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Daily alternative news articles at the News Desk for GrahamHancock.com. Featuring alternative history, science, archaeology, ancient egypt, paranormal & supernatural, environment, and much more. Check in daily for updates!

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April 29 2013

Feast your eyes on new Stonehenge theory


A site near Stonehenge has revealed archaeological evidence that hunters lived just a mile from Stonehenge roughly 5,000 years prior to the construction of the first stones, new research suggests.

What's more, the site, which was occupied continuously for 3,000 years, had evidence of burning, thousands of flint tool fragments and bones of wild aurochs, a type of extinct giant cow. That suggests the area near Stonehenge may have been an auroch migration route that became an ancient feasting site, drawing people together from across different cultures in the region, wrote lead researcher David Jacques of the Open University in the United Kingdeom, in an email.

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April 28 2013

Speed of light may not be constant, physicists say


The speed of light is constant, or so textbooks say. But some scientists are exploring the possibility that this cosmic speed limit changes, a consequence of the nature of the vacuum of space.

The definition of the speed of light has some broader implications for fields such as cosmology and astronomy, which assume a stable velocity for light over time. For instance, the speed of light comes up when measuring the fine structure constant (alpha), which defines the strength of the electromagnetic force. And a varying light speed would change the strengths of molecular bonds and the density of nuclear matter itself.

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April 28 2013

Physicists believe it's possible to build a perpetual motion machine


All bets are off. A prominent physicist has just announced that he's developed a proof for "time crystals" that can move thanks to a break in the symmetry of time. And now he's about to test his proof in the real world.

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April 28 2013

Lost city of Heracleion gives up its secrets


A lost ancient Egyptian city submerged beneath the sea 1,200 years ago is starting to reveal what life was like in the legendary port of Thonis-Heracleion.

For centuries it was thought to be a legend, a city of extraordinary wealth mentioned in Homer, visited by Helen of Troy and Paris, her lover, but apparently buried under the sea.

In fact, Heracleion was true, and a decade after divers began uncovering its treasures, archaeologists have produced a picture of what life was like in the city in the era of the pharaohs.

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April 28 2013

Sea surface temperatures reach highest level in 150 years


Sea surface temperatures in the Northeast Shelf Large Marine Ecosystem during 2012 were the highest recorded in 150 years, according to the latest Ecosystem Advisory issued by NOAA's Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC). These high sea surface temperatures (SSTs) are the latest in a trend of above average temperature seen during the spring and summer seasons, and part of a pattern of elevated temperatures occurring in the Northwest Atlantic, but not seen elsewhere in the ocean basin over the past century.

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April 28 2013

New phase of water could dominate the interiors of Uranus and Neptune


While everyone is familiar with water in the liquid, ice, and gas phases, water can also exist in many other phases over a vast range of temperature and pressure conditions. One lesser known phase of water is the superionic phase, which is considered an "ice" but exists somewhere between a solid and a liquid: while the oxygen atoms occupy fixed lattice positions as in a solid, the hydrogen atoms migrate through the lattice as in a fluid. Until now, scientists have thought that there was only one phase of superionic ice, but scientists in a new study have discovered a second phase that is more stable than the original. The new phase of superionic ice could make up a large component of the interiors of giant icy planets such as Uranus and Neptune.

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April 28 2013

We Had No Idea What Alexander Graham Bell Sounded Like. Until Now


During the years I spent in the company of Alexander Graham Bell, at work on his biography, I often wondered what the inventor of the world’s most important acoustical device—the telephone—might have sounded like.

Born in Scotland in 1847, Bell, at different periods of his life, lived in England, then Canada and, later, the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. His favorite refuge was Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, where he spent the summers from the mid-1880s on. In his day, 85 percent of the population there conversed in Gaelic. Did Bell speak with a Scottish burr? What was the pitch and depth of the voice with which he loved to belt out ballads and music hall songs?

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April 28 2013

New battery design could help solar and wind power the grid


Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have designed a low-cost, long-life battery that could enable solar and wind energy to become major suppliers to the electrical grid.

"For solar and wind power to be used in a significant way, we need a battery made of economical materials that are easy to scale and still efficient."

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April 28 2013

NASA chief: Visiting an asteroid is all agency can afford


A NASA plan to send astronauts to an asteroid was met with skepticism Wednesday when NASA Chief Charlie Bolden presented the idea to top space officials in Congress - though their doubts may not be enough to sink the program.

The asteroid mission, unveiled a few weeks ago, would send a NASA probe to capture a small asteroid and drag it to a point near the moon so astronauts riding a new rocket and capsule could visit it, possibly as soon as 2021.

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April 28 2013

Asteroid-mining company planning to launch tiny test satellite in 2014


A billionaire-backed asteroid-mining company aims to start putting its big plans into action soon, launching its first hardware into space by this time next year.

Planetary Resources, which counts Google execs Larry Page and Eric Schmidt among its investors, plans to loft a set of tiny "cubesats" to Earth orbit in early 2014, to test out gear for its first line of asteroid-prospecting spacecraft.

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April 28 2013

Archaeologists Find Earliest Evidence of Humans Cooking With Fire


At the base of a brush-covered hill in South Africa’s Northern Cape province, a massive stone outcropping marks the entrance to one of humanity’s oldest known dwelling places. Humans and our apelike ancestors have lived in Wonderwerk Cave for 2 million years — most recently in the early 1900s, when a farm couple and their 14 children called it home. Wonderwerk holds another distinction as well: The cave contains the earliest solid evidence that our ancient human forebears (probably Homo erectus) were using fire.

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April 28 2013

Rock art may last up to 60,000 years


SYDNEY: The world’s largest collection of rock art engravings could also potentially be home to some of the oldest, Australian researchers have found.

In a paper published in the June 2013 issue of Quaternary Science Reviews, scientists estimated that the Burrup Peninsula rock art gallery in Western Australia has the potential for the preservation of engravings up to 60,000 years old.

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April 28 2013

Is Australopithecus sediba the Most Important Human Ancestor Discovery Ever?


Three years ago researchers added a new branch to the human family tree: Australopithecus sediba, a nearly two-million-year-old relative from South Africa. By all accounts it was a dazzling find-- two partial skeletons, an adult female and young male, from a site called Malapa just outside Johannesburg. And it has been making headlines regularly since then whenever scientists release results of new studies of the material, as they did earlier this month. Any time human fossils, especially skeletons, are unearthed it's a big deal, because such remains are so incredibly rare. But I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that A. sediba may just be the most important hominin (modern humans and their extinct relatives) discovery yet.

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April 28 2013

Neanderthals Made a Last Stand at Subarctic Outpost?


A hardy band of Neanderthals may have made a last stand for their species at a remote outpost in subarctic Russia, a newfound prehistoric "tool kit" suggests.

The Ural Mountains site "may be one of the last [refuges] of the Neanderthals, and that would be very exciting," said study leader Ludovic Slimak, an archaeologist at France's Université de Toulouse le Mirail.

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April 28 2013

Giza Secret Revealed: How 10,000 Pyramid Builders Got Fed


The builders of the famous Giza pyramids in Egypt feasted on food from a massive catering-type operation, the remains of which scientists have discovered at a workers' town near the pyramids.

The workers' town is located about 1,300 feet (400 meters) south of the Sphinx, and was used to house workers building the pyramid of pharaoh Menkaure, the third and last pyramid on the Giza plateau. The site is also known by its Arabic name, Heit el-Ghurab, and is sometimes called "the Lost City of the Pyramid Builders.".

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April 28 2013

Archeologists unearth oldest Zapotec temple in Mexican valley


Archeologist's Elsa Redmond and Charles Spencer of the American Museum of Natural History report on new developments at the ongoing excavation site in the Valley of Oaxaca in Mexico. In a paper they've had published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the two describe a temple complex found at the site that appears to be similar to those described by Spanish explorers in the sixteenth century. The people that lived in the valley at the time were part of a group known as the Zapotec Civilization.

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April 28 2013

Insecticide firms in secret bid to stop ban that could save bees


Last-ditch lobbying to sway vote in Brussels to halt use of killer nerve agents

Europe is on the brink of a landmark ban on the world's most widely used insecticides, which have increasingly been linked to serious declines in bee numbers. Despite intense secret lobbying by British ministers and chemical companies against the ban, revealed in documents obtained by the Observer, a vote in Brussels on Monday is expected to lead to the suspension of the nerve agents.

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April 28 2013

Stonehenge Was An Ancient Burial Ground For the Rich: Study


The site of Stonehenge — that mysterious collection of British rocks that could have served as a calendar using the stars — was also a graveyard for the elite, according to new research.

A British group led by the University College London looked at 63 bodies surrounding the historical site. They determined these people were part of a group of elite families that brought their relatives to Stonehenge for burial over more than 200 years, starting from 2,900 BC.

The bodies were buried long before the rocks visible today were erected, though.

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April 28 2013

Egyptians grab ancient land of the pharaohs to bury their dead


Archaeologists fear for pyramid sites as illegal building gathers pace in wake of Arab spring

In Manshiet Dahshur, 25 miles south of Cairo, the villagers recently extended the boundaries of the cemetery. For Ahmed Rageb, a carpenter who buried his cousin in the annexe, it was a logical decision. "We want to bury the dead," he said, strolling through the new cemetery after visiting his cousin's tomb. "The old cemetery is full. And there is no other place to bury my family.".

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April 28 2013

Maya Sun Observatory Hints at Origin of Civilization


The oldest ancient Maya ceremonial compound ever discovered in the Central American lowlands dates back 200 years before similar sites pop up elsewhere in the region, archaeologists announced today (April 25). The recently excavated plaza and pyramid would have likely served as a solar observatory for rituals.

The finding at a site called Ceibal suggests that the origins of the Maya civilization are more complex than first believed. Archaeologists hotly debate whether the Maya -- famous for their complex calendar system that spurred apocalypse rumors last year -- developed independently or whether they were largely inspired by an earlier culture known as the Olmec. The new research suggests the answer is neither.

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