"Recently excavated Mayan murals are giving archaeologists a rare look into the lives of ordinary ancient Maya. The murals were uncovered during the excavation of a pyramid mound structure at the ancient Maya site of Calakmul, Mexico (near the border with Guatemala) and are described in the Nov. 9 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The find "was a total shock," said Simon Martin of the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia, who studied the paintings and hieroglyphs depicted in the murals. The Maya have been studied for more than a century, but "this is the first time that we've seen anything like this," Martin said..."We almost never get a view of what other layers of society are doing or what they look like, so this is one of the things that makes [the murals] so special," Martin told LiveScience...The images on the mural show people engaged in mundane activities, such as preparing food. Hieroglyphic captions accompany each image,...
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- Jeffrey Marsh
from Bookmarklet
"A spinoff company from Arizona State University plans to build a new battery with an energy density 11 times greater than that of lithium-ion batteries for just one-third the cost. With a $5.13 million research grant from the US Department of Energy awarded last week, Fluidic Energy hopes to turn its ultra-dense energy storage technology into a reality. The new Metal-Air Ionic Liquid battery is being designed by Cody Friesen, a professor of materials science at Arizona State and founder of Fluidic Energy, along with other researchers. The key to the new battery is that it uses ionic liquids as its electrolyte, which could help it overcome some significant problems faced by previous metal-air batteries. In the past, metal-air batteries have usually used water-based electrolytes, but due to water evaporation, the batteries tended to fail prematurely. The advantage of ionic liquids, like those used in Fluidic Energy's new battery, is that they don't evaporate. Ionic liquids are salts...
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- Jeffrey Marsh
from Bookmarklet
"Australia’s average surface temperature has risen more than 1 Fahrenheit degree since 1900. During roughly the same period, the body size of Australian passerine (perching) birds has declined by as much as 3.6 percent. Zoologist Janet L. Gardner of the Australian National University in Canberra and colleagues, who detected the shrinking trend in birds, suspect the two changes are no coincidence...Within a given animal species, individuals living at high latitudes, toward a pole, are usually larger than those living nearer the equator, probably because greater body mass helps ward off the cold. In keeping with that principle, the researchers calculated that southern populations of four Aussie bird species now have body sizes typical of populations that lived 7 degrees of latitude (about 483 miles) closer to the equator before 1950. In a nutshell, smaller birds now live somewhat closer to the South Pole."
- Jeffrey Marsh
from Bookmarklet
"Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, normally found in hospitals, the American team scanned the brains of two volunteers while they watched videos. The results were fed into a computer which looked for links between colours, shapes and movements on the screen, and patterns of activity in the brain. The computer software was then given the brain scans of the volunteers as they watched a different video and was asked to recreate what they were seeing. According to Dr Gallant, who has yet to publish the results of the experiment, the software was close to the mark. In one scene featuring comic actor Steve Martin in a white shirt, the computer reproduced his white torso and rough shape, but was unable to handle details of his face. In another, the volunteers watched an image of a city skyline with a plane flying past. The software was able to recreate the skyline - but not the aircraft."
- Jeffrey Marsh
from Bookmarklet
a college buddy sent over a few mixes a few weeks back which i listened to today w/ my brother-in-law... i miss some of those guys... (this was on it)
- Jeffrey Marsh