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The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the cornerstone of historic Christianity. But is there scientific evidence it really happened? Some scholars believe that yes, there is and it’s in a cathedral in Turin, Italy. The Shroud of Turin, a linen cloth 14 feet by 3 feet, contains the image of a man who was badly scourged, was crucified, wore a crown of thorns, and was stabbed in the chest with a Roman lance. Of course, all of these wounds fit what the Bible says happened to Jesus. Is the Shroud of Turin Jesus’ actual “clean linen shroud” given...

...the origin of these artworks is shrouded in mystery. Nobody is quite sure what the artists used for paint or binder, how the pigmentation has been preserved for so long, and -- most controversial of all -- exactly when the images were made... Today we get a unique insight into this question thanks to the work of Clodoaldo Roldán at the University of Valencia in Spain and colleagues... One way to date ancient artifacts is with carbon dating. But this works only with pigments that have a biological origin, and with the exception of black, most of them do not....

Interest in the origins of human populations and their migration routes has increased greatly in recent years. A critical aspect of tracing migration events is dating them. However, the radiocarbon techniques*, that are commonly used to date and analyse DNA from ancient skeletons can be inaccurate and not always possible to apply. Inspired by the Geographic Population Structure model that can track mutations in DNA that are associated with geography, researchers have developed a new analytic method, the Time Population Structure (TPS), that uses mutations to predict time in order to date the ancient DNA. Dr Umberto Esposito... TPS can...

One of the most important dating tools used in archaeology may sometimes give misleading data, new study shows - and it could change whole historical timelines as a result. The discrepancy is due to significant fluctuations in the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere, and it could force scientists to rethink how they use ancient organic remains to measure the passing of time.

Full title: Many global warming studies may be wrong as carbon dating found to be highly unreliable for organic matter over 30,000 years old Radiocarbon dating, which is used to calculate the age of certain organic materials, has been found to be unreliable, and sometimes wildly so - a discovery that could upset previous studies on climate change, scientists from China and Germany said in a new paper. Their recent analysis of sediment from the largest freshwater lake in northeast China showed that its carbon clock stopped ticking as early as 30,000 years ago, or nearly half as long as...

Radiocarbon dating which is used to estimate the age of every particular thing on earth is facing big threat from the fossil fuel and carbon in the atmosphere. Researchers said excess of carbon in atmosphere due to burning of fossil fuel could reduce the accuracy of Radiocarbon dating. Heather Graven, a climate-physics researcher at Imperial College London, after an analysis has found that emissions from fossil fuels are artificially raising the carbon age of the atmosphere. ... "Combustion of fossil fuels is diluting the fraction of atmospheric carbon dioxide containing radiocarbon. This is making the atmosphere appear as though it...

Sediment from Japanese lake provides more accurate timeline for dating objects as far back as 50,000 years. The carbon clock is getting reset. Climate records from a Japanese lake are set to improve the accuracy of the dating technique, which could help to shed light on archaeological mysteries such as why Neanderthals became extinct. Carbon dating is used to work out the age of organic material — in effect, any living thing. The technique hinges on carbon-14, a radioactive isotope of the element that, unlike other more stable forms of carbon, decays away at a steady rate. Organisms capture a...

Whereas the Sea People event constitutes a major turning point in ancient world history, attested by both written and archaeological (e.g. Ugarit, Enkomi, Kition, Byblos) evidence, our knowledge of when these waves of destructions occurred rests on translation of cuneiform tablets preceding the invasions (terminus ante quem) and on Ramses III's reign (terminus post quem). Here, we report the first absolute chronology of the invasion from a rare, well-preserved Sea People destruction layer (Fig. 2) from a Levantine harbour town of the Ugarit kingdom. The destruction layer contains remains of conflicts (bronze arrowheads scattered around the town, fallen walls, burnt...

More Fluctuations Found in Isotopic Clocks by Brian Thomas, M.S. | Aug. 17, 2012 Age-dating a rock using its radioactive isotopes only works by assuming that the rate at which that "clock" ticks was constant in the past and essentially identical to that in the present. Not long ago, scientists discovered excess helium in crystals1 and "orphaned" polonium radiohalos,2 both of which imply that the decay rates of isotopes commonly used to date earth rocks were dramatically accelerated in the past. Even today, researchers are finding small but significant changes in isotope decay rates, and these add credibility to the...

I read that carbon dating method is only accurate for up to 30,000 yrs. So how are scientists coming up with millions yrs. old fossils? For all we know dinosaurs died off not millions but 100's of thousands of yrs ago.

Much of the controversy between evolutionists and creationists concerns the age of the earth and its fossils. Evolution, depending as it does on pure chance, requires an immense amount of time to stumble upon anything remotely approaching the complexity we see in even the simplest living things. For over 1200 years, geologists have attempted to devise methods for determining the age of the earth that would be consistent with evolutionary dogma. At the time Darwin's Origin of Species was published [1859], the earth was “scientifically” determined to be 100 million years old. By 1932, it was found to be 1.6...

The cold war helps settle a hot debate about how hearts grow.New cells in old hearts.Punchstock Fallout from nuclear bomb tests during the cold war has just yielded encouraging news for those searching for ways to reverse heart disease.A team led by Jonas Frisén from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm has shown that adult human hearts make new muscle cells, albeit very, very slowly1.Human heart cells that can generate cardiomyocytes in culture have been identified before. But how the heart regenerates naturally has been hotly contested, says Kenneth Chien of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute in Cambridge. "This study shows...

PRESS RELEASE: Los Alamos National Laboratory team of scientists prove carbon 14 dating of the Shroud of Turin wrong COLUMBUS, Ohio, August 15 — In his presentation today at The Ohio State University’s Blackwell Center, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) chemist, Robert Villarreal, disclosed startling new findings proving that the sample of material used in 1988 to Carbon-14 (C-14) date the Shroud of Turin, which categorized the cloth as a medieval fake, could not have been from the original linen cloth because it was cotton. According to Villarreal, who lead the LANL team working on the project, thread samples they...

NEW YORK (AP) -- A new analysis of bones unearthed nearly 40 years ago in Ethiopia has pushed the fossil record of modern humans back to nearly 200,000 years ago -- perhaps close to the dawn of the species. Researchers determined that the specimens are around 195,000 years old. Previously, the oldest known fossils of Homo sapiens were Ethiopian skulls dated to about 160,000 years ago. Genetic studies estimate that Homo sapiens arose about 200,000 years ago, so the new research brings the fossil record more in line with that, said John Fleagle of Stony Brook University in New York,...

I have pondered at great length the recurring alarmism of environmental scientists as one shocking discovery after another have each, in their turn, posed planet-altering threats to humanity. I have also wondered at the rampant atheism of the scientific community as a whole. While each of these subjects is worthy of lengthy discussion, I have found what I believe is a common flaw in many of the methods of both, and other, camps. It seems that a common follow-up to the discovery of a phenomenon or development of a theory is an over-extrapolation of observable, solid facts. To wit: Observable...

<p>A team of archaeological scientists in the United States and Germany say they have developed a technique to accurately determine the age of stone tools and artifacts between 50,000 and 100,000 years old, a period that has proved particularly tricky to map with other methods.</p>

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (CNS) -- The wide publicity and controversy surrounding Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" have brought a spike of new interest in the Shroud of Turin, which many believe was Jesus' burial cloth. John P. and Rebecca S. Jackson, who run the Turin Shroud Center of Colorado in Colorado Springs, and Barrie Schwortz, who runs the interactive Web site www.shroud.com, reported a significant increase in calls or visits since the movie came out. "This is normally a busy time of the year for us, but there's been about a 40 percent increase" in phone calls, said...

PYROLYSIS/MASS SPECTROMETRY APPLIED TO THE SHROUD OF TURIN Raymond N. Rogers Fellow University of California, Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos, NM, USA ©2004 Raymond N. Rogers All Rights Reserved Our primary goal in undertaking pyrolysis-MS analyses on samples from the Shroud of Turin was the detection of impurities (e.g., painting materials). Most of the structural materials and probable impurities in Shroud samples were carbohydrates. We wanted to see traces of materia ls that were not carbohydrates. The samples were run at the Midwest Center for Mass Spectrometry (MCMS), University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This is a National Science Foundation "Center of...

<p>The "Peñon Woman III" skeleton was found near Mexico City International Airport.</p> <p>But perhaps more significant than the bones' age, researchers said, is that they were found while digging a well near Mexico City International Airport. Because the remains were discovered outside the United States, scientists will be able to study the DNA and structure of the skeleton without the objection of Native American groups, who can claim and rebury ancestral remains under a 1990 U.S. law.</p>