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Underwater excavations led by Ankara UniversityÂ’s Research Center for Maritime Archaeology (ANKÃœSAM) have uncovered sunken ships ranging from the second century B.C. to the Ottoman period in Ä°zmirÂ’s Urla district. A recent excavation uncovered a ship estimated to date back 4,000 years, which experts say would make it the oldest sunken ship to have been discovered in the Mediterranean. Urla Port is one of TurkeyÂ’s rare underwater excavation sites. Professor Hayat Erkanal, the head of Limantepe excavations for the underwater ancient city of Klozemenai and director of ANKÃœSAM, said the port dates back to the seventh century B.C. Klozemenai, he...

...The tiny artifact could attest to the fabled military campaign that Sheshonq I waged in the region nearly 3,000 years ago, researchers say... The site, which was discovered during excavations in 2002, was home to intense metal production during the Early Bronze Age, between about 3000 B.C. and 2000 B.C. But there is also evidence of more recent smelting activities at Khirbat Hamra Ifdan during the Iron Age, from about 1000 B.C. to 900 B.C. The hieroglyphic sequence on the scarab reads: "bright is the manifestation of Re, chosen of Amun/Re." That moniker corresponds to the throne name of Sheshonq...

According to China.org.cn, the tomb complex covers an area measuring 173,325 square metres, stretching 550m in length and 310 meters in width, and is the second largest tomb to have ever been discovered in the country... Qin Shi Huang (260-210BC) was the first emperor to unify China and enact major economic and political reforms across the country. China had previously consisted of a multitude of warring states and kingdoms, each under the control of feudal overlords, leading to much instability... After the death of Qin Shi Huang's father, he took the throne at the age of 13. His mother took...

While Francis Scott Key's song was known to most Americans by the end of the Civil War, the flag that inspired it remained an Armistead family keepsake. It was exhibited occasionally at patriotic gatherings in Baltimore but largely unknown outside of that city until the 1870s. The flag remained the private property of Lieutenant Colonel Armistead's widow, Louisa Armistead, his daughter Georgiana Armistead Appleton, and his grandson Eben Appleton for 90 years. During that time, the increasing popularity of Key's anthem and the American public's developing sense of national heritage transformed the Star-Spangled Banner from a family keepsake into a...

Explanation: How would Saturn look if its ring plane pointed right at the Sun? Before August 2009, nobody knew. Every 15 years, as seen from Earth, Saturn's rings point toward the Earth and appear to disappear. The disappearing rings are no longer a mystery -- Saturn's rings are known to be so thin and the Earth is so near the Sun that when the rings point toward the Sun, they also point nearly edge-on at the Earth. Fortunately, in this third millennium, humanity is advanced enough to have a spacecraft that can see the rings during equinox from the side....

Sunshine tied to suicide risk: study Fri, Sep 12 2014 By Andrew M. Seaman NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Exposure to sunshine over a short period of time may increase the risk of suicide but may also lower the risk over several months, suggests a new study from Austria. People shouldn’t avoid the sun based on the study’s findings, says its senior author. Instead, they may consider adding sunshine to the list of factors that may influence the risk of suicide. “Suicide is complicated and has many risk factors,” said Dr. Matthaeus Willeit from the University of Vienna. “People always...

Was This The First Robot Ever Arrested? On August 18, 1982 the Beverly Hills Police Department took a rather unusual perp into custody: a robot called DC-2. The crime? Illegally distributing business cards and generally causing a commotion on North Beverly Drive. It was probably the first time a robot had ever been arrested. When BHPD approached DC-2, the person operating it via remote control refused to identify himself to police. Officers searched the immediate area, but whoever was behind the thing was nowhere to be found. The bot's mysterious operator wasn't afraid of a little joking around though, despite...

Explanation: Against dark rifts of interstellar dust, the ebb and flow of starlight along the Milky Way looks like waves breaking on a cosmic shore in this night skyscape. Taken with a digital camera from the dunes of Hatteras Island, North Carolina, planet Earth, the monochrome image is reminiscent of the time when sensitive black and white film was a popular choice for dimmly lit night- and astro-photography. Looking south, the bright stars of Sagittarius and Scorpius are near the center of the frame. Wandering Mars, Saturn, and Zubenelgenubi (Alpha Librae) form the compact triangle of bright celestial beacons farther...

Explanation: For astrobiologists, these may be the four most tantalizing moons in our Solar System. Shown at the same scale, their exploration by interplanetary spacecraft has launched the idea that moons, not just planets, could have environments supporting life. The Galileo mission to Jupiter discovered Europa's global subsurface ocean of liquid water and indications of Ganymede's interior seas. At Saturn, the Cassini probe detected erupting fountains of water ice from Enceladus indicating warmer subsurface water on even that small moon, while finding surface lakes of frigid but still liquid hydrocarbons beneath the dense atmosphere of large moon Titan. Now looking...

Explanation: In this crowded starfield covering over 2 degrees within the high flying constellation Cygnus, the eye is drawn to the Cocoon Nebula. A compact star forming region, the cosmic Cocoon punctuates a long trail of obscuring interstellar dust clouds. Cataloged as IC 5146, the nebula is nearly 15 light-years wide, located some 4,000 light years away. Like other star forming regions, it stands out in red, glowing, hydrogen gas excited by the young, hot stars and blue, dust-reflected starlight at the edge of an otherwise invisible molecular cloud. In fact, the bright star near the center of this nebula...

Explanation: It has been a good week for auroras. Earlier this month active sunspot region 2158 rotated into view and unleashed a series of flares and plasma ejections into the Solar System during its journey across the Sun's disk. In particular, a pair of Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) impacted the Earth's magnetosphere toward the end of last week, creating the most intense geomagnetic storm so far this year. Although power outages were feared by some, the most dramatic effects of these impacting plasma clouds were auroras seen as far south as Wisconsin, USA. In the featured image taken last Friday...

Explanation: Galaxies, stars, and a serene reflecting pool combine to create this memorable land and skyscape. The featured panorama is a 12-image mosaic taken last month from the Salar de Atacama salt flat in northern Chile. The calm water is Laguna Cejar, a salty lagoon featuring a large central sinkhole. On the image left, the astrophotographer's fiancee is seen capturing the same photogenic scene. The night sky is lit up with countless stars, the Large and Small Magellanic Cloud galaxies on the left, and the band of our Milky Way galaxy running diagonally up the right. The Milky Way may...

There's some truth to the effectiveness of folk remedies and old wives' tales when it comes to serious medical issues, according to findings by a team from Detroit Medical Center. Dr. Sonal Saraiya and her colleagues in Michigan found that packing strips of cured pork in the nose of a child who suffers from uncontrollable, life-threatening nosebleeds can stop the hemorrhaging, a discovery that won them a 2014 Ig Nobel prize, the annual award for sometimes inane, yet often surprisingly practical, scientific discoveries. This year's winners honored Thursday at Harvard University by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine

This is simply “negative warming,” says reader Irving Prentice. NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE BURLINGTON VT… SEP 17 2014CONDITIONS ARE IDEAL FOR A WIDESPREAD FROST/FREEZE EVENT THURSDAY NIGHT…AS STRONG HIGH PRESSURE SETTLES SOUTHEASTWARD ACROSS THE REGION FROM ONTARIO AND SWRN QUEBEC. 1000-500MB RH VALUES DROP BELOW 30 PERCENT…AND ANTICIPATE GENERALLY CLEAR SKIES WITH LIGHT WINDS.FREEZE WATCH FOR ALL ZONES EXCEPT GRAND ISLE COUNTY (CHAMPLAIN ISLANDS)…WHERE THE MODERATING INFLUENCE OF THE WARMER LAKE WATERS SHOULD LOCALLY PRECLUDE A FREEZE.TEMPS WILL RANGE FROM 31-35F FOR MOST OF THE CHAMPLAIN VALLEY (JUST A FROST IN SOME LOCATIONS NEAR THE LAKE)…AND GENERALLY MID 20S TO LOWER...

The first manned missions to Earth's satellite began in 1969 with Apollo 11. Just a few years later, conspiracies sprouted up claiming that potentially each of the six lunar landing crews and every one of the 12 Apollo astronauts who walked on the moon had in fact participated in an elaborate ruse. To the conspiracists, it may never have happened -- or didn't happen like NASA said it did -- and oh by the way, we duped the Russians into losing the space race. Voxel global illumination, however, proves them wrong, says Nvidia. The technique, which the new GTX 970...

Corundum is a rock-forming mineral that is found in igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary rocks. It is an aluminum oxide with a chemical composition of Al2O3 and a hexagonal crystal structure. The mineral is widely known for its extreme hardness and for the fact that it is sometimes found as beautiful transparent crystals in many different colors. The extreme hardness makes corundum an excellent abrasive, and when that hardness is found in beautiful crystals, you have the perfect material for cutting gemstones.

Throughout the 20th century most people would never have thought about Canada being an important producer of diamonds. [1] Their knowledge of diamonds was fixed on mining operations in Africa and diamond trading centers in Europe. All of this started to change in 1991 when two geologists, Chuck Fipke and Stewart Blusson, found evidence of diamond-bearing Kimberlite pipes about 200 miles north of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. One of these pipes would soon be developed by BHP Billiton into the EKATI Diamond Mine, which produced Canada's first commercial diamonds in 1998.

An Oopart (out of place artifact) is a term applied to dozens of prehistoric objects found in various places around the world that, given their level of technology, are completely at odds with their determined age based on physical, chemical, and/or geological evidence. Ooparts often are frustrating to conventional scientists and a delight to adventurous investigators and individuals interested in alternative scientific theories. In 1991, the appearance of extremely tiny, coil-shaped artifacts found near the banks of Russia’s Kozhim, Narada, and Balbanyu rivers brought about a debate that has continued to this day. These mysterious and minuscule structures suggest that...

Chances are chocolate milk was a staple for you growing up. Kids chug the stuff no matter what the occasion, whether it’s with breakfast, lunch, or as an after-school snack. Chocolate powder, chocolate syrup — it’s all good. That is, until you get older. Chocolate milk is for kids, right? So as an adult, it’s either regular milk (almond milk if you’re about that non-dairy life) or bust. But a scoop or drizzle of chocolate isn’t only totally OK to have as an adult, it boasts some serious benefits.

The waters just west of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge hide a graveyard of sunken ships. By some estimates, there are 300 wrecks in the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary and the Golden Gate National Recreation Area alone. But only a fraction of them have been seen by scientists. Marine archaeologists and researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have set out to document those lost vessels. Over the course of a five-day survey that just ended yesterday (Sept. 15), the team discovered the sites of at least four wrecks: the 1910 SS Selja shipwreck, the...