Top 10 Wired Reader Macro Photos

From wired.com

Amazing up close.

Here are ten macro photos from a wired.com contest.

See the top ten photos here.

See additional photos here.

Greatest Warriors, Military leaders, or Tacticians in the Ancient World

This is a list constructed by N.S. Gill for about.com

Alaric the Visigoth
Alexander the Great
Attila the Hun
Cyrus the Great
Hannibal
Julius Caesar
Marius
Scipio Africanus
Sun Tzu
Trajan

If you follow the link to the article you can read descriptions of each man.

See the article here.

ET Likely Doesn’t Exist, Finds Math Model

From the discovery.com article:
Earth-like planets have relatively short windows of opportunity for life to evolve, making it highly doubtful intelligent beings exist elsewhere in the universe, according to newly published research based on a mathematical probability model.

Given the amount of time it has taken for human beings to evolve on Earth and the fact that the planet will no longer be habitable in a billion years or so when the sun brightens, Andrew Watson, with the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia in Norwich, says we are probably alone.

Earthlings overcame horrendous odds — Watson pegs it at less than 0.01 percent over 4 billion years — to achieve life. The harsh reality is that we don’t have much time left.

Read the rest of the article here.

Swedish researchers find world’s oldest living tree

From the news.yahoo.com article:
The world’s oldest living tree on record is a nearly 10,000 year-old spruce that has been discovered in central Sweden, Umeaa University said on Thursday.

Researchers had discovered a spruce with genetic material dating back 9,550 years in the Fulu mountain in Dalarna, according to Leif Kullmann, a professor of Physical Geography at the university in northwestern Sweden.

That would mean it had taken root in roughly the year 7,542 BC.

 See the rest of the article here.

Link

Light Beams to Color Rome Column

From the discovery.com article:

The Trajan Column, one of Rome’s most famous monuments, will be shown next year under a totally new light. Italian researchers announced they plan to restore the column’s original bright colors by “painting” it with light beams.

Erected in 113 A.D. in honor of the Emperor Trajan (53-117 A.D.), the huge marble column stands almost 100 feet in height. It is decorated with a spiral relief sculpture, winding 23 times around and depicting the story of Trajan’s triumphant campaigns in Dacia, now part of Romania.

One of the best preserved of all Roman artworks, the monument has however lost what might have been it most distinctive feature — color.

“The column, like many other statues of antiquity, was a carnival of color. The knights, the shields, the horses, the rivers, the sky were all painted,” Maurizio Anastasi, head of the technical office of Rome Superintendency for Archaeology told Discovery News.

Anastasi plans to return the column to its full polychrome glory using an innovative, fully reversible technology. The plan was announced at an international meeting on art restoration in Ferrara, Italy last week.

Read the rest of the article here.

Ancient Greek theatres crumbling

From the abc.net.au article:
Ancient open-air theatres across Greece are crumbling due to neglect and need swift government intervention to rescue them, archaeologists say.

Greece – where classical drama was born in the 5th century BC – boasts scores of theatres that form a key part of the country’s classical cultural heritage.

But while about 30 are in a state to host cultural events, archaeologists say 76 are in need of urgent repair.

Read the rest of the article here.

Found! Oldest galaxy pile-up

From abc.net.au:
Astronomers have discovered the most distant galactic collisions yet, a cluster of early galaxies caught merging into one giant galaxy when the universe was just a toddler.

The galactic ‘proto-cluster’, named LBG-2377, is a whopping 11.4 billion light-years away and in the past.

It provides a window into a time well after the universe inflated and spread matter far and wide.

But it was still a time when all of that matter was coalescing to make the clusters and super-clusters of galaxies that collectively create the cobwebby structure of matter in the modern universe.

The team used the volcano-top Keck Telescope in Hawaii to capture the image of the galaxies in the act of coming together at about two billion years after the Big Bang.

The discovery was originally part of a broader survey of distant galaxies.

“This particular system showed up as a particularly bright one,” says Dr Jeff Cooke, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California at Irvine (UCI).

Cooke and his colleagues publish their discovery in the online astrophysics bulletin astro-ph, accessible via the arXiv website.

To be so bright at such a distance, LBG-2377 must be about 10 times the mass of the Milky Way, say the researchers.

They gleaned the number of galaxies involved in the merger from LBG-2377’s spectra of light, which contain multiple galactic signals.

Equally important is the fact that the galaxies have been caught in the act of firing up loads of young stars that are very bright in ultraviolet light.

“It wasn’t at all what I expected,” Cooke says. “The event is so violent and catastrophic and they are creating so many new stars” that it shines far brighter than any other galaxies or clusters of galaxies at such a distance.

“It’s definitely the furthest merging galaxy cluster.”

Read the rest of the article here.

All About Stonehenge

More info on Stonehenge.
The Smithsonian Channel has a great site with everything you ever wanted to know about Stonehenge. Check it out here.

Also there are some great images of Stonehenge here. 

Source: Paull Young, Smithsonian Channel Community Administrator 

Interactive 360° panoramic of Stonehenge

The BBC has a cool site with an Interactive 360° panoramic view of Stonehenge, also videos from the dig that is in progress.

See the Interactive 360° panoramic of Stonehenge here.

Clashing magnetic fields blast solar winds

From the abc.net.au article:
The solar wind paints earth’s skies with auroras and pushes solar sails through space. But just how the streams of electrically charged particles flow out of the sun has been a mystery until now.

Like most phenomena associated with stars, the process is violent, international scientists have discovered.

Pockets of hot gases on the sun’s surface, which pool around bright knots of magnetic activity, spurt out into space when the sun’s snarling, snaking magnetic fields collide.

“[The phenomenon] has been debated for many years,” says Professor Louise Harra, a University College London researcher who this week unveiled the sun’s secret at a Royal Astronomical Society meeting in Belfast.

Harra planned to show images from the orbiting Hinode spacecraft showing magnetic fields linking two bright spots on the sun.

The spots are nearly 500 million kilometres apart, a distance equivalent to 40 earths placed side by side.

When the magnetic fields smashed into each other, charged gases flew out in all directions, forming the solar wind.

“It is fantastic to finally be able to pinpoint the source,” Harra says, adding that the next step is to figure out how the wind is transported through the solar system.

The solar wind permeates the solar system, defining its shape and scope, as it blasts along at 200 kilometres per second on the slow days.

During snappier binges, strong gusts blasting into earth’s magnetic bubble can have a myriad ramifications from the beautiful and benign aurora above earth’s poles to the shutdown of power and communications systems on the planet.

Read the rest of the article here.