The Global Reality

An international team of researchers including Colorado State University professors Christopher Fisher and Stephen Leisz have been utilizing LiDAR technology to seek ancient settlements and human constructed landscapes in an area long rumoured to contain the legendary city of Ciudad Blanca – the mythical “White City” – in Central America.

Lidar image with tree cover removed. Colorado State University

The project is a collaboration of the Global Heritage Foundation (GHF), UTL Productions, the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM), CSU, and the Honduran government. It is outlined in detail in the May 6 edition of The New Yorker.

LiDAR is the latest in survey prospection

Fisher, an associate professor of archaeology, and Leisz, assistant professor of geography, have previously worked with airborne LiDAR to help reveal a lost pre-Columbian city in central Mexico. LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) is a remote sensing technique used to examine the earth’s surface.

Researchers focused their search for evidence of ancient settlements in the Mosquitia Coast region of Central America. Until now, dense tropical forests and relative inaccessibility of the region have hampered systematic archaeological investigation.

LiDAR’s computer-generated images allow researchers to “see” through the forest canopy to the ground surface, revealing any evidence of ancient settlements or human-engineered landscapes.

A Russian billionaire has revealed controversial plans to upload his own brain and become immortal by 2045.

32 year-old Dmitry Itskov believes technology will allow him to live forever in a hologram body.

Still some work to do: 32 year-old Dmitry Itskov, seen here in prototype robotic form, believes he will be able to upload his brain to a hologram body in 2045 and live forever

His ’2045 initiative’ is described as the next step in evolution, and over 20,000 people have signed up on Facebook to follow its progress, with global conferences planned to explore the technology needed.

‘We are in the process of creating focus groups of experts,’ said Itskov.

‘Along with these teams, we will prepare goal statements and research programs schedules.’

The foundation has already planned out its timeline for getting to a fully holographic human, and claims it will be ready to upload a mind into a computer by 2015, a timeline even Itskov says is ‘optimistic’.

Residents in Quincy, Massachusetts are growing increasingly concerned about who or what has been flying about their city from dusk til dawn for the past 10 days.

At least person has captured an image of the plane which has helped to confirm that, despite suspicions, it isn’t a drone

Almost every night for the past two weeks, residents have spotted – and heard – a low-flying aircraft doing loops over the city.

At least person has captured an image of the plane which has at least helped to confirm that, despite suspicions, it isn’t a drone. The photograph revealed a Cessna single-engine airplane, which is a maned vehicle.

The rotting carcass of a mysterious-looking ‘sea monster’ has been found washed ashore on a New Zealand beach.

The 30-foot long carcass of the mysterious sea creature is seen almost buried under the sand on the New Zealand beach in the Bay of Plenty. Only its head and what appear to be flippers are visible

A YouTube video filmed by Elizabeth Ann on Pukehina Beach shows the half-buried head of the carcass with jagged teeth and gaping jaws.

Most of the rest of the creature’s body is missing.

New York police pulled a body from the Harlem River in the Bronx on Sunday, identified only by a tattoo of the Masonic Eye of Providence on the man’s left shoulder.

Mystery: Police pulled this male corpse from the Harlem River in the Bronx on Sunday and are seeking help from the public in identifying him from a tattoo of an ‘All Seeing Eye’ on his left shoulder

The corpse was discovered near West 225th Street, just East of Broadway, on the Bronx shore of the Harlem River shortly after 3pm on Sunday.

A bizarre legend and unsolved mystery which has haunted a small Iowa town for more than 100 years is the subject of a new book called The Van Meter Visitor.

A sketch of the bizarre creature that terrorized Van Meter in 1903 based on eyewitness accounts

The identity of this mysterious monster has never been discovered, but over 100 years later a new book is retelling the amazing tale and hoping to shed some light on what happened all those years ago.

The legend dates back to the fall of 1903, when several of Van Meter’s most well respected citizens reported a half human, half animal with enormous, smooth bat wings flying about.

The creature is described as moving at speeds the townsfolk had never witnessed before, plus it let off a powerful stench and shot a blinding light from its horned head.

Each time the townsfolk encountered the creature they fired their guns at it, but this appeared to have no impact on the creature.

As thousands of Orthodox Christians celebrated Easter Sunday today with services around the world, worshippers in Romania visited an underground room of skulls to mark Jesus Christ’s resurrection.

The nuns sing among the remains of the dead to mark Christ’s resurrection on Easter Sunday, which is today in the Orthodox calendar

The ossuary at Pasarea monastery near Bucharest contains mainly the remains of nuns who lived there.

A Romanian Orthodox priest led a service as nuns held candles and sang, while visitors looked on.

More than 85 per cent of Romanians are Orthodox Christian. They celebrate the resurrection of Christ on the evening before Easter Sunday, when a holy flame originating in Jerusalem is passed between churches.

Worshippers visit their local church with candles and take the flame – which is seen as a light from God – back into their homes for Easter Sunday.

The flame is brought from Jerusalem by members of the Romanian Orthodox clergy after an event called the Holy Fire ceremony at one of Christianity’s holiest churches.

The first evidence of agriculture appears in the archaeological record some 10,000 years ago. But the skills needed to cultivate and harvest crops weren’t learned overnight. Scientists have traced these roots back to 23,000-year-old tools used to grind seeds, found mostly in the Middle East.

Professor Li Liu and graduate student Hao Zhao take residue and use-wear samples from a grinding slab in China. Image: Stanford University

Now, research lead by Li Liu, a professor of Chinese archaeology at Stanford, reveals that the same types of tools were used to process seeds and tubers in northern China, setting China’s agricultural clock back about 12,000 years and putting it on par with activity in the Middle East. Liu believes that the practices evolved independently, possibly as a global response to a changing climate.

The earliest grinding stones have been found in Upper Palaeolithic archaeological sites around the world. These consisted of a pair of stones, typically a handheld stone that would be rubbed against a larger, flat stone set on the ground, to process wild seeds and tubers into flour-like powder.

Once the stones are unearthed, use-wear traces and residue of starch grains on the used surfaces can be analysed to reveal the types of plants processed.

Europeans all shared a common ancestor just 1,000 years ago, new genetic research reveals.

Maps that show where the distant cousins of modern-day people in the UK live, at three different levels of relatedness (recent on top, older on the bottom). Bigger circles mean more ancestors, and numbers give average number of shared genetic a

The same technique hasn’t been applied to other continents, but people in other parts of the world are just as likely to be closely related, the researchers said.

“In fact, it’s likely that everyone in the world is related over just the past few thousand years,” said study co-author Graham Coop, a geneticist at the University of California, Davis.

A Texas anarchist group has successfully produced the first-ever gun produced on a 3-D printer and made entirely of plastic parts.

Crude: The Liberator plastic gun is a simple single-shot weapon that fires a small .380-caliber bullet

An era of unlicensed plastic guns, made on 3-D printers costing as little as $1,000, has long been forecast, but no one has previously designed a weapon that could withstand the pressure of firing modern ammunition.

On Sunday, the group Defense Distributed posted a video of founder Cody Wilson firing the ‘Liberator’ plastic pistol.

Mr Wilson says he plans to make the schematics for the weapon available for free online this week – meaning everyone with a high-end 3-D printer can create their own version of the gun.

The ancestors of people from across Europe and Asia may have spoken a common language about 15,000 years ago, new research suggests.

Now, researchers have reconstructed words, such as “mother,” “to pull” and “man,” which would have been spoken by ancient hunter-gatherers, possibly in an area such as the Caucuses or the modern-day country of Georgia. The word list, detailed today (May 6) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could help researchers retrace the history of ancient migrations and contacts between prehistoric cultures.

“We can trace echoes of language back 15,000 years to a time that corresponds to about the end of the last ice age,” said study co-author Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom.

Tower of Babel

The idea of a universal human language goes back at least to the Bible, in which humanity spoke a common tongue, but were punished with mutual unintelligibility after trying to build the Tower of Babel all the way to heaven. [Image Gallery: Ancient Middle-Eastern Texts]

But not all linguists believe in a single common origin of language, and trying to reconstruct that language seemed impossible. Most researchers thought they could only trace a language’s roots back 3,000 to 4,000 years. (Even so, researchers recently said they had traced the roots of a common mother tongue to many Eurasian languages back 8,000 to 9,500 years to Anatolia, a southwestern Asian peninsula that is now part of Turkey.)

Molotov cocktails, a Romanian rifle, “white supremacist stuff”…

Today, the FBI announced the arrest of a Minnesota man believed to have been plotting a “localized terror attack.”

Buford Rogers, a 24 year-old from Montevideo, Minn., was arrested Friday and charged with one count of being a felon in possession of a firearm. He appeared in federal court Monday, and will have a second hearing Wednesday to set the terms of his detention.

The investigation is ongoing, but a number of early details are available. Here’s what we know so far:

1. An attack was probably not imminent

Authorities believe Rogers was planning to attack an undisclosed area in western Minnesota, and that he’d possibly targeted local authorities. According to the AP, that target was likely somewhere in Rogers’ home town of Montevideo.

However, investigators believe Rogers was still in the very early planning stages, and that an attack was not imminent. Nonetheless, “the FBI believes that a terror attack was disrupted by law enforcement personnel and that the lives of several local residents were potentially saved,” the Minneapolis FBI office said in a statement.

Law enforcement officials have been quick to shoot down any speculation about whether Rogers was acting alone or as part of a group. They’ve also declined to say if more arrests may be on the way.

“This is an ongoing investigation,” FBI spokesman Kyle A. Loven told the Los Angeles Times.