A significant layer of water ice has been spotted across the mid latitudes of Mars, located just a few feet below the planet’s surface. This new finding adds a new layer to the geological history of the Red Planet, and also may offer a useful source of water for future human expeditions sent there.
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Adding to the list of animals that make use of tools, it turns out that Australian raptors deliberately set fires to flush out prey, picking up burning sticks from an existing fire and dropping them onto dry grass to start a new conflagration. Although this is news to modern science, stories of this behavior are interwoven into Aboriginal culture, from knowledge that spans back through the millennia.
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Last November, the Scan Pyramids project unveiled evidence that there is a 30-meter (100-foot) chamber running above the Grand Gallery in the Great Pyramid at Giza. The image of the chamber, produced by muon tomography (basically an x-ray of the pyramid, made using cosmic rays), is unfortunately imprecise, leading to a wide variety of ideas and speculation as to the chamber’s function and what may lie within. One such idea has been put forward by a Italian astrophysicist/archaeoastronomer Giulio Magli, in that it may contain an iron throne for the pharaoh to sit upon, as part of his journey into the afterlife.
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Researchers at Japan’s Kyoto University have developed a new artificial intelligence program that can be used to decode human thought patterns, translating brain scans into pictures of not only what the subject is looking at, but also simply remembering, into digital images that can be reviewed.
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