You may have caught this on MSNBC, but Italian researchers studying imagery from the Quickbird satellite discovered a 97,000-square-foot pyramid on the banks of Peru’s Nazca river:

The discovery doesn’t come as a surprise to archaeologists, since some 40 mounds at Cahuachi are believed to contain the remains of important structures.

“We know that many buildings are still buried under Cahuachi’s [...]

I’m quite fond of the aurochs. As the feared onager was to the domestic donkey, so the aurochs to domestic cattle. Onagers gave their name to a medieval siege weapon; aurochs gave their name to a letter of the runic alphabet.

Both onagers and aurochs are extinct now, although some breeders have been attempting to bring back [...]

At last!

A peppy, eternal polka that illustrates the movements of subatomic particles!

Found in this fun Hey, Poindexter! interview, which also includes the following inspirational passage:

Why do science? You do it because you like it, because its neat, and you want to make discoveries about the world, the body, about the universe. These other societies see [...]

For a while in the 1990s, it seemed like everybody wanted to be a pygmy chimp. A bonobono. All bonobos did, they said, was hang out in the jungle, avoid mean old regular chimpanzees and make an awful lot of whoopie. But new research proves bonobonos are not the peaceful sex-addicts some have described:

PhysOrg:
Bonobos are perhaps best known for [...]

WebMD reports on the first clinical application for using really big magnets to zap depressed people’s brain waves:

The clearance comes nearly two years after a January 2007 FDA advisory panel said clinical trials failed to establish that the device was clinically effective. Although TMS-treated patients were twice as likely as sham-treated patients to show clinical benefit, some panel members [...]

Far be it from this site to endorse a candidate for the American presidential election…

…but who would Dr. Frankenstein vote for?

As inspired by the outrage of planetarium fans and scientific educators.

What will we think of next….

BBC News recently covered a project at the intersection of theology and computer science, in which experts with scanners are digitizing and reassembling the world’s oldest bible:

For 1,500 years, the Codex Sinaiticus lay undisturbed in a Sinai monastery, until it was found – or stolen, as the monks say – in 1844 and split between Egypt, Russia, Germany and [...]

A new research center is delving into a rich, as-yet-untapped reservoir of African medical knowledge, seeking new treatments for AIDS and other diseases by hoping, in effect, the witch-doctors really will tell us what to do:

How safe and effective these treatments are will be the focus of The International Center for Indigenous Phytotherapy Studies (TICIPS), a collaborative research effort [...]

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A diagram. An iconic diagram.

This is America’s answer to Sputnik, the Explorer I satellite, launched aboard the Jupiter C rocket on January 31, 1958. This satellite carried the radiation detection experiment designed by Dr. James Van Allen, which is why that radioactive zone around our planet is called the Van Allen Radiation Belt.

From NASA’s image [...]