The Cave of Altamira: First Prehistoric Cave Paintings

The Cave of Altamira is located near the town of Santillana del Mar in Cantabria, Spain. The cave was declared World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1985 and it is famous for its Upper Paleolithic cave paintings featuring drawings and poly-chrome rock paintings of wild mammals and human hands.

The site's special relevance comes from the fact that it was the first cave in which prehistoric cave paintings were discovered. When the discovery was first made public in 1880, it led to a bitter public controversy between experts, which continued into the early 20th century, as many of them did not believe prehistoric man had the intellectual capacity to produce any kind of artistic expression. The acknowledgement of the authenticity of the paintings, which finally came in 1902, changed forever the perception of prehistoric human beings.

Marcelino de Sautuola

In 1879, amateur archaeologist Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola discovered the cave drawings. The cave was excavated by Sautuola and the archaeologist Juan Vilanova y Piera from the University of Madrid, resulting in a much acclaimed publication in 1880 which interpreted the paintings as Paleolithic in origin.

The French specialists, led by Gabriel de Mortillet and Emile Cartailhac, were particularly adamant in rejecting the hypothesis of Sautuola and Piera, causing their findings being loudly ridiculed at the 1880 Prehistorical Congress in Lisbon, due to the supreme artistic quality, and the exceptional state of conservation of the paintings, Sautuola was even accused of forgery and fraud. A fellow countryman maintained that the paintings had been produced by a contemporary artist on Sautuola's orders.

It was not until 1902, when several other findings of prehistoric paintings had served to render the hypothesis of the extreme antiquity of the Altamira paintings less offensive, that the scientific society retracted their opposition to the Spaniards. That year, Emile Cartailhac emphatically admitted his mistake in the famous article, "Mea culpa d'un sceptique", published in the journal L'Anthropologie. Sautuola, having died 14 years earlier, did not live to enjoy his rehabilitation and his triumph against the skeptics.

In 2012, further uranium-thorium dating research was published, supporting an older age for portions of the art, including one claviform image at 35,600 years old.

Further information: http://museodealtamira.mcu.es/

The Tunguska Event: Example of Imminent Danger to Humankind

The Tunguska event was an enormously powerful explosion that occurred near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia, on June 30, 1908. The explosion, having the epicentre: 60.886°N, 101.894°E; is believed to have been caused by the air burst of a small asteroid or comet at an altitude of 5 to 10 kilometres (3 to 6 miles) above Earth's surface.

Different studies have yielded widely varying estimates of the object's size, on the order of 60m (200ft) to 190m (620ft). It is the largest impact event on or near Earth in recorded history.

The number of scholarly publications on the problem of the Tunguska explosion since 1908 may be estimated at about 1,000 (mainly in Russian). Many scientists have participated in Tunguska studies, the best-known of them being Leonid Kulik, Yevgeny Krinov, Kirill Florensky, Nikolai Vladimirovich Vasiliev, and Wilhelm Fast.

In 2013, a team of researchers led by Victor Kvasnytsya of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine published analysis results of micro-samples from a peat bog near the blast epicenter showing fragments possibly of meteoric origin.

The Tunguska explosion knocked down an estimated of 80 million trees over an area covering 2,150 square kilometres (830 sq. mi.) and it is estimated that the shock wave from the blast would have measured 5.0 on the Richter scale, explosion capable of destroying a large metropolitan area. This catastrophic possibility, helped to spark the discussion on the importance of creating asteroid deflection strategies.

The Antikythera Mechanism: History and Explanation (Ancient Astronomical Clock)

The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient analog computer designed to calculate astronomical positions. It was recovered in 1900–1901 from a shipwreck in the region of Antikythera, Greece, nonetheless its significance and complexity were not understood until a century later.

Jacques Cousteau visited the wreck site in 1978, but although he found new dating evidence, he did not find any additional remains of the Antikythera mechanism, the construction has been dated to the early 1st century BCE.
Technological artifacts approaching its complexity and workmanship did not appear again until the 14th century CE, when mechanical astronomical clocks began to be built in Western Europe.

The Antikythera mechanism is kept at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. It is now displayed at the temporary exhibition about the Antikythera Shipwreck, accompanied by reconstructions made by Ioannis Theofanidis, Derek de Solla Price, Michael Wright, the Thessaloniki University and Dionysios Kriaris. Other reconstructions are on display at the American Computer Museum in Bozeman - Montana, at the Children's Museum of Manhattan in New York and at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris.

Yonaguni: The Underwater Mysterious Ruins

The Yonaguni Monument is a massive underwater rock formation off the coast of Yonaguni, the southernmost of the Ryukyu Islands, in Japan. There is a debate about whether the site is completely natural, is a natural site that has been modified, or is a human-made artifact. For these reasons, the site is also known in Japanese as the Yonaguni (Island) Submarine Ruins.

The flat parallel faces, sharp edges, and mostly right angles of the formation have led many people, including many of the underwater photographers and divers who have visited the site and some scholars, to the opinion that those features are human-made. These people include Gary and Cecilia Hagland and Tom Holden, who went on underwater expeditions to study and photograph the site. These features include a trench that has two internal 90° angles as well as the twin megaliths that appear to have been placed there. These megaliths have straight edges and square corners. However, sea currents have been known to move large rocks on a regular basis. Some of those who see the formations as being largely natural claim that they may have been modified by human hands. The semi-regular terraces of the Monument have been compared to other examples of megalithic architecture, such as the rock-hewn terraces seen at Sacsayhuaman. The formations have also been compared to the Okinawa Tomb, a rock-hewn structure of uncertain age.

Cosmos Returns to TV in 2014!

The astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson is one of the main figures behind the project of bringing back the very well-known Carl Sagan's TV series "Cosmos", which was broadcasted in the 80's.

It's nice to read the good comments made by people throughout the web about this type of TV program. Let's now wait for the first episodes.

The Astonishing Fibonacci Sequence

In mathematics, the Fibonacci numbers or Fibonacci series or Fibonacci sequence are the numbers in the following integer sequence: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, ...

By definition, the first two numbers in the Fibonacci sequence are 0 and 1, and each subsequent number is the sum of the previous two.

The Fibonacci sequence is named after Leonardo Fibonacci. His 1202 book Liber Abaci introduced the sequence to Western European mathematics, although the sequence had been described earlier in Indian mathematics.

Hidden Magnetic Portals Around the Earth Announced by NASA

A favorite theme of science fiction is "the portal", an extraordinary opening in space or time that connects travelers to distant realms. A good portal is a shortcut, a guide, a door into the unknown. If only they actually existed....

It turns out that they do, sort of, and a NASA-funded researcher at the University of Iowa has figured out how to find them.

"We call them X-points or electron diffusion regions," explains plasma physicist Jack Scudder of the University of Iowa. "They're places where the magnetic field of Earth connects to the magnetic field of the Sun, creating an uninterrupted path leading from our own planet to the sun's atmosphere 93 million miles away."

Source: NASA

Jill Tarter on TED: Why The Search for Alien Intelligence Matters

Jill Cornell Tarter (born January 16, 1944) is an American astronomer and the outgoing director of the Center for SETI Research, holding the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI at the SETI Institute.

Tarter has worked on a number of major scientific projects, most relating to the search for extraterrestrial life. As a graduate student, she worked on the radio-search project SERENDIP, and created the corresponding "backronym", "Search for Extraterrestrial Radio Emissions from Nearby Developed Intelligent Populations."