Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the brightest star of all?

Actually, it’s not about the brightest star of all, but the brightest star in our galaxy. It seems there’s a new contender for the title of Milky Way brightest star; it’s near its dusty center, and infrared observations performed by NASA have revealed how bright it is by piercing the dust that surrounds it.
The thing […]

Mystery insect baffles experts at London museum

If you have a bug you want to identify and know everything about, there’s one place which will solve all your problems; the experts at the Natural History Museum in London are proud to say that they can identify species from around the globe, from birds and mammals to insects and snakes. Still, if […]

Everything you wanted to know about Easter Island but were too afraid to ask

Geography
Easter Island (Rapa Nui in the native Easter Island language) is situated in the southeastern Pacific Ocean - it’s an overseas territory of Chile. It’s the most isolated inhabitated area, and it’s famous for the monumental statues, called moai (pronounced MOE-eye) which have fascinated and baffled people for many, many years; and still, no good […]

The Seven Wonders (of the Ancient World) - with pics

Seven was considered a magic number by the ancient Greeks. So when it came to naming the most impressive constructions mankind had achieved at the time, it was a must that they settle on just seven. The historian Herodotus and the architect Callimachus of Cyrene made these lists, but their writing remained only as references. […]

5 things Leonardo da Vinci did to change the world

Many are known about Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, yet many things still await to be discovered. Widely considered an archetipe of the “Renaissance man”, he was a man whose curiosity was equaled only by his powers of invention and talent. Among others, he was a scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, […]

Bloodless Worm Sheds Light on Human Blood

University of Maryland researchers have managed to shed some light in an important matter which puzzled medical scientists and not only for ages: how iron carried in human blood is absorbed and transported into the body. Among the benefits of this discovery I’ll just name a better understanding of iron deficiency, the world’s number one […]

Huge Meteorite Impact Found In UK — Britain’s Largest

After the “crash site” in Peru, meteorites keep the headlines again! This time, scientists from the University of Oxford and the University of Aberdeen found the biggest meteorite to ever crash in the British islands. The scientists believe that a large meteorite hit northwest Scotland about 1.2 billion years ago near the Scottish town of […]

Earliest jewish gold scroll found in Austria

The University of Vienna is the oldest university in the German-speaking world. Recently, archaeologists that work there found an amulet inscribed with a Jewish prayer in a Roman child’s grave, dating for almost two milleniums, from the 3rd century.
They found it in the Austrian town of Halbturn. This amulet has a very big historical importance […]

Evidence of Ice Age hunters: hand axes

An amateur Dutch archaeologist named Jan Meulmeester made a startling find which pleases scientists: an amazing collection of 28 flint hand-axes, dated by archaeologists to be around 100,000 years-old. He found them in an area about 13km off Great Yarmouth.
Jan Meulmeester diggs regularly for mammoth bones and fossils in marine sand and gravel delivered the […]

Tiny Pacific skeletons lead to hobbit debate

[reddit-me]After it was proved that Homo floresiensis (”Man of Flores”, nicknamed Hobbit) is a different species than humans, the tiny skeletons found in the caves of the Pacific islands of Palau let to the theory that similar remains found in Indonesia are a very unique species.

The Palau skeletons which are from 900 and 2800 years old seem to have belonged to the “insular dwarfs”, as they have been named. Scientists believe that they have grown smaller due to the life on the island. They claim that these findings could prove that a similar thing happened in Indonesia, where the small skeletons aging from 15,000 to 18,000 were found, intriguing scientists ever since when they were found, in 2004.

Still, there are groups that claim Homo floresiensis is not a different species, but that it evolved this way due to nutritional deficiencies, genetic defects or something similar. The thing is that the Palau dwarfs (let’s call them this way) share traits from both H. sapiens and H. floresiensis, which complicates things even more. Professor Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, says neither he nor his colleagues can explain this.

“These rock islands contain numerous caves and rock shelters, and many of these sites contain abundant fossilised or subfossilised human remains,” they write in their report.
“At least 10 burial caves have been discovered in the rock islands, and excavations at one of them (Chelechol ra Orrak) has produced the skeletal remains of at least 25 individuals,” they add.

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