Oh. What a 'surprise'! I, and many others have written over the years about "lost knowledge" of trade and travelling between continents so now we are getting more proof.
Ancient Roman coins unearthed from castle ruins in Okinawa
KYODO
NAHA, OKINAWA PREF. –Coins issued in ancient Rome have been excavated from the ruins of a castle in Okinawa Prefecture, the local board of education said, the first time such artifacts have been discovered in Japan.
The board of education in the city of Uruma said the four copper coins, believed to date back to the Roman Empire in the third to fourth centuries, were discovered in the ruins of Katsuren Castle, which existed from the 12th to 15th centuries.
Okinawa’s trade with China and Southeast Asia was thriving at the time and the finding is “precious historical material suggesting a link between Okinawa and the Western world,” the board of education said.
Each coin measures 1.6 to 2 cm in diameter. The designs and patterns on both sides are unclear due to abrasion.
Based on X-ray analysis, however, the board said the coins appear to bear an image of Constantine I and a soldier holding a spear. Other relics unearthed from the site include a coin from the 17th century Ottoman Empire, as well as five other round metallic items that also appear to be coins.
The ruins of Katsuren Castle were registered in 2000 on the World Heritage list as part of the Gusuku Sites and Related Properties of the Kingdom of Ryukyu, a group of ancient monuments and castle ruins in the island prefecture.
The coins will be displayed at Uruma City Yonagusuku Historical Museum in central Okinawa until Nov. 25.
Hawking made -again- a fundamental error in his "We should not broadcast to aliens that we are here" piece. As Seth Shostak points out, we have been doing so for 70 years, but even that is an error of sorts.
Radio waves and signals began in the 1920s and are now MANY light years out in space. Radio/radar testing and broadcasts as well as nuclear tests from the 1940s prior to 1944 will be "out there"
Far, far older civilisations than ours would have had their own SETI and spotted our Earth. However, the question is would WE go to a planet that has never seen peace? Destroys its environment at an alarming pace? If they are watching our TV broadcasts and listening to our radio it is far more likely Earth and Humans would be on a Quarantine list.
REAL science would combine SETI with investigation of high graded reports of "UFO" landings because if just one out of 1000 such reports -even 5000- was real......
Someone once told me (I hope he was joking) that I was the "Bernard Quatermass of UFO research". Well, I've not seen anything unearthly myself.....
This gets more and more depressing. I have to post of more wolves to be killed.
Finland,USA and now Norway ~legal~ killing off wolves that can be added to by French and Spanish illegal killings of wolves. Lucky all barring the USA are in the EU club and this at a time that CITES is looking at the killing off and need to protect species....it selects
Outrage as Norway plans to cull majority of its wolf population
Animal rights groups have strongly criticised a plan that will allow hunters in Norway to shoot 47 of an estimated 68 wolves living in the wilderness.
The Norwegian government justified this year’s planned cull – the biggest in more than a century – on the basis that the predators pose a threat to sheep.
Environmental groups dispute this claim, saying the real damage is minimal and the proposed response is disproportionate.
Nina Jensen, chief executive of WWF in Norway, said on Twitter: “This is an outright mass slaughter. Something like we have not seen in almost 100 years.”
“This decision must be stopped,” said Silje Ask Lundberg, chair of Friends of the Earth Norway, the Guardian reported. “We are calling on the minister of environment to stop the butchering. Today, Norway should be ashamed.”
“Shooting 70% of the wolf population is not worthy of a nation claiming to be championing environmental causes. People all over the country, and outside its borders, are now reacting,” Jensen said.
It appears there’s a huge appetite for hunting in the Scandinavian country. Last year, more than 11,000 hunters applied for licences to shoot 16 wolves, a ratio of more than 700 applicants to each licence.
Under the proposals, 24 wolves will be shot within the region of the country designated for wolf habitat, while another 13 will be shot in neighbouring regions and a further 10 in other areas of the country.
Animal rights activists and others have reacted angrily to Norway’s wolf cull plan.
BBC NEWS http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-37473617 Image copyrightNASAImage captionEuropa is one of the best search targets for extra-terrestrial life in the Solar System
Further evidence has been obtained to show that Jupiter's icy moon Europa throws jets of water out into space.
Scientists first reported the behaviour in 2013 using the Hubble telescope, but have now made a follow-up sighting.
It is significant because Europa, with its huge subsurface ocean of liquid water, is one of the most likely places to find microbial life beyond Earth.
Flying through the jets with an instrumented spacecraft would be an effective way to test the possibility.
One could even attempt to capture a sample of ejected material and bring it back to Earth for more detailed biological analysis.
The alternative - of trying to land on the moon and drill through perhaps tens of kilometres of ice to examine the ocean's water - would be immensely challenging.
Hubble made its latest identification by studying Europa as it passed in front of Jupiter.
The telescope looked in ultraviolet wavelengths to see if the giant planet's light was in any way being absorbed by material emanating from the moon's surface.
Ten times Hubble looked and on three of those occasions it spied what appeared to be "dark fingers" extending from the edge of Europa.
Image copyrightNASA/ESA/W. SPARKS (STSCI)/USGSImage captionThis composite image shows suspected plumes of water vapour erupting at the 7 o’clock position
William Sparks, the lead astronomer on the study, said he could think of no natural phenomenon other than water plumes that might produce such protuberances.
"We're not aware of any instrumental artefacts that could cause these features; they are statistically significant. But we remain cautious because we are working at difficult wavelengths for Hubble," he told reporters.
"We do not claim to have proven the existence of plumes, but rather to have contributed evidence that such activity may be present."
Nonetheless, the location for the putative jets looks very similar to the region where Hubble earlier this decade detected an excess of oxygen and hydrogen - the component parts of water.
That certainly made for an intriguing case, said Hubble's senior project scientist, Jennifer Wiseman.
"The [earlier work] used spectroscopy, so they really could discern evidence of dissociated water molecules," she commented.
"The Sparks team discovered evidence of plume activity through imaging - visually. So these are different approaches but they complement one another, and they appear to be independent evidence of plume activity on Europa."
The suggestion is that the jets reach several hundred kilometres in height before then falling back on to Europa. The calculation based on the 2013-reported work estimated a volume of water equivalent to an Olympic swimming pool could be being spewed into space about every eight minutes.
What is clear though is that any activity is sporadic, and scientists will need to understand why that should be so.
Image copyrightNASAImage captionIntricate patterns of fractures can be seen on the icy surface of Europa
Water jets have already been seen up close at Enceladus, an icy moon of Saturn. These emanate from a series of fissures at its south pole.
The Cassini spacecraft, in orbit currently at Saturn, has even dived through the emissions to "taste" some of their chemistry. But the probe's instrumentation is not designed to detect the presence or activity of microbes. That would require a mission dedicated to the task.
The US space agency (Nasa) has just sent a satellite to Jupiter called Juno, but again this has no life-detection equipment onboard and, in any case, is not going anywhere near Europa in the course of its work.
Both Nasa and the European space agency do however have future missions in the planning stage that will visit Europa to make repeated flybys, and the determination that the moon has water jets will surely factor into the organisations' thinking.
Curt Niebur, who works on the American concept, said the spacecraft would have instruments that could "aggressively investigate" any plumes, but he also stressed that obtaining convincing proof that microbes lived at Europa was far from easy.
"The Europa flyby mission which will launch in the 2020s is not a life-finding mission," he explained. "That mission is focused on assessing the habitability of Europa.
"And we do it in this way for a very simple reason: we know how to measure habitability; we have a lot of experience at doing that; we have a lot of instruments that are very robust and good at doing that. When it comes to finding life, we don't have as much experience. And we actually have an ongoing and vigorous debate in the scientific community as to the best way of going about detecting life on a mission such as this."
What was not in doubt, said Paul Hertz, the director of the astrophysics at Nasa, was Europa's profile as a key target in the search for extra-terrestrial life: "On Earth, life is found wherever there is energy, water and nutrients. So we have a special interest in any place that might posses those characteristics. And Europa might be such a place."
Well it seems that the presence of "water" is not going to prove to be as rare as some scientists once thought. Let's wait and see what else NASA has to tell us...
Water found on PLUTO hours before NASA makes Europa announcement
PLUTO has thousands of gallons of LIQUID WATER hidden under the surface, scientists have claimed.
The exciting revelation comes just hours before NASA reveals details about Jupiter’s moon Europa – with many believing the announcement will also be about the discovery of subsurface water.
Experts have suspected Pluto has had a subsurface ocean since the New Horizon spacecraft flew past it last year.
Now experts at Brown University have been analysing the images sent by NASA’s spaceship, and concluded there is likely more than 100 kilometres of liquid water under Pluto’s surface.
Brandon Johnson, an assistant professor in Brown University’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences, said: "Thermal models of Pluto's interior and tectonic evidence found on the surface suggest that an ocean may exist, but it's not easy to infer its size or anything else about it.
"We've been able to put some constraints on its thickness and get some clues about composition.”
The team, led by Mr Johnson, mainly focussed their research on the Sputnik Planum – a 900 kilometre stretch that makes up the western lobe of Pluto’s famous ‘heart’.
It is believed the Planum was caused by a giant meteor crashing into the dwarf planet.
GETTY
Pluto is not much bigger than Earth's moon
However, as the team states, an impact would usually mean the area which had been hit would have a negative mass – essentially void of any content.
Mr Johnson said: "An impact crater is basically a hole in the ground. You're taking a bunch of material and blasting it out, so you expect it to have negative mass anomaly, but that's not what we see with Sputnik Planum.”
But what the researchers has found is that the crater has a positive mass, which they believe is a result of the asteroid hitting Pluto, which caused the subsurface ocean to even out across the dwarf planet.
Mr Johnson: "We wanted to run computer models of the impact to see if this is something that would actually happen.
“What we found is that the production of a positive mass anomaly is actually quite sensitive to how thick the ocean layer is.
"It's also sensitive to how salty the ocean is, because the salt content affects the density of the water.
"What this tells us is that if Sputnik Planum is indeed a positive mass anomaly – and it appears as though it is – this ocean layer of at least 100 kilometres has to be there.
"It's pretty amazing to me that you have this body so far out in the solar system that still may have liquid water."
Is it just me or does anyone else feel nostalgic occasionally and sit back and think "I enjoyed the Cold War. It was fun"?
Me then?
Look at me...look at that shirt collar!! So young. Nose still not quite "lumped out" yet. And hair. Ahem. You know what I miss about the 1970s-1990s? The chasing and climbing. There was a lot of chasing odd lights across fields, over rooves and while seated as a passenger in a car that just avoided colliding with a bus. Even up the highest rock conveyer belt in Europe.
Monsters. All sizes. All types. The weird stuff. That's the difference today. About 99.9% of what you see on TV shows and read in books is fake. Made up or simply ignoring the actual facts to continue a 'mystery'. People wanting to self promote and earn big money from TV and books rather than seriously investigate and research a case.
We lost our way. No one really cares about finding any real evidence of possible alien landings, of unidenbtified sea creatures or any mystery creature. Why should they? It's all better on the TV in the comfort of your living room. You don't have to go out in the cold and wet or hot sun. Just sit there snacking, belch or fart and say "Course it's real -I saw it on TV. There!"
Ivan T. Sanderson, Donald E. Keyhoe, Roy Mackal -any number of other pioneers of investigation into the unexplained and strange- would despair today. They travelled jungles, swamps, mountains, down rivers, across seas and more to get to locations and investigate.
And what do we have today?
The internet. Everything at our finger-tips. "Hey, Terry -have you heard about this?" or "Hey, Terry -there was a sighting of something weird...." No. Thousands of you out there reading this blog and nothing. But I'm betting a lot of you do check out all the fake Bigfoot, monster, UFO, ghost and other excretia on You Tube?
Have we really seen the end of true investigation and research? Are we really in the age where it's better to watch You Tube fakery and TV fakery -and read and listen what the flim-flam men write and say and buy their books? Pay them to fake, distort and out-rightly lie to us?
I do not want to contribute material that helps that. I've given up. Material gets stolen from this blog -original research- and gets distorted by alleged 'cryptozoologists' and 'ufologists' for their own means -and to make money.
I post. No one even thinks to respond. So I guess it's pointless posting because none of this stuff is sensationalist or interesting enough?
I have books full of case YOU have never even heard of. But its not sensationalist or interesting.
