Plato's account of how the fabled city of Atlantis sank below the surface of the ocean does have scientific grounding, according to a seafloor survey of an island west of the Straits of Gibraltar.
Marc-André Gutscher of the University of Western Brittany in Plouzané, France, performed a detailed mapping of the seafloor on Spartel Island, already proposed as a candidate for the origin of the Atlantis legend in 2001 by French geologist Jacques Collina-Girard.
Lying 60 meters beneath the surface in the Gulf of Cadiz, the island is right "in front of the Pillars of Hercules," or the Straits of Gibraltar, as stated by Plato.
*yawn*
Yet another acronym to remember Trees that tell stories
Harv Burman pulls a palm-sized, bumble bee-colored GPS device from his park ranger uniform, and his fingers dance across the keypad. He records a few notes about a stately ponderosa pine, the trunk missing a long, wide patch of its scaly, yellow bark.
The information ends up in an office computer at the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, where the Global Positioning System has recorded the location of the specimen.
It's not the old-growth pine that attracts the seasonal ranger, but the scarring, a definitive shape that makes him believe it was created by human hands, possibly hundreds of years ago.
It's arguing that perhaps entire landscapes should be preserved much as buildings and other sites are.
Medieval cliff cemetery unearthed
A medieval cemetery, along with remains of some of those buried there, have been unearthed near cliffs in Pembrokeshire.
Archaeologists are now speculating the site at West Angle Bay may house an even older burial ground and possibly the remains of an ancient chapel.
They believe the cemetery dates back to around 900 to 1000 AD but are waiting for the results of carbon dating tests.
DNA traces evolution of extinct sabertooths and the American cheetah-like cat
By performing sequence analysis of ancient DNA, a team of researchers has obtained data that help clarify our view of the evolutionary relationships shared by the large predatory cats that once roamed the prehistoric New World.
The work is reported in the August 9 issue of Current Biology by Ross Barnett of the University of Oxford and a team of researchers from Britain, Canada, the United States, Sweden, and Australia.
Toward the end of the last Ice Age, around 13,000 years ago, North and South America were home to a variety of large cats such as the sabertooths (Smilodon and Homotherium) and other now-extinct species known as the American lion-like cat (Panthera atrox) and cheetah-like cat (Miracinonyx trumani). Of these big cats, only the puma (Puma concolor) and jaguar (Panthera onca) survive in the Americas today.
Update: More stuff
Another mammoth find Mammoth find may be biggest ever
The remains of a mammoth have been located north of Yakima by the town of Selah. While mammoth parts have been found before, it's been nothing like this. It is more than a yard long. On a human, it would be the equivalent of the right upper arm bone. Only this bone belongs to a mammoth.
“We actually have another bone here, mammoth size, and another bone here. And they’re all about the same level,” said field assistant Jake Shapley.
Remote sensing update Archaeologists seek buried clues to 19th century settlement
Archaeologists dug with electronic fingers into the soil of Central Park on Wednesday to learn more about Seneca Village, a vanished 19th century settlement of poor folks _ blacks, Irish immigrants and who knows who else _ that existed before the park landscapers arrived in the 1850s.
A team of scientists from Barnard and City College of New York launched the two-day effort using ground-penetrating radar to probe selected areas of the site that once covered roughly two blocks and was home to as many as 260 people.
More politics and media bias Apparently, the NY Times article on the so-called Palace of David is getting more attention.
Finally, Andie links to a story in the Guardian about preserving documentation on nuclear waste. Seems they are using a papyrus-like paper (no acid, very stable) in "copper impregnated bags" (= poisonous to bacteria) in dry storage boxes to ensure the documents are legible for some time. This is similar to the problem some people in the US were working on some time ago regarding warning signs over nuclear waste dumps. How to make some form of monument that will not only last for thousands of years, but also be readable. Don't know if they've figured that one out yet.