The US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was meant to kick-start the Cold War rather than end the Second World War, according to two nuclear historians who say they have new evidence backing the controversial theory.
Causing a fission reaction in several kilograms of uranium and plutonium and killing over 200,000 people 60 years ago was done more to impress the Soviet Union than to cow Japan, they say. And the US President who took the decision, Harry Truman, was culpable, they add.
Surprisingly from NewScientist
The ancient tale of Gautama Siddhartha, the founder of Buddhism, spread from his homeland to Europe, where he became a Christian saint with the name of ``Iosaphat.?
That?s the conclusion of a group of Korean researchers who have conducted a multi-linguistic study of the westward spread of the story of the Buddha.
According to Paik, while the Buddha?s tale spread westbound, his name ``Buddha?? or ``Bodhisatta?? in Sanskrit, changed gradually in accordance with various linguistic backgrounds with similar accounts of the tale.
For example, it changed to ``Bodisav?? in Persian texts in the sixth or seventh century, ``Budhasaf or Yudasaf?? in an eighth-century Arabic document and ``Iodasaph?? in Georgia in the 10th century.
The name in turn was adapted to ``Ioasaph?? in Greece in the 11th century, and ``Iosaphat?? or ``Josaphat?? in Latin since then.
Korea Times
Human footprints discovered beside an ancient Mexican lake have been dated to 40,000 years ago. If the finding survives the controversy it is bound to stir up, it means that humans must have moved into the New World at least 30,000 years earlier than previously thought.
?If true, this would completely change our view of how and when the Americas were first colonised,? says Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, UK. But like several US experts, he is reserving judgement until the dates can be independently confirmed.
NewScientist
New evidence from fossil fish, hundreds of millions of years old, casts doubt on current ideas about evolutionary theory.
The research, by paleontologists Philip Donoghue of the University of Bristol and Mark Purnell of the University of Leicester, appears to have solved a scientific riddle by using the fossil record to explain evolutionary “leaps” between species, laying to rest the creationist argument that such leaps would be impossible and so imply intelligent design.
Sci Scoop
Many many years ago, my friend Richard Metzger went to interview Howard Bloom about his then current book The Lucifer Project and came back with his mind blown. Ever since, he has been telling me (and presumably everybody else) to read this man’s work. With the recent release of Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, I finally took the plunge. As usual, Metzger was on to something big. This is an “intelligent design” theory that they won’t be teaching in Kansas any time soon.
According to Bloom, we are all part of an evolving intelligent system that started at the big bang. I “got it” around the second chapter and, for a moment I wondered why I would want to read the rest of the book. But I pressed on. Bloom beautifully evokes the collective minds of everything from trilobites to bees to human societies. His writing style is rich, scholarly, and expository; playful and convincing.
from NeoFiles
Proto-historic Hawaiian temples on the island of Maui may have mushroomed up within just 30 years, not 250 as previously supposed, scientists say. The findings could significantly alter researchers’ understanding of the pace of precontact sociopolitical change in the Pacific.
From Scientfic American
MEXICO CITY – The discovery of a tomb filled with decapitated bodies suggests Mexico’s 2,000 year-old “Pyramid of the Moon” may have been the site of horrifically gory sacrifices, archeologists said on Thursday.
From CNN/Netscape
A star that exploded nearly three million years ago left traces of debris on Earth and might have affected the course of human evolution, a new study suggests.
A fossil plankton dating from 65 million years ago helps confirm the theory that a dark winter lasting many thousands of years doomed the dinosaurs, researchers said on Wednesday.
In 1912 Wilfrid Voynich, an American rare-book dealer, made the find of a lifetime in the library of a Jesuit college near Rome: a manuscript some 230 pages long, written in an unusual script and richly illustrated with bizarre images of plants, heavenly spheres and bathing women. Voynich immediately recognized the importance of his new acquisition. Although it superficially resembled the handbook of a medieval alchemist or herbalist, the manuscript appeared to be written entirely in code. Features in the illustrations, such as hairstyles, suggested that the book was produced sometime between 1470 and 1500, and a 17th-century letter accompanying the manuscript stated that it had been purchased by Rudolph II, the Holy Roman Emperor, in 1586. During the 1600s, at least two scholars apparently tried to decipher the manuscript, and then it disappeared for nearly 250 years until Voynich unearthed it.
A joint Egyptian-Polish archeological team has reportedly found the long-lost Library of Alexandria. This facility was effectively the first true University, with lecture rooms for thousands of students and nearly a million scrolls for them to read. This is the place where Archimedes invented the screw-shaped water pump that is still in use today, the place where Eratosthenes measured the diameter of the Earth, the place where Euclid wrote The Elements after discovering the rules of geometry, the place where Ptolemy wrote The Almagest, the most influential scientific book about the nature of the Universe for 1,500 years.
Scientists said yesterday they have found evidence that a huge meteorite or comet plunged into the coastal waters of the Southern Hemisphere 251 million years ago, possibly triggering the most catastrophic mass extinction in Earth’s history.
A new discovery of microbial activity in 3.5 billion-year-old volcanic rock and one of earth’s earliest signs of geological existence sheds new light on the antiquity of life, says University of Alberta researchers who are part of a team that made the groundbreaking finding.
Arlington, Va.—How land-living animals evolved from fish has long been a scientific puzzle. A key missing piece has been knowledge of how the fins of fish transformed into the arms and legs of our ancestors. In this week’s issue of the journal Science, paleontologists Neil Shubin and Michael Coates from the University of Chicago and Ted Daeschler from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, describe a remarkable fossil that bridges the gap between fish and amphibian and provides a glimpse of the structure and function changes from fin to limb.
WASHINGTON (Reuters)—Two new species of dinosaur, one a quick-moving meat-eater and the other a giant plant-eater, have been discovered in Antarctica, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.
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