A cave inside some remote mountains of Armenia contain what is being called the oldest winery yet discovered, dating back to around 4,100 B.C., 1,000 years earlier than previous finds.
The discovery was made in the same
mysterious Armenian cave complex where ancient leather shoe was found last summer.
This is the oldest complete wine production facility ever found, including grape seeds, withered grape vines, remains of pressed grapes, a rudimentary wine press, a clay vat apparently used for fermentation, wine-soaked potsherds, and even a cup and drinking bowl.
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has detected beams of antimatter launched by thunderstorms, which act like enormous particle accelerators and can emit gamma-ray flashes called TGFs - and also high-energy electrons and positrons. TGFs are produced inside thunderstorms and shown to be associated with lightning. It is estimated that about 500 such flashes occur daily worldwide, but most go undetected.
Scientists now think that most TGFs produce particle beams and antimatter.
Hanny's Voorwerp, a strange, glowing green cloud of gas that has mystified astronomers since its discovery in 2007, has gotten a better look by Hubble. The cloud of gas is lit up by the bright light of a nearby quasar and shows signs of ongoing star formation.
Hanny's Voorwerp (Hanny's Object in Dutch) is a mysterious, glowing green blob of gas is floating in space near a spiral galaxy - the size of the Milky Way.
Thanks to the Tevatron Facebook account manager, R.M. (Ron, tell me if I can disclose your identity here), I can offer to you today an exceptional plot of historical significance.
Before I paste below the plot in question, let me discuss what it is about. The Tevatron collider has operated since October 1985 -about a couple of geological eras back, in particle physics terms. The W and Z bosons were newborn babies back then, the top quark was thought to have a mass in the 30-50 GeV ballpark, and, to paraphrase the Rolling Stones, "Carlo Rubbia raged and the bodies stunk".
Why haven't antioxidant therapies yielded more positive results? The answer may be that Nrf2, a protein that plays an important role in some antioxidant therapies, may not be as effective due to additional mechanisms that cause it to promote atherosclerosis - clogging of the arteries.
Nrf2 has been thought to be an important drug-therapy target for diseases such as cancer because it can induce chemopreventive activity by attaching to specific sequences of DNA, leading to the release of numerous antioxidant and anti-inflammatory genes and enzymes that can decrease or inhibit the effects of carcinogens.
Without question nanotechnology is a key component in our energy future. In recent years, developers have been investigating light-harvesting thin film solar panels made from nanotechnology and promoting efficiency metrics which they say make the technology marketable but a researcher has challenged recent "charge" measurements for increasing solar panel efficiency.
While we need to invest in the future, we need to make sure there is no hype that promises to increase efficiencies in thin film panels.
Neurons within the brain's neocortex behave much like people in social networks, with a small population of highly active members who give and receive more information than the majority of other members, says Alison Barth, associate professor of biological sciences at Carnegie Mellon in new research. By identifying these neurons, scientists could increase understanding of the neocortex, thought to be the brain's center of higher learning.
The following is a neat little experiment, the result of which may be counter-intuitive to some of those who embrace the “all bodies fall the same way inside earth’s gravity” doctrine.
In a piece by Richard Stone in this week’s Science, it was pointed out that in Chinese Museums, it is likely that up to 80% of the marine reptiles on display have been altered or artificially combined to some degree. This seems like a shocking figure, but it is more understandable when it is considered that few of these museums have palaeontologists as staff, and that many of these fossils are unearthed by Chinese farmers that dress their finds up so that a museum is more likely to buy them. Of late there has been a boom, both in the numbers of museums, but also in the acquisition funds set aside for accessioning fossils; this, coupled with prizes for the best specimens, means that finding (or fabricating) a complete fossil can prove to be quite lucrative.
