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The Metropolitan Museum of Art is hosting a special summer guest: the
world's oldest known cello. Known as the Amati 'King' cello, the
16th-century instrument is on loan from the National Music Museum on the
campus of the University of South Dakota. Andrea Amati
constructed the instrument in Cremona, Italy. He influenced all of the
violin makers up to this day. He is credited with being the father of
the modern violin. Before him there were all sorts of shapes and sizes.
He standardized things and also made templates so he could produce the
instruments a bit faster.
As far as major cities go, few other places are in possession of so
many treasures that are so poorly exhibited as Berlin. It's as though
cultural institutions here go out of their way to keep people from
visiting. More...
Forgotten Nazi Arms Caches a Bonanza for Historians
by Frank Thadeusz
For decades, a vast network of Nazi arms caches and supply depots in
the forest of Normandy lay forgotten. Now, research shows the extent to
which the Wehrmacht sought to defend itself against the impending Allied
invasion. More...
Everyone knows about the Stasi and the extent to which it spied on
the East German populace. But that was only a small part of the
informing that went on. New research shows that snitching was vastly
more common than previously thought. More...
Cancer in central Appalachia is itself like
an invasive tumor, and restoring health to the region means excising a
tangled knot of issues with roots that extend far beyond the mountain
range and into the very heart and soul of America.
An Illinois man is facing multiple charges following an attack on a South American immigrant inside a Chicago bar on July 17.
According to the Chicago...
A Chicago man with a history of hate crimes
was arrested once again after going on a racist rant at a local bar and
shooting a man he believed was an illegal immigrant in the face with a
pellet gun while claiming to be a police officer.
Obama
wants to cut the number of people in jails, curb
solitary confinement and end mandatory minimum sentences, all this
year.(Got to make room for all the wingnuts that will be heading to
prison shortly)
Scanning
sonar from a scientific expedition has revealed the remains of a
previously unknown shipwreck more than a mile deep off the North
Carolina coast. Artifacts on the wreck indicate […]
In the small town of Ottosdal in South Africa, miners working in
pyrophyllite mines have been digging up mysterious metal spheres known
as Klerksdorp Spheres. Some of these dark reddish brown spheres have
three parallel grooves running around the equator.
The most striking examples have the uncanny appearance of being
something manufactured but these metallic objects have been dated to 3
billion years old, a time when the Earth was too young to host
intelligent life capable of creating these spheres. Klerksdorp Spheres, however, aren't out-of-place. Neither they are mysterious.
The astronomical chart on the ceiling of the Kitora Tomb.
The Kitora Tomb,
located near the village of Asuka in Japan's Nara Prefecture, is known
for gorgeous, colourful paintings at the four cardinal points of the
compass. A black tortoise guards the north of the ancient tumulus, which
has been standing since the seventh or eighth century. A red phoenix
stands at the south, a white tiger at the west and a blue dragon at the
east.
The
ceiling of the tomb is decorated differently, with a map of the night
sky, charting 68 constellations, with the stars picked out in gold leaf.
Three concentric circles are drawn with vermilion, showing the movement
of celestial objects, one of which is the sun.
According
to Kazuhiko Miyajima, a professor at Doshisha University who studied
the chart after the tomb was discovered in 1998, this makes it possibly the oldest astronomical chart of its kind in the world. It has designations for the horizon, equator and ecliptic circles, as well as recognisable patterns of stars.
While older depictions of the skies have been found in the west (the 17,300-year-old Lascaux cave painting, for example, shows Pleiades, Taurus, Orion and Aldebaran), most do not contain recognisable star patterns, or diagrams of astronomical phenomena.
One thing that has baffled researchers, however, is the area of sky the chart depicts.
The chart as annotated by University of Iowa research fellowSteve Renshaw
The
two researchers worked separately, and determined that the sky as
depicted in the Kitora Tomb chart was seen from China, from locations
such as modern-day Xi'an and Luoyang.
They
also determined that the chart showed the sky as it would have appeared
several hundred years before the construction of the Kitora Tomb --
although they didn't agree on the number of years. Soma said that it
shows the sky as it would have appeared between 240 and 520, while
Nakamura said it would have appeared so between 120BC and 40BC.
Miyajima
believes differently, extrapolating that the chart shows the sky as it
would have appeared in 65BC, either from Pyongyang or Seoul, the
capitals of North and South Korea respectively. In his 1999 lecture, he had said that the chart had probably come from Korea, but showed the sky in China.
We often speak of the universe being a reflection of ourselves, and
point to how the eye, veins, and brain cells mirror visual phenomenon in
the natural universe. As above so below right? Well check this out. How
about the idea that the universe is a giant brain? The idea of the
universe as a ‘giant brain’ has been proposed by scientists and science
fiction writers for decades, but now physicists say there may be some
evidence that it’s actually true (in a sense).
The Study
According to a study published in Nature’s Scientific Reports, the
universe may be growing in the same way as a giant brain - with the
electrical firing between brain cells ‘mirrored’ by the shape of
expanding galaxies. The results of a computer simulation suggest that
“natural growth dynamics” – the way that systems evolve – are the same
for different kinds of networks – whether its the internet, the human
brain or the universe as a whole.
When the team compared the universe’s history with growth of social
networks and brain circuits, they found all the networks expanded in
similar ways: They balanced links between similar nodes with ones that
already had many connections. For instance, a cat lover surfing the
Internet may visit mega-sites such as Google or Yahoo, but will also
browse cat fancier websites or YouTube kitten videos. In the same way,
neighboring brain cells like to connect, but neurons also link to such
“Google brain cells” that are hooked up to loads of other brain cells.
“The new study suggests a single fundamental law of nature may govern these networks”, said physicist Kevin Bassler
of the University of Houston. “”For a physicist it’s an immediate
signal that there is some missing understanding of how nature works,”
says Dmitri Krioukov from the University of California San Diego.
“Here we show that the causal network representing the
large-scale structure of spacetime in our accelerating universe is a
power-law graph with strong clustering, similar to many complex networks
such as the Internet, social, or biological networks. We prove that
this structural similarity is a consequence of the asymptotic
equivalence between the large-scale growth dynamics of complex networks
and causal networks.”
What does this mean?
The universe has a built-in mechanism that is designed to expand and
evolve in a way that encourages novelty and an increase in coherence.
Our minds are microcosms of what is happening within the expansion of
galaxies and celestial bodies, since our minds themselves are activities
of the universe and the laws that govern it.
We are more interconnected to the universe and its evolutionary
process than we have realized. When you look up to the stars and their
formations, you are looking at the same intelligent process that is
responsible for creating the eyes you are looking through and the neural
networks that are interpreting the data. We literally are the
universe.
Scientists with NASA’s New Horizons mission are puzzling over
how a world that never gets more sun than Earth at twilight is
reshaping its surface, filling in craters, cracking its crust and
building towering mountains and smooth hills.
In a new portrait, imaged shortly before NASA New Horizons
punched through the dwarf planet's neighborhood on Tuesday, Pluto and
largest moon Charon hang serenely in the dark.
A 75,000-acre reserve will protect rare lemurs, aye-ayes,
frogs, flying foxes, the 'Tarzan chameleon' and other strange but
endangered animals from logging and mining pressure.
Drs.
Carole Baldwin and Ross Robertson from the Smithsonian Institution
discovered a new small goby fish that differs from its relatives not
only in its size and colors, but also […]
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