New Nazca Geoglyph Of Strange, Tongue-Poking Creature Discovered

New Nazca Geoglyph Of Strange, Tongue-Poking Creature Discovered

photo credit: The newly-spotted marking is thought to depict a mythical creature. Yamagata University

A drawing of the outline of the newly discovered geoglyph. Yamagata University

One of the greatest mysteries of the ancient world may have any depth, after a huge and unprecedented geoglyph representing a bizarre-looking animal was spotted on the famous Nazca plateau in Peru. Dotted with hundreds of other geoglyphs - many of which can not be fully visible from the air - the area was once inhabited by the Nazca culture. Yet the fact that this pre-Columbian civilization had long since disappeared by the time the Europeans arrived in the Americas means that very little is known about how they lived and why they built these gargantuan illustrations.

The discovery was made by researchers at Yamagata University in Japan, who were able to spot from the ground thanks to the fact that he had been engraved on a slope. About 30 meters long (100 feet), the odd creature seems to be sticking her tongue and has a lot of legs and mottled marks on his body.

Researcher Masato Sakai told Discovery News that the geoglyph "certainly an imaginary or mythical creature," and suggested that it could have acted as a landmark for pilgrims heading to the Cahuachi ceremonial center nearby. This theory is supported by that the structure is located near another geoglyph which was first spotted on an adjacent slope in 2011, and the old road to Cahuachi short between.

The previously discovered geoglyph is said to represent "a scene of decapitation", adding weight to the idea that these giant prints may have played a ceremonial role, since the cutting of human head is thought to have been an important ritual activity for Nazca.

As with most of the surrounding geoglyphs, the latest discovery seems to have been constructed by removing the oxidized surface rocks to reveal darker land light color underneath. Displaced rocks were then placed around the contour of the mythical creature, to highlight its shape.

Many of the surrounding geoglyphs have also been created using the same technique - particularly those dating back to the late Paracas period, which lasted about 200 to 400 B.C.E. Based on this knowledge, Sakai told Andina that the newly discovered function "can be traced back to 2000-2500 years ago."

Since archaeologists began to take an interest in the Nazca lines way back in the 1940s, a number of theories have been advanced as to what purpose, they can be served. Some, for example, suggested that the impressive markings were somehow aligned with celestial bodies and thus acted as a kind of enormous astronomical map. Others, however, rejected the idea, instead saying they were sanctuaries.

Although we can never know for sure exactly why the Nazca lines were built, it is unlikely that sufficiently admire these amazing brands and speculate on what role they played in the life of the Nazca people .

All images via Yamagata University

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Full Zika Genome Discovered In Fetus With Microcephaly

Full Zika Genome Discovered In Fetus With Microcephaly

photo credit: Over 4,000 children are thought to have been born in Brazil with microcephaly, linked to the Zika virus. Mario Tama/Getty

The link between Zika and development of microcephaly, in which babies are born with abnormally small heads, is still not yet proven, but the evidence is gradually. Now, for the first time, the researchers found the complete genome of Zika in the brain of a fetus with microcephaly. The virus was found in what scientists describe as "extremely abnormal brain", but not in all other organs of aborted fetus, suggesting that preferentially infects the brain.

While the virus has been known since 1947 when it was identified in Uganda, he has since toured the world. After leaving West Africa, it emerged in Asia, Micronesia and the Philippines before finally arriving in South America, where it was linked to a series of babies born with microcephaly. Why he suddenly emerged with such devastating effect, especially in Brazil, is still unknown, with answers scrambling researchers and vaccine if necessary.

Reports have also flowed into more and more people outside of South America being diagnosed with the virus. Although the active transmission has been limited mainly to the tropics, many people returning from these countries brought the virus with them. In the US, there have been 35 confirmed cases mainly related to travel, while Australia reported their first cases of Zika in a pregnant woman this week. It is important to emphasize that the risk of transmission of the disease in these countries is still close to zero, because it is mainly transmitted through a single mosquito species, which is found only in some areas.

In what is apparently a trend, it seems that Zika have been spreading around the world undetected for some time before the public health emergency was declared by the World Health Organization. In the U.K., for example, seven people have been diagnosed with Zika over the past three years, but four of these cases have been discovered since January. A similar situation was seen in Australia, with one person may have contracted the virus in December last year, but only a positive test last week. Officials believe that with the epidemic in South America is gaining much attention, more people are now test and find that they have the virus unknowingly.

Officials across South America are now embarking on a large-scale mission to control the mosquitoes that spread Zika. Conred Guatemala/Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

In an effort to accelerate research on the virus, and to encourage the sharing of knowledge, nature has announced that it will make all documents related to the virus free access until further notice Zika. The publishing group say they were pressured to make a decision after the Ebola epidemic in both 2014 and Zika epidemic underway. They note that in the context of public health emergencies, sharing all information allows all parties involved to make the most informed decisions.

Although no travel bans have been issued, those responsible for public health are still calling people to assess their risks before traveling to countries where the virus transmission by mosquitoes was confirmed. The warning currently only pregnant women, to try to prevent them from infecting their unborn child. There are, however, some concern about the possibility that the virus could be transmitted sexually, and so people are encouraged to use condoms for at least four weeks.

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Horses Can Read Our Facial Expressions

Horses Can Read Our Facial Expressions

Horses understand the expressions of man's face, and they can make the difference between happy faces and angry, according to a new study published this week in Biology Letters.

Previous work has shown that horses are able to produce complex facial expressions and also collect other members of their species. They are also sensitive to us signals, too. After all, the ability to read the emotions through the species barrier would be particularly useful for social species, domestic - no matter how different our faces could watch their.

To see if they can discern our expressions, the University of Sussex team led by Amy Smith showed photographs of 28 domestic horses (Equus caballus) aged four to 23, recruited from five stables in Sussex and Surrey in the UK these are color photos of two unidentified men smile or frown . For researchers to get spontaneous reactions, horses have received no training for this experience. The team measured the heart rate of horses, which correlates with stress, and recorded their answers with camcorders.

Image in the text: A.V. Smith et al., 2016 Biol. Lett. 

When horses have seen pictures of men making an angry face, their heart rate increased faster than when they looked at pictures of smiling men. In addition, many of them also moved her head to look at the picture angry with their left eye - a behavioral response previously linked to the perception of negative stimuli.

The right brain that handles information for the left eye, is specialized for processing threatening stimuli. "It is particularly important for animals to recognize threats in their environment," said Smith in a statement. "In this context, recognition of angry faces can act as a warning system, allowing horses to anticipate the negative human behavior as rough handling." This is called the left-eye polarization, and dogs do too. Neither species showed a sideways glance to facial expressions happy, since they are not threatening indices.

There are several possible explanations why horses have the ability to distinguish certain expressions of the human face. "Horses may have adapted preexisting capacity (ancestral) to respond appropriately to negative emotional expressions of their peers and, throughout their co-evolution with humans, transferred this capability to a morphologically different species," the team writes . Or, individual horses may have simply learned to interpret our words in their life.

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Why threatening decrease in the number of bees continuation of life on our planet?

Why threatening decrease in the number of bees continuation of life on our planet?

Directly bee pollination is responsible for about 70 percent of all plants and increases about 30 percent of the global food supply, making the survival of hives essential for health and sustainable agriculture on indicator of the planet.

Unfortunately, reports of a sharp drop in the number of bee colonies around the world show that portends a great danger. This decrease may be due to global warming accelerated because of the rate of growth of the causes of harmful diseases such as dust mites, viruses, fungi, or pesticides used on crops that are addressed and transferred to hives by bees during the production pollination and increased electromagnetic radiation in the atmosphere, which is associated with the rapid growth of mobile phones and wireless communication towers that are supposed to interfere with the ability of bees to identify trends in during flight.

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Morocco Just Switched On The World's Largest Solar Plant

Morocco Just Switched On The World's Largest Solar Plant

Whenever finished, the site will cover a range bigger than the nation's capital, Rabat, and will make Morocco's sun powered plant the biggest on the planet. It is trusted that it will in the long run create so much power that the country won't just have the capacity to meet its own particular vitality needs, additionally trade the overabundance to Europe. The main area of the plant was turned on this evening by Morocco's Above all else Mohammed VI, and is relied upon to begin producing 160 megawatts. 

Worked close to the town of Ouarzazate in focal Morocco, the plant utilizes sunlight based warm innovation, as opposed to photovoltaic sun powered boards. Sun based warm innovation utilizes mirrors, which track the development of the Sun, to focus sun oriented beams to warmth oil in funnels. The hot oil is utilized to make steam keeping in mind the end goal to power turbines, making the power. The benefit of utilizing this procedure is that the oil can then be utilized to liquefy salt, which clutches the vitality, and can be utilized to create control even after the Sun has gone down.

The section that has just been turned on, called Noor 1, is expected to provide enough energy for around a million homes, and will be producing electricity for up to three hours after the Sun has set. When the full plant is up and running by 2018, it will be creating 560 megawatts of electricity. At this stage, it is expected to be running 20 hours a day and will cover an area of 24.3 square kilometers (9.4 square miles).
By focusing the energy of the Sun onto a single point, the plant is able to heat the oil up to extremely high temperatures. This is used to melt the salt at 500°C (932°F), which is then stored in massive tanks. The solar plant is just one aspect of the nation’s ambition to generate 42 percent of its electricity needs from renewables (through a mixture of wind, hydro, and solar power) by 2030 – though it is expected to up this to 52 percent at the next climate meeting. Compare this to the U.K., a much richer country, which has pledged to generate 30 percent of its electricity from renewables over the same period of time.
So far, the power plant has had $3.9 billion (£2.7 billion) in funding, with around $1 billion (£690 million) coming from a German investment bank and $400 million (£276 million) from the World Bank. It is hoped that as the price of solar power continues to drop, it will become more and more viable to build even more of these projects, and move further away from fossil fuels. 
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The Amazing Hubble

The Amazing Hubble

In the history of modern astronomy, there is probably no one greater leap forward than the building and launch of the space telescope known as the Hubble.  While NASA has had many ups and downs, the launch and continued operation of the Hubble space telescope probably ranks next to the moon landings and the development of the Space Shuttle as one of the greatest space exploration accomplishments of the last hundred years.

An amazing piece of astronomy trivia that few people know is that in truth, only about ten percent of the universe is visible using conventional methods of observation.  For that reason, the Hubble really was a huge leap forward.  That is for the very simple reason that the Hubble can operate outside of the atmosphere of Earth.  Trying to make significant space exploration via telescopes from the terrestrial surface of planet Earth is very difficult.  That very thing that keeps us alive, our own Earth’s atmosphere presents a serious distraction from being able to see deeper and further into space.

The Hubble space telescope was named after the great scientist and visionary Edward Hubble who discovered that the universe was expanding which was explained by what is now known in science as Hubble’s Law.  To truly get a feel for the amazing accomplishment that was achieved with the launch of the Hubble telescope, spend some time on Nasa’s web site dedicated to the project at http://hubble.nasa.gov.  There are also a number of sites where you can enjoy some stunning pictures from the Hubble including here and here. 

It’s hard to believe how long the Hubble has been orbiting earth and sending back amazing video and pictures of what it is discovering in space.  But the Hubble was actually initially launched on April 25th 1990.  It was the culmination of literally decades of research and construction which began in 1977.  Expectations were high as the orbiting telescope was put in place and actually began to function as it was designed to do.

All was not always perfect with the telescope and the early pictures were disappointing.  After some study NASA discovered that the reason for the early failures was the curvatures of one of the main lenses of the orbiting telescope.

We probably could never have kept this intricate piece of equipment operational as well as we have had we not had the Space Shuttle program to give us a tool to implement repairs and improvements to the Hubble.  In 1993 a new lens was installed on the Hubble which corrected the problem of picture resolution that was noted in the early operation of the telescope.

Two other repair and upgrade mission have been made to the Hubble since it launched, both of them in 1997 to upgrade older equipment and to retrofit the telescope to extend its useful life through 2010.  It’s pretty amazing to think that this scientific and mechanical marvel has been operating now for ten years without maintenance.  We can be assured that plans are in the works for NASA to upgrade or replace parts on the Hubble to extend its useful life even further as that 2010 time frame draws closer.  

It is hard to imagine the science of astronomy or the natural quest for greater knowledge of our universe without the Hubble.  While many times those who would not fund space exploration have tried to cut funding for the Hubble, the operation of this telescope is just too important to astronomers and to the scientific well being of mankind and our planet not to continue to use the Hubble, or its next natural successor.  We will always need to have a set of eyes in the sky to watch the universe and discover more of its mysteries.

THE BASICS OF BUYING A TELESCOPE

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