Bronze-Age Wheel Sheds Light on Prehistoric Transport

Archaeologists have unearthed the oldest, largest, most complete wheel ever found in Britain, revealing intriguing Bronze Age technology, Cambridge University announced on Friday.

Dating from 1100-800 BC, the wooden wheel is the latest find from a settlement in the UK county of Cambridgeshire described as Britain's Pompeii.

The site was home to several families who lived in a number of circular wooden houses built on stilts above a river. The settlement was abandoned in haste 3,000 years ago as a dramatic fire caught on the houses. The dwelings fell into the river, where silt and clay preserved the contents.

The wheel, around three feet in diameter, was no exception. Found near the remains of the largest roundhouse, it is exceptionally well-preserved. Made of five panels of solid timber stitched together, it still has its reinforced hub in the center.

Archaeologists are puzzled as the wheel was found in a marshy area by a river where boats were the most common method of transport. Eight canoes of various sizes were unearthed nearby in 2011.

"The discovery of the wheel demonstrates that the inhabitants of this watery landscape had links to the dry land beyond the river," David Gibson, Archaeological Manager at the Cambridge Archaeological Unit, Division of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, said in a statement.

The archaeologists hope to find new insights into domestic life 3,000 years ago as the excavation, which is now half way through the four-year project, continues over the coming months.

"Among the wealth of other fabulous artifacts and the new structural remains of round houses built over this river channel, this site continues to amaze and astonish us," Kasia Gdaniec, senior archaeologist for Cambridgeshire County Council, said.

Previous objects unearthed at the site, such as exotic glass beads that were part of an elaborate necklace, suggested "a sophistication not usually associated with the British Bronze Age," according to Cambridge Archaeological Unit.

Read more at Discovery News

Super-Rare Minerals Make Earth Unique in Cosmos

We all like to think that we’re unique, but our planet probably is, at least in terms of its assortment of rare minerals. Those substances represent Earth’s truest distinction from other planets, according to scientists who’ve developed the first system for categorizing rarities in the mineral kingdom.

Scientists Robert Hazen of the Carnegie Institution and Jesse Ausubel of The Rockefeller University, whose research paper will appear in a future issue of the journal American Mineralogist, have inventoried the world’s rarest mineral species.

Their database includes 2,550 substances that are far rarer than diamonds and gemstones. Several, in fact, are so scarce that the known supply worldwide would be smaller than a sugar cube. Many are incredibly fragile, with a tendency to melt, evaporate or dehydrate, and a few will decompose if they are exposed to sunlight.

And as the scientists note in their paper, many of the rarest minerals develop as a consequence of biological changes in the Earth’s environment. “We suggest that the distribution of rare minerals may not only arise from biological activity, but also may be a robust biosignature of life” on Earth and other planets, they wrote.

Surprisingly, the stuff that we think of as rare often isn’t.

“Uses of the word ‘rare’ in the context of ‘rare earth elements’ or ‘rare metals’ are similarly misleading, as many thousands of tons of these commodities are produced annually,” the scientists point out. And precious gems are found in numerous places around the world, and are bought and sold in commercial quantities.

Diamonds, for example, are found in significant quantities in 11 countries around the world, and the biggest producer, Russia, mined 23,000 tons of them in 2014, according to Geology.com. In contrast, each of the 2,550 rare minerals is found at five or fewer locations worldwide.

Perhaps the rarest mineral is ichnusaite, created from a combination of the radioactive element thorium and lead-like molybdenum underground. Only one specimen has ever been found, in Sardinia back in 2013. And Nevadaite, a combination of vanadium and copper, has been found only in Nevada and Kyrgyzstan.

From Discovery News

Rings May Be Common Around a Weird Kind of Asteroid

Chariklo — affectionately dubbed a “strange little object” by one researcher — is an asteroid that orbits in a weird spot. Instead of residing in the usual locations (between Mars and Jupiter, or beyond Neptune) it resides between Saturn and Uranus. What’s more, Chariklo has its own ring system. The 2014 discovery is still baffling researchers because the only other rings we know of are around huge planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

After the discovery, planetary scientist Margaret Pan at the University of Toronto was curious as to how those rings came to be. Recent research she led hints at a solution. Using mathematics and observations of Chariklo, her team suggested a new way the rings could have been created for the asteroid and other space rocks (dubbed Centaurs) in its neighborhood.

Their work suggests that as Chariklo moved out of the Kuiper Belt of icy objects (beyond Neptune) towards its current orbit, the sudden heating would have caused outgassing of carbon monoxide or nitrogen gas. This process would have lifted dust particles off the surface, eventually forming the rings. This theory competes with another idea previously brought out in the literature, which is that Chariklo picked up a small moon while in the Kuiper Belt, a moon that eventually broke apart into a ring when Chariklo passed close to Neptune. Pan said the latter scenario is likely rare; only some Centaurs could get rings that way.

“(Our) scenario predicts that all 100 km-class (62-mile) Centaurs should have some kind of orbiting dusty material. We’re eager for future Centaur observations to help distinguish between these formation pathways,” Pan wrote in an e-mail to Discovery News.

Rings are a rare phenomenon in our solar system. Saturn (pictured) has a spectacular set along with Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune and Chariklo.

Why the 100-kilometer limit? Pan says that outgassing on smaller objects wouldn’t have enough mass to stop the dusty material from flying away. She adds that Kuiper Belt objects wouldn’t be expected to have these rings, because they’re too far from the sun and thus too cold to experience this outgassing. Even if a Kuiper Belt object moved close enough to a planet to split a little orbiting moon apart, the trajectory would inevitably change the asteroid into a Centaur.

Uranus and its rings, based on Hubble observations performed in 2003. Chariklo’s rings appear to be the most similar to those of Uranus.

Observations of Chariklo are limited so far, but astronomers have seen that it has two rings. They are wider on one side of Chariklo than the other, with the second ring only containing about one-tenth the mass of the first ring.

Pan’s team suggests that the ring is not quite circular (elliptical). The particles don’t form into a circle due to the individual gravitational interactions between particles. The research implies that for this to happen, you would need to have enough material to create a 1-km (0.62-mile) sized ice ball. A typical particle would also have to be a few meters in size.

When comparing Chariklo’s rings to other ringed bodies in the solar system, it appears most similar to Uranus despite its diminutive size.

“The geometry of Chariklo’s rings, which are fairly dense and narrow, is most like that of the Uranian rings. Interestingly, some of the Uranian rings are also noticeably elliptical, and studies of the Uranian system inspired our treatment of Chariklo’s rings,” Pan wrote.

Read more at Discovery News

The Huge, Bee-Decapitating Hornet That Can’t Survive Group Hugs

Asian giant hornets trying to make friends with some honey bees just kidding they're going to massacre the little things.

Thirty Asian giant hornets, following a scent laid by their scout, descend on a hive of honey bees and get straight to the decapitations. The hornets snag the tiny bees and pop their heads right off using their enormous mandibles. Here a head, there a head. Desperately, the bees try to sting the hornets, yet they can’t puncture the giants’ armor.

Here a head, there a head—pop pop pop. One by one the bees fall, a single hornet taking down as many as 20 victims a minute. At that rate, the tiny band of marauders can wipe out a colony of 30,000 bees in a few hours, a glut of beheadings that makes the French Revolution look like Dance Dance Revolution.

The remarkable Asian giant hornet, Vespa mandarinia, grows to almost two inches in length and can sting through a rain jacket. And unlike a honey bee, it can sting repeatedly, its venom breaking down flesh and overloading kidneys. The hornet is formidable, to say the least, but the native honey bees it menaces have an ingenious defense: They form a ball around the scout hornet and vibrate to cook the invader to death, keeping the colony’s coordinates out of the hands of the scout’s soldiers back at base.

The Asian giant hornet is in many ways a modern winged T. rex. It’s an apex predator, capable of taking down any other insect and incapacitating any mammal dumb or unfortunate enough to disturb it. Should you come across one, don’t move, as the good doctor Grant always said (OK fine, maybe he was wrong about that).

Just ask actual doctor Stephen Martin, an entomologist at the University of Salford. Once while observing a nest, he and a colleague—sans suits—displeased the hornets and got themselves attacked. “You close your eyes, you close your mouth, you grit your teeth, because it’s quite frightening,” he says. “The other guy just couldn’t cope and he ran away, and he got stung several times. I was fine.” If the hornets don’t take you to be a threat, they’ll leave you alone. No sense in wasting venom and risk getting squashed, after all.

Get stung, though, and you’ll want to go ahead and start considering a trip to the hospital. The hornet’s venom breaks down flesh cells, leaving you with a divot, while neurotoxins glitch nerves, resulting in an intense, searing pain that one victim described as having a hot nail hammered into you. (Had he actually ever had a hot nail hammered into him? Seems like a really specific comparison.) Because of its size, the hornet can inject a whole lot of venom—you can end up with a teaspoon of the stuff in your system if a swarm jabs you 30 or 40 times. Catch enough stings and your kidneys will shut down, or even your heart if you have a weak ticker. If you happen to be allergic, it’ll be anaphylactic shock instead.

What makes the Asian giant hornet particularly problematic is its size. Because this thing is so huge, so is its nest, which can weigh more than 20 pounds. That would snap a tree branch, so instead the hornet holes up in, well, holes in the ground—where unsuspecting humans can stroll too close. If you do, don’t bother running. These things can fly at up to 15 miles per hour, and even faster if they’ve got a good tailwind.

This is a lot like a stork delivering a baby except it’s the exact opposite.

While an Asian giant hornet can ruin your day, it can ruin a honey bee’s life. But the native bee it menaces has evolved a rather unconventional way to fight back: group hugs.

Should a hornet scout find itself a beehive, the occupants won’t rush out to intercept it. Instead, the bees will let the scout in to mark the location with pheromones for its comrades to follow. It’s a trap: On cue the workers swarm, forming a frantic, living ball around the intruder. The bees vibrate, revving up their body temperatures to begin cooking the hornet to death. All the while, carbon dioxide builds up inside the ball.

The bees also exploit a unique bit of insect anatomy: The hornet doesn’t have a heart—literally and I suppose kind of figuratively when you think about it—and instead pumps blood with contractions of its body. “The bees just crowd it and crowd it and crowd it like a boa constrictor, so they prevent the hornet from being able to pump blood around its body,” Martin says. This further raises the hornet’s body temperature.

“So it’s this combination of heating them, building up the carbon dioxide in the middle of it, and then restricting their blood flow by effectively squeezing them,” Martin adds. The hornet scout eventually dies, taking with it the coordinates of the hive. It may have picked off a bee here and there in the struggle, and some of the workers themselves may have been crushed or asphyxiated, but the hive is saved.

It’s a remarkable countermeasure that has evolved over millennia. That’s time the introduced European honey bee ain’t got. It hasn’t stumbled upon the swarm countermeasure, so the hornet scout inevitably marks a European bee nest and returns with its friends. The marauders slaughter every adult, yet don’t bother eating their relatively calorie-poor bodies. Instead, the hornets take the bee larvae back to their nest to feed to their own larvae, shuttling back and forth. The hornets will even post guards at the hive entrance to protect their booty overnight if they haven’t finished looting in one day.

Beekeepers tending the European variety in China and Japan don’t so much appreciate all this. Some attach special guards to their hives to keep the hornets out, while others take a rather more active approach, hiring people to volley the things with tennis or badminton rackets. (At least one overachieving beekeeper in Japan employs the enviable trap-plus-badminton-racket technique.) In wealthier Japan, beekeepers actually pay some brave soul to remove nearby hornet nests—apparently they’ve got solid health care over there or something.

The hornet’s apparent attitude problem isn’t exactly great for PR. “With hornets, people ask us often what use are they, they just sting us, they hurt us, we should just get rid of them all,” Martin says. “We’ve got the bees, they make honey, they work really hard, they’re really good.”

Read more at Wired Science

Astronomer detected a new source of intense gamma-radiation in the sky

Analyzing the data collected by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope Maxim Pshirkov (The Sternberg Astronomical Institute, MSU) discovered a new source that confirmed the fact that binary systems with strong colliding stellar winds comprise a separate new population of high-energy gamma-ray sources. His article was published in the latest issue of 'Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters'.

Massive binary star systems with highly luminous and hot Wolf-Rayet stars and massive (tens solar masses) OB companion generate strong stellar winds. Its percussion may lead to producing a fierce photon flux with an energetic potential of more than a hundred mega electronvolt (MEV), when a distance separating stars is relatively short. That phenomenon was considered as a possible source of gamma-radiation for a long while.

Strong stellar winds are generated in the binary systems consisting of highly luminous and hot Wolf-Rayet stars and massive ( several tens solar masses) OB companions. Wind collision may produce strong photon emission with photon energies exceeding hundred mega electronvolts (MeV). This phenomenon was considered as a possible source of gamma-radiation for a long while.

Though such radiation was detected only once, with the famous Eta Carinae, which was observed for more than four centuries (particularly intensively -- after 1834, when one of its stars underwebt an explosion and for some time was the most luminous star in the sky) ). Eta Carinae is comparatively close to Earth -- around 7,5 -- 8 thousand light years. The stars in this system weight 120 and (30-80) solar masses respectively, and shine brighter than millions of suns. If they were 10 parsec (30 light years) away from the Earth, they would be just as luminous as the Moon, while the Sun would be invisible on such distance. Naturally, Eta Carinae was the first candidate to consider and seven years ago high-energy radiation from this system was finally detected.

However, one example was not enough to confirm the model of binary stars emitting high-energy radiation, and the search for similar sources was continued, which turned out to be a tricky task.

"Recent calculations proved such star types as Eta Carinae to be incredibly rare -- probably, one per a galaxy like we inhabit, or less,' said Maxim Pshirkov, my colleagues' research resulted in no certain findings. In 2013 an American-Austrian research team composed a list of seven stellar systems containing Wolf-Rayet stars, where a radiation could most probably appear. This research was based on two years of observations and lacked data, so it was only possible to set an upper limit on the HE radiation. I decided toutilize larger set of data seven years of Fermi-LAT observations. As the result -- it was discovered that Gamma Velorum is the source of gamma-radiation at 6.σ. confidence level"

This system contains two stars with masses of 30 and 10 solar masses. Their orbital parameters are well-studied and they are separated by about the same distance as Earth and Sun. The luminosity of this binary system is about 200 thousand times higher than of the Sun and strong stellar winds have very high mass loss rate: hundred-thousandth and two ten-millionth of the solar mass every year . Though these figures seem to be small, actually this amount is huge, particularly comparing to the solar wind which only amounts to 10-14 solar mass per annum As the stellar winds in the Gamma Velorum system collide on a speed exceeding 1000 kilometers per second, particles are accelerated in the shock. Though an exact mechanism of this acceleration is still unknown, it definitely leads to a high energy photon radiation that turned out to be detected by Fermi LAT.

An attentive reader who followed the process of searching for Higgs boson in the Large Hadron Collider has probably faced the standard deviation that Pshirkov mentions and remembered that in physics a hypothesis is proved on a statistical accuracy higher than 5σ. That means it is confirmed with a probability higher than 99,999%. In other words Pshirkov's discovery with its six standard deviations is definitely reliable, though it's still not far away from the threshold. According to the article, it was partly a pure luck that helped the researcher.

Read more at Science Daily

Longest-lasting stellar eclipse: Three-and-a-half year eclipses in binary system

Imagine living on a world where, every 69 years, the sun disappears in a near-total eclipse that lasts for three and a half years.

That is just what happens in an unnamed binary star system nearly 10,000 light years from Earth. The newly discovered system, known only by its astronomical catalog number TYC 2505-672-1, sets a new record for both the longest duration stellar eclipse and the longest period between eclipses in a binary system.

Discovery of the system's extraordinary properties was made by a team of astronomers from Vanderbilt and Harvard with the assistance of colleagues at Lehigh, Ohio State and Pennsylvania State universities, Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network and the American Association of Variable Star Observers and is described in a paper accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal.

"It's the longest duration stellar eclipse and the longest orbit for an eclipsing binary ever found...by far," said the paper's first author Vanderbilt doctoral student Joey Rodriguez.

The previous record holder is Epsilon Aurigae, a giant star that is eclipsed by its companion every 27 years for periods ranging from 640 to 730 days.

"Epsilon Aurigae is much closer -- about 2,200 light years from Earth -- and brighter, which has allowed astronomers to study it extensively," said Rodriguez. The leading explanation is that Epsilon Aurigae consists of a yellow giant star orbited by a normal star slightly bigger than the sun embedded in a thick disk of dust and gas oriented nearly edge on when viewed from Earth.

"One of the great challenges in astronomy is that some of the most important phenomena occur on astronomical timescales, yet astronomers are generally limited to much shorter human timescales," said co-author Keivan Stassun, professor of physics and astronomy at Vanderbilt. "Here we have a rare opportunity to study a phenomenon that plays out over many decades and provides a window into the types of environments around stars that could represent planetary building blocks at the very end of a star system's life."

Two unique astronomical resources made the discovery possible: observations by the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO) network and the Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard (DASCH) program.

AAVSO is a non-profit organization of professional and amateur astronomers dedicated to understanding variable stars. It provided a few hundred observations of TYC 2505-672-1's most recent eclipse.

The DASCH survey is based on thousands of photographic plates taken by Harvard astronomers between 1890 and 1989 as part of a regular survey of the northern sky. In recent years the university has begun digitizing these plates. In the process TYC 2505-672-1 caught the eye of Sumin Tang at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Rodriguez attended a conference where Tang presented her results on TYC 2505-672-1 and the system piqued his interest as well. He is a member of the survey team for the low-cost Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT) system that consists of a pair of robotic telescopes designed to find exoplanets around bright stars operated by astronomers at Ohio State University, Vanderbilt University, Lehigh University and the South African Astronomical Observatory. KELT has an extremely wide field of view (26 degrees by 26 degrees) and he thought it was likely that the KELT database contained a number of recent images of the distant binary system.

After the lecture Rodriguez contacted Tang and they agreed to collaborate. When he searched the KELT database, Rodriguez found about 9,000 images of the obscure system taken in the last eight years that they could combine with the 1,432 images taken over the last century at Harvard. Rodriquez also contacted the AAVSO network and obtained several hundred more observations of the system's most recent eclipse to help fill in the picture. When she became busy with some other projects, Tang agreed to let Rodriguez take the lead.

The resulting analysis revealed a system similar to the one at Epsilon Aurigae, with some important differences. It appears to consist of a pair of red giant stars, one of which has been stripped down to a relatively small core and surrounded by an extremely large disk of material that produces the extended eclipse.

"About the only way to get these really long eclipse times is with an extended disk of opaque material. Nothing else is big enough to block out a star for months at a time," Rodriguez said.

TYC-2505-672-1 is so distant that the amount of data the astronomers could extract from the images was limited. However, they were able to estimate the surface temperature of the companion star and found that it is about 2,000 degrees Celsius hotter than the surface of the sun. Combined with the observation that it appears to be less than half the diameter of the sun has led them to propose that it is a red giant that has had its outer layers stripped away and that this stripped material may account for the obscuring disk. However, they don't know that for certain.

In order to produce the 69-year interval between eclipses, the astronomers calculate that they must be orbiting at an extremely large distance, about 20 astronomical units, which is approximately the distance between the Sun and Uranus.

Read more at Science Daily

Puzzling asteroid observations explained by destruction of asteroids close to Sun

An international team composed of researchers from Finland, France, the United States and the Czech Republic originally set out to construct a state-of-the-art model of the NEO population that is needed for planning future asteroid surveys and spacecraft missions. The model describes the NEOs' orbit distribution and estimates the number of NEOs of different sizes.

The vast majority of NEOs originate in the doughnut-shaped main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The orbit of a main-belt asteroid slowly changes as it is pushed by the uneven release of excess solar heat from the asteroid's surface. The asteroid's orbit eventually interacts with the orbital motions of Jupiter and Saturn changing the trajectory to bring the asteroid close to the Earth. An asteroid is classified as an NEO when its smallest distance from the Sun during an orbit is less than 1.3 times the average Earth-Sun distance.

The team used the properties of almost 9,000 NEOs detected in about 100,000 images acquired over about 8 years by the Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) near Tucson, Arizona, to construct the new population model. One of the most challenging problems facing the team was computing which asteroids they could actually detect. An asteroid appears as a moving point of light against a background of fixed stars but detecting it on an image depends on two factors -- how bright it is and how fast it seems to be moving. If the telescope isn't looking in the right location at the right time when an asteroid is bright enough and slow enough to be detected, we simply may never find that asteroid. Accounting for these observational selection effects required a detailed understanding of the operations of the telescope and detector systems and a tremendous amount of computing time even with novel, fast mathematical techniques. The team produced the best-ever model of the NEO population by combining information about CSS's selection effects with the CSS data and theoretical models of the orbit distributions of NEOs that originate in different parts of the main asteroid belt.

But they noticed that their model had a problem -- it predicted that there should be almost 10 times more objects on orbits that approach the Sun to within 10 solar diameters. The team then spent a year verifying their calculations before they came to the conclusion that the problem was not in their analysis but in their assumptions of how the Solar System works.

Dr. Mikael Granvik, a research scientist at the University of Helsinki and lead author of the Nature article, hypothesized that their model would better match the observations if NEOs are destroyed close to the Sun but long before an actual collision. The team tested this idea and found an excellent agreement between the model and the observed population of NEOs when they eliminated asteroids that spend too much time within about 10 solar diameters of the Sun. "The discovery that asteroids must be breaking up when they approach too close to the Sun was surprising and that's why we spent so much time verifying our calculations," commented Dr. Robert Jedicke, a team member at the University of Hawai'i Institute for Astronomy.

The team's discovery helps to explain several other discrepancies between observations and predictions of the distribution of small objects in our Solar System. Meteors, commonly known as shooting stars, are tiny bits of dust and rock that are dislodged from the surfaces of asteroids and comets that then end their lives burning up as they enter our atmosphere. Meteors often travel in "streams" that follow the path of their parent object, but astronomers have been unable to match most of the meteor streams on orbits closely approaching the Sun with known parent objects. This study suggests that the parent objects were completely destroyed when they came too close to the Sun -- leaving behind streams of meteors but no parent NEOs. They also found that darker asteroids are destroyed farther from the Sun than brighter ones, explaining an earlier discovery that NEOs that approach closer to the Sun are brighter than those that keep their distance from the Sun. The fact that dark objects are more easily destroyed implies that dark and bright asteroids have a different internal composition and structure.

Read more at Science Daily

Oldest Known Dress Made More Than 5000 Years Ago

The first known dress, as well as the earliest known bar and restaurant in France, were identified this week.

The discoveries, reported in the journal Antiquity, provide a glimpse of what early life was like in both ancient Egypt and southern France thousands of years ago.

The garment, which dates to around 3482 B.C., is known as the “Tarkhan Dress,” and now looks like a tattered and stained shirt. When new, however, the linen dress would have looked fashionable even today, as researchers determined it featured a natural pale grey stripe with knife-pleated sleeves and bodice. Its hem is missing, so the original length of the dress is unknown.

“The survival of highly perishable textiles in the archaeological record is exceptional, the survival of complete, or almost complete, articles of clothing like the Tarkhan Dress is even more remarkable,” Alice Stevenson, curator of the University College London (UCL) Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, said in a press release.

“We’ve always suspected that the dress dated from the First Dynasty, but haven’t been able to confirm this as the sample previously needed for testing would have caused too much damage to the dress,” she added.

Now that the dress’ age has been confirmed, it has been named Egypt’s oldest garment and is the oldest known surviving woven garment in the world.

To calculate its age, Michael Dee of the University of Oxford and colleagues measured a small sample of the dress to determine how much radiocarbon (a radioactive isotope of carbon) remained in the linen. Linen is especially suitable for radiocarbon dating, according to the researchers, because it is composed of flax fibers that grow over a relatively short time.

The dress, currently on display at the UCL Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, features wear and tear that date back to its earliest days. The researchers believe that a young teenager or a very slim woman wore it.

A separate study in the same journal reports the discovery of a tavern in southern France. The remains of the structure are 2141 years old and are located at a site called Lattara.

“Not only is the tavern the earliest of its kind in the region, it also serves as an invaluable indicator of the changing social and economic infrastructure of the settlement and its inhabitants following the Roman conquest of Mediterranean Gaul in the late second century B.C.,” wrote co-authors Benjamin Luley of Gettysburg College and Gaël Piquès of Montpellier University.

At first the researchers thought that they had found a bakery, since they determined that the site once featured three huge ovens and indoor gristmills. They later, however, found that another nearby room, across from a courtyard, had benches lining its walls.

Bones from fish, sheep and cattle were also unearthed, as were the remains of big platters and bowls. The meat was probably cooked BBQ-style over a charcoal-burning hearth, which was also found at the site.

Read more at Discovery News

Eight New Spiders Grab (Don't Bite) Humans

Eight new species of whip spiders look threatening, but these newly found arachnids from the Amazon region of Brazil don’t bite — they just grab.

The newfound creepy crawlies double the known number of species of this type spider in Brazil, according to new research in PLOS ONE.

Whip spiders worldwide, also known as tailless whip scorpions, have scared many because of their resemblance to venomous stinging scorpions. They are, however, harmless to people, which they grab instead of bite, as this video shows:

You can also get a really good look at another whip spider in the below video.

Researchers Alessandro Ponce de Leao Giupponi and Gustavo Silva de Miranda found the new whip spiders in the Brazilian states of Pará and Amazonas. All of the spiders belong to the order Amblypygi and are of the genus Charinus. They include C. bichuetteae, C. bonaldoi, C. carajas, C. ferreus, C. guto, C. orientalis, C. brescoviti, and C. ricardoi.

“Brazil now becomes the country with the largest diversity of Amblypygi in the world, with 25 known species,” the researchers, both from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, wrote.

The name “amblypygid” means “blunt rump,” and refers to the spiders’ lack of a flagellum or tail that is seen in actual whip scorpions. The spiders possess no silk glands or poisonous fangs. When they grab a person, the sensation is a bit like being pricked by a rose thorn. Such attacks can stun or crush the spiders’ tiny insect prey, though.

They are very social and gregarious creatures, so some people even keep them as pets. Half of the new species are already considered to be highly endangered, however, so saving the spiders in their own habitat is the priority now.

Read more at Discovery News

Jerusalem's First Homes Unearthed

Israeli archaeologists have found the earliest known houses in Jerusalem, showing that a thriving settlement existed there as far back as 7,000 years ago, far longer than had been thought.

The discovery was made during the building of a new road in the northern Jerusalem neighborhood of Shuafat, the Israel Antiquities Authority said in a statement on Wednesday.

The archaeologists unearthed two houses, complete with stone floors and well-preserved artifacts such as pottery vessels, flint tools, a stone bowl and even a carnelian gemstone.

Stages of construction and signs of maintenance show the buildings were used for a considerable length of time.

The houses were built in the Chalcolithic period, approximately in the 5th millennium BC. At that time, man started developing the use of copper (chalcos in Greek) while using tools made of stone (lithos).

The remains predate previously found evidence of human settlement in the area by up to 2,000 years.

“The buildings uncovered are of a standard that would not fall short of Jerusalem’s architecture,” Ronit Lupo, director of excavations for the Israel Antiquities Authority, said.

“This discovery represents a highly significant addition to our research of the city and the vicinity,” he added.

He noted the artifacts unearthed at the site reveal the livelihood of the local population in prehistoric times: small sickle blades were likely employed for harvesting crops, while chisels and axes were used for building.

“The bead made out of carnelian indicates that jewelry was either made or imported. The grinding tools, mortars and pestles, like the basalt bowl, attest to technological skills as well as to the kinds of crafts practiced in the local community,” Lupo said.

Read more at Discovery News