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BEIJING — A medicine mogul spent six years building his own private mountain peak and luxury villa atop a high-rise apartment block in China’s capital, earning the unofficial title of “most outrageous illegal structure.” Now, authorities are giving him 15 days to tear it down. The craggy complex of rooms, rocks, trees and bushes looming over the 26-story building looks like something built into a seaside cliff, and has become the latest symbol of disregard for the law among the rich as well as the rampant practice of building illegal additions. Angry neighbors say they’ve complained for years that the...

The government’s antitrust authorities have thrown a large road block in the way of the merger of American Airlines and US Airways, suing to block the deal. The suit, filed by the Department of Justice after months in which the air carriers said they were confident that the deal would sail through anti-trust review, sent shares of US Airways tumbling Tuesday. The stock is down nearly 9% to $17.15 in recent trading.

BEIJING, - China's national tourism agency issued a set of guidelines for Chinese tourists whose behavior overseas has become a source of concern. The marching orders consist of reminders not to litter, speak too loudly in public or commit acts of vandalism like the recent incident in Egypt where a "Ding Jinhao Was Here" suddenly appeared carved into a 3,000 year-old relic. No less than a vice premier said publicly that "improving the civilized quality of the citizens" was a good way of improving China's international image. The reception for the new guidelines, however, wasn't universally warm inside China. ABC...

Working on some area and latitude calculations for sea ice. many hundreds of on-line references report that the Antarctic continent is 14,000,000 square kilometers: A nice, convenient even round number. That's obviously always been rounded off as one source copies from everybody, or just never measured accurately. Neither seems correct. the NSIRDC tracks sea ice, and they have explicitly written me that their "Antarctic Sea Ice"totals do NOT include the permanent ice shelves around many areas of that continent. Fine, no problem: and it even makes sense: Why should a federal agency track "permanent sea shelves" when they can get...

It is called “The Hyperloop” and, according to the designer, it will be a revolutionary “fifth mode” of transport, eclipsing trains, planes, boats and automobiles. (snip) Billionaire Elon Musk’s CV is impressive, to say the least. He made his initial fortune from PayPal ... his SpaceX venture ... founded Tesla (snip) he would be publishing plans for the Hyperloop on Monday, August 12 (snip) Mr Musk will not be patenting the design and it will be “open source”, meaning anyone can modify it, or try to build it.

Maggots found in Atlanta airport sandwich, food inspections enhanced ATLANTA — Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport officials tell Channel 2 Action News they are enhancing the way they inspect restaurants inside the airport after a man showed Channel 2 Action News a sandwich he purchased from an airport vendor had maggots. The passenger told Channel 2's Amy Napier Viteri he bought a sandwich at an airport restaurant Wednesday morning. When he opened it he said he was stunned to find maggots on it. Joel Woloshuk says he got out his phone and recorded video of the bugs crawling on his focaccia...

A group of 15 elephants in mourning for a herd member struck and killed by a train have reportedly taken out their anguish on nearby villages, damaging at least 10 homes and partially destroying a schoolhouse. For the last several days, the elephants have remained near the location of the fatal train accident in an ongoing vigil near the village of Matari in eastern India, and the herd has halted several other trains passing through the area. Villagers have been keeping all-night vigils themselves, in an effort to thwart the attacks and hold the elephants back with firecrackers, but so...

The United States, land of freedom and opportunity, is also the land of scowling faces and folded arms, according to a new poll. Travel magazine Conde Nast Traveler has unveiled the results of its annual readers' choice survey. More than 46,000 readers gave their opinions last year on everything from favorite airlines to best hotels and friendliest and unfriendliest cities. It's the latter category that might cause the most surprises, with U.S. cities dominating the "unfriendly" list. Newark, New Jersey, is the unfriendliest city in the world according to the survey. "Newark is best known for being the site of...

.....It’s a geocache (gee-oh-cash). And finding these modern-day treasure chests is worth more than the hunt, devotees say. “It gets you outside — gets you exercise. And while your mind can wander while you’re walking, it makes you think, solve puzzles,” says Kevin Venator, 45, a Johnson County geocacher. Interest is very high in the sport right now, Venator said. “It’s exploding,” he said. Geocaching has become so popular that cities have had to wrestle with the hobby. If a geocacher looks out of place or suspicious, homeowners might call police. That could result in an altercation. The practice recently...

Sliven. Archaeologists discovered a rich Thracian grave from the 1st century AD in a mound in the municipality Sliven in south-eastern Bulgaria. The findings provide evidence for the preservation of burial rites and a strong Thracian aristocracy in the Roman era. The main finding is a 15 cm long bronze amphora, with two uniquely decorated handles. Another valuable discovery is a bronze skillet-shaped patera. One of its side handles ends with a lion's head, while the other ends with an animal combining features of the lion and the goat. Both items served ritual purposes. The archeologists also unearthed a bronze...

During excavations carried out by the Bodrum Underwater Archaeology Museum in the Aegean town of Bodrum’s Ortakent district, graves from the Mycenaean era have been unearthed. According to a written statement issued by the Culture and Tourism Ministry, pieces unearthed in the graves are very important for the scientific world. Among the pieces are baked earth, water bottles, cups with three handles, a carafe, a razor, animal bones and lots of glass and beads of various sizes. Examinations on nearly 3,500-year-old artifacts show that the graves date back to the Mycenaean III era around 600 B.C. to 1,000 B.C years...

We were invited to Israel to visit the IWI factory just outside of Tel Aviv. Obviously this was a one of a kind opportunity for both MAC and for the YouTube firearms community. We not only toured the home of the Tavor but also the Negev 5.56 and 7.62x51, the Jericho 941, Uzi, Galil ACE and the X95. After the factory tour we headed to the range and fired all of the weapons mentioned, which really was the highlight of the whole trip. It's one thing to see these amazing firearms, but getting to fire them? Out of this world!...

Freepers driving on Rt. 1 through DE this morning will get a nice surprise on the way to work/beach. Show em some love!

The legend has returned – and its splash is sure to reverberate from Main Street all the way to Juneau Avenue in Milwaukee. The new generation of American V-Twin cruisers made its grand debut in front of a crowd of thousands of enthusiasts and dignitaries at the Sturgis Motorcycle Hall of Fame Saturday night....... For those who worried Polaris would severely alter the legend, fear not: the new 2014 Indians harken back to a bygone era of motorcycling.

The find, a fossil tooth (molar) uncovered through excavations at the site of Barranco León in the Orce region of southeastern Spain, was dated to about 1.4 million years ago using several combined dating techniques, including Electron Spin Resonance (ESR) in combination with paleomagnetic and biochronological data... Researchers identified the lithic assemblage as characteristic of Oldowan technology, the earliest known stone tool industry, first discovered at Olduvai Gorge in East Africa by Louis Leakey in the 1930s. The same industry was found at Dmanisi in the country of Georgia, where early human fossils dated to about 1.8 million years ago...

Previous genetic research has indicated the existence of two ancient modern human individuals who passed their genes along to all humans living today... "Mitochondrial Eve"... between 190,000 and 200,000 years ago, and ... "Y-chromosomal Adam", between 50,000 and 115,000 years ago. Now, a team of researchers led by Stanford University's Carlos Bustamente and David Poznik have redefined the ranges for Y-chromosomal Adam and Mitochondrial Eve, placing them at 120,000 to 156,000 years ago and 99,000 to 148,000 years ago, respectively. The most significant finding relates to the relative timing of their existence... ...The researchers compared Y-chromosome sequences among 69 men...

Why are the Kalash important?There are three reasons why the Kalash are important in the study of Eurasian prehistory: Their mountainous habitat contributed to isolation and relative immunity from historical population movementsTheir non-Islamic religion has definitely preserved them from recent gene inflowTheir language is unique within the Indo-Aryan family, and it often considered today as part of a separate Dardic family of Indo-Iranian in addition to the more populous Iranian and Indo-Aryan families.The Kalash are crucial for those interested in the origins of Indo-Iranians, and the fact that they are, indeed, a simple West/South Asian mix is not without significance...

This shield, the front of which is shown here, dates back around 1,300 years and was discovered in a sealed portion of an ancient temple at the site of Pañamarca in Peru. Made by the Moche people, it's about 10 inches (25 centimeters) in size. The front has red and brown textiles along with about a dozen yellow feathers, which appear to be from the body of the Macaw bird. Originally it may have had more than 100 feathers arranged in two or more concentric circles. The back of the shield has basketry weaving and a handle. The shield would...

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak set off an explosion Thursday, launching an ambitious and controversial plan to make the Western Desert bloom with water channeled from the Nile River. When the canal is done, if all goes according to plan, water will wind its way 190 miles (310 kilometers) across the Western Desert to irrigate 500,000 acres (200,000 hectares) of virgin land. And, if all goes according to plan, the newly irrigated land will be populated by hundreds of thousands of people. The explosion Thursday was the first step in the construction on a pumping station that Egypt claims will be...

A U.S. business owner was killed in Thailand after going onstage to sing with a band. What was supposed to be a fun vacation in Bangkok turned into a nightmare for one family. Bobby Ray Carter, 51, of Texas, his wife Kelly, and their 18-month-old daughter Sadie, traveled to Thailand to celebrate Mr. Carter’s birthday. The Carters were meeting up with several other couples including Carter's adult son. The group went out to the Longhorn Saloon bar at the Ao Nang beach in Krabi province in Thailand.

Archaeologists digging around an ancient church in Turkey say they’ve made a startling discovery and unearthed a piece of the cross that used to crucify Jesus. The diggers found a stone chest this week and inside were several relics believed to be tied to the crucifixion. Among them was a piece of the actual cross upon which Jesus was nailed, one historian with Turkey’s Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts said in the Hurriyet Daily News.

MOSCOW — Edward Snowden, the fugitive former U.S. security contractor, left the transit zone at Moscow’s international airport Thursday after Russian authorities granted him temporary asylum.

Aerial photographs from the 1950s didn’t prepare Adam Shoalts for what he was about to encounter. The self-dubbed “modern explorer” was canoeing a stretch of little-known whitewater rapids just south of Hudson Bay when the river started to disappear in front of him. Courtesy: Adam Shoalts “I’ve discovered a waterfall and now I’m about to go straight over it,” Mr. Shoalts thought. “This is not good.” He tried to back paddle, but the current was too swift. And then, “It’s past the point of no return.” The current pivoted his canoe sideways, sending him down the 12-metre waterfall. As he...

When farmer Ifor Edwards dropped his keys in a field he had no idea the search to find them would result in the discovery of buried treasure. Mr Edwards, 56 and his wife Anna, 40, called in enthusiasts from Wrexham Heritage Society when he lost his keys on land at Oak Farm in Bronington, near Whitchurch. But as well as finding his keys -- which had gone through a lawn mower -- the team armed with metal detectors also found 14 mediaeval coins dated from the 14th and 15th centuries. At an inquest in Ruthin the North East Wales Coroner...

According to The Times of India, a 17-year-old Class XI student at a government school in Pur village was beaten to death on Friday by his classmates when he refused to hand over his pen. As police and onlookers stood on the sidelines, Monu Valmiki was viciously trampled by about nine other students for over half an hour. ... No one intervened to stop the attack, which led people from the Dalit community, where the victim was from, to throw stones at the Kotkasim police station in Alwar.

Es ist lustig, weil es wahr ist. Clicky

The archaeologist who helped discover the extinct Homo species Flores Hobbit, Professor Mike Morwood, has died after a struggle with cancer. New Zealand-born Professor Morwood, who was based at the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Wollongong, was also a world expert in Australian rock art. Professor Morwood was based at the University of New England in 2003 when he and a team of Indonesian researchers excavated the Liang Bua Cave on the island of Flores and found a set of curious bones that came to be known as Homo floresiensis or the Hobbit. The discovery...

Ancient Israelite capital Sebastia, site of important Roman and Crusader ruins, lies unprotected because of security situation. The ancient town of Sebastia is one of the major archaeological sites of the Holy Land, with its overlapping layers of history dating back nearly 3,000 years. But today the hilltop capital of biblical kings, later ruled by Roman conquerors, Crusaders and Ottomans, is marred with weeds, graffiti and garbage. Caught between conflicting Israeli and Palestinian jurisdictions, the site has been largely neglected by both sides for the past two decades. Beyond the decay, unauthorized diggers and thieves have taken advantage of the...

Mass extinctions, like lotteries, result in a multitude of losers and a few lucky winners. This is the story of one of the winners, a small, shell-crushing predatory fish called Fouldenia, which first appears in the fossil record a mere 11 million years after an extinction that wiped out more than 90 percent of the planet's vertebrate species. The extinction that ended the Devonian Era 359 million years ago created opportunities quickly exploited by a formerly rare and unremarkable group of fish that went on to become -- in terms of the sheer number of species -- the most successful...

'The remora sucker is a truly amazing anatomical specialisation but, strange as it may seem, it evolved from a spiny fin,' said Dr Matt Friedman of Oxford University's Department of Earth Sciences, lead author of the report. 'In this fossil the fin is clearly modified as a disc but is found on the back of the fish. It enables us to say that first fin spines on the back broadened to form wide segments of a suction disc. After the disc evolved, it migrated to the skull, and it was there that individual segments became divided in two, the number...

Historical references and archaeological excavations have indicated continuous occupation in Stobi from the 6th century BC to the 6th century AD. Investigations have yielded remains of the Archaic (6th century BC) and Classical periods (5th-4th century BC), evidencing the earliest periods of Stobi's history. The Roman historian Titus Livy writes that in 197 BC the Macedonian king Philip V defeated the Dardanians in the vicinity of Stobi and, also according to Livy, during the Roman conquests in Macedonia, Stobi became an important center for salt trading. But it wasn't until AD 69 when Emperor Vespasian granted Stobi the rank of...

Archaeologists in Spain are busy excavating the Gran Dolonia portion of the Atapuerca archaeological site for clues to the first humans that arrived in Europe. Many archaeological treasures have come from this northern Spain location known as the caves of the Sierra de Atapuerca. In 2007 human remains were found that date back one and a half million years, considered the oldest Europeans remains ever found. Human remains have also been found from the "Homo antecessor" dating back 850,000-to-950,000-years ago. The youngest remains found here date back a mere 5,000-years ago from the homo sapien species. The site is in...

Artists and craftsmen more than 2,000 years ago developed thin-film coating technology unrivaled even by today's standards for producing DVDs, solar cells, electronic devices and other products. Understanding these sophisticated metal-plating techniques from ancient times, described in the ACS journal Accounts of Chemical Research, could help preserve priceless artistic and other treasures from the past. Share This: Gabriel Maria Ingo and colleagues point out that scientists have made good progress in understanding the chemistry of many ancient artistic and other artifacts -- crucial to preserve them for future generations. Big gaps in knowledge remained, however, about how gilders in the...

Conventional scientific wisdom has it that plants and other creatures have only lived on land for about 500 million years, and that landscapes of the early Earth were as barren as Mars. A new study, led by geologist Gregory J. Retallack of the University of Oregon, now has presented evidence for life on land that is four times as old -- at 2.2 billion years ago and almost half way back to the inception of the planet. That evidence... involves fossils the size of match heads and connected into bunches by threads in the surface of an ancient soil from...

Archaeologists have unearthed relics that suggest prehistoric humans lived along the Silk Road long before it was created about 2,000 years ago as a pivotal Eurasian trade network. An excavation project that started in 2010 on ruins in northwest China's Gansu Province has yielded evidence that people who lived on the west bank of the Heihe River 4,100 to 3,600 years ago were able to grow crops and smelt copper, the researchers said. The site is believed to date back to the Han Dynasty (202 BC - AD 220). Over the past three years, archaeologists have discovered a variety of...

HONG KONG – 20th Century Fox will open its first international theme park in Malaysia, in 2016, as a partnership with local property conglomerate Genting Malaysia. The licensing deal with Twentieth Century Fox Consumer Products, will feature 25 rides and attractions at the park based on movies including “Ice Age,” “Life of Pi,” “Rio,” “Alien” and “Night at the Museum” (pictured). The park is an upgrade of 25 acres of Resorts World Genting, the hilltop theme park and hotels destination that Genting has operated for the past 35 years at a site an hour outside Kuala Lumpur. “Brought to life...

Sometimes, small is everything. In Taipei’s exceptional National Palace Museum, I chanced on a case containing a carved olive kernel. It was an unlikely exhibit, the kind that had people tilting their heads one way, then the other, before peering in closer. Shaped by the evidently steady hands of a master craftsman more than 250 years ago, it portrays a miniature boat, complete with exquisite awning, passengers and rigging. For a tiny piece of fruit matter it is a near-miraculous piece of art. The sculpture was created for the Chinese emperor of the day and, like so much in the...

SUNSET BLISS: Despite various challenges such as the lack of expertise, laws and high cost associated with retirement villages, a silver lining appears in the horizon as a greying Malaysian population ups the demand In a two-acre piece of land in Cheras, about 30 single-storey houses cater to a special class of residents. These are elderly but independent people who despite their age, still value their independence in living in separate housing. Each of these 650-sq ft houses has a bedroom, kitchen and living/dining area allowing a great deal of freedom, privacy and space as compared to rooms in an...

If you don’t know what New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner is, you might just think Spirit Airlines’ new promo has something to do with a mysterious hot dog that is coming back from wherever it is texting hot dogs go. “The Weiner Rises Again!” trumpets Spirit in its new promo, featuring a masked frank holding a cell phone. See, because it’s the second time that Weiner has admitted to sending saucy messages to women. And this go-around, he took on the personality of one “Carlos Danger.”Weiner stepped down from Congress in 2011 in the aftermath of sending photos...

Staff on one of the world's most luxurious cruise lines hid more than 15 trolleys of food in cabins to try to avoid it being seen by health protection officers, according to a report into a sudden inspection carried out on board Silversea's Silver Shadow in June. The damning report claimed staff had tried to hide cooked and raw food, including raw meat, cheeses and vegetables as well as kitchen equipment in over 10 cabins shared by two or three galley crew members. Health inspection officers working for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who'd boarded the ship...

Geological testing was done at the site in 2005, for the purpose of placing pillars in solid ground so that the stability of the roof would not be an issue in the event of an earthquake. What they found while using high resolution travel time tomography, a method of getting images from under the surface of the earth using waves of energy, were underground cavities. These were both man made and natural. The man made gaps in the earth were filled with rocks, ceramics, and other items of interest to archeologists. Before drilling the new shafts and setting the pillars...

John Morillo, a 47-year-old Canadian man, acknowledged that it was "really stupid" of him to drink eight beers and swim across the Detroit River on Monday night. However, he is glad that he actually made it. “If I’m going to be in the paper, I’d at least like them to say I actually made it, even though I got in trouble and everything,” he told The Windsor Star Tuesday. “I gotta pay fines and stuff. But I don’t want it to sound like I didn’t make it, because then my buddies are going to say ‘ha, ha, you didn’t make...

NEW YORK, - The Transportation Security Administration said a pair of shoes seized at a New York airport had fake guns for heels. The TSA posted a photo on its Twitter account of a pair of high-heeled shoes with fake revolvers as the heels, ABC News reported Monday. The TSA said the heels were seized from a woman traveling at New York's LaGuardia Airport. "Also, what not to wear through a #LGA checkpoint," the tweet read. The agency said the shoes were banned for being replica guns. They were voluntarily surrendered by the traveler, who was not arrested or fined.

Although ancient ruins in Akrotiri were discovered in 1860 by workers quarrying volcanic rock for the Suez Canal, large scale excavations there didn't begin until 1967. An archeologist by the name of Spyridon Marinatos suspected there were extensive ruins beneath the farmlands at Akrotiri and wrote about his theory in 1936. Due to the outbreak of World War II and the Greek Civil War, he had to postpone his explorations. Earlier digs in the area had been destroyed by plowing of the fields and there were no written records of where they had taken place or what the findings were....

Over 100 years of excavations on Crete have exposed elegant Minoan frescoes that once adorned the walls of the island’s Bronze Age palaces. This distinctively colorful Aegean art style flourished in the Middle Bronze Age (1750-1550 B.C.). The nearby inhabitants of Akrotiri, a city on the Cycladic island of Thera (modern Santorini), painted numerous artworks in the style of the Minoan frescoes before the island was decimated by a volcanic eruption in the late 17th or 16th century B.C. Until recently, there was no archaeological evidence of Minoan frescoes beyond the islands of the Aegean. Art exhibiting Aegean characteristics has...

A scanty but varied ensemble of finds challenges the idea that Neandertal material culture was essentially static and did not include symbolic items. In this study we report on a fragmentary Miocene-Pliocene fossil marine shell, Aspa marginata, discovered in a Discoid Mousterian layer of the Fumane Cave, northern Italy, dated to at least 47.6-45.0 Cal ky BP. The shell was collected by Neandertals at a fossil exposure probably located more than 100 kms from the site. Microscopic analysis of the shell surface identifies clusters of striations on the inner lip. A dark red substance, trapped inside micropits produced by bioeroders,...

While approximately forty buildings have been uncovered at Akrotiri, there are six that have been given more attention than the others. The architecture and function of each building is different. The largest building uncovered so far, Xeste 4, is three stories high and believed to be a public building because of its dimensions. The staircase had fragments of frescoes on either side depicting males ascending in a procession. The second largest building, Xeste 3, was at least two stories high, with fourteen rooms on each floor. The rooms were decorated with paintings and some had more than one door. One...

Under the rule of the Kushans, northwest India and adjoining regions participated both in seagoing trade and in commerce along the Silk Road to China. The name Kushan derives from the Chinese term Guishang, used in historical writings to describe one branch of the Yuezhi—a loose confederation of Indo-European people who had been living in northwestern China until they were driven west by another group, the Xiongnu, in 176–160 B.C. The Yuezhi reached Bactria (northwest Afghanistan and Tajikistan) around 135 B.C. Kujula Kadphises united the disparate tribes in the first century B.C. Gradually wresting control of the area from the...

The 12 selected concepts and their principal investigators are: •Pulsed Fission-Fusion (PuFF) Propulsion System (Rob Adams, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center) •Torpor-Inducing Transfer Habitat For Human Stasis To Mars (John Bradford, Spaceworks Engineering, Inc.) •Two-Dimensional Planetary Surface Landers (Hamid Hemmati, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory) •Dual-mode Propulsion System Enabling CubeSat Exploration of the Solar System (Nathan Jerred, Universities Space Research Association) •Growth Adapted Tensegrity Structures: A New Calculus for the Space Economy (Anthony Longman) •Eternal Flight as the Solution for 'X' (Mark Moore, NASA Langley Research Center) •Deep Mapping of Small Solar System Bodies with Galactic Cosmic Ray Secondary Particle Showers...