Skulls in China Reveal Mass Female Sacrifice

Archaeologists have uncovered more than 80 skulls of young women who may have been sacrificed 4,000 years ago in China.

The skulls were discovered in what is being called a mass grave at the Shimao Ruins at the site of a neolithic stone city in the northern province of Shaanxi.

"This collective burial might also have something to do with the founding ceremony of the city," Sun Zhouyong, deputy head of the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology, told state broadcaster CCTV.

The women's bodies were not found according to China's official news agency Xinhua. Archaeologists in China suspect that a mass outbreak of violence or ethnic conflict may be the cause for the death of the women.

Zhouyong told CCTV that the first 40 skulls found last year at the Shimao Ruins showed "signs of being hit and burned." Archaeologists have since found more than 100 remains of murals and jadeware at the site which dates back to 2,000 BC.

This is not the first time evidence of human sacrifice in early China has been found. Kings and emperors were often buried with their servants and concubines who were sometimes killed first or buried alive.

Read more at Discovery News

'Secret' Labyrinth of Roman Tunnels Mapped

Deep under the streets and buildings of Rome is a maze of tunnels and quarries that dates back to the very beginning of this ancient city. Now, geologists are venturing beneath Rome to map these underground passageways, hoping to prevent modern structures from crumbling into the voids below.

In 2011, there were 44 incidents of streets or portions of structures collapsing into the quarries, a number that rose to 77 in 2012 and 83 to date in 2013. To predict and prevent such collapses, George Mason University geoscientists Giuseppina Kysar Mattietti and scientists from the Center for Speleoarchaeological Research (Sotterranei di Roma) are mapping high-risk areas of the quarry system.

The mapping is important, Kysar Mattietti told LiveScience, because through the years, Roman citizens have taken the patching of the quarry systems into their own hands.

"The most common way is to take some big plastic bags and fill them with cement and stick them in the holes," she said.

Lucky geology

Volcanism created the land Rome was built upon. These volcanic rocks, or tuff, were a boon to Rome's earliest architects, who soon learned the tuff was strong and easy to carve into building blocks. Lighter, less compacted volcanic ash was used as a main ingredient in mortar.

The first Romans were savvy, Kysar Mattietti said. The geoscientists quarried outside the city, and found that even when the suburbs began to encroach over the quarries, the ancient Romans knew to keep the tunnels narrow enough so that the ground above was still supported.

But two things worked against the long-term stability of the tunnels.

The first was Mother Nature. As soon as the rock is exposed to air, it starts to weather, Kysar Mattietti said. The second problem was human. Later generations kept building, using the same quarries for rock and widening the tunnels beyond their original size to create new structures above them.

Secret passageways

The tunnels are something of an open secret in Rome. Over the years, once quarrying ended, people repurposed the underground labyrinth as catacombs, for mushroom farming and as an unofficial sewer system. During World War II, people used the tunnels as bomb shelters.

But younger Romans are less aware of the geological hazard under the city, Kysar Mattietti said. And few realize the quarries' extent.

"Since they weren't serving any use, people tend to forget what can be a problem," Kysar Mattietti said.

Now, Kysar Mattietti and other geoscientists are using laser 3-D scanning to search for hidden weaknesses in the tunnels. The researchers also enter the tunnels through manholes and map the labyrinth by hand once they're sure the area is safe.

"There might be cracks, so they will be showing as veins almost, or openings, so we map the openings and map any kind of detachment," she said. In some spots, the ceiling of the tunnel sloughs off like cracking plaster. In others, there are total collapses — sometimes not reaching quite to street level, but leaving very little ground between the surface and the void.

"It's interesting, because at times when you are down there, you can hear people on top," Kysar Mattietti said.

To fix critical points, city officials seal off the unstable point and pour mortar into the tunnel, filling the entire void instead of simply patching over the top.

"What the municipality wants to do is to basically have a map of the risk so at that point they can on their side decide what kind of intervention needs to be done," Kysar Mattietti said.

Read more at Discovery News

Ancient Humans Had Sex with Mystery Relatives

A new, improved sequencing of ancient human relative genomes reveals that Homo sapiens didn't only have sex with Neanderthals and a little-understood line of humans called Denisovans. A fourth, mystery lineage of humans was in the mix, too.

As reported by the news arm of the journal Nature, new genetic evidence suggests that several hominids -- human relatives closer than humans' current living cousin, the chimpanzee -- interbred more than 30,000 years ago. This group of kissing cousins included an unknown human ancestor not yet revealed by the ancient DNA record.

"It's implied it could be something like Homo erectus or similar," said Carles Lalueza-Fox, a paleogenomics researcher at Pompeu Fabra University in Spain, who was not involved in the research, but who was present at a talk on the findings given by lead author David Reich of Harvard Medical School at a meeting on ancient DNA sponsored by the Royal Society in London on Nov. 18. Homo erectus is an extinct species of human that originated in India and spread into Asia.

Ancient human lineages

Neanderthals are an extinct group of humans who lived between about 30,000 and 130,000 years ago. Despite their reputation as bone-headed dummies, Neanderthals were likely as advanced as modern humans in areas such as tool-making, though they were probably less socially adept.

Denisovans are a far more mysterious group. These early humans lived in Siberia and probably split off from the branch of the human family tree that would eventually give rise to Neanderthals about 300,000 years ago. Little is known about how Denisovans lived and what they looked like.

But genetic analyses of Neanderthals, Denisovans and modern humans suggest the three groups occasionally had sex and produced offspring. Denisovan genes show up in modern Pacific Islanders and in people from Southeast Asia and southern China. Neanderthal genes appear in 1 to 4 percent of modern Eurasian people, suggesting that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals interbred after modern humans trekked out of Africa.

For unknown reasons, Homo sapiens are the only human survivors, as all others in the Homo genus eventually went extinct.

New genomes, new discoveries

The new research has been submitted to a scientific journal for publication. Under the journal's rules, lead author Reich cannot speak to the news media about the study until the paper comes out.

A Nature News reporter who attended the Nov. 18 talk, however, reports that Reich and his colleagues have created much more complete sequences of the Denisovan and Neanderthal genomes than those used in previous research.

The sequences confirmed previous findings that Denisovans mated with the ancestors of Pacific Islanders and East Asians, but also revealed a surprise: Genetic traces of an unknown population of human ancestors were found in the Denisovan gene, suggesting even more interbreeding than previously expected. Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London, described the ancient environment to Nature as a "'Lord of the Rings'-type world" with many human populations living side-by-side.

Lalueza-Fox said the question of the mystery fourth ancestor is a "paleontological debate," but that the genetic work done by Reich and his colleagues opens the door to a deeper understanding of the individual diversity of ancient human ancestors. New techniques will enable researchers to tease out original DNA from later contaminants, he said.

Read more at Discovery News

Merging Black Holes Trapped in Galactic Death Spiral

We now know that the vast majority of galaxies have supermassive black hole behemoths living in their cores. We also suspect that they grow when their host galaxies merge with other galaxies, eventually spawning the mother of all growth spurts: black hole mergers — when bigger black holes with masses millions or even billions of times the mass of the sun are created. Now, with the help of NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), two supermassive black holes have been discovered, caught in the middle of a merging dance in the center of a galaxy 3.8 billion light-years away.

WISE’s primary mission came to an end in 2011 after its coolant ran dry, but a new batch of data has just been released and an oddity was discovered. Assumed to be a lively star-forming region, astronomers soon realized the infrared object known as WISE J233237.05-505643.5 had some weird properties. With the help of followup studies by the Australian Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) near Narrabri, Australia, and the Gemini South observatory in Chile, the real nature of the object was unraveled.

“At first we thought this galaxy’s unusual properties seen by WISE might mean it was forming new stars at a furious rate,” said WISE project manager Peter Eisenhardt, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “But on closer inspection, it looks more like the death spiral of merging giant black holes.”

When active black holes “feed” on surrounding matter in galactic hubs, a superheated plasma forms around the black hole’s event horizon. Through complex physics in the intense relativistic environment that are not yet fully understood, jets blast from the poles of the spinning black hole, generating powerful emissions. In the case of WISE J233237.05-505643.5, it appears that two black holes are orbiting one another, separated by only a few light-years (which is very close considering the gigantic masses of these huge multi-million solar mass black holes), and one of the black hole’s jets are being “wiggled” by the gravitational interactions with its merging partner.

“We think the jet of one black hole is being wiggled by the other, like a dance with ribbons,” said Chao-Wei Tsai, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, lead author of this research set to appear in a paper to be published in the Dec. 10 issue of Astrophysical Journal. “If so, it is likely the two black holes are fairly close and gravitationally entwined.”

There’s only one way this extreme cosmic dance will end — both black holes will eventually spiral together, losing energy and momentum to gravitational waves rippling from their spacetime warping, collide and merge to form an even bigger black hole.

Black hole mergers are a rare event to observe and only a few candidates have been found. Some black hole merger candidates have been identified, but this example is the most distant discovered to date. Following the WISE discovery of the black hole pair, radio emission data from the ATCA spotted the strange zig-zag pattern one of the black holes’ jets seemed to be producing. Then, from infrared/optical data gathered by Gemini South, the anomalous jet wiggle was confirmed. Clumpiness in material surrounding one of the suspected black holes also indicates the local region is being perturbed by the gravitational presence of another black hole.

Read more at Discovery News

Understanding Hearing

Children learning to speak depend on functional hearing. So-called cochlear implants allow deaf people to hear again by stimulating the auditory nerve directly. Researchers at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) are working to overcome current limits of the technology. They are investigating the implementation of signals in the auditory nerve and the subsequent neuronal processing in the brain. Using the computer models developed at the TUM manufacturers of cochlear implants improve their devices.

Intact hearing is a prerequisite for learning to speak. This is why children who are born deaf are fitted with so-called cochlear implants as early as possible. Cochlear implants consist of a speech processor and a transmitter coil worn behind the ear, together with the actual implant, an encapsulated microprocessor placed under the skin to directly stimulate the auditory nerve via an electrode with up to 22 contacts.

Adults who have lost their hearing can also benefit from cochlear implants. The devices have advanced to the most successful neuroprostheses. They allow patients to understand the spoken word quite well again. But the limits of the technology are reached when listening to music, for example, or when many people speak at once. Initial improvements are realized by using cochlear implants in both ears.

A further major development leap would ensue if spatial hearing could be restored. Since our ears are located a few centimeters apart, sound waves form a given source generally reach one ear before the other. The difference is only a few millionths of a second, but that is enough for the brain to localize the sound source. Modern microprocessors can react sufficiently fast, but a nerve impulse takes around one hundred times longer. To achieve a perfect interplay, new strategies need to be developed.

Modeling the auditory system

The perception of sound information begins in the inner ear. There, hair cells translate the mechanical vibrations into so-called action potentials, the language of nerve cells. Neural circuitry in the brain stem, mesencephalon and diencephalon transmits the signals to the auditory cortex, where around 100 million nerve cells are responsible for creating our perception of sound. Unfortunately, this "coding" is still poorly understood by science.

"Getting implants to operate more precisely will require strategies that are better geared to the information processing of the neuronal circuits in the brain. The prerequisite for this is a better understanding of the auditory system," explains Professor Werner Hemmert, director of the Department for Bio-Inspired Information Processing, at the TUM Institute of Medical Engineering (IMETUM).

Based on physiological measurements of neurons, his working group successfully built a computer model of acoustic coding in the inner ear and the neuronal information processing by the brain stem. This model will allow the researchers to further develop coding strategies and test them in experiments on people with normal hearing, as well as people carrying implants.

Read more at Science Daily

Baby Dino Fossil: So Intact It's Lifelike

It may be bony looking, but a newly unearthed fossil of a baby dinosaur is so complete that it appears to hop out of the rock in which it was entombed.

The dinosaur is now believed to be among the best preserved dinosaurs in the world and it is the first known baby Chasmosaurus belli fossil.

“It’s pretty exciting. It’s a super specimen and I’m very lucky to be the guy that found it,” Philip Currie, Canada Research Chair in Dinosaur Paleobiology at the University of Alberta, said in a press release. “There’s no question this is one of the very best ones I’ve ever found.”

The baby dinosaur lived 72 million years ago and was about three years old when it died. Currie thinks it probably drowned.

He found the remains on a steep hillside while dino hunting in Alberta’s badlands at a place called Dinosaur Provincial Park. At first he noticed a piece of skull protruding from the Earth. He thought it might be part of a turtle skeleton, just because of what was sticking out and because turtles were also common there, but a day’s worth of digging unveiled the young near-complete dinosaur.

The skeleton is fully intact minus the arms, which Currie thinks were eroded away by a sinkhole several thousand years ago.

Chasmosaurus was a horned, plant-eating dinosaur that was a relative of Triceratops. It once flourished in Alberta’s badlands.

The remains have rocketed to dino stardom at the University of Alberta’s Laboratory for Vertebrate Paleontology, a collection that includes more than 50,000 specimens ranging in age from 450 million to 10,000 years old.

Read more at Discovery News

Weird Organ Makes Koalas Sound Like Frogs

Simple calculations suggest koalas should have high-pitched voices. That's because the pitch generated by an object is linked to its size, and usually animals' vocal chords tend to be large or small according to the mass of their bodies.

But koalas have relatively low voices, especially males, which produce bellowing sounds during the mating season that alternately sound like a donkey braying and a frog vomiting. The average pitch of this bellow is 20 times lower than an animal that weighs 8 kilograms (18 lbs.) and more typical of an animal the size of an elephant, according to a study published today (Dec. 2) in the journal Current Biology.

So what's the koalas' secret? The animals actually have an extra "organ" outside the larynx, which contains the vocal chords that mammals and other animals use. In the koala's case, the vocal chords consist of long fleshy folds of tissue in the soft pallet between the upper throat, or pharynx, and the nasal cavities. When the koalas breathe in, they can push air through these "velar vocal folds," as the authors call them, to make low-pitched sounds, according to the study. This is quite unusual, they wrote.

"We have discovered that koalas possess an extra pair of vocal folds that are located outside the larynx, where the oral and nasal cavities connect," Benjamin Charlton, a study co-author and researcher at the University of Sussex, said in a statement. "We also demonstrated that koalas use these additional vocal folds to produce their extremely low-pitched mating calls."

In their study, Charlton and colleagues examined the larynxes and throats of 10 male koalas and found these vocal folds in the animals. Female koalas have also been known to bellow and should also be studied, the researchers wrote.

Read more at Discovery News

Ancient 'Ghostbuster' Creatures Pooped Together

Enormous herds of rhino-like animals turned parts of what is now Argentina into minefields of dung, new fossils reveal.

These massive herbivores were dicynodonts, mammal-like reptiles that looked something like a cross between a rhinoceros and the demon dogs from "Ghostbusters." Argentine researchers have now found that these dicynodonts pooped in communal latrines, designated areas for depositing dung.

Many modern-day animals, including elephants, llamas and rhinos, poop in communal latrines. Even raccoons do it, much to the irritation of homeowners whose backyards are chosen as the places to defecate. Fossilized hyena poop from several hundred thousand years ago was deposited in communal latrines, but the behavior has not been found further back in the fossil record.

"This is the only case of megaherbavore latrine and it's the oldest," found fossilized, said study researcher Lucas Fiorelli of the Centro Regional de Investigaciones Científicas y Transferencia Tecnológica in La Rioja, Argentina.

Herd of reptiles

Fiorelli and his colleagues began excavating in northwest Argentina two years ago and quickly uncovered fossilized poop — known as coprolites — by the bucket load. These coprolites date back to the middle Triassic, 240 million years ago. In this era, small dinosaurs were just beginning to appear, but the world belonged to strange mammal-like reptiles, including the famous sail-backed Dimetrodon.

In some areas, there were as many as 94 rounded fossil poops every 10 square feet (1 square meter). The coprolites varied in size from just about half an inch (1 centimeter) in diameter to more than a foot (35 cm) wide. Such variation in such a small area strongly suggested a herd of young and old animals living together, defecating communally.

In total, the researchers found eight separate latrine spots. Most of the coprolites were oval or spherical, with a few "sausagelike" outliers and a few shaped like cow patties. The only animal large enough to produce dung balls more than a foot in diameter in this region was Dinodontosaurus, a beaky, tusked bruiser that could weigh up to 6,600 pounds (3,000 kilograms). In comparison, a modern African female bush elephant weighs about 8,000 lbs. (3,600 kg).

Communal pooping

Modern animals use communal latrines for communication — a big pile of dung can say anything from "dominant male lives here" to "fertile female nearby!" Communal defecation also prevents animals from spreading parasites, because they don't poop where they eat, Fiorelli said. It's not possible to know why Dinodontosaurus engaged in communal pooping, but the behavior could have served a similar purpose.

"It's an important social behavior," Fiorelli said. "They were gregarious animals."

The discovery is not only the first evidence of Triassic communal latrines; it's also the first direct evidence of Dinodontosaurus's diet. Most researchers agreed that this weird creature was a vegetarian, but only based on the animal's beaklike jaw. The gray-brown coprolites contained no animal bones, only woody plant material, seeds and pollen, Fiorelli and his colleagues found. The analysis reveals that Dinodontosaurus was indeed herbivorous.

Fiorelli and his colleagues have plans for more excavations in the region. They also plan to take a closer look at the Dinodontosaurus poop, which provides direct evidence of the kind of plants that were in the area 240 million years ago.

Read more at Discovery News

The Mystery of Neutron Stars Heats Up

Until now, scientists were pretty sure they knew how the surface of a neutron star -- a super dense star that forms when a large star explodes and its core collapses into itself -- can heat itself up.

However, research by a team of scientists led by a Michigan State University physicist has researchers rethinking that.

Scientists had long thought that nuclear reactions within the crust, the thick, solid, outermost layer of the star, contributed to the heating of the star's surface.

However, writing in the journal Nature, Hendrik Schatz and colleagues report results from theoretical calculations that identify previously unknown layers where nuclear reactions within the crust cause rapid neutrino cooling. Neutrinos are elementary particles created through radioactive decay that pass quickly through matter.

"These cooling layers are pretty shallow beneath the surface," said Schatz, a professor of physics and astronomy. "If heat from deeper within the star comes up, it hits this layer and never makes it to the surface."

Schatz said this discovery produces more questions than answers.

"This completely changes the way we think about the question of the star's hot surface," he said. "It's a big puzzle now."

On the sub-atomic level, the team found that the process is greatly affected by the shape of the reacting nuclei.

"Many nuclei are round, and that suppresses the neutrino cooling," said Sanjib Gupta, co-author and faculty member at IIT Ropar in India. "In this case, the nuclei are predicted by theorists to be 'deformed,' more football-shaped."

Read more at Science Daily

7 Ultimate Destinations for Booze Aficionados

Jack Daniel’s Distillery – Lynchburg, Tenn.

If you think of drinking as something to be done on your couch or in a dive bar, you’re not a booze aficionado. But if you’re willing to hop on a plane to find out more about your favorite beer, wine or cocktail, you most certainly are. If that’s the case, these seven destinations around the world should all be on your list of places to visit. It make take a few years: They range from Wisconsin to Moscow to Amsterdam to the Swiss Alps. But they’re all worth the trip.

Despite the fact that Moore County, home to Lynchburg, has been a dry county ever since Prohibition, it’s home one of the top destinations for real booze lovers: the Jack Daniel’s Distillery.

The basic tour is mostly outdoors, going from the "Rickyard" where charcoal for mellowing the whiskey comes from, to the limestone cave spring whose water is reserved for making Jack Daniel’s, to the vats in the Barrelhouse, built in 1938. For a nominal fee, you can tour the distillery itself and get a taste of the famous Old No. 7.

Russia Vodka Museum – Moscow

Heading anywhere but Russia to learn about vodka would be like heading to New York to learn about bourbon. The Vodka Museum, which recently moved to Moscow from St Petersburg, recounts the long (1,000 years plus) and storied history of the clear liquor.

In the 1920s, it served as currency in Siberia; front line soldiers in World War II were given daily rations of 100 grams to get them through the day, per Stalin’s order. The museum includes a tasting hall, with near daily tastings.

National Brewery Museum – Potosi, Wisc,

Back in the United States, the National Brewery Museum in Wisconsin is dedicated to preserving the products that accompany drinking more than telling the story of the drink. But if you like beer culture, it’s a great place, full of neon signs, old brewing equipment, posters and all kinds of bottles.

There’s even a cave used to keep beer cold before the advent of refrigeration, now used as a display area for all the other goodies.

Monsteiner Brewery, Switzerland

Of course, Americans don’t have a monopoly on great beer. If you want to take your knowledge of the stuff to another level, climb high in the Alps to Monstein, 5,300 feet above sea level. No offense to Potosi, Wisconsin, but a great location adds a lot to an experience. Such is the case at the Monsteiner Brewery.

Forbes recommends the opportunity to taste nine beers (all made with mountain spring water). The brewery also has a shop offering bacon, cheese and bread- making your mountain experience delicious and complete.

House of Bols – Amsterdam, Netherlands

Unlike the other destinations on the list, Amsterdam's House of Bols isn't dedicated to a specific type of alcohol. Rather, it's devoted to the world of cocktails and bar tending, specifically to Bols brand vodkas, gins, genevers and liquers.

The highlight of the self-guided tour (for $15) is the Hall of Taste, where you can explore the boozy flavors and aromas. There are a lot of other things to do as well: a variety of cocktail workshops (bridal, springtime, culinary), cocktail catering, and martini cocktail parties.

Read more at Discovery News