The 1,600-Year-Old Goblet and How Romans Were Nanotechnology Pioneers

Researchers have finally found out why the jade-green cup (showed bellow) appears red when lit from behind.
The colorful secret of a 1,600-year-old Roman chalice at the British Museum is the key to a super­sensitive new technology that might help diagnose human disease or pinpoint biohazards at security checkpoints.

«The Romans may have first come across the colorful potential of nanoparticles by accident, but they seem to have perfected it.»

The glass chalice, known as the Lycurgus Cup because it bears a scene involving King Lycurgus of Thrace, appears jade green when lit from the front but blood-red when lit from behind—a property that puzzled scientists for decades after the museum acquired the cup in the 1950s. The mystery wasn’t solved until 1990, when researchers in England scrutinized broken fragments under a microscope and discovered that the Roman artisans were nanotechnology pioneers: They’d impregnated the glass with particles of silver and gold, ground down until they were as small as 50 nanometers in diameter, less than one-thousandth the size of a grain of table salt. The exact mixture of the precious metals suggests the Romans knew what they were doing, «an amazing feat», says one of the researchers, archaeologist Ian Freestone of University College London.

The ancient nanotech works something like this: When hit with light, electrons belonging to the metal flecks vibrate in ways that alter the color depending on the observer’s position. Gang Logan Liu, an engineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who has long focused on using nanotechnology to diagnose disease, and his colleagues realized that this effect offered untapped potential. «The Romans knew how to make and use nanoparticles for beautiful art», Liu says. «We wanted to see if this could have scientific applications».

When various fluids filled the cup, Liu suspected, they would change how the vibrating electrons in the glass interacted, and thus the color. (Today’s home pregnancy tests exploit a separate nano-based phenomenon to turn a white line pink).

Since the researchers couldn’t put liquid into the precious artifact itself, they instead imprinted billions of tiny wells onto a plastic plate about the size of a postage stamp and sprayed the wells with gold or silver nanoparticles, essentially creating an array with billions of ultra-miniature Lycurgus Cups. When water, oil, sugar solutions and salt solutions were poured into the wells, they displayed a range of easy-to-distinguish colors—light green for water and red for oil, for example. The proto­type was 100 times more sensitive to altered levels of salt in solution than current commercial sensors using similar techniques. It may one day make its way into handheld devices for detecting pathogens in samples of saliva or urine, or for thwarting terrorists trying to carry dangerous liquids onto airplanes.

The original fourth-century C.E. Lycurgus Cup, probably taken out only for special occasions, depicts King Lycurgus ensnared in a tangle of grapevines, presumably for evil acts committed against Dionysus, the Greek god of wine. If inventors manage to develop a new detection tool from this ancient technology, it’ll be Lycurgus’ turn to do the ensnaring.

Source:  http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/This-1600-Year-Old-Goblet-Shows-that-the-Romans-Were-Nanotechnology-Pioneers-220563661.html

So, you think Humanities are not important...?

Rupert Sheldrake - The Science Delusion (BANNED TED TALK)

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.

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."

Scientists Prove Viking's Mystical Sunstone is Real

Colour Formation and Magenta (RGB)

Nasa: 3 Years of Sun in 3 Minutes

Alien Planet - On the Search for Alien Life (Full Documentary)

Stephen Hawking: Alien Constituents

Stephen Hawking: Encountering Intelligent Life

Sending Messages to Extraterrestrials. Good or Bad?

The Wow! signal was a strong narrow-band radio signal detected by Jerry R. Ehman on August 15, 1977, while he was working on a SETI project at the "Big Ear radio telescope" of The Ohio State University, then located at Ohio Wesleyan University's Perkins Observatory in Delaware, Ohio. The signal bore the expected hallmarks of non-terrestrial and non-Solar System origin. It lasted for the full 72 seconds duration that "Big Ear" observed it, but has not been detected again. The signal has been the subject of significant media attention.

Sending Messages to Extraterrestrials. Good or Bad? Sooner or later we might have to take this question seriously.

Mummy Head Reveals Advanced Medieval Science

In the second century, an ethnically Greek Roman named Galen became doctor to the gladiators. His glimpses into the human body via these warriors' wounds, combined with much more systematic dissections of animals, became the basis of Islamic and European medicine for centuries.

Galen's texts wouldn't be challenged for anatomical supremacy until the Renaissance, when human dissections — often in public — surged in popularity. But doctors in medieval Europe weren't as idle as it may seem, as a new analysis of the oldest-known preserved human dissection in Europe reveals.

 The gruesome specimen, now in a private collection, consists of a human head and shoulders with the top of the skull and brain removed. Rodent nibbles and insect larvae trails mar the face. The arteries are filled with a red "metal wax" compound that helped preserve the body. 

The preparation of the specimen was surprisingly advanced. Radiocarbon dating puts the age of the body between A.D. 1200 and A.D.1280, an era once considered part of Europe's anti-scientific "Dark Ages." In fact, said study researcher Philippe Charlier, a physician and forensic scientist at University Hospital R. Poincare in France, the new specimen suggests surprising anatomical expertise during this time period.   

"It's state-of-the-art," Charlier told LiveScience. "I suppose that the preparator did not do this just one time, but several times, to be so good at this."

Myths of the middle ages

Historians in the 1800s referred to the Dark Ages as a time of illiteracy and barbarianism, generally pinpointing the time period as between the fall of the Roman Empire and somewhere in the Middle Ages. To some, the Dark Ages didn't end until the 1400s, at the advent of the Renaissance.

But modern historians see the Middle Ages quite differently. That's because continued scholarship has found that the medieval period wasn't so ignorant after all.

"There was considerable scientific progress in the later Middle Ages, in particular from the 13th century onward," said James Hannam, an historian and author of "The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution" (Regnery Publishing, 2011).

For centuries, the advancements of the Middle Ages were forgotten, Hannam told LiveScience. In the 16th and 17th centuries, it became an "intellectual fad," he said, for thinkers to cite ancient Greek and Roman sources rather than scientists of the Middle Ages. In some cases, this involved straight-up fudging. Renaissance mathematician Copernicus, for example, took some of his thinking on the motion of the Earth from Jean Buridan, a French priest who lived between about 1300 and 1358, Hannam said. But Copernicus credited the ancient Roman poet Virgil as his inspiration.

Much of this selective memory stemmed from anti-Catholic feelings by Protestants, who split from the church in the 1500s.

As a result, "there was lots of propaganda about how the Catholic Church had been holding back human progress, and it was great that we were all Protestants now," Hannam said. 

Anatomical dark ages?

From this anti-Catholic sentiment arose a great many myths, such as the idea that everyone believed the world to be flat until Christopher Columbus sailed to the Americas. ("They thought nothing of the sort," Hannam said.)

Similarly, Renaissance propagandists spread the rumor that the Medieval Christian church banned autopsy and human dissection, holding back medical progress.

In fact, Hannam said, many societies have banned or limited the carving up of human corpses, from the ancient Greeks and Romans to early Europeans (that's why Galen was stuck dissecting animals and peering into gladiator wounds). But autopsies and dissection were not under a blanket church ban in the Middle Ages. In fact, the church sometimes ordered autopsies, often for the purpose of looking for signs of holiness in the body of a supposedly saintly person.

The first example of one of these "holy autopsies" came in 1308, when nuns conducted a dissection of the body of Chiara of Montefalco, an abbess who would be canonized as a saint in 1881. The nuns reported finding a tiny crucifix in the abbess' heart, as well as three gallstones in her gallbladder, which they saw as symbolic of the Holy Trinity.

Other autopsies were entirely secular. In 1286, an Italian physician conducted autopsies in order to pinpoint the origin of an epidemic, according to Charlier and his colleagues.

Some of the belief that the church frowned on autopsies may have come from a misinterpretation of a papal edict from 1299, in which the Pope forbade the boiling of the bones of dead Crusaders. That practice ensured Crusaders' bones could be shipped back home for burial, but the Pope declared the soldiers should be buried where they fell.

"That was interpreted in the 19th century as actually being a stricture against human dissection, which would have surprised the Pope," Hannam said.

Well-studied head

While more investigation of the body was going on in the Middle Ages than previously realized, the 1200s remain the "dark ages" in the sense that little is known about human anatomical dissections during this time period, Charlier said. When he and his colleagues began examining the head-and-shoulders specimen, they suspected it would be from the 1400s or 1500s.

"We did not think it was so antique," Charlier said. 

But radiocarbon dating put the specimen firmly in the 1200s, making it the oldest European anatomical preparation known. Most surprisingly, Charlier said, the veins and arteries are filled with a mixture of beeswax, lime and cinnabar mercury. This would have helped preserve the body as well as give the circulatory system some color, as cinnabar mercury has a red tint.  

Thus, the man's body was not simply dissected and tossed away; it was preserved, possibly for continued medical education, Charlier said. The man's identity, however, is forever lost. He could have been a prisoner, an institutionalized person, or perhaps a pauper whose body was never claimed, the researchers write this month in the journal Archives of Medical Science.

The specimen, which is in private hands, is set to go on display at the Parisian Museum of the History of Medicine, Charlier said.  

"This is really interesting from a historical and archaeological point of view," Charlier said, adding, "We really have a lack of skeletons and anthropological pieces."

Source: http://www.livescience.com/27624-mummy-head-middle-ages-anatomy.html

Scientists Create Automated "Time Machine" for Languages

Ancient languages hold a treasure trove of information about the culture, politics and commerce of millennia past. Yet, reconstructing them to reveal clues into human history can require decades of painstaking work. Now, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have created an automated "time machine," of sorts, that will greatly accelerate and improve the process of reconstructing hundreds of ancestral languages.

In a compelling example of how "big data" and machine learning are beginning to make a significant impact on all facets of knowledge, researchers from UC Berkeley and the University of British Columbia have created a computer program that can rapidly reconstruct "proto-languages" -- the linguistic ancestors from which all modern languages have evolved. These earliest-known languages include Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Afroasiatic and, in this case, Proto-Austronesian, which gave rise to languages spoken in Southeast Asia, parts of continental Asia, Australasia and the Pacific. 

"What excites me about this system is that it takes so many of the great ideas that linguists have had about historical reconstruction, and it automates them at a new scale: more data, more words, more languages, but less time," said Dan Klein, an associate professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and co-author of the paper published online Feb. 11 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The research team's computational model uses probabilistic reasoning -- which explores logic and statistics to predict an outcome -- to reconstruct more than 600 Proto-Austronesian languages from an existing database of more than 140,000 words, replicating with 85 percent accuracy what linguists had done manually. While manual reconstruction is a meticulous process that can take years, this system can perform a large-scale reconstruction in a matter of days or even hours, researchers said.
Not only will this program speed up the ability of linguists to rebuild the world's proto-languages on a large scale, boosting our understanding of ancient civilizations based on their vocabularies, but it can also provide clues to how languages might change years from now.
"Our statistical model can be used to answer scientific questions about languages over time, not only to make inferences about the past, but also to extrapolate how language might change in the future," said Tom Griffiths, associate professor of psychology, director of UC Berkeley's Computational Cognitive Science Lab and another co-author of the paper.
The discovery advances UC Berkeley's mission to make sense of big data and to use new technology to document and maintain endangered languages as critical resources for preserving cultures and knowledge. For example, researchers plan to use the same computational model to reconstruct indigenous North American proto-languages.

Humans' earliest written records date back less than 6,000 years, long after the advent of many proto-languages. While archeologists can catch direct glimpses of ancient languages in written form, linguists typically use what is known as the "comparative method" to probe the past. This method establishes relationships between languages, identifying sounds that change with regularity over time to determine whether they share a common mother language. 

"To understand how language changes -- which sounds are more likely to change and what they will become -- requires reconstructing and analyzing massive amounts of ancestral word forms, which is where automatic reconstructions play an important role," said Alexandre Bouchard-Côté, an assistant professor of statistics at the University of British Columbia and lead author of the study, which he started while a graduate student at UC Berkeley.

The UC Berkeley computational model is based on the established linguistic theory that words evolve along the branches of a family tree -- much like a genealogical tree -- reflecting linguistic relationships that evolve over time, with the roots and nodes representing proto-languages and the leaves representing modern languages. 

Using an algorithm known as the Markov chain Monte Carlo sampler, the program sorted through sets of cognates, words in different languages that share a common sound, history and origin, to calculate the odds of which set is derived from which proto-language. At each step, it stored a hypothesized reconstruction for each cognate and each ancestral language.

"Because the sound changes and reconstructions are closely linked, our system uses them to repeatedly improve each other," Klein said. "It first fixes its predicted sound changes and deduces better reconstructions of the ancient forms. It then fixes the reconstructions and re-analyzes the sound changes. These steps are repeated, and both predictions gradually improve as the underlying structure emerges over time."

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130212112025.htm

Real Footage of Meteorite Crash in Russia

Molecular Robotics: Nano-Spiders Made of DNA Molecules

A group of scientists from Columbia University, managed to invent extremely small spider robots measuring about 4nm across. If you wish to compare, these nano robots are about 100,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair.

It would be interesting to note that the spider robots are made of DNA molecules. They can walk, turn right and left and create their own products. Developed at the molecular level, the robots represent DNA walkers, featuring legs to walk autonomously, though very slow, 30 meters in 1 hour.

In order to observe the spider robots scientists used atomic force microscopy. The molecular robots managed to attract a lot of attention due to the fact that they can be programmed to sense the environment and react accordingly. For example, they can detect disease markers on a cell surface, identify whether it is a cancerous one and then bring a compound to kill it, if necessary.

Researchers consider that their latest invention is an important step in molecular robotics. Although today this field cannot boast many great inventions, scientists and engineers believe that in the near future it could become one of the most important industries that could create devices for various medical applications.

Source: http://physicsinventions.com/index.php/robotic-nano-spiders-made-of-dna-molecules/

Scientists Discover How Bacteria Changes Ions Into Gold

Bacteria with the ability to change ions into solid gold? This scenario may sound like a biochemist’s version of a fairy tale, but it’s real and scientists at McMaster University have just described how the process works in a recent article published online in the journal Nature Chemical Biology. 

The bacteria is called Delftia acidovorans, and it turns out that its King Midas-like conversion is part of a self-defense mechanism. Gold ions dissolved in water are toxic, so when the bacteria senses them it releases a protein called delftibactin A. The protein acts as a shield for the bacteria and changes the poisonous ions into harmless particles that accumulate outside the cells.

Although the amount of gold that Delftia acidovorans release is tiny (the particles are 25-50 nanometers across) it’s possible that the bacteria or the protein could someday be used to dissolve gold from water or to help people identify streams and rivers carrying the mineral.

Source: http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2013/02/06/scientists-discover-how-bacteria-changes-ions-into-gold/