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Surf City was a mythical place, a paradise for the era’s restless teens in the summer of 1963, when the song became the first surfing tune to reach No. 1 on the Billboard charts. Fame came quickly for the Los Angeles-born duo of Jan Berry and Dean Torrence, who became stars in their early 20s. They would build on their success with hits such as “Dead Man’s Curve,” “Ride the Wild Surf” and “The Little Old Lady From Pasadena,” joining with their younger friends, the Beach Boys, in writing the anthems of the California coastal lifestyle. Skip forward more than...

Archaeologists in Rome have discovered the foundations of a second triumphal arch of Roman Emperor Titus, which was thought to be lost to history, the Telegraph reports. The arch once stood at the entrance to ancient Rome's chariot-racing stadium, the Circus Maximus. A member of the Flavian dynasty, Titus was emperor of Rome from 79 to 81 A.D. Even though he responded quickly with aid when Vesuvius erupted barely two months into his reign in 79 and is credited with completing the Colosseum in 80, it is the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and his victory against the Jews...

Anyone who pans for gold hopes to be rewarded by the glitter of colors in the fine material collected in the bottom of the pan. Although the exercise and outdoor activity experienced in prospecting are rewarding, there are few thrills comparable to finding gold. Even an assay report showing an appreciable content of gold in a sample obtained from a lode deposit is exciting. The would-be prospector hoping for financial gain, however, should carefully consider all the pertinent facts before deciding on a prospecting venture.

Einstein's theory of time and space will celebrate its 100th anniversary this year. Even today it captures the imagination of scientists. In an international collaboration, researchers from the universities of Vienna, Harvard and Queensland have now discovered that this world-famous theory can explain yet another puzzling phenomenon: the transition from quantum behavior to our classical, everyday world. Their results are published in the journal Nature Physics. In 1915 Albert Einstein formulated the theory of general relativity which fundamentally changed our understanding of gravity. He explained gravity as the manifestation of the curvature of space and time. Einstein's theory predicts that...

The release of Jurassic World has reignited our love for palaeontology. Many of us share a longing to understand the dinosaurs that roamed the Earth long before we arrived. But palaeontology is a discipline much broader than this. Dinosaurs dominated the land for 135 million years, but what happened during the rest of the Earth's 4.6 billion-year history? The role of palaeontologists past and present has been to unravel the mysteries of life on Earth, and in doing so they've found a lot more than just dinosaur bones. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. The spiky-backed ocean dweller: Right side up? Credit: Natural Math/flickr,...

In ancient Egypt, so many people worshiped Anubis, the jackal-headed god of death, that the catacombs next to his sacred temple once held nearly 8 million mummified puppies and grown dogs, a new study finds. The catacomb ceiling also contains the fossil of an ancient sea monster, a marine vertebrate that's more than 48 million years old, but it's unclear whether the Egyptians noticed the existence of the fossil when they built the tomb for the canine mummies, the researchers said. Many of the mummies have since disintegrated or been disrupted by grave robbers and industrialists, who likely used the...

The final opportunity to visit the award-winning annual dig at the Maryport Roman Temples Project and learn about the excavation directly from lectures by the archaeologists involved has begun in Cumbria. The eight-week dig aims to explore Roman Maryport’s complex religious landscape and to learn more about the famous altars found at the site, on display in nearby Senhouse Roman Museum... The majority of the altars, dedicated annually by the commanders of the Roman fort, were found in an 1870 excavation by Humphrey Senhouse. Since then, the five year project, commissioned by the Senhouse Museum Trust and supported by Newcastle...

University of New South Wales Australia-led research on limestone formations in a remote Scottish cave has produced a unique 3000-year-long record of climatic variations that may have influenced historical events including the fall of the Roman Empire and the Viking Age of expansion. The study of five stalagmites in Roaring Cave north of Ullapool in north-west Scotland is the first to use a compilation of cave measurements to track changes in a climate phenomenon called the North Atlantic Oscillation. 'Our results also provide the longest annual record of this important phenomenon, which has a big impact on the climate in...

Scientists in the Russian Far East have carried out a post-mortem examination of the remains of the only mummified dog ever found in the world. Found sealed inside permafrost during a hunt for traces of woolly mammoths, the perfectly-preserved body is 12,450 years old. The dog, believed to be a three-month-old female, was unearthed in 2011 on the Syallakh River in the Ust-Yana region of Yakutia, also known as the Sakha Republic. Experts spent the past four years analysing the body – which included not just bones but also its heart, lungs and stomach – but only carried out the...

The bombings of 17 May 1974 were a series of coordinated car bombings in Dublin and Monaghan. A new Irish TV documentary has claimed that the purpose of the Dublin/Monaghan bombings in 1974 was to start a civil war. The bombings were carried out by Loyalists acting under orders from British Army agents the documentary revealed. The bombings of 17 May 1974 were a series of coordinated car bombings in Dublin and Monaghan. Three exploded in Dublin during rush hour and a fourth exploded in Monaghan almost 90 minutes later. They killed 33 civilians and a full-term unborn child, and...

A plain dark cloak still streaked with mud from the battle of Waterloo – which the Duke of Wellington is said to have draped around the shoulders of Lady Caroline Lamb when he was one of the most famous, and she one of the most infamous people in Europe – is to be sold for the first time in 200 years. The victor of Waterloo and the tempestuous aristocrat, who was once served up naked in a silver dish at a dinner, had a brief fling in Brussels in the weeks after the battle on 18 June 1815 which changed...

Storms off the west coast of Ireland have disturbed the seabed to reveal two 16th century cannons wrecked from the Spanish Armada. The cannons were brought to the surface this week by underwater archaeologists and are said to be in "extraordinarily good condition". They are thought to come from the wreck of the merchant vessel La Juliana, which sank in storms off Stredagh, Co Sligo on Ireland’s west coast in September 1588 along with two others,La Lavia and Santa Maria de Vision. The artifacts were recovered by the Underwater Archaeology Unit of Ireland’s Department of Arts, Heritage and Gaeltacht. One...

In July 1996, two college students were wading in the shallows of the Columbia River near the town of Kennewick, Wash., when they stumbled across a human skull. At first the police treated the case as a possible murder. But once a nearly complete skeleton emerged from the riverbed and was examined, it became clear that the bones were extremely old — 8,500 years old, it would later turn out. The skeleton, which came to be known as Kennewick Man or the Ancient One, is one of the oldest and perhaps the most important — and controversial — ever found...

Among the entries in a 1999 anthology called The Best American Sports Writing of the Century is a profile of Ty Cobb (1886-1961). It was originally published in True magazine the year of Cobb’s death. The writer, Al Stump, recalls the last, bleak days of the great ballplayer’s life and makes him into a bitter, violent, alcoholic monster. In one passage, he describes a visit to the graveyard in the town of Royston, Georgia, where Cobb had grown up. Cobb wanted Stump, who was ghostwriting his autobiography, to go with him, on Christmas Eve, to see where he would soon...

The Duke of Wellington famously described his first and last battlefield confrontation with Napoleon as a “the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.” He was referring, of course, to the Battle of Waterloo, a bloody, furious one-day engagement in and around a village in northern Belgium of that name, fought 200 years ago today between France’s Army of the North and an allied army of British, Prussian, and Dutch troops under Wellington’s overall command.

In what Prof. Barkai describes as a "time capsule," the analysed calculus revealed three major findings: charcoal from indoor fires; evidence for the ingestion of essential plant-based dietary components; and fibers that might have been used to clean teeth or were remnants of raw materials. "Prof. Karen Hardy published outstanding research on the dental calculus of Neanderthals from El Sidron cave in Spain, but these dated back just 40,000-50,000 years—we are talking far earlier than this," said Prof. Barkai. "This is the first evidence that the world's first indoor BBQs had health-related consequences," said Prof. Barkai. "The people who lived...

In November 2014, Mahsa Vahabi, an Archeology student serendipitously discovered in the dug soil in Mowlavi St., of Tehran Water and Wastewater Company some pottery. Her discovery of simple earthen material drew attentions from her fellow archeologist and a study team addressed the place on Mowlavi St. Further excavations uncovered from under the soil bones and skeleton, reportedly and supposedly belonging to a women from 7,000 years ago. Soon archeology researchers carried out research to find out more about its characteristics. A 3D documentation method was carried out on the skeleton by Mohammad Reza Rokni, an expert in Archeology Research...

Arsonists in northern Israel torched two storerooms filled with artifacts found at a nearby salvage excavation at Tel Kishon on Monday. Some of the antiquities were over 4,000 years old. The blaze inflicted irreparable damage to the antiquities, the Israel Antiquities Authority said in a statement Tuesday morning. The authority lodged a report with the police, who opened an investigation into the incident. The excavations at Tel Kishon were being conducted to prevent damage to artifacts during roadwork on Route 65, near Mount Tabor in the Galilee. Among the antiquities found, and damaged in the blaze, were Bronze Age pottery...

The archaeological sites of the ancient Roman Empire constitute without rival the most prolific array of ancient architecture and artifacts that can be attributed to any single civilization or culture. Its remains pockmark the Old World landscape from North Africa and Egypt to Hadrian’s Wall in Britain. The artifacts populate museums the world over. But comparatively rarely does one find the preserved footprint of an ancient Roman citizen. That is why excavators and archaeologists got excited when, while digging at the site of Hippos-Sussita (an ancient Hellenistic-Roman site just east of the Sea of Galilee in Israel), they came across...

credit: Heather Humphries (Twitter feed)