Lazy lifestyle may age you faster

From the cosmos.com article:

Yet another reason to get off the couch: physically active people don’t just look better – they may be biologically younger too.

British researchers examined 2,401 twins and found that those who reported having an active lifestyle had biological markers which appeared to be as much as ten years younger than those of their less active twins.

“A sedentary lifestyle increases the propensity to aging-related disease and premature death,” said Lynn Cherkas, geneticist at King’s College in London, U.K., and lead author of the study published in the American Medical Association journal, the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Read the article here.

Parthenon Marbles Battle

From the nationalgeographic.com article:

The Parthenon is among Greece’s greatest national treasures, but important parts of it have been displayed at the British Museum in London for two centuries. Should Greece’s ancient marbles be returned to Athens?

See the video here.

Smash! The Search for Sparticles

From the space.com article:
Squarks, photinos, selectrons, neutralinos. These are just a few types of supersymmetric particles, a special brand of particle that may be created when the world’s most powerful atom smasher goes online this spring.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at a particle physics lab called the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, will very likely change our understanding of the universe forever. The 17-mile-long underground particle accelerator will send protons flying around its circular track until they smash into each other going faster than 99 percent of the speed of light. When the particles impact, they will unleash energies similar to those in the universe shortly after the Big Bang, the theoretical beginning of time.

Scientists don’t know exactly what to expect from the LHC, but they anticipate its energetic collisions will create exotic particles that physicists have so far only dreamed of.

Many researchers are hoping to see supersymmetric particles, called sparticles for short. Sparticles are predicted by supersymmetry theory, which posits that for every particle we know of, there is a sister particle that we have not yet discovered. For example, the superpartner to the electron is the selectron, the partner to the quark is the squark and the partner to the photon is the photino.

Read the article here.

Deconstruction: large hadron collider 

Brief Chronology of Rome

A Brief Chronology of Rome, color coded into Monarchy, Republic, Empire and Divided Empire.

See the Chronology here.

Amber Room Mystery

 

From wikipedia.org:
The original Amber Room in the Catherine Palace of Tsarskoye Selo near Saint Petersburg was a complete chamber decoration of amber panels backed with gold leaf and mirrors. Due to its singular beauty, it was sometimes dubbed the “Eighth Wonder of the World”.

The Amber Room was created from 1701 to 1709 in Prussia and remained at Charlottenburg Palace until 1716 when it was given by Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm I to his then ally, Tsar Peter the Great of the Russian Empire. The Amber Room was looted during World War II by Nazi Germany and brought to Königsberg. Knowledge of its whereabouts was lost in the chaos at the end of the war. Its fate remains a mystery, and the search continues.

A reconstructed Amber Room was inaugurated in 2003 in the Catherine Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia.

See a short video about the Amber Mystery here.
Read the Wikipedia article here.

Timeline of Art History – Europe 8000-2000 B.C.to present

Anglo Saxon Disk Brooch and Two Pendants, all three early 600s

This site will provide more information then you can possibly take in at one time and as such it makes for a great reference site. This site basically covers the art history of sentient European man and otherwise. Also be sure to  check out this section on the United States here.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Timeline of Art History

Mona Lisa’s Identity Confirmed

From the nationalgeographic.com article:
A researcher has uncovered evidence that apparently confirms the identity of the woman behind the Mona Lisa’s iconic smile, Germany’s University of Heidelberg says.

She is Lisa del Giocondo, wife of Florentine businessman Francesco del Giocondo, according to book-margin notes written by a friend of Leonardo da Vinci while the artist worked on the masterpiece, the school said in a statement Monday.

The discovery by a Heidelberg University library manuscript expert appears to confirm what has long been suspected.

The Mona Lisa is known as “La Gioconda” in Italian.

Read the article here.

Don’t Mess with Rome

There is a tendency by some to whitewash history in order to fit modern sensibilities, to speak of the Ancient Romans as a tolerant people who valued all cultures and in so doing equate that supposed tolerance to the multiculturalism of today. Well that’s one way to look at it, another would be to say the Romans didn’t tolerate anyone who wasn’t willing to bend to the Roman will and that’s something else entirely. The following story is just one example of the Roman will, their inclination toward tolerance and a slice of reality.

From the 100falcons.wordpress.com article:

The Roman Empire was a nice package of countries and peoples. But what happened if you didn’t want to become part of it?
The native Spaniards of a little town called Numancia decided that they were damned if they would be bullied by Rome. They were not damned, as it turned out, but they were annihilated. Rome itself admired them for generations.

Read the article here.

Source of Mysterious Antimatter Found

From the space.com article:
Antimatter, which annihilates matter upon contact, seems to be rare in the universe. Still, for decades, scientists had clues that a vast cloud of antimatter lurked in space, but they did not know where it came from.

The mysterious source of this antimatter has now been discovered — stars getting ripped apart by neutron stars and black holes.

Read the article here.

More info about antimatter here.

Discover the new world and get syphilis for your trouble

From the wired.com article:
Diseases carried to North America by Spanish explorers killed millions of the continent’s original inhabitants, but the trip cut both ways: scientists say Christopher Columbus took syphilis back to Europe.

In a study published in the January 14 issue of the journal Public Library of Science Neglected Tropical Diseases, Emory University geneticists studied 26 strains of treponema, the bacterial genus to which the infamous venereal disease belongs. After comparing their differences and evolutionary history, they decided that modern syphilis-causing strains most closely resembled those found in South America.

The findings give ammunition to adherents of the so-called Columbian theory of syphilis, which holds that  the disease arrived in Europe with Columbus. Their opponents point to earlier European evidence, especially syphilitic lesions in skeletons from a 14th century English monastery, as absolving the notorious explorer of this particular scourge.

This probably won’t settle the debate, but both sides do agree on one basic fact: a pandemic of syphilis hit Europe shortly after Columbus’ return, and it changed the course of history.

Read the article here.