Why Would Someone Steal Shakespeare's Head?

“Good frend, for Iesus sake forebeare To digge the dust encloased heare. Bleste be ye man spares these stones, And curste be he moves my bones.”

This is William Shakespeare’s epitaph, dating back to 1616. Though the world’s best- known dramatist, Shakespeare was not being dramatic when he wrote these words. Instead, he was trying to prevent something unsavory that neither his fame nor fortune could deter: his corpse being dug up by grave robbers.

His curse may not have worked, at least not centuries ago: According to a documentary that aired over the weekend, “A radar scan of William Shakespeare’s tomb has discovered signs of tampering with his final resting place that lend credence to a story about his skull being stolen in the 18th century, researchers say.”

The archaeologists cleverly avoided Shakespeare’s curse, which specifically warns against “digging dust” and “moving bones” but says nothing about using ground-penetrating radar. The findings, though indirect, give new life to speculation—long dismissed as rumor—that his head may have been stolen in 1794.

But why would anyone want to steal Shakespeare’s head?

As “The New York Times” noted, one motivation for stealing his skull can be found in phrenology, a wildly popular—and widely believed—pseudoscientific field of “study” begun in the late 1700s in which a person’s skull was believed to reveal his or her personality and other characteristics.

A prominent bump on the forehead, for example, might be assumed to reflect a proficiency in language or dramatics. It’s not surprising that the skull of one of the most famous and important literary figures in history would be coveted and examined.

Skull-Duggery and Grave Robbing

Aside from phrenological curiosity about Shakespeare’s skull specifically, there were other reasons why the bard’s bones might have been disturbed. Throughout most of history, medical knowledge of anatomy was poor and indirect, partly because of fear and taboos against cutting open corpses.

The Renaissance brought an emphasis on practical, real-world knowledge about anatomy, which necessarily meant examining and cutting up the dead. In Europe, the rise of early medical centers created a strong demand for dead bodies; a few cadavers were made available by royal decree, usually the bodies of condemned criminals. In the 1700s, in fact, dissection was a punishment for serious crimes. Demand soon outstripped supply, however, and a black market for cadavers emerged.

Centuries ago it was not uncommon to wear dead strangers’ body parts; in the 1600s and 1700s teeth and hair from dead bodies was sometimes used to make dentures and wigs, respectively (if not respectfully).

By 1720, theft from graveyards was common in London, and grave robbers (or “resurrection men,” as they were known) were making a profit digging up bodies and selling them to anatomists and doctors. Some were so eager to cash in that they didn’t wait for people to die: Irish grave robbers Brendan Burke and William Hare, for example, committed 16 murders and sold the bodies to a well-known London anatomist in 1828.

Read more at Discovery News

Pluto May Have Nitrogen Lakes That Freeze and Thaw

Data collected by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft shows that tiny, distant Pluto not only likely has an ocean beneath its frozen face, but also may have had lakes on its surface in the recent past and likely will have them again in the future.

Even on its warmest days, Pluto is far too cold for surface lakes made of water, but they could contain liquid nitrogen during periods of time when the planet's atmosphere bulks up.

Pluto, which takes 248 years to circle the sun, turns out to have large swaths of real estate with direct overhead sunlight due to an extreme axial tilt of 120 degrees, relative to its orbital plane. Earth, by comparison, is tilted 23 degrees.

That gives Pluto a much broader range of tropical latitudes than Earth, noted New Horizons scientist Richard Binzel, with Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Because arctic and tropical zones alternatively extend over such wide swaths of the dwarf planet's surface, Pluto has regions where both extremes occur, though not at the same time.

Pluto also has a wobble, which causes its axis to tilt up an additional 20 degrees from its present orientation, triggering long-term climate cycles that far exceed anything experienced on Earth, Binzel said.

Pluto is now in an intermediate phase between its climate extremes, with the last peak occurring less than 1 million years ago. Temperatures today measure about minus-400 degrees Fahrenheit.

Variations in the amount of sunlight falling on Pluto have direct impacts on Pluto’s atmosphere, noted New Horizon’s lead scientist Alan Stern, with the Southwest Research Institute.

“We find that Pluto’s atmospheric pressure today is atypically low and that in the past it could have been 1,000 to 10,000 times higher,” exceeding the pressure of Mars by up to 40 times, Stern said.

Computer models show that when Pluto’s temperature and atmospheric pressure are high, conditions could be suitable for liquid nitrogen.

Read more at Discovery News

First 3D Atlas of Extinct Dodo Created

The first-ever 3D atlas of the dodo’s skeletal anatomy has been created, based on the best known skeletons of a bird synonymous with the word extinction.

The atlas, now published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, is the first document to display the dodo skeleton with proportional accuracy, say its creators, a team of international scientists. The atlas also describes previously unknown dodo bones such as kneecaps, ankles, and wrists.

“Being able to examine the skeleton of a single, individual dodo, truly allows us to grasp what an actual dodo looked like and how it must have operated in its island environment,” said project co-contributor Leon Claessens, of the College of the Holy Cross’s biology department, in a statement.

The “island” in question was Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, off the east coast of Madagascar. The huge – about 3 feet tall and weighing up to 40-plus pounds — flightless bird was well adapted to life there. At least it was until Dutch colonists arrived on the island and the bird went extinct by 1693, within about 100 years of man’s arrival.

(The likely culprit for the dodo’s demise, though, was not human hunting but rather the animals that came with the colonists. Dogs, cats, and rats likely wreaked havoc with dodo eggs and young dodos.)

There are only two near-complete dodo skeletons in existence, each discovered between 1899 and 1910 by amateur naturalist Etienne Thirioux. One represents the only known complete skeleton from a single individual dodo. The other is considered near-complete and may contain bones from more than one dodo.

All other dodo samples, the atlas creators say, are not complete and use the bones of many different individual birds.

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Ancient Non-Stick Pan Factory Found in Italy

Italian archaeologists have found a site near Naples where the precursors of non-stick pans were produced more than 2,000 years ago.

The finding confirms that non-stick frying pans, an essential tool in any modern kitchen, were used in the Roman Empire.

The cookware was known as “Cumanae testae” or “Cumanae patellae,” (pans from the city of Cumae) and was mentioned in the first-century Roman cookbook De Re Coquinaria as the most suitable pans for making chicken stews.

However, the pans from Cumae remained a mystery until 1975, when Giuseppe Pucci, archaeologist and professor of history of Greek and Roman art, attempted an identification.

Pucci proposed that a pottery commonly known as Pompeian Red Ware which featured a heavy red-slip coating in the inside, was the “Cumanae testae” from historical sources.

Now Marco Giglio, Giovanni Borriello and Stefano Iavarone, archaeologists at the University of Naples “L’Orientale,” have found evidence in Cumae to support Pucci’s identification.

“We found a dump site filled with internal red-slip cookware fragments. The dumping was used by a pottery factory. This shows for the first time the Cumanae patellae were indeed produced in this city,” Giglio told Discovery News.

Giglio and colleagues found more than 50,000 fragments of lids, pots and pans of various sizes and thickness, each featuring a very distinct coating.

“All the defective artifacts were dumped here. These pieces help us enormously to reconstruct the way the pottery was manufactured,” Giglio said.

Many of the fragments featured the thick internal red-slip coating that provided a non-adherent surface, making the pots and pans ideal for cooking meat-based stews.

“Apart from the production’s defects that made them end up in the dump, all the recovered fragments are of very high quality,” Giglio said.

Only 10 percent of the site once occupied by the pottery factories has been excavated at Cumae, an ancient city overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea about 12 miles west of Naples.

One of the first Greek colonies in Italy, Cumae is best known for having been home to sibyls (Greek prophetess) whose cave was rediscovered in 1932. Rome conquered the city in 338 BC; it was then destroyed by the Neapolitans and subsequently abandoned in 1205.

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Climate Change Is Coming For Your Maple Syrup

On a brisk late February day, some bulge with maple sap while others sport little sap icicles. The blue bags are a little less romantic than the metal pails that Rapp’s forbearers hung off trees, but they have the benefit of being easily weighed and transported.

Measuring those blue bags is crucial for Rapp, a scientist at Harvard Forest in Petersham, Mass., who is studying the impact climate change is having on syrup availability and quality. Sugar maples generally have to be about 40 years old before they're ready to be tapped, which means the knowledge scientists are building now incredibly valuable for the future of the industry.

“We’ve been having huge flows early this season,” Rapp said, standing next to a maple syrup boiler as a sweet steam rose from the bubbling vat of syrup through the vent in the roof of the sugar shack.

In what has been the warmest winter on record for New England, producers tapped trees two to three weeks earlier than usual. A little to the east of his sugar shack, Rapp said it was the “first time in memory” producers tapped their trees in January, an annual ritual usual relegated to the second or third week of February.

Maple syrup production is intimately tied to the weather. Sap only flows when temperatures rise above freezing during the day and drop below it during the night. That temperature difference creates enough pressure to push sap out of the tree — one of nature’s amazing feats.

But warming driven by human-caused climate change is having an impact on these natural processes. The easiest one to spot is the shift in maple syrup season as winters have warmed by about 1°F (0.6°C) per decade across much of the Northeast since 1970.

“In general over New York and New England, the season is now beginning about seven days earlier than it did 40-50 years ago and ending 10 days earlier,” Timothy Perkins, the director of the University of Vermont’s Proctor Maple Research Center, said on a phone call.

New York and the New England states account for about three quarters all the maple syrup produced in the U.S., an industry worth $117 million in 2014. While a change in the dates of the season is notable, it’s not exactly going to bankrupt the industry.

Warming on the southern fringe, however, is a major concern. Virginia syrup producers are already tapping at the coldest time of the year and future warming could make even that time unsuitable for maple syrup production.

And even in the syrup strongholds of New England and eastern Canada, warming could have an important impact on the amount of sap produced and its quality.

That’s why each week, Rapp weighs the bags and then proceeds to prepare that week’s batch of maple syrup (for science, of course).

His maple syrup operation is part of a network of sugar shacks at research institutions as well as commercial operations from Quebec — the world’s largest producer of maple syrup — to Virginia that are part of a project looking at the range of climate impacts on maple syrup.

Selena Ahmed, a researcher at Montana State University who is spearheading the project, said maple producers have told her team that weather within the season is becoming more variable, causing more erratic sap flows and impacting quality. The vagaries of sap flow may not mean much to the average waffle enthusiast, “but what is happening to changes in quality? That’s the big research gap and consumers can relate the most to that,” Ahmed said.

Ahmed is conducting a chemical analysis of syrup from the producers in the network to see how temperature shifts affect the compounds that give maple syrup its distinct flavor. This type of analysis will serve as a baseline for monitoring future changes to the syrup on your morning pancakes. Ahmed has done a similar analysis of tea and found changes are afoot.

Read more at Discovery News

Trace Your Ancient Human Ancestry with New Map

A new map allows us to trace our ancient human ancestry, revealing how extensively past interbreeding has affected people alive today.

The genetic analysis behind the map’s creation strengthens earlier findings that modern humans migrating out of Africa interbred with the populations they encountered in Europe and Asia. These populations consisted of at least two types of ancient humans: Neanderthals and Denisovans.

Neanderthals have received a lot of attention over the years, and studies have concluded that all people of European and Asian heritage are related to Neanderthals. Denisovans were identified more recently, yet these mysterious, now-extinct humans that once ranged from Siberia to Southeast Asia turn out to have really made their mark in modern genomes. People of South Asian ancestry today may actually be more Denisovan than they are Neanderthal.

The new research, published in the journal Current Biology, also determined that modern human interbreeding with Denisovans happened about 100 generations after the trysts with Neanderthals.

“There are certain classes of genes that modern humans inherited from the archaic humans with whom they interbred, which may have helped the modern humans to adapt to the new environments in which they arrived,” senior author David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute, said in a press release.

“On the flip side,” he added, “there was negative selection to systematically remove ancestry that may have been problematic from modern humans. We can document this removal over the 40,000 years since these admixtures occurred.”

Studying what ancestry was removed via natural selection, as well as what was added, is helping researchers determine which traits were favored for modern human survival as people migrated into Asia and Europe from Africa.

For example, Reich and his team said Denisovan genes could potentially be linked to a more subtle sense of smell in Papua New Guineans and high-altitude adaptions in Tibetans. Meanwhile, Neanderthal genes found in people around the world most likely contribute to tougher skin and hair.

The scientists’ analysis of Denisovan, Neanderthal and modern human genomes found that ancient human ancestry was lost from the X chromosome, as well as in genes expressed in the male testes. They believe that this has contributed to a reduction of fertility in certain men.

Read more at Discovery News

Galaxy Map: Here Are the Milky Way's Red Dwarfs

The Milky Way’s diminutive red dwarf stars have been mapped for the very first time and the results show that roughly 7 percent of them live in the outer reaches of the galaxy.

The information came from observations from the Hubble Space Telescope — which serendipitously observed 274 dwarfs while looking at distant galaxies — and the application of a density model to estimate how many there are in the galaxy. With these data, astronomers estimate there to be 58 billion red dwarfs, which will keep mappers busy for many years.

“Astronomers believe that there are very many of these stars. That makes them really quite suitable for mapping the galaxy even though they are so hard to find,” said Leiden Astronomy student Isabel van Vledder, one of the researchers on the paper, in a statement. Co-leading the paper was Dieuwertje van der Vlugt, also a student.

The students looked at M-class red dwarf stars, which are also locations where planet-hunters often seek out planets. The stars are too small to burn hydrogen and are dimmer than our own sun, making it easier to detect faint planets.

The research also has implications for future mapping missions, particularly the upcoming Euclid Space Telescope that the European Space Agency expects to launch in 2020. Euclid will map the whole sky in infrared light, where dwarfs are easiest to spot.

“With our research, astronomers can now better assess whether they are dealing with a distant galaxy or a star in our own galaxy,” Van Vledder said.

The students used three density models to determine the disk and the halo of the Milky Way (both together and separately). Using the Monte Carlo statistical modelling method, the students then determined which density model was best. It turned out to be the one that included both the disk and the halo of our galaxy.

Read more at Discovery News

Was Jesus Really Nailed To The Cross?

Jesus’s crucifixion is probably one of the most familiar images to emerge from Christianity. Good Friday, one of the holiest days in the Christian calendar, marks the event. But what was crucifixion? And why was Jesus killed that way?

Crucifixion was a Roman method of punishment. Suspended from a large cross, a victim would eventually die from asphyxiation or exhaustion – it was long, drawn-out, and painful. It was used to publicly humiliate slaves and criminals (not always to kill them), and as an execution method was usually reserved for individuals of very low status or those whose crime was against the state. This is the reason given in the Gospels for Jesus’s crucifixion: as King of the Jews, Jesus challenged Roman imperial supremacy (Matt 27:37; Mark 15:26; Luke 23:38; John 19:19–22).

Crucifixion could be carried out in a number of ways. In Christian tradition, nailing the limbs to the wood of the cross is assumed, with debate centering on whether nails would pierce hands or the more structurally sound wrists. But Romans did not always nail crucifixion victims to their crosses, and instead sometimes tied them in place with rope. In fact, the only archaeological evidence for the practice of nailing crucifixion victims is an ankle bone from the tomb of Jehohanan, a man executed in the first century CE.

So was Jesus nailed to the cross?

Gospel Accounts

Some early Gospels, such as the Gospel of Thomas, don’t include the narrative of Jesus’s crucifixion, choosing instead to focus on his teaching. But Jesus’s death by crucifixion is one of the things that all four canonical Gospels agree on. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, all include the crucifixion event in their own slightly different ways.

None of the Gospels in the New Testament mentions whether Jesus was nailed or tied to the cross. However, the Gospel of John reports wounds in the risen Jesus’s hands. It is this passage, perhaps, that has led to the overwhelming tradition that Jesus’s hands and feet were nailed to the cross, rather than tied to it.

The Gospel of Peter, a non-canonical gospel from the first or second century CE, specifically describes in verse 21 how after Jesus had died, the nails were removed from his hands. The Gospel of Peter also famously includes the cross itself as an active character in the Passion narrative. In verses 41-42 the cross speaks, responding with its own voice to God: “And they were hearing a voice from the heavens saying, ‘Have you made proclamation to the fallen-asleep?’ And an obeisance was heard from the cross, ‘Yes.’” Tradition is clearly of paramount importance to this text.

Over the past few years, several people have claimed to have found the actual nails with which Jesus was crucified. Each time, biblical scholars and archaeologists have rightly pointed out the assumptions and misinterpretations of evidence behind these claims. Curiously, this fixation on the nails persists, despite the fact that the earliest gospels make no mention of Jesus being nailed to the cross.

Depictions Of The Crucifixion

It isn’t surprising that Christians took a while to embrace the image of Christ on the cross, given that crucifixion was a humiliating way to die. What is surprising is what the earliest image of the crucifixion turns out to be. Rather than the devotional icons with which we are familiar – pictures that glorify Jesus’s death – this earliest image appears to be some late second-century graffiti mocking Christians.

Called the Alexamenos Graffito, artist Rodolfo Lanciani shows a figure with the head of a donkey on a cross with the words: “Alexamenos worships his God.”

Called the Alexamenos Graffito, the image shows a figure with the head of a donkey on a cross with the words: “Alexamenos worships his God.” This was apparently a common accusation in antiquity, as Minucius Felix(Octavius 9.3; 28.7) and Tertullian (Apology 16.12) both attest. Since the graffito was clearly not made by a Christian, this image suggests that non-Christians were familiar with some core elements of Christian belief as early as the second century.

Gemstones, some used for magical purposes, also provide some of our earliest depictions of the crucified Jesus. This second or third century piece of carved jasper depicts a man on a cross surrounded by magic words.

This second or third century piece of carved jasper depicts a man on a cross surrounded by magic words.

Another very early image of the crucifixion is found carved into the face of a carnelian gemstone made into a ring.

Constanza gemstone with the crucified Christ, surrounded by 12 apostles.

Scholars think that the Constanza gemstone, as it is known, dates from the fourth century CE. In this depiction, Jesus’s hands do not appear to be nailed to the cross, since they fall naturally, as if he is tied at the wrists.

Since the evidence from antiquity doesn’t provide a clear answer as to whether Jesus was nailed or tied to his cross, it’s tradition that dictates this common depiction. Those who have seen the film The Passion of the Christ will recall how much time the director, Mel Gibson, devoted just to the act of nailing Jesus onto the cross —- almost five whole minutes.

Read more at Discovery News

Ancient Yellowstone Eruptions Bigger Than Thought

A series of massive volcanic eruptions between eight and 12 million years ago in what is now Idaho may have been larger than colossal events known to have taken place in Yellowstone.

In all, there were 12 such eruptions centered on the region of the Snake River Valley, and while that is roughly half as many as had been previously believed, they were “significantly larger” than had been calculated.

“While it is well-known that Yellowstone has erupted catastrophically in recent times, perhaps less widely appreciated is that these were just the latest in a protracted history of numerous catastrophic super-eruptions that have burned a track along the Snake River eastwards from Oregon to Yellowstone from 16 million years ago to the present,” said Tom Knott of the University of Leicester Department of Geology’s Volcanology Group.

Knott was the lead author of the new study, which was just published in the journal Geological Society of America Bulletin.

“The size and magnitude of this newly defined eruption is as large, if not larger, than better known eruptions at Yellowstone, and it is just the first in an emerging record of newly discovered super-eruptions during a period of intense magmatic activity between 8 and 12 million years ago,” he added.

To reach their conclusions, the researchers painstakingly pieced together numerous pieces of evidence, including examining widespread glassy deposits fused to the landscape, each of which preserves subtly distinctive magnetic, mineralogical, and chemical characteristics that allow them to be traced great distances. They also drilled deep into rock composed of ancient volcanic ash.

They found that one of the super-eruptions from the Yellowstone hotspot-track, defined as the Castleford Crossing eruption, occurred about 8.1 million years ago; they estimated the eruption volume exceeded 1,900 cubic kilometers (456 cubic miles). To put that into some kind of perspective, that would be more than enough to completely fill Lake Ontario.

The strength of that eruption was calculated to be approximately 8.6 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI). That means it was hundreds of times more powerful than the Mt. Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines in 1991, which had a VEI of 6 and was itself 10 times more powerful than the 1980 Mt. St. Helens event.

The hotspot track gradually worked its way eastward to Yellowstone, where an eruption 640,000 years ago formed the Yellowstone Caldera. The most recent eruption at Yellowstone was 170,000 years ago, and the last lava flow was about 70,000 years ago.

Read more at Discovery News

Saturn's Moons and Rings Younger Than the Dinosaurs?

A grand canyon called Ithaca Chasma cuts across the fact of Saturn’s moon Tethys in this image from NASA’s Cassini probe. Scientists think the canyon opened millions of years ago when Tethys was orbitally synced with sister moon Dione.

Some of the moons and icy objects orbiting Saturn may have formed less than 100 million years ago, while dinosaurs still roamed the Earth.

The idea that some of Saturn’s moons may be relatively modern stems from computer models that simulated the moons’ gravitational interactions and shifting orbital tilts over time.

SETI Institute astronomer Matija Cuk and colleagues conclude that the moons inferior to giant Titan are not primordial, and most likely formed in the last 2 percent of the planet’s 4.5 billion-year history.

Saturn hosts at least 62 moons, 53 of which are currently named. The tally doesn’t include the hundreds of small icy objects that comprise the planet’s rings.

Titan, Saturn’s largest moon (which is bigger than the planet Mercury), is the only moon in the solar system that has a thick atmosphere.

Though most of Saturn’s current moons may be relatively new, the models show the planet has always had hordes of orbital companions.

“Our best guess is that Saturn had a similar collection of moons before, but their orbits were disturbed by a special kind of orbital resonance involving Saturn’s motion around the sun. Eventually, the orbits of neighboring moons crossed and these objects collided. From this rubble, the present set of moons and rings formed,” Cuk said in a statement.

The research is published in The Astrophysical Journal.

From Discovery News