Free Republic

A searchable map detailing 40 years of Israeli archaeological work in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, developed for the USC Digital Library, has won the 2009 Open Archaeology Prize from the American Schools of Oriental Research.A nonprofit organization founded in 1900 and located at Boston University, the American Schools of Oriental Research support the study and public understanding of peoples and cultures of the Near East. The prize, to be presented today at a professional meeting in New Orleans, recognizes “the best open-access, open-licensed, digital contribution to Near Eastern archaeology by an ASOR member.” Project leaders Lynn Swartz Dodd...

Scientists have watched as a new species is “born”—or is that “evolved”?—on one of the Galapagos Islands, home of Darwin’s famous finches...

THEY were the words that launched one of the darkest episodes in Scottish history, remembered and resented to this day.• Clan Campbell murdered Clan MacDonald in Glencoe in 1692 Now the original handwritten order for the massacre at Glencoe "to fall upon the rebels ... and put all to the sword under seventy" goes on show in Edinburgh this week. Sent to Robert Campbell of Glenlyon, in 1692, the simple 20-line letter triggered the murder of 38 members of the MacDonald clan and is the centrepiece of an exhibition of cultural "treasures" at the National Library of Scotland. It is...

<snip>2.4 Diagnosis #4: The Attraction of Magnificent Academic Trusels. A "trusel" is an idea or a finding that is widely perceived to be true, but which is largely useless (or even of negative value). (The idea that a truth may lack value may be disturbing, but it is true, although it is not a trusel and probably will not be thought to be magnificent.) A "Magnificent Academic Trusel" (MAT) is a trusel that has been widely acknowledged for its intellectual content (explicitly or implicitly), but without a corresponding amount of attention being given to its utility or even to its...

A team of Bulgarian archaeologists led by Veselin Ignatov formally presented Tuesday their finds from the tomb of an aristocrat from Ancient Thrace near the southern town of Nova Zagora. In October and November 2009, Ignatov's team found a burial tomb of dated back to the end of 1st century and beginning of 2nd century AD, located outside of the village of Karanovo, in southern Bulgaria. The finds at the lavish Thracian tomb include gold rings, silver cups and vessels coated with gold and clay vessels. Those include two silver cups with images of love god Eros, and a number...

Researchers may have uncovered the first archaeological evidence that refers to Jesus as an actual person and identifies James, the first leader of the Christian church, as his brother. The 2,000-year-old ossuary—a box that held bones—bears the inscription "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus." Until now, all references to the three men have been found only in manuscripts. The ossuary is not quite rectangular, like most burial boxes found so far, but trapezoid in shape. It is about 20 inches long, 10 inches wide, and 12 inches high. The image on top shows the inscription "James, son of Joseph,...

Pope Benedict XVI said last night that bone fragments found inside the tomb of St Paul in Rome had been carbon dated for the first time, "confirming the unanimous and uncontested tradition that they are the mortal remains of the Apostle Paul". He said that archaeologists had inserted a probe into the white marble sarcophagus under the Basilica of St Paul's Outside the Walls which has been revered for centuries as the tomb of St Paul. The pontiff said: "Small fragments of bone were carbon dated by experts who knew nothing about their provenance and results showed they were from...

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Sometimes a job is just a job, even when from the outside it looks like it involves the stuff of an Indiana Jones movie. Fabrizio Bisconti is the newly named archaeological superintendent of the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology, which oversees the upkeep and preservation of 140 Christian catacombs from the third and fourth centuries scattered all over Italy. Most of the time, he said, the job is just work and study. Staff members can spend a full month with surgical tools and cotton balls cleaning a third-century sarcophagus, but then there are those stunning, shocking,...

Dutch researcher Eva Kaptijn succeeded in discovering -- based on 100,000 finds -- that the Zerqa Valley in Jordan had been successively inhabited and irrigated for more than 13,000 years. But it was not just communities that built irrigation systems: the irrigation systems also built communities... she has been applying an intensive field exploration technique: 15 metres apart, the researchers would walk forward for 50 metres. On the outward leg, they'd pick up all the earthenware and, on the way back, all of the other material. This resulted in more than 100,000 finds, varying from about 13,000 years to just...

The animals, which included mammoths, elephant-sized mastodons and beavers the size of black bears, were probably picked off by more inept hunters who only much later developed specialised weapons when their prize catches became scarce. "Some people thought humans arrived and decimated the populations of these animals in a few hundred years, but what we've found is not consistent with that rapid 'blitzkrieg' overkill of large animals," said Jacquelyn Gill, a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who led the research team... Gill's team rules this out by putting a more accurate date on the decline and fall...

The gardens were built when the Abbey of Cernes was transformed into a country mansion in the mid-16th century after the Dissolution of the Monasteries. One resident who may have been responsible for the gardens was Denzil Holles, a characterful MP who fought for the Parliamentarians but was a Royalist at heart and who occupied the house from 1642-66. The Rev John Hutchins, a local historian writing in 1774, claimed that he was told that the giant was "a modern thing" cut by Lord Holles. The National Trust, which owns the field where the giant is carved, suggests that the...

According to a new study of clay pots and ceramic tablets discovered almost 70 years ago in Harappa, now in Pakistan, the people of the Indus Valley had a detailed system of commodity value, weights and measures. Dr Bryan Wells, a researcher based at India's Institute of Mathematical Sciences, told The Daily Telegraph he had begun work on his thesis ten years ago when he first saw photographs of the clay pots with markings which appeared to be in proportion to their relative size. But he was not able to test his thesis until he visited New Delhi earlier this...

Jews had long suspected that the entrance to the real burial chamber must be here, and because of that they placed their prayer slips of paper in wall cracks on the exterior of the building at this same location... Dr. Jevin... recounted to Nachrichten aus Israel (News from Israel) how he forced himself through a narrow entrance, went down 16 steps and crawled along a 20-meters long, 60-cm high and 100-cm wide tunnel in order to finally reach a 3.5 x 3.5 meter room. The chamber, tunnel and steps were all made of the same worked stones as the building...

Two fingers and a tooth removed from Galileo Galilei's corpse in a Florentine basilica in the 18th century and given up for lost have been found again, a Florence museum said Friday. Paolo Galluzzi, director of the Museum of the History of Science, said three fingers, a vertebra and a tooth were removed by enthusiastic admirers from the astronomer's body in 1737, 95 years after his death, while his corpse was being moved from a storage place to a monumental tomb, opposite the tomb of Michelangelo, in Santa Croce Basilica in Florence. One of the fingers was recovered soon after,...

Appearing in the Nov. 27, 2009, issue (Vol. 284, No. 48) of JBCA key question in the origin of biological molecules like RNA and DNA is how they first came together billions of years ago from simple precursors. Now, in a study appearing in this week's JBC, researchers in Italy have reconstructed one of the earliest evolutionary steps yet: generating long chains of RNA from individual subunits using nothing but warm water. Many researchers believe that RNA was one of the first biological molecules present, before DNA and proteins; however, there has been little success in recreating the formation on...

It has always amazed me how unconcerned evolutionists seem to be about entropy and the problems it poses both for a natural origin of life and for macroevolution. The argument from entropy is one of the most powerful arguments against the spontaneous formation of life from a random association of non-living chemicals...

CLICK HERE FOR THE WHOLE PAMPHLET ...Big Government has spent $79 billion on the climate industry, 3000 times more than Big Oil. Leading climate scientists won’t debate in public and won’t provide their data. What do they hide? When faced with freedom-of-information requests they say they’ve “lost” the original global temperature records. Thousands of scientists are rising in protest against the scare campaign. Meanwhile $126 billion turned over in carbon markets in 2008 and bankers get set to make billions. Twenty pages of concise commentary and cartoons: The short synopsis of how we paid to find a crisis. The...

Amateur fossil hunters Jamie and Jonathan Hiscocks were looking for dinosaur remains in East Sussex, UK, when they instead found tiny spider webs trapped inside a piece of ancient amber. Oxford University paleobiologist Martin Brasier inspected the amber, which was assigned an age of over 100 million years. He concluded that spiders back then were able to spin webs just like today’s garden spiders.The amber-encased webbing formed concentric circles like those that contemporary orb-weaver spiders manufacture. Also evident were “little sticky droplets along the web threads to trap prey,� Brasier told the Daily Mail. He added, “You can match the...

Not to mince words - the modern synthesis is gone --snip-- "The discovery of pervasive HGT and the overall dynamics of the genetic universe destroys not only the tree of life as we knew it but also another central tenet of the modern synthesis inherited from Darwin, namely gradualism. In a world dominated by HGT, gene duplication, gene loss and such momentous events as endosymbiosis, the idea of evolution being driven primarily by infinitesimal heritable changes in the Darwinian tradition has become untenable." ...

The History Channel is airing this week a truly remarkable series - World War II HD: WWII in HD is the first-ever World War II documentary presented in full, immersive HD color. Culled from thousands of hours of lost and rare color archival footage gathered from a worldwide search through basements and archives, WWII in HD will change the way the world sees this defining conflict. Using footage never before seen by most Americans--converted to HD for unprecedented clarity--viewers will experience the war as if they were actually there, surrounded by the real sights and sounds of the battlefields.Here are...

The last breaths of mammoths and mastodons some 13,000 years ago have garnered plenty of research and just as much debate. What killed these large beasts in a relative instant of geologic time? A question asked less often: What happened when they disappeared? A new study, based partly on dung fungus, provides some answers to both questions. The upshot: The landscape changed dramatically. "As soon as herbivores drop off the landscape, we see different plant communities," said lead researcher Jacquelyn Gill of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, adding the result was an "ecosystem upheaval." Gill and her colleagues found that...

The evolutionary history of New Zealand's many extinct flightless moa has been re-written in the first comprehensive study of more than 260 sub-fossil specimens to combine all known genetic, anatomical, geological and ecological information about the unique bird lineage. That lineage ended only about 600 years ago after a journey through time that most likely began about 80 million years earlier on the prehistoric supercontinent of Gondwana, according to the study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by an international team of researchers. Found on the south and north islands of New Zealand, the evolutionary history and...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Villagers in the highlands of Papua New Guinea who ritualistically ate human brains but did not die of a brain disease called kuru have a genetic mutation that protects them, researchers said Wednesday. Their study of the unusual cannibalistic practice shows evolution in real time in the human population, and might lead to a treatment for similar brain-wasting conditions, the researchers reported in the New England Journal of Medicine. Kuru once wiped out entire generations of women in remote Papuan villages. It was traced to a now-defunct mortuary ceremony in which women and children ate the brains...

November 19, 2009 Brain-eating tribe enriches understanding of mad cow disease Mark Henderson, Science Editor A cannibalistic ritual in which the brains of dead tribespeople were eaten by their relatives has triggered one of the most striking examples of rapid human evolution on record, scientists have discovered. In the middle of the 20th century the Fore tribe of the Eastern Highlands province of Papua New Guinea was devastated by a CJD-like disease called kuru, which was passed on by mortuary feasts in which the brains of the dead were consumed. Although the practice was banned in the 1950s and kuru...

Hardening of the arteries has been detected in Egyptian mummies, some as old as 3,500 years, suggesting that the factors causing heart attack and stroke are not only modern ones; they afflicted ancient people, too. Study results are appearing in the Nov. 18 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and are being presented Nov. 17 at the Scientific Session of the American Heart Association at Orlando, Fla. "Atherosclerosis is ubiquitous among modern day humans and, despite differences in ancient and modern lifestyles, we found that it was rather common in ancient Egyptians of high socioeconomic status...

Amazing collection of photos taken during the WW2 and nowadays. The WW2 photos were taken during the invasion of Normandy on and after D-Day.

Homo floresiensis not diseased sub-population of healthy humans Researchers from Stony Brook University Medical Center in New York have confirmed that Homo floresiensis is a genuine ancient human species and not a descendant of healthy humans dwarfed by disease. Using statistical analysis on skeletal remains of a well-preserved female specimen, researchers determined the "hobbit" to be a distinct species and not a genetically flawed version of modern humans. Details of the study appear in the December issue of Significance, the magazine of the Royal Statistical Society, published by Wiley-Blackwell. In 2003 Australian and Indonesian scientists discovered small-bodied, small-brained, hominin (human-like)...

Israel's high rise buildings in Jerusalem are built out of Jerusalem stone, a beautiful natural building material that makes even the new city look gloriously resurrected from the very hills themselves. Obama is a Third World socialist, meaning that he sees everything through the lens of revenge against Western colonialism of the 19th century. Where Obama sees "settlements," Israelis see 900 units of beautiful high-rise buildings made out of the living rock of the land.

Clocks are clocks are clocks – or so you may think. However, some clocks are astronomical both literally and metaphorically. Here is a great selection of astronomical clocks of Europe.

The lesson of history for any small child is that if you are lucky enough to be presented to the future president of the US, then make sure you have evidence of the encounter before bragging about it to your classmates. George Patten, aged eight, discovered the bitter truth of that maxim in 1860 after he boasted at school about having met Abraham Lincoln, having been introduced to the then presidential candidate with his journalist father. The boy's friends thought he had made the story up, and bullied him. To settle the matter, Patten's teacher wrote to the White House...

Paleontologist Paul Sereno and his colleagues unearthed a bizarre bunch of crocodile remains in the Sahara. The crocs sported snouts and other traits that resembled some modern-day animals and inspired nicknames, including SuperCroc (weighed 8 tons), BoarCroc (upper right), PancakeCroc (lower right), RatCroc, DogCroc and DuckCroc. Credit: Photo by Mike Hettwer, courtesy National Geographic. From a crocodile sporting a boar-like snout to a peculiar pal with buckteeth for digging up grub, an odd-looking bunch of such reptiles dashed and swam across what is now the Sahara Desert some 100 million years ago when dinosaurs ruled. That's the picture created by...

ROSEBURG, Ore. -- Mount Mazama's catastrophic volcanic eruption created Crater Lake over 7,600 years ago. But it also created a sort of time capsule for Oregon scientists. Now researchers from the Umpqua National Forest and the Oregon State Museum of Anthropology are digging in. This Passport in Time project actually started last summer, but was put on hold after the Williams Creek fire broke out in July. Now dozens of volunteers and researchers are back to unearth Oregon's history. These archaeologists spend hours sifting and digging, all in hopes of finding something ancient. "We're looking for artifacts that will demonstrate...

Creationists are ‘liars' (?): Geologist Donald Prothero doesn’t like the fact that we don’t agree with his ideas on evolution. I love the attitude some evolutionists have toward professional, scientific debate. Because creationist scientists do not agree with their biased, subjective and unsubstantiated ideas they spit the dummy and call us liars. The latest tirade from geologist Donald Prothero is in an opinion piece in NewScientist entitled ‘Evolution: What missing link?’1 I like that title. His article was picked up by the Telegraph newspaper in the UK which reported, ‘Creationists “peddle lies about the fossil record�.’2 Lies? Are creationists really...

The Great Rift Valley extends some 4,000 miles southward from Syria north of Israel, through the Gulf of Aqaba, through Ethiopia, and all the way to Mozambique in southeast Africa. It harbors a giant fault, which has been under investigation as a model for sea floor spreading. A recent geologic event rent a gaping crack through the desert of Ethiopia, causing safety concerns for locals. These crustal plate motions may foreshadow rifting events further north in the Great Rift Valley...

New Scientist magazine is generally regarded by the secular community as one of the top-ranked science magazines in the world. However, a published opinion by a regular columnist demonstrated how “unscientific” and anti-God some of their articles have become—something we have documented before (see Refutation of New Scientist’s Evolution: 24 myths and misconceptions). Amanda Gefter wrote an article discussing multiverse theory, or the idea that our universe may be only one of many that currently exist. Such speculations attempt to explain away the appearance of design in the universe, because of, as we shall see, the spiritual implications. In an...

Volcanic activity in 2005 accompanied the formation of a deep, wide rift in Ethiopia on part of the 4,000-mile-long north-to-south trending Great Rift Valley fault. Studies show that the injection of mantle material that “unzipped” the earth along the fault operated the same way as similar material does in less-accessible undersea rifts. Scientists knew that rifts were formed in this manner, but the suddenness of this one’s formation astonished them...

There's something strange and big swimming in the canals of Madeira Beach along the Pinellas County coast. Those who have seen it say it's no fish and think it could be a sea serpent. Russ Sittlow, 78, has seen it. He calls the creature "Normandy Nessie" because he lives on Normandy Road. The retired engineer said he first saw "Nessie" in April. "His head come up out of the water, and then he rolled up in a double roll behind him and he was long he was huge," he said of that first sighting.

Darwinizing Everything --snip-- The Darwinians, who took over biology in the 19th century, are still busily engaged in mythmaking, comforting the feebleminded who accept their explanations as wisdom, denouncing the heretics who call their bluff. They wear S on their chests: Science, the equivalent of Superman in intellectual circles. They are phonies. Bring out the kryptonite of critical analysis. It scares them to death, even though they never had special powers to begin with...

Mark HoffmanSurrounded by white corn drying the traditional way, manager Jeff Metoxen talks about the benefits of white corn to a group of visitors from Germany last month at the Tsyunhehkwa Agricultural Center in Oneida. Oneida embrace planting, harvesting of white corn as a staple of diet, culture Mark HoffmanWhite corn has far fewer rows of kernels than its sweet corn cousin. Oneida - George Washington's troops at Valley Forge may have starved to death without the white corn an Oneida Indian chief gave them in the winter of 1777 during the Revolutionary War. Now, the Oneida, like other...

MEMRI: Palestinian Historian Dr. Ibrahim Al-Sinwar: Ancient Egyptians Had the Right to Force the Jews to Work Building Pithom and Raamses; Benjamin Franklin Warned against the Jews MEMRI No. 2260| November 16, 2009 Palestinian Historian Dr. Ibrahim Al-Sinwar: Ancient Egyptians Had the Right to Force the Jews to Work Building Pithom and Raamses; Benjamin Franklin Warned against the Jews Following are excerpts from an interview with Dr. Ibrahim Al-Sinwar, a lecturer on Islamic history at the Islamic University of Gaza. The interview aired on Al-Aqsa TV on July 31, 2009. To view this clip, visit http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/2260.htm Dr. Ibrahim Al-Sinwar: The...

Scientists have uncovered heart disease in 3,500-year-old Egyptian mummies, suggesting the risk factors behind it are not just modern in nature. Heart disease is often ascribed to modern risk factors, such as smoking, unhealthy diets rich in saturated fats, salt and processed sugars, or sedentary lifestyles. But then cardiologists touring the Egyptian National Museum of Antiquities in Cairo during a medical conference last year noticed the nameplate of the pharoah Merenptah, who ruled from 1213 B.C. to 1203 B.C. It read that when Merenptah died at roughly age 60, he was afflicted with atherosclerosis, or thickening of the arteries due...

Signature in the Cell makes 2009 list of top ten bestselling science books Today Amazon.com announced their bestselling books of 2009 and Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (HarperOne) by Dr. Stephen C. Meyer made the top ten in the science category. According to Amazon.com, books on its 2009 list of best sellers are “[r]anked according to customer orders through October. Only books published for the first time in 2009 are eligible.” The book's publisher, HarperOne, reports that the book is entering its fifth printing in as many months, and continues to sell strongly both...

According to Thomas Bouchard, a US psychologist famous for his research on twins raised apart,[1] even scientists with good reason to believe that the majority are wrong can be silenced. The reason is...

One of the oldest archaeological sites not on a heritage list, this Pacific state, like Easter Island, is an engineering marvel We zigzag slowly in our skiff around the shallow coral heads surrounding Pohnpei. The island, a little smaller than New York City, is part of the Federated States of Micronesia. It is nestled in a vast tapestry of coral reefs. Beyond the breakers, the Pacific stretches 5,578 miles to California. A stingray dashes in front of us, flying underwater like a butterfly alongside our bow. Our destination is Nan Madol, near the southern side of the island, the only...

Vatican City, Sep 16, 2008 / 10:50 am (CNA).- Two universities from different sides of the Atlantic announced plans today to hold an international conference to discuss Charles Darwin’s work “The Origin of the Species.” The conference will approach Darwin’s theory of evolution from a scientific standpoint, rather than an ideological one, an organizer explained.  "Biological Evolution: Facts and Theories. A Critical Appraisal 150 years after 'The Origin of Species'" is scheduled for March 3-7, 2009 in Rome and is being sponsored by the University of Notre Dame (USA) and the Pontifical Gregorian University. The congress, while being sponsored by...

A new molecule that performs the essential function of life - self-replication - could shed light on the origin of all living things. If that wasn't enough, the laboratory-born ribonucleic acid (RNA) strand evolves in a test tube to double itself ever more swiftly. "Obviously what we're trying to do is make a biology," says Gerald Joyce, a biochemist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. He hopes to imbue his team's molecule with all the fundamental properties of life: self-replication, evolution, and function. Joyce and colleague Tracey Lincoln made their chemical out of RNA because most researchers...

An Amazon of words flowed from Charles Darwin's pen. His books covered the gamut from barnacles to orchids, from geology to domestication. At the same time, he filled notebooks with his ruminations and scribbled thousands of letters packed with observations and speculations on nature. Yet Darwin dedicated only a few words of his great verbal flood to one of the biggest questions in all of biology: how life began.

Minerals help molecules thought to have been essential for early life to form. A team of US scientists may have found the 'primordial womb' in which the first life on Earth was incubated. Lynda Williams and colleagues at Arizona State University in Tempe have discovered that certain types of clay mineral convert simple carbon-based molecules to complex ones in conditions mimicking those of hot, wet hydrothermal vents (mini-volcanoes on the sea bed). Such complex molecules would have been essential components of the first cell-like systems on Earth. Having helped such delicate molecules to form, the clays can also protect them...

Baseball is as American as ... tea and crumpets?

On December 24, 1971, the New York Times ran one of the first of many articles on a new holiday designed to foster unity among African Americans. The holiday, called Kwanzaa, was applauded by a certain sixteen-year-old minister who explained that the feast would perform the valuable service of "de-whitizing" Christmas. The minister was a nobody at the time but he would later go on to become perhaps the premier race-baiter of the twentieth century. His name was Al Sharpton .... With money also comes forgetfulness. As those warm Kwanzaa feelings are generated in a spirit of holiday cheer, those...