Free Republic

The most western ancient Greek colony documented in the Mediterranean is revealing its secrets through the development of a Document Centre on Greek trade and presence in Iberia, according to the creators of the Iberia Graeca centre. Empúries, formerly known by its Spanish name Ampurias, was a town on the Mediterranean coast of the Catalan comarca of Alt Empordà in Catalonia, Spain. It was founded in 575 BC by Greek colonists from Phocaea with the name of Emporion, meaning "market". It was later occupied by the Romans, but in the Early Middle Ages, when its exposed coastal position left it...

Focusing on mitochondrial DNA sequences from 13 Neandertal individuals, including a new sequence from the site of Valdegoba cave in northern Spain, the research team found some surprising results. When they started looking at the DNA, a clear pattern emerged. Neandertal individuals from Western Europe that were older than 50,000 years and individuals from sites in western Asia and the Middle East showed a high degree of genetic variation, on par with what might be expected from a species that had been abundant in an area for a long period of time. In fact, the amount of genetic variation was...

Explanation: Sister planet stands / together with sister stars. / Celebrate the sky.

Averting the worst consequences of human-induced climate change is a "great moral issue" on a par with slavery, according to the leading Nasa climate scientist Prof Jim Hansen. He argues that storing up expensive and destructive consequences for society in future is an "injustice of one generation to others". Hansen, who will next Tuesday be awarded the prestigious Edinburgh Medal for his contribution to science, will also in his acceptance speech call for a worldwide tax on all carbon emissions. In his lecture, Hansen will argue that the challenge facing future generations from climate change is so urgent that a...

Explanation: After wandering about as far from the Sun on the sky as Venus can get, the brilliant evening star crossed paths with the Pleiades star cluster earlier this week. The beautiful conjunction was enjoyed by skygazers around the world. Taken on April 2, this celestial group photo captures the view from Portal, Arizona, USA. Also known as the Seven Sisters, even the brighter naked-eye Pleiades stars are seen to be much fainter than Venus. And while Venus and the sisters do look star-crossed, their spiky appearance is the diffraction pattern caused by multiple leaves in the aperture of the...

Scientists, it's said, behave more like lawyers than philosophers. They do not so much test their theories as prosecute their cases, seeking supportive evidence and ignoring data that do not fit—a failing known as confirmation bias. They then accuse their opponents of doing the same thing. This is what makes debates over nature and nurture, dietary fat and climate change so polarized. But just because the prosecutor is biased in favor of his case does not mean the defendant is innocent. Sometimes biased advocates are right. An example of this phenomenon is now being played out in geology over the...

As a climate scientist, I am quite familiar with the background facts that Prof Michael E. Mann (now at Penn State U) so shamelessly distorts in his new book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines. Mann's claim to fame derives from his contentious (and now thoroughly discredited) "hockeystick" research papers (in Nature 1998 and Geophysical Research Letters 1999).

Scientists in search of ancient tusks made a startling discovery. They uncovered the nearly perfectly preserved remains of a woolly mammoth in northern Siberia. The juvenile mammoth is believed to be more than 10,000 years old, but was only 3 to 4 years old when it died. It is unlike any other mammoth that has been unearthed before. The scientists reveal their discovery, which they named "Yuka," in a BBC documentary. Yuka has strawberry blond hair, unlike the dark hair that other mammoths have been found to have. Plus, Yuka's footpads are incredibly well preserved, but some of his bones...

Explanation: Sweeping from the eastern to western horizon, this 360 degree panorama follows the band of zodiacal light along the solar system's ecliptic plane. Dust scattering sunlight produces the faint zodiacal glow that spans this fundamental coordinate plane of the celestial sphere, corresponding to the apparent yearly path of the Sun through the sky and the plane of Earth's orbit. The fascinating panorama is a mosaic of images taken from dusk to dawn over the course of a single night at two different locations on Mauna Kea. The lights of Hilo, Hawaii are on the eastern (left) horizon, with the...

Explanation: What's the closest active galaxy to planet Earth? That would be Centaurus A, only 11 million light-years distant. Spanning over 60,000 light-years, the peculiar elliptical galaxy is also known as NGC 5128. Forged in a collision of two otherwise normal galaxies, Centaurus A's fantastic jumble of young blue star clusters, pinkish star forming regions, and imposing dark dust lanes are seen here in remarkable detail. The colorful galaxy portrait was recorded under clear Chilean skies at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. Near the galaxy's center, left over cosmic debris is steadily being consumed by a central black hole with...

Sparsely populated Lakota, N.D., is the first known site where a drone was used domestically to help arrest a U.S. citizen. It was the case of Rodney Brossart, a rancher accused of refusing to return a herd of cows that wandered onto his land. When police tried to move in, the family allegedly greeted them with loaded weapons. Sgt. Bill Macki, who runs the SWAT team in nearby Grand Forks, called in the reinforcements: a Department of Homeland Security Predator drone...

Posted on April 5, 2012 by Anthony Watts From the Daily Globe and Mail in Canada:Healthy polar bear count confounds doomsayers The debate about climate change and its impact on polar bears has intensified with the release of a survey that shows the bear population in a key part of northern Canada is far larger than many scientists thought, and might be growing.The number of bears along the western shore of Hudson Bay, believed to be among the most threatened bear subpopulations, stands at 1,013 and could be even higher, according to the results of an aerial survey released Wednesday...

Get rid of hippies, save the planetThe Green movement needs to rethink its philosophy from the ground-up. That's according to Peter Kareiva, a leading conservation expert and chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy, the world's biggest environmental group.It must abandon the idea that nature is "feminine" and in particular that it's "fragile", he said, because not only is this artificial, it's wrong, and so many bad ideas follow.When people believe that a fragile "Mother Nature" is harmed by anything humans do, it's actually the humans who suffer, Kareiva argues in the co-written essay Conservation in the Anthropocene. It's little wonder...

The Planet Under Pressure conference has brought out the clawing powermongers. The Commentator.com team who were brave enough to attend, tell us that no one got very excited about the science, but the word “regulation” was received, well… ecstatically. The conference was largely focused on how scientists and activists can coalesce to deconstruct the Western way of living and moving to something entirely different, where economic growth and wealth creation is abandoned and replaced, instead, with sustainability targets, trade barriers, regulation and taxation. Indeed there were numerous occasions during the main sessions whereby even the mention of the word ‘regulation’...

It's not often you see a dinosaur with a girth and toothy grimace reminiscent of Tyrannosaurus rex yet covered in a downy winter coat worthy of L.L. Bean. But that's what a team of paleontologists in China reports. They've dubbed their find Yutyrannus huali (beautiful feathered tyrant), a creature that stretched 30 feet from tail-tip to snout and weighed 1.5 tons. It's the largest dinosaur yet to host feather-like features all over its body – features well preserved on three nearly complete, mostly intact fossil skeletons the team found....

A juvenile mammoth, nicknamed "Yuka," was found entombed in Siberian ice near the shores of the Arctic Ocean and shows signs of being cut open by ancient people. The remarkably well preserved frozen carcass was discovered in Siberia as part of a BBC/Discovery Channel-funded expedition and is believed to be at least 10,000 years old, if not older. If further study confirms the preliminary findings, it would be the first mammoth carcass revealing signs of human interaction in the region. The carcass is in such good shape that much of its flesh is still intact, retaining its pink color. The...

A ginger-haired mammoth baby found in Siberia could have been snatched by hungry human hunters from the jaws of a lion 10,000 years ago. The body of the beast - the first ever found with its distinctive 'strawberry blonde' hair - has been described as being of 'huge' significance. It's could be evidence that ancient humans attacked and fed on mammoths in Siberia, with the body of 'Yuka' showing wounds consistent with an attack by lions AND people.

This is an attempt to redefine the graph made famous by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth that showed temperature leading CO2.From a press release embargoed until 1PM EST 4/4:Work that may clarify the relationship between carbon dioxide (CO2) levels and temperature at the end of the last ice age is presented in this week’s Nature. The study reveals that rising temperatures were preceded by CO2 increases during the last deglaciation, contrary to prior findings derived from ice cores that were thought to represent larger global patterns. These results support an important role for CO2 in driving global climate change....

LOS ANGELES — The discovery of a giant meat-eating dinosaur sporting a downy coat has some scientists reimagining the look of Tyrannosaurus rex. With a killer jaw and sharp claws, T. rex has long been depicted in movies and popular culture as having scaly skin. But the discovery of an earlier relative suggests the king of dinosaurs may have had a softer side. The evidence comes from the unearthing of a new tyrannosaur species in northeastern China that lived 60 million years before T. rex. The fossil record preserved remains of fluffy down, making it the largest feathered dinosaur ever...

Soon, the moment will come when the crowd will say “I always knew it was fake”.Here are three signs we are at the beginning of The End.1. Op-Ed writers will be pointing out how governments are unwinding policies: Dominic Lawson: Britain Has Finally Rejected The Bogus Economics Of Climate Change. Germany (home of half the worlds solar energy production) is winding up its pursuit of renewables, and eight Eastern European nations said “No Thanks” (legally) to the EU’s authoritarian dictat on carbon emissions, and hardly anyone complained… And which energy source is ecologically correct Germany now developing faster than...