Free Republic

Discovery of vast prehistoric works built by Giants?The Geoglyphs of Teohuanaco Posted: February 24, 2008 1:00 am EasternBy David E. Flynn© 2008 RaidersNewsNetwork The size and scope of David Flynn's Teohuanaco discovery simply surpasses comprehension. Mammoth traces of intelligence carved in stone and covering hundreds of square miles. For those who understand what they are seeing here for the first time, this could indeed be the strongest evidence ever found of prehistoric engineering by those who were known and feared throughout the ancient world as gods. ~ Thomas Horn This satellite image (above) is a portion of the Andean foothills...

Mysterious Pyramid Complex Discovered in Peru Kelly Hearn in Buenos Aires, Argentina for National Geographic NewsFebruary 20, 2008 The remnants of at least ten pyramids have been discovered on the coast of Peru, marking what could be a vast ceremonial site of an ancient, little-known culture, archaeologists say. In January construction crews working in the province of Piura discovered several truncated pyramids and a large adobe platform (see map). Last week they announced that the complex, which is 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) long and 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) wide, belonged to the ancient Vicús culture and was likely either a...

'Bizarre' new mammal discovered By Rebecca Morelle Science reporter, BBC News The curious-looking creature was caught on camera A new species of mammal has been discovered in the mountains of Tanzania, scientists report. The bizarre-looking creature, dubbed Rhynochocyon udzungwensis, is a type of giant elephant shrew, or sengi. The cat-sized animal, which is reported in the Journal of Zoology, looks like a cross between a miniature antelope and a small anteater. It has a grey face, a long, flexible snout, a bulky, amber body, a jet-black rump and it stands on spindly legs. "This is one of the most exciting...

Liberals say we are destroying the planet and destroying species. Yet, just about everyday something new is discovered. Maybe this earth is bigger than we think. Discovery New Tribe Spotted in Peruvian Amazon! Found: Giant Lobster Species! New Genus! Australian Truffles! New Species of Orchid Flirts With Wasps Squid Body + Octopus Legs = New Species? What’ll They Do Next- Revive the Dodo? uh..no- really? 9 July, 2007 From an article by Kate RaviliousNational Geographic News July 3, 2007 Adventurers exploring a cave on an island in the Indian Ocean have discovered the most complete and well-preserved dodo skeleton ever found, scientists reported yesterday. Researchers...

This will be the official thread for the landing of the Space Shuttle Discovery.. What a mission!!!!

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The next mission of the space shuttle Discovery set for liftoff Tuesday is critical to building the International Space Station, ferrying in the Harmony module key to installing the European lab Columbus and Japan's Kibo lab. Harmony, a big Italian-made aluminum tube weighing in at 14.3 tonnes, will connect the two labs to the outpost and give it its almost final shape. NASA plans to bring in the Columbus on an Atlantis shuttle flight December 6 and the Kibo early in 2008. Discovery's crew of seven includes five men and two women, one of whom is Commander...

A powerful Apollo-era crawler-transporter slowly carried the shuttle Discovery from the Vehicle Assembly Building to launch complex 39A today for work to ready the ship for blastoff Oct. 23 on a complex space station assembly mission. The three-mile trip began around 6:47 a.m. and the orbiter's mobile launch platform was "hard down" at the pad by around 1:15 p.m. NASA had hoped to move the ship to the pad last week, but the trip was delayed after engineers discovered a hydraulic leak in the shuttle's right main landing gear strut. Four seals in the strut mechanism were replaced, clearing the...

Archeological Discovery in Ohio River September 27, 2007 It’s like a discovery channel special, a living history lesson and a heated border war all rolled into one. A recent river recovery of an eight ton treasure was followed by angry claims of archeological thievery. This sandstone scratching is far from another face in the crowd. After years of planning and weeks of effort, a Portsmouth, Ohio Volunteer Recovery Team pulled the prehistoric, legendary Indian’s Head Rock off the mighty Ohio River’s bottom. “It was tough to get straps around it,” recovery team diver Dave Vetter said. In the 18 and...

What does the California prison system have in common with Harvard University? It costs precisely as much to house, feed and guard one prisoner for one year in a California state prison as tuition, meals and housing cost for a student enrolled for one academic year at Harvard. As far as California taxpayers are concerned, it gets even worse. Their prison system is so overcrowded that it’s reached a breaking point. Either the state finds a long-term solution, or the federal courts have warned that they’ll begin ordering the release of inmates, just to ease the crush. In this two-hour...

RALEIGH - Harlan “Carolina” Jones was commissioned by Biblical Archeology Review in 1977 to find the long-lost Ark of the Covenant. Three decades of frustration could have been avoided had Craig Newmark, then a 24-year-old fratboy at Wofford College, hurried up and started his nifty Web site for classified ads—Craigslist.org. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited and all,” Jones said. “But I feel like a dang fool.” Jones was searching on Raleigh Craigslist for a new Husky toolbox for his pickup truck when he clicked on the following ad: “Funky storage box. Used. Free jar, stick and a couple of...

WASHINGTON - Astronomers have stumbled upon a tremendous hole in the universe. That's got them scratching their heads about what's just not there. The cosmic blank spot has no stray stars, no galaxies, no sucking black holes, not even mysterious dark matter. It is 1 billion light years across of nothing. That's an expanse of nearly 6 billion trillion miles of emptiness, a University of Minnesota team announced Thursday. Astronomers have known for many years that there are patches in the universe where nobody's home. In fact, one such place is practically a neighbor, a mere 2 million light years...

The universe has a huge hole in it that dwarfs anything else of its kind. The discovery caught astronomers by surprise. The hole is nearly a billion light-years across. It is not a black hole, which is a small sphere of densely packed matter. Rather, this one is mostly devoid of stars, gas and other normal matter, and it's also strangely empty of the mysterious "dark matter" that permeates the cosmos. Other space voids have been found before, but nothing on this scale. Astronomers don't know why the hole is there. "Not only has no one ever found a void...

Possible discovered of America by Marco Polo before Colomb: account in VSD 'America - its West coast - would have been discovered by Marco Polo some 200 years before Christophe Colomb, according to a chart of the Library of the Congress in Washington examined since 1943 by the FBI and whose history is told in published review VSD Wednesday. This document, brought to the Library in 1933 by Marcian Rossi, an American naturalized citizen originating in Italy, “represents a boat beside a chart showing part of India, China, Japan, the Eastern Indies and North America”, indicates the report/ratio of...

Science Daily — St. Andrews scientists have discovered a new way of levitating tiny objects - paving the way for future applications in nanotechnology. Artist's impression of a mirror levitating using a repulsive version of the Casimir effect. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of St Andrews) Theoretical physicists at the University of St. Andrews have created 'incredible levitation effects' by engineering the force of nature which normally causes objects to stick together by quantum force. By reversing this phenomenon, known as 'Casimir force', the scientists hope to solve the problem of tiny objects sticking together in existing novel nanomachines. Professor...

NASA is racing the clock for a space shuttle flight — and desperately hoping it never gets off the ground. Not Endeavour — scheduled to lift off next week with a crew of seven, including schoolteacher-astronaut Barbara Morgan — but sister shuttle Discovery, which is being readied for launch at short notice. Discovery will mount a rescue mission if Endeavour flies into trouble and its crew has to be brought back. After Columbia disintegrated during re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere in February 2003, scientists developed several methods for repairing stricken shuttles. These include wing sensors to detect impacts, a redesigned fuel...

TO LIVE up to his public image of a rugged, ex-SAS adventurer, it must have seemed essential for Bear Grylls to appear at ease sleeping rough and catching his own food in his television survival series. But it has emerged that Grylls, 33, was enjoying a far more conventional form of comfort, retreating some nights from filming in mountains and on desert islands to nearby lodges and hotels. Now Channel 4 has launched an investigation into whether Grylls, who has conquered Everest and the Arctic, deceived the public in his series Born Survivor. The series, screened in March and April...

Coin discovery thrills archaeologists Archaeologists monitoring some digging by the City of Oslo's waterworks department made a sensational discovery this week.Gunhild Høvik Hansen spotted the special coin while digging herself. PHOTO: ANNE-STINE JOHNSBRÅTEN The discovery was made while archaeologists were monitoring replacement of new waterlines in the oldest part of Oslo. PHOTO: ANNE-STINE JOHNSBRÅTEN The archaeologists have been following excavations done by city workers who are replacing underground water pipes in the oldest part of Oslo, called Gamlebyen. That's the neighbourhood east of today's downtown area where Oslo’s first known settlements were established more than a thousand years ago....

SINAI PENINSULA, EGYPT – In a startling new discovery that is turning the heads of biblical scholars and skeptics alike, manna—a nondescript bread-like eatable—has reportedly been found covering the ground each morning in a dry and desolate region outside of Serabit El-Khadem.

Aventura - ancient Maya city discovered on modern papaya farm in Corozal Friday, 01 June 2007 By Joseph Stamp Romero - Staff Reporter Excavated structure where platform was found. Platform can be seen to the left of the gentleman. Archeologists say they have stumbled on three Mayan foundations, which are part of a large Mayan city called Aventura, dating back to the early Classic Period of the Mayan Civilization. Among the artifacts retrieved are the bones a man and a woman, believed to be 1,800 years old. The Belize National Institute of Archaeology have said that they found what appears...

Only in science could the discovery of something old and crusty be exciting. And researchers are very excited about finding chunks of Earth's outer crust that are 3.8 billion years old. Most stuff that old has been folded back into the planet and lost forever or spat back out after being melted into unrecognizable magma. The discovery, detailed in today's issue of the journal Science, provides solid evidence that Earth had crustal plates way back then that were banging into each other much as they do today in a process that drives earthquakes and reshapes continents. That activity, and the...

Odds of 'Lost Tomb' Being Jesus' Family Rest on Assumptions Until two weeks ago, University of Toronto statistician Andrey Feuerverger's body of research encompassed uncontroversial topics such as medical scanning and correcting for camera blurring. ... Prof. Feuerverger calculated there is just a one-in-600 chance that those same names would have come together in a family that didn't belong to Jesus of Nazareth. ... But the one-in-600 calculation is based on many assumptions about the prevalence of the names and their biblical significance. For purposes of his calculations, Prof. Feuerverger relied on new scholarly research that links the inscription "Mariamene...

False Tombs and Gnostic Tales Mocking the heart of Christianity "Last year, it was the Gnostic nonsense of the 'Da Vinci Code.'... This year it's a variation on the 'Da Vinci' theme. We are not only being told that there was a Mrs. Jesus (aka Mary Magdalene). We are also informed that her tomb and that of Jesus have been found in Jerusalem; that DNA testing has proved that they are not related and so must have been married (how exactly does it prove that?)... In a surreal moment on 'Larry King Live' earlier this week, the film's producer, James...

The Lost Tomb of Jesus on the Discovery Channel was followed up by a panel discussion moderated by Ted Koppel. Koppel and two professors who are not affiliated with the documentary totally eviscerated the director of the film and one of his consultants. Koppel seemed particularly offended by the film maker's claims of being a journalist. If you get the chance to see this review of the documentary, watch it. It is very funny.

By Luis Sergio Solimeo It just does not stop. Following in the footsteps of The Da Vinci Code, the Gnostic offensive against Christianity is forging ahead with new pretexts, and, once again, with massive media coverage. The New Onslaught: Archeological FictionThis time, it is not a pseudo-historic novel,1 but a pseudo-scientific Discovery Channel documentary, titled: The Lost Tomb of Jesus, which was directed by James Cameron and Simcha Jacobovici.  The two are well-suited for the task.  Mr. Cameron is a science fiction2 fan, while Mr. Jacobovici could be considered an archeological fiction aficionado. Four years ago, he produced another...

Discover weapons that will always find their target, including the AS50 semi-automatic sniper rifle, the Vulcan and Aardvark mine destroyers, the SMAW-NE shoulder-launched thermobaric munition and the Fire Scout unmanned aerial vehicle.

When Mark Polansky reaches space, he'll have brought a little piece of Jersey with him. The astronaut is scheduled to lift off tonight from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard Space Shuttle Discovery. He is commanding the STS-116 mission to the International Space Station. But his journey began as a boy growing up by Roosevelt Park in North Edison, a pharmacist's son who devoured books on science, was glued to the television for all the early space launches and pretended a cardboard box was a spaceship. "I loved geography. I loved the idea of exploring," Polansky said. "I figured...

The decision earlier this week to add a spacewalk to Discovery's mission and still preserve a final heat shield inspection today forced NASA managers to delay re-entry one day to Friday and in so doing, give up one of three end-of-mission landing opportunities. With only two available landing days - Friday and Saturday - NASA flight rules require a landing attempt Friday, even if that means diverting the shuttle to California or New Mexico. The latter option is a worst-case scenario that could expose the orbiter to sub-freezing weather for two days, possibly damaging thruster seals and water lines, and...

Loss Of Weather Contingency Day May Prove Challenging NASA reports the space shuttle Discovery undocked from the International Space Station at 5:10 pm EST Tuesday, ending an eight-day stay. Pilot Bill Oefelein guided the shuttle through a partial fly-around of the space station, before firing Discovery's rockets to begin the final separation from the station and the trip back home. The STS-116 crew bid farewell to the International Space Station’s Expedition 14 crew before entering Space Shuttle Discovery. The hatches closed between the two vehicles at 2:42 pm Then, the two crews conducted leak checks before Discovery undocked. Discovery is...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Fresh from the success of an impromptu spacewalk, shuttle Discovery's astronauts awoke Tuesday to the strains of "Zamboni" by the Gear Daddies and got ready to undock from the international space station. "We can't offer you a Zamboni to drive today," said Mission Control astronaut Shannon Lucid, referring to the ice rink machine immortalized in the Minnesota band's country rock song. "But if you look at today's flight plan, you will see that we are offering you the opportunity to fly the shuttle for half a lap flyaround. That's not a bad tradeoff." Space shuttle Discovery's...

Pakistani boy leads scientists to pain discovery By Patricia Reaney Wed Dec 13, 1:25 PM ET A young Pakistani street performer and members of three related families have enabled scientists to make a genetic breakthrough that could lead to more effective painkillers. During his short life, the unnamed boy never felt pain. He was a local celebrity in northern Pakistan where he astonished crowds by plunging knives through his arms and walking on burning coals. He died on his 14th birthday after jumping from a roof. By studying his case, and other individuals from families in the same clan, researchers...

HOUSTON - The 2-ton, $11 million addition astronauts have delivered to the international space station may be one of the smaller pieces of the structure, but even supporting actors are vital. The addition will act both as a spacer between a pair of the station's power-generating solar arrays and as a channel through which lines of electricity, data and cooling liquid will run, NASA said. Two astronauts were scheduled to install the addition on Tuesday, in the first of three harrowing spacewalks during the 12-day mission that left Earth on Saturday. The space shuttle Discovery crew are continuing the assembly...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - After a two-day journey, space shuttle Discovery reached the international space station Monday for a weeklong stay to continue construction on the orbiting lab and rotate out a crew member. Discovery commander Mark Polansky closed in on the station at a tenth of a foot per second before latches automatically linked the spacecraft as they flew 220 miles above southeast Asia during a sunrise. "Capture confirmed," Polansky told Mission Control and the space station. About an hour before docking, Discovery did a slow back flip so the space station crew could photograph its belly for any...

HOUSTON - The orbiting Discovery crew, en route Sunday to rewire the international space station, first had to make sure the shuttle's heat shield wasn't damaged during liftoff. The seven astronauts prepared to inspect the wings and nose cap Sunday afternoon for chips or other damage from foam, a procedure made mandatory after the Columbia accident in 2003. Mission specialist Nicholas Patrick will maneuver the shuttle's 50-foot robotic arm and similarly long boom with cameras and sensors. The Columbia disintegrated while re-entering the atmosphere, killing the crew members. Preliminary radar reports from Discovery's launch showed nothing of concern, NASA spokesman...

Will the Shuttle go or not... It all depends on the weather...

WASHINGTON (NNS) -- Three Navy astronauts are part of the crew of NASA's space shuttle Discovery currently awaiting launch. The nighttime launch of Discovery had been set for Dec. 7, but was delayed becuase of weather. Capt. Robert L. Curbeam Jr. and Cmdrs. William A. Oefelein and Sunita L. Williams will be on Discovery when it launches toward the International Space Station, where the astronauts will continue construction on the station, rewiring the orbiting laboratory and adding a segment to its integrated truss structure. The electrical repairs are the crew’s main mission, but they also will be rotating a crew...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 7, 2006 -- Three Navy astronauts are part of the crew for NASA’s latest Discovery shuttle mission, which is set to launch at 9:35 p.m. Eastern Time today. Navy Capt. Robert L. Curbeam Jr. and Cmdrs. William A. Oefelein and Sunita L. Williams will be on the space shuttle Discovery when it launches tonight toward the International Space Station, where the astronauts will continue construction on the station, rewiring the orbiting laboratory and adding a segment to its integrated truss structure. NASA reported on its Web site a 60 percent chance of weather prohibiting the scheduled liftoff,...

This is the official live thread for the Space Shuttle Discoery launch thread.. Weather permitting of course...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Space shuttle Discovery's seven astronauts arrived at the Kennedy Space Center Sunday for a final stretch of training and preparations before they are launched on a 12-day mission to rewire the international space station. Liftoff was set for Thursday at 9:35 p.m. EST. It will be the first night launch in four years. "We're going to go ahead and hopefully have one heck of a night show to give everybody this Thursday night," Mark Polansky, Discovery's commander, said after he and his crew arrived from Houston aboard five training jets. Polansky and pilot William Oefelein will...

Any person, who is just getting acquainted with the Russian patent legislation, may feel a bit giddy: lack of development and ambiguity of legal norms make it possible to register any discovery in one’s name from the chair to the fork and claim the fee from manufacturers. Russian patent law was almost inviolate derived from the Soviet legislation, which wasn’t influenced by global tendencies due to the total isolation. Today some of its sections sound so awkwardly that they may be patented themselves.

SAQQARA, Egypt - The arrest of tomb robbers led archaeologists to the graves of three royal dentists, protected by a curse and hidden in the desert sands for thousands of years in the shadow of Egypt's most ancient pyramid, officials announced Sunday. The thieves launched their own dig one summer night two months ago but were apprehended, Zahi Hawass, chief of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, told reporters. That led archaeologists to the three tombs, one of which included an inscription warning that anyone who violated the sanctity of the grave would be eaten by a crocodile and a snake,...

When Discovery Communications launched the Animal Planet channel in 1996, network executives hunted for a star to help distinguish it from the staid, narrated documentaries that were the hallmark of animal shows.

Zoologist Darren Naish has written a thoughtful essay on “Are Sumatran Rhinos Really Living Fossil?” His blog is in response to my comments on the “living fossil” issue, discussed here. I disagree with Naish’s restrictive parameters, of course, as I see this more an issue of educational semantics influenced by zoology, not ruled by it. Darren Naish’s approach is worthy of your attention and he has every right to his very informed point of view. Needless to say, in this case, I was employing the “living fossil” definition that this rhino species is “a living species/clade with many ‘primitive’ characteristics...

DSC — Dirty Jobs: 100th Dirty Job Special 100th Dirty Job Special The two-hour special will be hosted by Mike Rowe as he introduces his work with the United States Army. Mike will share stories from behind the scenes and answer viewer mail as he unites the US with the dirtiest jobs, and funniest moments of the show. 9PM Eastern/Pacific, 8PM Central

The image of featureless steel structures catastrophically crumbling into a fatal dust storm was indelibly imprinted on the minds of millions of people around the world. Yet the enormous plumes of smoke, the soaring balls of fire and the sheer scale of the buildings masked the human face of the tragedy. For the first time, through drama supported by interviews and archival footage, TV audiences will be invited to venture inside the towers to follow the stories of more than a dozen individuals whose daily routine is swept aside by events that changed the world forever. Based on the testimonies...

Paleontologists have uncovered a 25-million-year-old whale fossil with a monstrous set of teeth and enormous eyes on the coast of Australia.The discovery has researchers rethinking whales’ evolutionary history.Scientists were surprised to find that the vicious-looking specimen is an ancestor of modern baleen whales, gentle giants of today’s seas. The fossil suggests a creature that grew to a little more than 11 feet with teeth about an inch-and-a-half long. Baleen whales, which include the blue and humpback, feed by filtering plankton and small fish from seawater through hair-like fibers in their jaws. Their ferocious forebears, on the other hand, appear to...

An archaeology crew excavated what its members think is a prehistoric skeleton from the banks of Lake Travis on Sunday. Evidence at the site indicates that the skeleton is between 700 and 2,000 years old, most likely dating back about 1,000 years, members of the excavation crew said. The nearly intact skeleton is being donated to the University of Texas for further study. The skeleton was found Aug. 9 by an Austin man riding a personal watercraft on Lake Travis. David Houston had pulled onto the sloped southern bank, admiring a nearby house, when he saw a jawbone, teeth and...

Mythbusters investigate the source of the diet cola/Mentos reaction. Also, try to confirm/bust postage stamp on helicopter blade myth

A 3,000-year-old voyage of discovery JENNIFER VEITCHMen would have used this type of log boat to fish and hunt, as well as to trade goods with others, as this drawing exhibits. Picture: Courtesy Perth and Kinross Heritage Trust IN ANCIENT times, when Scotland was virtually covered in dense forest, there was only one way to get around. Traveling by boat helped early Scots to find food and trade goods with their neighbours. The work to extract the boat from the river bed is slow and painstaking. Picture: Courtesy Historic Scotland Now, with the excavation of a 3,000-year-old log boat, archaeologists...

Family, friends cheer on McAllen astronauthttp://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/MYSA071806.1A.valley.space.169b85e.html http://tinyurl.com/zs9yd Web Posted: 07/17/2006 11:02 PM CDT Jesse Bogan Rio Grande Valley Bureau McALLEN — The recent e-mail from outer space informed the small group the voyage had been safe and rewarding. Their supporting role was almost over. "Now the shuttle is just about packed and ready to come home," astronaut Mike Fossum, 48, who grew up in McAllen, wrote them from the space shuttle Discovery on Sunday. "We're all ready, too — our objectives have been met." Hours later, on Monday morning, they gathered before a large television screen in Fossum's boyhood home,...

This is will be the live thread for the Space Shuttle Discovery Landing (weather permitting that is).