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Deep inside a cave 30 miles from Johannesburg, South Africa, a tight crevasse guards the passageway to what was, until recently, the grave of at least 15 human-like individuals. Their bones and teeth—more than 1,500 fragments in all—lay in a heap in the bottom of a pitch-black chamber for ages, until two skinny spelunkers with flashlights squeezed into the earth deep enough to find them. Now those bones are in the hands of scientists who say they belong to a new species of prehumans, with a mix of features typically associated with modern man or fossils belonging to Australopithecina, a...

A 12-METRE monolith, hacked out of limestone by stone-age humans some nine thousand years ago, has been found at the bottom of the Mediterranean. The enormous stone totem, now split in two and sitting in the Sicilian Channel between Tunisia and Sicily, was hewed from a rocky outcrop some 300m away when the Mediterranean Sea was still a dry basin. It’s now under 40m of water. The new study, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, says the area was submerged about 9350 years ago (give or take 200 years) when the last Ice Age retreated. Before that time the...

The cupboards of the Natural History Museum in London hold spectacular dinosaur fossils, from 10-centimeter, serrated Tyrannosaurus rex teeth to a 4-meter-long hadrosaur tail. Now, researchers are reporting another spectacular find, buried in eight nondescript fossils from the same collection: what appear to be ancient red blood cells and fibers of ancient protein. Using new methods to peer deep inside fossils, the study in this week’s issue of Nature Communications backs up previous, controversial reports of such structures in dinosaur bones. It also suggests that soft tissue preservation may be more common than anyone had guessed. “It’s encouraging,” especially because...

Abstract Exceptionally preserved organic remains are known throughout the vertebrate fossil record, and recently, evidence has emerged that such soft tissue might contain original components. We examined samples from eight Cretaceous dinosaur bones using nano-analytical techniques; the bones are not exceptionally preserved and show no external indication of soft tissue. In one sample, we observe structures consistent with endogenous collagen fibre remains displaying ~67 nm banding, indicating the possible preservation of the original quaternary structure. Using ToF-SIMS, we identify amino-acid fragments typical of collagen fibrils. Furthermore, we observe structures consistent with putative erythrocyte remains that exhibit mass spectra similar to emu...

Dinosaur fossils, it was long thought, are simple objects. The fossilization process leaves the overall shape of a dinosaur's bones intact, but all the microscopic structures inside them — the blood cells, connective fibers, and other sorts of soft tissue — inevitably decay over time. The photo above, from a new study published today in Nature Communications and led by Sergio Bertazzo of Imperial College London, shows an extremely zoomed-in view of a 75-million-year-old theropod claw, taken from the London Natural History Museum's collection. When researchers scraped tiny pieces off the fossil and looked at them under an electron microscope,...

Students Surprised to Find Noah's Ark Feasible by Brian Thomas, M.S. * Advanced physics students at Leicester University were tasked with determining if the Biblical dimensions of Noah's ark—assuming it was properly constructed—could have supported the mass of 70,000 animals. Student Kayie Raymer told UK's The Telegraph that after other "more serious" assignments, this one was "something different."1 What did they find? The students used 48.2cm (almost 19 inches) as the length of a cubit to estimate the total dimensions of the ark. Using the density of water and Archimedes' principle of buoyancy, they calculated the total mass the ark...

Noah’s Ark could have floated even with two of every land animal in the world packed inside, scientists have calculated. Although researchers are unsure if all the creatures could have squeezed into the huge vessel, they are confident it would have handled the weight of 70,000 animals without sinking. A group of master’s students from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Leicester University studied the exact dimensions of the Ark, set out in Genesis 6:13-22. According to The Bible, God instructed Noah to build a boat that was 300 cubits long 50 cubits wide and 30 cubits high —...

NOAH’S Ark would have floated — even with two of every animal on board, physicists have determined based on the weight of the beasts and the buoyancy of the boat. The students from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leicester who came to this conclusion used the dimensions for the boat that were given in the Bible. In the book of Genesis, Noah is commanded to build an ark which is 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide and 30 cubits high to house himself, his family and two of every species of animal. For the study,...

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) is the only major Republican likely 2016 presidential candidate who hasn't weighed in on the controversy over Indiana's "religious freedom" law that erupted this week — and his explanation for avoiding the issue is questionable.

A Two Thousand Year Old Project Two thousand years ago the Epicureans believed that the world arose spontaneously. Their idea was that randomly veering atoms attained a great variety of configurations by chance, and would eventually find themselves forming stable, functional structures. And while this may seem unlikely, the immense universe provided a great many opportunities for those configurations to come about. In Cicero’s dialog, the Epicurean explains this to his stoic opponent: You [stoics] would surely have no need of the activity of such a figure [a skilled craftsman] if you would only observe how unlimited, unbounded tracts...

It has been called the most contested plot of land in the world — the fissure at which three major faiths come together, and break apart. There have been holy wars fought over it and holy writ foretelling of battles yet to come. It’s Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. But what if history got it wrong? What if the spot where Solomon built the first Jewish Temple, and Herod built the second, was actually about 600 feet to the south, in a place known as the ancient City of David? Enter Robert Cornuke. He travels the world solving Bible mysteries: Noah’s Ark,...

Charles Darwin worried about a possible hole in his theory of evolution, but some American scientists may just have plugged it. For about a billion years after the dawn of life on Earth, organisms didn't evolve all that much. Then about 600 million years ago came the "Cambrian explosion." Everything changed relatively quickly, with all kinds of plants and animals emerging—which doesn't quite seem to fit with Darwin's theory of slow change, hence "Darwin's dilemma." Now, within a few days of each other, two new studies have appeared that could explain the shift, ABC News reports. One, by scientists at...

Imagine if you were told that the world is simple and exactly as it seems, but that there is an infinite number of worlds just like ours. They share the same space and time, and interact with each other. These worlds behave as Newton first envisioned, except that the slightest interactions of the infinite number create nuances and deviations from the Newtonian mechanics. What could be deterministic is swayed by many worlds to become the unpredictable. Schrödinger, in explaining his wave function and the interaction of two particles (EPR paradox) coined the term “entanglement”. In effect, the MIW theory is...

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno, the new president of the Vatican Observatory Foundation, has no doubt that life exists elsewhere in the universe and that when humanity discovers it, the news will come as no big surprise. He suggested that the likely discovery -- whether next month or a millennium from now -- will be received much the way that news of planets orbiting far off stars has filtered in since the 1990s. "The general public is going to be, 'Oh, I knew that. I knew it was going to be there,'" Brother Consolmagno told Catholic News...

Religions have surprisingly diverse approaches to the issue of possible extraterrestrial life, David Weintraub found. Below, a quick survey adapted from his book "Religions and Extraterrestrial Life: How Will We Deal With It?" and interviews with the author.

If modern physics is to be believed, we shouldn’t be here. The meager dose of energy infusing empty space, which at higher levels would rip the cosmos apart, is a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times tinier than theory predicts. And the minuscule mass of the Higgs boson, whose relative smallness allows big structures such as galaxies and humans to form, falls roughly 100 quadrillion times short of expectations. Dialing up either of these constants even a little would render the universe unlivable. To account for our incredible luck, leading cosmologists like Alan Guth and...

The objects found in the sacrificial pits included animal-faced sculptures and masks with dragon ears, open mouths and grinning teeth; human-like heads with gold foil masks; decorative animals including dragons, snakes, and birds; a giant wand, a sacrificial altar, a 4-meter-tall (13-foot-tall) bronze tree; axes, tablets, rings, knives, and hundreds of other unique items. Among the collection was also the world’s largest and best preserved bronze upright human figure, measuring 2.62 meters (8 feet). However, by far the most striking findings were dozens of large bronze masks and heads represented with angular human features, exaggerated almond-shaped eyes, straight noses, square...

Scientists are working to bring the multiverse hypothesis, which to some sounds like a fanciful tale, firmly into the realm of testable science. Never mind the Big Bang; in the beginning was the vacuum. The vacuum simmered with energy (variously called dark energy, vacuum energy, the inflation field, or the Higgs field). Like water in a pot, this high energy began to evaporate -- bubbles formed.

Are there out-of-sequence fossils that are problematic for evolution? by Gary Bates and Lita Cosner Published: 17 April 2014 (GMT+10) In his debate with Ken Ham, (the ‘science guy’) Bill Nye dogmatically claimed, and asked Ham, to cite any out of order fossils in the geologic record, because if there were any, it would be problematic for the evolutionary model. Due to the seeming confidence of Nye’s assertion (and that it was not answered during the debate), many have contacted us for an answer on this single question. In addition, while out on ministry our speakers have mentioned how this...

The rich are not the problem, the greedy are not the problem, the crooked are not the problem - the problem is the system that brings them about. If the system is ours, the system means by the people, of the people, for the people, then now it is time to take it back. Now it is time to demand that it would be changed.