Archaeology News Online

The origins of smiley could be nearly 4,000-years-old after archaeologists in southeastern Turkey excavated a pot that bore the ubiquitous symbol, which today is one of the most frequently used emoticons online. The roots of the symbol are widely believed to be from the early 1960s, with the classic smiley version bearing a bright yellow background said to have emerged in the early 1970s. However, the latest discovery in Turkey would now force a rethink of the origins of the symbol, versions of which have also been widely featured in several pieces of popular literature such as the graphic novel, The Watchmen. The pot was discovered during seven-year long excavations in Gaziantep province’s Karkamis district along the Syria border under the guidance of Nicolo Marchetti, an archeology professor at the University of Bologno in Italy. Marchetti said his team found a variety of objects at the site depicting the era of the Hittites, an ancient civilization and empire that is believed to hav

No other animal on land is faster than a cheetah -- the elephant is indeed larger, but slower. For small to medium-sized animals, larger also means faster, but for really large animals, when it comes to speed, everything goes downhill again. For the first time, it is now possible to describe how this parabola-like relationship between body size and speed comes about. A research team under the direction of the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) and the Friedrich Schiller University Jena (Germany) have managed to do so thanks to a new mathematical model, and also published their findings in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution . The African elephant is the largest animal on land, but not the fastest. There is a parabola-like relationship between the  body mass of animals and the maximum speed they can reach. For the first time, researchers are able to describe how  this comes about, thanks to a simple mathematical model [Credit: Bernd Adam] A beetle is slower

Scientists from the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and the Philip J Currie Dinosaur Museum have identified and named a new species of dinosaur in honour of renowned Canadian palaeontologist Dr. Philip J. Currie. Albertavenator curriei, meaning "Currie's Alberta hunter." It stalked Alberta, Canada, about 71 million years ago in what is now the famous Red Deer River Valley. The find recognizes Currie for his decades of work on predatory dinosaurs of Alberta. Research on the new species is published in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences . Life recreation of Albertavenator curriei [Credit: © Oliver Demuth] Palaeontologists initially thought that the bones of Albertavenator belonged to its close relative Troodon, which lived around 76 million years ago -- five million years before Albertavenator. Both dinosaurs walked on two legs, were covered in feathers, and were about the size of a person. New comparisons of bones forming the top of the head reveal that Albertavenator had a

More species of birds have accumulated in genera inhabiting climatically stable areas. This is shown by a new study from Umea University. Bar-tailed Godwit [Credit: Umea University] "The explanation may be that a stable climate makes it more likely that diverging lineages persist without going extinct or merging until speciation is completed, and stability reduces the risk for extinction in response to climatic upheavals," says Roland Jansson, researcher from Umea University who led the study. How life has evolved from simple origins into millions of species is a central question in biology that remains unsolved. Advances in genomics and bioinformatics mean we now know a lot about the relationships among species and their origins, but surprisingly little is known about which environmental conditions that allows species to multiply. In a project focusing on how climate changes in the past affects the evolution of biodiversity, researchers tried to fill this knowledge gap. They

New research published in Nature Climate Change has revealed how strengthening winds on the opposite side of Antarctica, up to 6000kms away, drive the high rate of ice melt along the West Antarctic Peninsula. The path of the Kelvin waves that interact with the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and push warmer waters under  the ice shelves of the West Antarctic Peninsula. These waves are generated by strengthening winds,  6000km away, on the opposite side of the Antarctic [Credit: Ryan Holmes/NCI] Researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science found that the winds in East Antarctica can generate sea-level disturbances that propagate around the continent at almost 700 kilometers per hour via a type of ocean wave known as a Kelvin wave. When these waves encounter the steep underwater topography off the West Antarctic Peninsula they push warmer water towards the large ice shelves along the shoreline. The warm Antarctic Circumpolar Current passes quite close to the co

One night three months ago, Rosa Castro finished her dinner, opened her laptop, and uncovered a novel object that was neither planet nor star. Therapist by day and amateur astronomer by night, Castro joined the NASA-funded Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 citizen science project when it began in February -- not knowing she would become one of four volunteers to help identify the project's first brown dwarf, formally known as WISEA J110125.95+540052.8. This illustration shows the average brown dwarf is much smaller than our sun and low mass stars and only slightly  larger than the planet Jupiter [Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center] After devoting hours to skimming online, publicly available "flipbooks" containing time-lapse images, she spotted a moving object unlike any other. The search process involves fixating on countless colorful dots, she explained. When an object is different, it simply stands out. Castro, who describes herself as extremely detail oriented, has

A simulated universe created by Swinburne University of Technology and The University of Melbourne has revealed galaxies emerging in the first billion years after the Big Bang were experiencing a recession. The density of gas in and around a simulated galaxy just over a billion years after the Big Bang. New gas  is arriving at too great a rate for the galaxy to convert it into stars and the gas piles up  [Credit: Swinburne University of Technology] It has long been imagined that the first galaxies formed after the Big Bang were rapidly growing, turning huge clouds of pristine gas into stars at rates thousands of times greater than what we see in the Milky Way today. However, new modelling inspired by economics theory has instead revealed the galaxies weren’t forming as fast as they could have. Swinburne astronomer Associate Professor Alan Duffy created supercomputer simulations of the early Universe treating the complex forming galaxies as a simple economical model with raw materials a