be abominable unions?
That is what today’s Nature paper, A structured coalescent model reveals deep ancestral structure shared by all modern humans, with first author Trevor Cousins, argues. The paper concludes that our modern human lineage arose out of an admixture event dating to some 300,000 years ago between two hominin species who had split 1.5 million years ago. One lineage, “population A” contributed about 80% of our species’ ancestry. It emerged out of the same lineage that begat Neanderthals and Denisovans. The other, “population B” contributed the remaining 20% of our ancestry. It was only after the mixing between these two human species, evolutionarily as distant as wolves are from coyotes, that the proto-modern human lineage arose, diversified, and went on to conquer Africa, and then the world. So how did population B alter us? The evidence suggests that population B contributed a major software upgrade to be run on hardware mostly from population A, B’s brains hitched to A’s brawn.
Astronomers analyzing a dark energy survey by a ground-based telescope have discovered what might be another dwarf planet orbiting the Sun, but doing so in an orbit so extreme that it reaches the outskirts of the theorized Oort Cloud more than 151 billion miles out.
This object, dubbed, 2017 OF201, was found in 19 different observations from 2011 to 2018, allowing the scientists to determine its orbit. The map to the right is figure 2 from their paper [pdf], with the calculated orbit of 2017 OF201 indicated in red. As you can see, this new object — presently estimated to be about 450 miles in diameter — is not the first such object found in the outer solar system with such a wide eccentric orbit. However, the object also travels in a very different region than all those other similar discoveries, suggesting strongly that there are a lot more such objects in the distant outer solar system.
Its existence also contradicts a model that proposed the existence of a larger Planet X. That theory posited that this as-yet undetected Planet X was clustering the orbits of those other distant Trans-Neptunian objects shown on the map.
The most insidious and fraudulent aspect of modern climate
science isn't flawed models or uncertain predictions... it's the
deliberate erasure of past climatic states that undermine the prevailing
narrative. The IPCC, ostensibly tasked with objective scientific
assessment, has become a vehicle for confirmation bias, selectively
omitting historical climate extremes to support alarmist conclusions.
I've extensively documented this inherent bias, highlighting how it
shapes and distorts their findings (Confirmation Bias within the IPCC).
The author continues:
One such selective amnesia case is the historical megadroughts.
These natural extremes far exceed modern droughts attributed to
human-caused climate change, yet the IPCC habitually overlooks such
critical historical data. A striking example is the Cantona megadrought
in ancient Mexico, a devastating natural event entirely unconnected to
anthropogenic factors. This severe drought, spanning centuries, dwarfs
recent climate events but remains conspicuously absent from IPCC
assessments (Forgotten Extremes: The Megadroughts the IPCC Ignores).
Similarly,
the Medieval Warm Period (MWP)—a globally recognized warm epoch from
roughly 950 to 1250 AD—poses an existential threat to the IPCC-endorsed
narrative that modern warming is unprecedented. Initially documented
extensively, the MWP was systematically erased from mainstream climate
records following the infamous hockey stick graph popularized by Michael
Mann in 1999. This graph significantly flattened historical temperature
variability to emphasize recent warming, providing political ammunition
for urgent climate action despite contradictory historical evidence (The Medieval Warm Period: A Global Phenomenon?).
This
erasure isn't accidental. The IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report (AR6)
minimizes the MWP, often describing it as a regional or modest climate
fluctuation... not a globally significant phase. This vague framing
allows them to avoid confronting the wide body of peer-reviewed evidence
showing synchronized warming across both hemispheres, a conclusion that
undermines the entire premise of modern warming being "unprecedented."
He then discusses the evidence showing that the Medieval Warming period was not a regional phenomena, but global.
- "Still booting after all these years: The people stuck using ancient Windows computers"--BBC Future. Discussing the many pieces of equipment and networks using legacy computers--everything from elevators, railway systems, old but costly printers used for printing artwork, CNC machines, and more.
- "When Were the Gospels Written and How Can We Know?"--The Doston Jones Blog. A look at how scholars date ancient texts using the four Gospels as an example.
- "The Great Timbuktu Book Heist"--Forgotten Footprints. While there are some segments if Islam that have respect for knowledge and books, there are also fundamentalists that are intent on destroying anything of cultural, historical, or intellectual worth. This article relates how librarians in Tumbuktu snuck 400,000 ancient texts past Al Qauda guerillas in order to save the books. From the lede:
In June 2012, Al-Qaeda took over Timbuktu, a city on the edge of the Sahara desert. The goal of the terrorists was to wipe out the city’s history. They launched a vicious assault on Timbuktu’s UNESCO World Heritage sites.
One guy saw the Islamists coming for the thing every oppressor fears: knowledge. The man was Abdel Kader Haidara, the director of the Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Islamic Research, an institute dedicated to preserving Mali’s past.
Since the 1990s, Haidara had painstakingly collected hundreds of thousands of priceless manuscripts, dating from the early 11th century through the 19th century. He was on a mission to prove that Africa has a tradition of writing history and preserving wisdom.
Haidara was racing against time, as the terrorists approached the city and planned to target his institute. He rounded up the rest of the librarians from Timbuktu and briefed them on the challenge ahead. There was a serious risk of losing the centuries-old texts.
They needed to hurry up.
Haidara and his colleagues risked their lives to rescue 95% of the volumes kept in Timbuktu’s libraries in the following nine months. They snuck past Al-Qaeda guards, delivering the manuscripts to safe hands in Mali’s capital, Bamako.
Because of their courage, journalist Joshua Hammer called them “Badass librarians of Timbuktu”.
