The Global Reality

Humans lived in South America at the height of the last ice age, thousands of years earlier than we thought, according to a controversial study. A team claims to have found 22,000-year-old stone tools at a site in Brazil, though other archaeologists are disputing the claim.

Christelle Lahaye of Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux 3 University in France and colleagues excavated a rock shelter in north-east Brazil and found 113 stone tools.

The team dated the sediments in which the tools were buried using a technique that determines when the sediments were last exposed to light. Some tools were buried 22,000 years ago – thousands of years earlier than any known human colonisation of the Americas.

For decades, archaeologists thought that the Clovis people were the first to enter the Americas, 13,000 years ago. But since the 1980s evidence has accumulated for an earlier colonisation, at least 15,000 years ago.

The genetic makeup of Europe mysteriously transformed about 4,000-5,000 years ago, researchers have discovered.

Researchers say the rapid expansion of the Bell Beaker culture, which is believed to have been instrumental in building the monoliths at Stonehedge, could hold the key to why the genetic lineage of Europe mysteriously transformed about 4000 years ago

An Australian team found the unexplained change while analysing several skeletons unearthed in central Europe that were up to 7,500 years old.

They say the rapid expansion of the Bell Beaker culture, which is believed to have been instrumental in building the monoliths at Stonehedge, could hold the key.

‘What is intriguing is that the genetic markers of this first pan-European culture, which was clearly very successful, were then suddenly replaced around 4,500 years ago, and we don’t know why,’ study co-author Alan Cooper of the University of Adelaide Australian Center for Ancient DNA said.

‘Something major happened, and the hunt is now on to find out what that was.’

The Boston bombings and the subsequent hunt for the suspects had put all mainstream media outlets to the test with rapid developments and unexpected twists – and many of them failed miserably.

New Girl wanted: Viewers who tuned in to Fox 4 and had their closed captioning option turned on were treated to the following script: ‘Marathon bombing, he is 19-year-old Zooey Deschanel’

On Friday night, a tense police standoff with a bombing suspect unfolded in real time on live TV in Watertown, Mass., giving rise to much confusion that left some reporters feeling exasperated.

And one correspondent for the channel New England Cable News let his frustration show – and be heard – on air.

As veteran NBC presenter Brian Williams cut to the channel to get an update on the situation in Watertown, the unnamed reporter could be heard saying: ‘Oh, you’re not listening? Well, I don’t know sh*t,’ Gawker reported.

The initial discovery was made by Benjamin Troper, the training coordinator of the Kfar Etzion field school, who suddenly, while aiding a troubled tourist down a deep cave south of Jerusalem, turned to look at the nearby wall and saw an ancient stone column.

“I had gone down that hole dozens of times,” Tropper told Makor Rishon, “but this was the first time, because I was helping the tourist, that I came down looking in that direction.”

What he saw was a bona fide ancient column with a capital, which he recognized from his years as tour guide and from the time he spent working in excavating ancient Jerusalem.

That’s the story of a remarkably rare archeological discovery, which no one has heard about. For some reason, possibly political, the Israeli authorities have been trying to silence this discovery which could usher in a breakthrough in our understanding of the periods of King David and his son, King Solomon.

The column capital Tropper ran, or rather climbed down into, is very likely part of a complete temple or palace buried underground.

Tropper, who expected nothing short of a medal for his fortunate discovery, called over the field school’s director, Yaron Rosenthal, who in turn alerted a senior employee of Israel’s Antiquities Authority. But no medals were to come any time soon.

The find is really big, according to Rosenthal. It may also be a singular opportunity to unearth a whole structure that hadn’t undergone “secondary use,” meaning that it hasn’t been altered by later dwellers of the area. Often, later period folks utilize the components of older structures as building blocks for their own structures.

As details emerge about the Texas fertilizer plant that was the site of Wednesday’s fatal explosion and fire, a few tidbits can be gleaned from a 2007 lawsuit that the plant’s owners filed against agribusiness giant Monsanto Co.

Firefighter conduct search and rescue of an apartment destroyed by an explosion at a fertilizer plant in West, Texas

The suit, filed as a potential class action in U.S. District Court for the western district of Texas, claimed that Monsanto had artificially inflated prices for its herbicide Roundup through anti-competitive actions. The suit did not relate to storing fertilizer, believed to be at the root of Wednesday’s blast.

The suit was filed by Texas Grain Storage Inc. The company now calls itself West Fertilizer Co.

In the suit, the company said that it was started in 1957 as a grain-storage business by the Plasek family in the town of West, Texas. It later built a small fertilizer-blend plant and started selling fertilizer to area farmers.

Zak Covar, executive director of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, told a news conference Wednesday that the fertilizer storage and blending facility had been there since 1962.

A robot will soon begin exploring the last stretch of a tunnel found at the archaeological site of Teotihuacan in central Mexico, the third time anywhere in the world that such an automaton is used to design excavation strategies.

Modern Tech to Be Used in Exploring Mexico’s Teotihuacan Ancient Site

The Tlaloc II-TC robot, which will be the first to travel the remaining 30 to 35 meters (100 to 115 feet) of the tunnel, is composed of three independent mechanisms, the first being the transport vehicle that reaches a length of over a meter (3 1/4 feet) once its arms are stretched out.

The robotic arms serve to deal with any obstacles in the vehicle’s path.

With the exploration of these areas, the INAH looks forward to making some of the most important archaeological discoveries at Teotihuacan, one of the largest cities of Mesoamerica in pre-Columbian times.

In an unreal scene, a massive explosion ripped through a fertilizer plant Wednesday night in the community of West, Texas, just north of Waco, sending a massive fireball into the sky and setting parts of the town ablaze.

West Texas Explosion 100 Injured Massive Fire Near Waco Say Reports

As of 7:25 a.m. on Thursday we know this: Several buildings were reported damaged, including a nearby nursing home, and numerous injuries were reported with multiple ambulances requested after a fertilizer plant exploded.

According to some initial reports there were scores of deaths because of the explosion. West EMS Director Dr. George Smith told the local KWTX that as many as 60 or 70 people died and at least 100 were injured Wednesday night in a fertilizer plant explosion in West.

The number of dead and injured could not immediately be confirmed.

“We’ve heard that figure of 60 to 70 dead that’s coming from the county’s emergency management office down here,” said WFAA (Dallas) reporter Todd Unger a short distance from the blast epicenter. “I can tell you that a couple of law enforcement soucres expect that number to go up.”

Former Republican presidential candidate and longtime television preacher Pat Robertson implied on “The 700 Club” Wednesday that LGBT people are covertly out to destroy the family, the church and the state, in the vein of the Illuminati of the French revolutionary war.

“It has been said that those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to live them again,” he says in footage snipped and published online by Right Wing Watch.

“You go back in history to the French Revolution, you find there was a thrust, uh, spurred by the, uh, writings of a group called the Illuminati, to destroy the family, to destroy the state, to destroy capitalism, to destroy the church,” Robertson continues. “And it was lived out in the blood of the French Revolution.”

So, what exactly does that have to do with LGBT people? Robertson doesn’t quite make the connection, and instead explains: “We have here a debate over same sex marriage. But is it really just about marriage? Or does it go far beyond that? They’re destroying the traditional family and building a country without God.”

Applying a maxim from computer science to biology raises the intriguing possibility that life existed before Earth did and may have originated outside our solar system, scientists say.

Moore’s Law is the observation that computers increase exponentially in complexity, at a rate of about double the transistors per integrated circuit every two years. If you apply Moore’s Law to just the last few years’ rate of computational complexity and work backward, you’ll get back to the 1960s, when the first microchip was, indeed, invented.

Now, two geneticists have applied Moore’s Law to the rate at which life on Earth grows in complexity — and the results suggest organic life first came into existence long before Earth itself.

Deep in the waters off Alderney, third largest of the Channel Islands, there lies the wreck of an Elizabethan warship.

Sunk there in 1592, it has surrendered many treasures to divers over the years. They include the armour, muskets and cannon proudly displayed in Alderney’s museum.

Magical crystal: New research suggests this is a fabled Viking sunstone, which has long been the stuff of legend

But it is an almost forgotten object, long hidden away in the museum’s storeroom, that may prove the most momentous find of all.

Salvaged from the depths in 2002, it looks like a bar of soap and is just as opaque, but only because its surface has been scratched and dulled by sand and seawater over hundreds of years.

First discovered during a survey two years ago, four disk-shaped copper plates found by archaeologists near the ancient site of Hippos-Sussita just east of the Sea of Galilee continue to mystify them.

Now, archaeologists involved in the ongoing excavations at the site are reaching out to scholars and the public alike to help them find the answer to the riddle.

“They were found in the Hippos necropolis during several surveys”, says Israeli archaeologist Dr. Michael Eisenberg of the Zinman Institute of Archaeology at the University of Haifa, Israel. He directs the Hippos Excavation Project, which has uncovered remarkably well-preserved monumental remains and artifacts at this ancient mountaintop Greco-Roman city, a site that overlooks the Sea of Galilee. “None were found during excavation, but all were found very near to robbed and open graves. It was Dr. Alexander Iermolin, conservator from the institute of Haifa, who first found the pieces during a metal detector survey. They were totally ignored even by us as at first glance they look rather modern.”

The disk-shaped plates (see image below), about 20 cm in diameter and found at the necropolis hill located 300 m south of Hippos, feature what appear to be incisions in a decorative pattern on what has been interpreted as their inner sides, with clear marks of nails and a hole in the middle of each.

Ever since Google first showed off Glass, there’s been speculation about the futuristic headgear’s specifications. Now we’ve finally got some official details, straight from the tech deities of Mountain View, Calif. — right down to the fact that Glass software will be called “Glassware.”

The Google Glass display — that strange square that sits just above eye-level — is described as being the “equivalent of a 25-inch- high definition screen from eight feet away.” Glass can take 5-megapixel photos and shoot 720p video. There’ll be 16GB of flash memory, 12GB of which is deemed “usable memory.” (Glass syncs with Google’s cloud storage service, of course.) As we’ve known for a while, there’s support for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

If fully charged, Glass will run for a full day (assuming “typical use”). Google cautions that “some features, like Hangouts and video recording, are more battery intensive,” though, implying that you might not always Glass it up all day long without needing a power outlet. You’ll charge Glass using the included micro USB cable. (“While there are thousands of Micro USB chargers out there, Glass is designed and tested with the included charger in mind,” Google explains. “Use it and preserve long and prosperous Glass use.”) Along with the micro USB charger and cable, a protective pouch is also included with Glass.