"A University of Colorado Boulder-led team excavating a Maya village in El Salvador buried by a volcanic eruption 1,400 years ago has unexpectedly hit an ancient white road that appears to lead to and from the town, which was frozen in time by a blanket of ash.

The road, known as a "sacbe," is roughly 6 feet across and is made from white volcanic ash from a previous eruption that was packed down and shored up along its edges by residents living there in roughly A.D. 600, said CU-Boulder Professor Payson Sheets, who discovered the buried village known as Ceren near the city of San Salvador in 1978. In Yucatan Maya, the word "sacbe" (SOCK'-bay) literally means "white way" or "white road" and is used to describe elevated ancient roads typically lined with stone and paved with white lime plaster and that sometimes connected temples, plazas and towns.

The sacbe at the buried village of Ceren -- which had canals of water running on each side -- is the first ever discovered at a Maya archaeology site that was built without bordering paving stones, said Sheets. The road was serendipitously discovered by the team while digging a test pit through 17 feet of volcanic ash in July to analyze agricultural activity on the edges of Ceren, considered the best preserved Maya village in Central America.

"Until our discovery, these roads were only known from the Yucatan area in Mexico and all were built with stone linings, which generally preserved well," said Sheets of CU's anthropology department. "It took the unusual preservation at Ceren to tell us the Maya also made them without stone. I'd like to say we saw some anomaly in the ground-penetrating radar data that guided us to the Ceren sacbe, but that was not the case. This was a complete surprise."

The sacbe was struck almost dead-on by the excavators of the 3-meter by 3-meter test pit, said Sheets, with the full width of road visible. In order to follow the sacbe, two subsequent test pits were excavated to the north and confirmed the sacbe had a minimum length of at least 148 feet long -- about half the length of a football field.

The sacbe appears to be headed toward two Ceren ceremonial structures less than 100 feet away -- buildings that were unearthed in Ceren by Sheets and his team in 1991. One structure is believed to have been used by a female shaman. The adjacent community ceremonial structure contained evidence -- including the bones of butchered deer, a deer headdress painted red and blue and a large alligator-shaped pot -- that large quantities of food and drink were being prepared and dispensed to villagers in the town plaza during what Sheets believes was a crop-harvesting ceremony.

"We know there was a celebration going on when the eruption hit," said Sheets. "And we've found no evidence of anyone going back to their houses, gathering up valuables, and fleeing, because all the household doors were tied shut. We think people may have left the plaza and run south, possibly on the sacbe, because the danger was to the north."

Radiocarbon dates from Ceren indicate the eruption occurred in roughly A.D. 630, and CU researchers have even pinpointed the month and time of day the fiery mass of ash and debris from the Loma Caldera volcano rained down on the town from less than a third of a mile away. Sheets believes the eruption hit at roughly 7 p.m. on an August evening because of the mature corn stalks preserved in ash casts, the fact that the farming implements had been brought inside, the sleeping mats had not yet been rolled out, meals had been served but the dishes were not yet washed, and corn was set into pots to soak in water overnight.

Sheets said it is logical that the villagers in the plaza might have used the white sacbe as an emergency route to flee the destruction of the volcano in the dark of night. "How far they might have gotten, I don't know," said Sheets. "It would have been a footrace. I think it is very likely we will find bodies as we follow the sacbe southward in future excavations." To date, no human remains have been found at the village..."

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"Comet Hartley 2 contains water more like that found on Earth than prior comets seem to have, researchers say.

A study using the Herschel space telescope aimed to measure the quantity of deuterium, a rare type of hydrogen, present in the comet's water.

The comet had just half the amount of deuterium seen in comets.

The result, published in Nature, hints at the idea that much of the Earth's water could have initially came from cometary impacts.

Just a few million years after its formation, the early Earth was rocky and dry; something must have brought the water that covers most of the planet today.

Water has something of a molecular fingerprint in the amount of deuterium it contains, and only about a half-dozen comets have been measured in this way.

All of them have exhibited a deuterium fraction twice as high as the oceans, so the current theory holds that asteroids were likely to be the carriers for water; meteorites that they give rise to have roughly the same proportion of deuterium that the Earth's oceans contain.

Clouded measure

However, until now, all of those measured have been so-called Oort Cloud objects, believed to have been formed early in the Solar System's history in the region of the giant planets Neptune and Uranus and kicked out to a great distance as they bumped into the planets and each other.

The assumption has thus been that if anything brought the water to Earth, it must have been asteroids and meteors - despite the fact that comets carry significantly larger amounts of water..."

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"Television’s newest legal drama could be the rawest one ever. It comes later this fall, beamed in from the courtroom near the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. Only you won’t get to watch it.

Right now, there is only one way to witness a so-called military commission for an accused terrorist: Ask the Pentagon to let you travel to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Be warned: Only journalists and representatives of human-rights groups get approved. And those lucky few civilians admitted to the island have to pay several hundred dollars to hang around a baking-hot military base under constant supervision — vastly stricter than any base in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Oh, and they also have to sign a long, confusing list of rules that allows the military to censor all your footage at Gitmo. And if officers think a reporter has violated any of those rules, the journo can kiss future coverage goodbye.

But that’s starting to change. Somewhat.

The new military commissions chief, Brig. Gen. Mark Martins — who once took Danger Room on a tour of Bagram’s detention center — is letting more sunlight peek into the courtrooms of Guantanamo. Tucked into a fawning Weekly Standard profile is the news that the Pentagon will beam a closed-circuit feed from the commissions room back into an undisclosed venue in the continental United States. There’ll be a 40-second delay to protect classified information.

The first such commission to be beamed into the States will probably belong to Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri, the accused mastermind of the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole. Commission officials filed capital charges against al-Nashiri on Wednesday. No date for the hearing has been set.

But the average citizen probably won’t get to see Nashiri’s commission, or any other Gitmo trial. And since there’s no photography permitted in the courtroom — just the indefatigable sketch artist Janet Hamlin — don’t expect any archived video to show up on the Pentagon’s YouTube channel. (The networks will probably get to shoot video of the closed-circuit, though the details are still undetermined.) Military commissions will remain less transparent than U.S. civilian courts..."

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-- "And on the 8th day god said let there be epic and there was this...."

"Everyday life in Iran is often mischaracterised, says the Iranian author and academic – especially when it comes to the struggles of its women. She recommends five books that give us a window on Iranian history and family life.

People have strong images of Iran as a totalitarian country where women can still be stoned for adultery. What are some of the most common misconceptions about Iran?

There is an overwhelming preoccupation with Islam – or more particularly with Islamic fundamentalism – in Western media coverage of Iran. Islam is portrayed as the single defining feature of life there. Of course the Islamic regime constitutes a dominant framework for people’s lives, but they manage nonetheless to lead fully complex lives within that framework. Moreover, many of the problems average Iranians face relate less to Islam than to the economy. A succession of occupations, wars and, more recently, economic sanctions, have crippled Iran and made life quite hard for people there. These financial realities and so much else about the country do not get translated to a western audience.

We will be exploring those realities with your book choices. But before we start, what kind of images spring to mind when you think about your country?

The condition of women comes to mind at once. But the images you mentioned earlier of women being stoned are very extreme and rare incidents. When I think of Iran, I think of the grittiness and the vitality of its women. They endure what are sometimes horrific circumstances, and yet I feel that the intelligence and strength of Iranian women is so much more representative of their lives.

Your next book is also a travel book written by an outsider – Mirrors of the Unseen by Jason Elliot.

Given the history between the countries, it may be a bit of a travesty that I have picked an Englishman to tell us about Iran! The word “orientalist” has such unsavoury connotations these days. But I think of Elliot as an orientalist in the best sense of the word – an outsider guided by a deep curiosity about the Middle East, and devoted to understanding it better. He has also written an account about Afghanistan, An Unexpected Light. Mirrors of the Unseen finds him travelling through Iran over a period of three years..."

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"Just like right out of a Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein novel, Israeli researchers have created a robot brain in which they implanted into the skull of a rat with brain damage allowing it to function normally again.

Matti Mintz of Tel Aviv University in Israel worked with colleagues to build the rodent-sized artificial cerebellum consisting of a computer chip that is electrically wired into the rat’s brain with electrodes.

Since the cerebellum is responsible for coordinating movement, the chip was programmed to take sensory information from the body, interpret it, and communicate it back to the brain stem and throughout the body.

The team conditioned the rat to blink whenever it heard a tone to determine if the robot brain was functioning correctly. When the researchers disabled the rat’s cerebellum, however, the rat could no longer coordinate this behavior. Once the artificial brain was hooked up again, the rat went back to blinking whenever the tone was played.

“It’s proof of concept that we can record information from the brain, analyze it in a way similar to the biological network, and return it to the brain,” Mintz told NewScientist.

While the research is astounding, researchers say the days of having a full-on robotic brain implant are not likely to happen anytime soon.

The work was presented by Mintz at the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence meeting in Cambridge, UK this month."

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"The high-pitched ringing, squealing, hissing, clicking, roaring, buzzing or whistling in the ears that can drive tinnitus sufferers crazy may be a by-product of the brain turning up the volume to cope with subtle hearing loss, a new study suggests. The results, published in the Sept. 21 Journal of Neuroscience, may help scientists understand how the condition arises.

Tinnitus is clearly a disorder of the brain, not the ear, says study coauthor Roland Schaette of the University College London Ear Institute. One convincing piece of evidence: Past attempts to cure the condition by severing the auditory nerve in desperate patients left people completely deaf to the outside world — but didn’t silence the ringing. How the brain creates the maddeningly persistent phantom noise remains a mystery.

Usually, tinnitus is tied to some degree of measurable hearing loss, but not always. “We’ve known for a long time that there are people who report tinnitus whose audiograms are normal,” says auditory neuroscientist Larry Roberts of McMaster University in Canada, who wasn’t involved in the new study. “It has been a puzzle to figure out these exceptions to the rule.”

Schaette and coauthor David McAlpine, also of the UCL Ear Institute, suggest that these exceptions may actually be due to “hidden hearing loss” that shirks detection in standard hearing tests.

The pair focused on the 10 percent of people with tinnitus who seem to have normal hearing. The team recruited 15 women with chronic tinnitus and 18 women who were free of the condition, all of whom had normal hearing tests. The researchers used electrodes to record the brain’s electrical activity as the subjects listened to loud, rapid-fire clicks.

In the people with tinnitus, electrodes picked up a subtle abnormality in one of the brain’s initial electrical response to the clicks. A signal generated by nerve fibers that carry sounds from the ear’s cochlea into the brain was weakened, perhaps because of damage to some of the fibers. This hard-to-detect hearing loss may be driving tinnitus.

A signal generated later in the sound-ear-brain pathway looked normal in people with tinnitus, the team found. In response to the loud clicks, electrical activity in the brainstem was no different between the two groups.

In participants with tinnitus, this seemingly normal signal from the brainstem comes from the brain compensating for its hearing loss by boosting nerve cells’ signal-sending activity in a way that doesn’t depend on the external sounds, Schaette and McAlpine propose. It’s this heightened — and spontaneous — nerve cell activity in the brainstem that leads to the phantom tinnitus sound, they reason..."

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-- Graphic designer, Taras Lesko, created this model papercraft Audi A7, in 245hrs, for the display at the IAG building during the 2012 Audio A7 announcement. Follow the link for more photos!

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"What does desire truly look like? Science hasn’t come up with an answer, because most of us won’t let curious researchers watch us tumbling between the sheets, and surveys aren’t necessarily reliable. Are you willing to jot down answers to questions like “Have you ever felt attracted to your pet schnauzer?”—even if the unshaven young grad student quizzing you insists, “Trust me—your answers are completely anonymous”?

Only one scientist managed to survey a large number of people on a broad range of sexual interests: Alfred Kinsey. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Kinsey and his team interviewed thousands of subjects, asking questions about a tremendous variety of turn-ons, including bondage, bestiality, and silk stockings. But the Kinsey reports are now more than a half century old, and the findings were limited: The subjects were primarily educated, middle-class Caucasians; they were not selected randomly or systematically; and the data consisted of only recollections the subjects chose to share.

Today, a wide variety of scientists—neuroscientists, psych­ologists, anthropologists, biologists, pharmacologists—study desire, and one of their most basic questions remains: Why do we like the things we like? To answer that, we must first determine what people like, and stealing a look at men and women’s true interests has been far from easy.

Until the arrival of the Internet.

In 1991, the year the World Wide Web went online, there were fewer than 90 different adult magazines published in America. Just six years later, there were about 900 pornography sites on the web. Today, there are 2.5 million adult websites. It’s hard to imagine a more revolutionary development in the history of human sexuality. With a visit to an adult video site like PornHub, you can see more naked bodies in a single minute than the most promiscuous Victorian would have seen in an entire lifetime.

By examining raw search data, we can finally view an unfiltered snapshot of human desire. Take a look at the following list. Each phrase is an actual search entered into Dogpile (a popular “meta-engine” combining results from sources like Google and Bing) in May 2010: shemales in prom dresses, Twilight slash Edward and Jacob, black meat on white street, wives caught cheating on cam, best romance novels with alpha heroes, kendra wilkinson sex tape, spanking stories, free gay video tube, Jake Gyllenhaal without shirt, girls gone wild orgies. What immediately jumps out is the remarkable diversity of people’s sexual interests..."

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"Johns Hopkins researchers have devised a protein "switch" that instructs cancer cells to produce their own anti-cancer medication.

In lab tests, the researchers showed that these switches, working from inside the cells, can activate a powerful cell-killing drug when the device detects a marker linked to cancer. The goal, the scientists said, is to deploy a new type of weapon that causes cancer cells to self-destruct while sparing healthy tissue.

This new cancer-fighting strategy and promising early lab test results were reported this week in the online early edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Although the switches have not yet been tested on human patients, and much more testing must be done, the researchers say they have taken a positive first step toward adding a novel weapon to the difficult task of treating cancer.

One key problem in fighting cancer is that broadly applied chemotherapy usually also harms healthy cells. In the protein switch strategy, however, a doctor would instead administer a "prodrug," meaning an inactive form of a cancer-fighting drug. Only when a cancer marker is present would the cellular switch turn this harmless prodrug into a potent form of chemotherapy.

"The switch in effect turns the cancer cell into a factory for producing the anti-cancer drug inside the cancer cell," said Marc Ostermeier, a Johns Hopkins chemical and biomolecular engineering professor in the Whiting School of Engineering, who supervised development of the switch..."

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"Using acceleration 1 trillion times faster than a jet fighter in a maximum turn, researchers have gained new insight into dynamic compression of aluminum at ultrahigh strain rates.

Controlled shock compression has been used for decades to examine the behavior of materials under extreme conditions of pressure and temperature.

Using an ultrafast spectroscopic technique (used to track shocks on a time scale of ten trillionths of a second), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists Jonathan Crowhurst, Michael Armstrong, Kim Knight, Joseph Zaug and Elaine Behymer measured breakouts (driven by laser-induced shocks) in aluminum thin films with accelerations in the range of 10 trillion g's. The research appears in the Sept. 23 edition of the journal Physical Review Letters.

"The details of how solid materials rapidly deform on sub-micron-length scales have been the subject of speculation for decades," Armstrong said. "For the first time, our experiments can test fundamental scaling laws on time and length scales where they may start to break down at strain rates that are orders of magnitude larger than previously examined."

"In solids, a sufficiently large amplitude shock produces irreversible plastic deformation and relaxes the initial stress," Crowhurst said. "As the amplitude continues to increase, and if the shock drive is maintained, a steady-wave shock profile evolves, which propagates indefinitely without change in form."

But the team said that a fundamental understanding of shock-induced deformation is still lacking. In particular, little is understood about the behavior of materials, including metals, during the initial phase of shock compression and at high strain rates..."

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