66 Roman Army camps in northern Spain shed light on infamous conquest

 Posted on January 18, 2023  |  2 minutes  |  323 words  |  Trudie Dory

A vast network of dozens of Roman Army camps have been discovered in a mountainous region of northern Spain.  The camps show just how big the Roman military was around 2,000 years ago during the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula.  "They reveal the intense Roman activity at the entrance to the Cantabrian Mountains during the last phase of the Roman conquest of Hispania," study co-author João Fonte, a landscape archaeologist at the University of Exeter in England, said in a statement. [Read More]

A Dart in a Boy's Eye May Have Unleashed This Legendary Massacre 350 Years Ago

 Posted on January 18, 2023  |  4 minutes  |  786 words  |  Fernande Dalal

Archaeologists have uncovered a 350-year-old massacre in Alaska that occurred during a war that may have started over a dart game. The discovery reveals the gruesome ways the people in a town were executed and confirms part of a legend that has been passed down over the centuries by the Yup'ik people. A recent excavation in the town of Agaligmiut (which today is often called Nunalleq) has uncovered the remains of 28 people who died during the massacre and 60,000 well-preserved artifacts. [Read More]

Ancient Egyptian hoard of counterfeit 'dirty money' unearthed

 Posted on January 18, 2023  |  4 minutes  |  840 words  |  Patria Henriques

A shortage of silver caused by the collapse of leading Bronze Age civilizations around the eastern Mediterranean about 1200 B.C. resulted in the original "dirty money" — several hundreds of years before coins had been invented. The ancient counterfeiting was revealed by archaeologist Tzilla Eshel, then a doctoral student at the University of Haifa, who studied the chemical composition of 35 buried hoards of Bronze Age silver found at archaeological sites around Israel. [Read More]

Apollo 11 Lunar Module Timeline Book Could Fetch $9 Million at Auction

 Posted on January 18, 2023  |  4 minutes  |  707 words  |  Trudie Dory

A one-of-a-kind item in the history of space exploration goes on the auction block today (July 18) at Christie's in New York City. The timeline book from Apollo 11's Eagle lunar module, annotated by astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, is expected to command a staggering $7 million to $9 million. This remarkable manual, part of the auction "One Giant Leap: Celebrating Space Exploration 50 Years After Apollo 11," rode to the moon in the Eagle module between Armstrong and Aldrin. [Read More]

Close-Up Photos Make You Look Bad

 Posted on January 18, 2023  |  3 minutes  |  431 words  |  Trudie Dory

A close-up picture slightly distorts the details of your face, and those subtle changes might make you look less attractive and less trustworthy to others, a new study suggests. In several experiments, researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) asked study participants to judge 36 photographs showing two different images of 18 individuals. One image in each pair was taken at a close range of about 2 feet (0.6 meters) and the second was shot from a distance of about 7 feet (2. [Read More]

Deep-Voiced Men Don't Have 'Macho' Sperm

 Posted on January 18, 2023  |  2 minutes  |  317 words  |  Arica Deslauriers

A low-pitched voice in a man is associated with a litany of masculine traits: dominance, strength, greater physical size, more attractiveness to women, and so on. But new research strikes one trait off that list: virility. An Australian study looked at male voice pitch, women's perceptions of it, and semen quality. Their first finding was no surprise: Women like deep voices and consider them masculine. But contrary to expectations, they also found that these men aren't better off in the semen department. [Read More]

Garmin Vivofit: Fitness Tracker Review

 Posted on January 18, 2023  |  8 minutes  |  1533 words  |  Patria Henriques

Garmin Vivofit(opens in new tab)(opens in new tab)$169.73(opens in new tab)View(opens in new tab)We check over 250 million products every day for the best pricesThe Garmin Vivofit is a fitness tracker marketed as a device that can help you turn your daily exercise into healthy, lifelong habits. In addition to logging the standard fitness-tracker data — including steps taken, calories burned, distance walked and sleep — the Vivofit assigns you a personalized fitness goal, which adjusts itself daily, as the device learns your habits and milestones. [Read More]

Gene Regulation May Explain How Homosexuality Flourishes

 Posted on January 18, 2023  |  4 minutes  |  798 words  |  Trudie Dory

The search for a "gay gene" may be off-target, new research finds. Another process called epigenetics that switches genes on and off may explain why homosexuality runs in families. Epigenetics are heritable changes caused by factors other than DNA. Instead of traits getting passed down through the genes, epigenetic change happens because of the way genes are regulated, or turned on and off. These genetic regulators may be the reason homosexuality persists in nature despite the fact that gay people are less likely to reproduce, suggests the new study published in the journal The Quarterly Review of Biology. [Read More]

New measurement may resolve cosmological crisis

 Posted on January 18, 2023  |  5 minutes  |  897 words  |  Patria Henriques

A fundamental disagreement in the measurement of the universe's expansion rate could be explained away, new data suggests. In a new paper, a major player in this dilemma takes a look at the available information and concludes that the best observations might be pointing to a triumph for our standard picture of how the universe has grown over time. Scientists know that the universe is expanding but have disagreed for a decade about just how fast this process is happening. [Read More]

New Test Reveals Good vs. Bad Sperm

 Posted on January 18, 2023  |  3 minutes  |  490 words  |  Fernande Dalal

A simple laboratory test can separate healthy, functional sperm cells from sperm with damaged DNA with 99-percent accuracy, according to new research. The test uses a chemical found in the membrane of human egg cells to sort functional from non-functional sperm. It has already been approved for use in in-vitro fertilization by the Food and Drug Administration and can raise the chances of a successful pregnancy by 20 to 30 percent, according to lead developer Gabor Huszar, a senior researcher in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences at Yale Medical School. [Read More]