Thread: Strange News

Authorities recover stolen painting. Very strange news.

doesn't happen every day

Originally Posted by DrWilly

Authorities recover stolen painting. Very strange news.

What a fkin plank this bloke is.

Originally Posted by S Landreth

Who is that holding the picture?

^^


Isles of Scilly remains are iron age female warrior, scientists say

Scientists have solved the mystery of a 2,000-year-old grave on the Isles of Scilly, raising intriguing questions about warfare in iron age Britain.

For decades archaeologists have puzzled over whether the stone-lined burial chamber, which was discovered in 1999 on Bryher, contained the remains of a man or a woman.

Excavations revealed a sword in a copper alloy scabbard and a shield alongside the remains of the sole individual, objects commonly associated with men. But a brooch and a bronze mirror, adorned with what appears to be a sun disc motif and usually associated with women, were also found. The grave is unique in iron age western Europe for containing both mirror and sword.

Now a scientific study led by Historic England has determined the remains are that of a woman, a discovery that could shed light on the role of female warriors during a period in which violence between communities is thought to have been a fact of life.

Original attempts to establish sex by traditional methods, such as DNA analysis, failed because of disintegration of the bones. All that could be seen of the skeleton was a dark soil stain where the body had once lain, with only small pieces of bone and teeth amounting to about 150g recovered.

Scientific advances, in particular the development of a sophisticated technique at the University of California, Davis, meant it was possible to test tooth enamel, according to research findings published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

Dr Glendon Parker, an adjunct associate professor in the department of environmental toxicology at UC Davis, said: “Tooth enamel is the hardest and most durable substance in the human body. It contains a protein with links to either the X or Y chromosome, which means it can be used to determine sex. This is useful because this protein survives well compared to DNA.

“Our analysis involved extracting traces of proteins from tiny pieces of the surviving tooth enamel. This allowed us to calculate a 96% probability that the individual was female.”

The main form of warfare 2,000 years ago is likely to have been raids – surprise attacks – on enemy settlements. The mirror and weapons found in the grave are all associated with warfare.

It is thought that mirrors may have be used in the iron age for signalling, communicating and coordinating attacks. They also had ritualistic functions, as a tool to communicate with the supernatural world to ensure the success of a raid or “cleanse” warriors on their return.

Dr Sarah Stark, a human skeletal biologist at Historic England, said the findings provided “evidence of a leading role for a woman in warfare on iron age Scilly.

“Although we can never know completely about the symbolism of objects found in graves, the combination of a sword and a mirror suggests this woman had high status within her community and may have played a commanding role in local warfare, organising or leading raids on rival groups.”

Stark added: “This could suggest that female involvement in raiding and other types of violence was more common in iron age society than we’ve previously thought, and it could have laid the foundations from which leaders like Boudicca would later emerge.”

The Bryher sword and mirror are on display at the Isles of Scilly Museum.

^ Perhaps was a case of LGBTQ++

Male born in the body of a woman, was in the process of transitioning and insisted on the pronouns them/they.

It could be gender-hate and human abuse to simply label them as female.

^DNA.....

Originally Posted by S Landreth

^DNA.....

Doesn't identify one's true gender, or pronoun demands.

I’m not going there

• Seoul’s secret space: vast mysterious tunnel revealed for the first time

South Korea’s capital has a 3,000 square metre void underneath one of its most iconic plazas, and no one can be sure why

If you look in the right place, beneath the bustling streets in the heart of Seoul, you will come across something unexpected: stalactites.

They hang ominously from the dank ceiling, a witness to the passage of time and decades of neglect.

These mineral deposits have gathered under Seoul Plaza, probably one of South Korea’s most well-known spaces, famous for hosting everything from protests to concerts, in a vast mysterious underground tunnel the purpose of which even city officials are unsure of.

The tunnel – which stretches on for 335 metres and covers an impressive 3,000 square metres – has remained hidden for decades, until now. Public tours of this urban oddity are being offered for the first time and for a limited time.

The starting point for the guided tour is suitably James Bond. After pulling on a dust mask, safety helmet, and protective shoe covers, we enter through the backdoor of a now-demolished toy library in an underground arcade, stepping into complete darkness.

Every few minutes, you can hear the rumble of subway Line 2 below .

The tunnel is located just 13 metres below Seoul Plaza, beneath the city’s first underground shopping mall between Euljiro 1-ga and City Hall stations.

One tour participant, Lee, describes the experience as “a little scary”, mentioning that he had passed by the toy library many times before without realising it held a secret. “I hope that whatever this site becomes, visitors will be able to experience the city’s history,” he says.

It is easy to assume the space served as an air-raid bunker, which is not uncommon in South Korea given the country’s proximity to North Korea. But its original purpose is unknown. City officials think it might have been built to connect two subway stations but never used.

The one-hour tour provides insights into the city’s planning history, including the construction of the Seoul subway system starting in the early 1970s.

Our guide explains that the construction of Line 2 involved excavating downward from the surface, rather than using the more modern tunnel boring methods of today. When Euljiro 1-ga station opened in 1983, this unused space was presumably created, covered up, and left untouched for over 40 years.

The unveiling of this hidden space forms part of a city project aimed at turning subway stations into urban attractions. Citizens will now have until mid-October to submit suggestions for how to utilise it.

Hong Sun-ki, head of Seoul’s Future Urban Spaces Planning Bureau, describes the tour as “an opportunity to learn about the city’s hidden stories” and explore a space “that you could have never imagined”.

It also begged the question: what other hidden secrets might the city hold?

_________

Originally Posted by Edmond

For some reason it seems strange news to me.

Danny Masterson: That 70's Show actor given 30 years to life in prison for raping two women | Ents & Arts News | Sky News

Continued, although not strange. Kind of expected.

Bijou Phillips seeking spousal support from Danny Masterson after filing for divorce amid 30-year sentence

The couple, who share 9-year-old daughter Fianna, were married for nearly 12 years. The 43-year-old actress requested to “terminate the court’s ability to grant support” to Masterson, according to People. She also wants full legal and physical custody of their child, while allowing Masterson visitation rights.

Phillips also reportedly asked the court to divide up their assets as separate property. The outlet reported there is no indication in the court documents that a prenup exists.

She also requested her legal name be restored to Bijou Phillips and asked for Masterson to pay her legal fees, TMZ reported.

Monday’s divorce filing shocked many, considering that Phillips wrote a letter to Los Angeles judge Charlaine F. Olmedo ahead of Masterton’s sentencing, in which she called him an “extraordinary husband to me and a devoted father to our daughter,” while admitting she understood he “has been convicted of serious crimes.”

Bijou Phillips Files for Divorce from Danny Masterson

‘Oldest wooden structure’ discovered on border of Zambia and Tanzania

Researchers have discovered remnants of what is thought to be the world’s oldest known wooden structure, an arrangement of logs on the bank of a river bordering Zambia and Tanzania that predates the rise of modern humans.

The simple structure, made by shaping two logs with sharp stone tools, may have formed part of a walkway or platform for human ancestors who lived along the Kalambo River nearly 500,000 years ago.

Marks on the logs show they were cut, chopped and scraped with an array of stone tools found at the site. One log, a type of bushwillow, overlies the other and is held in place by a large inverted U-shaped notch in its underside.

“When I first saw it, I thought this can’t be real. The wood and the stone suggest a high level of ingenuity, technological skill and planning,” said Prof Larry Barham, an archaeologist at the University of Liverpool who led the work.

“It could be part of a walkway or part of a foundation for a platform,” he said. “A platform could be used as a place to store things, to keep firewood or food dry, or it might have been a place to sit and make things. You could put a little shelter on top and sleep there.”

Scientists at the University of Aberystwyth dated the structure to at least 476,000 years old, from long before Homo sapiens are thought to have emerged about 300,000 years ago. The structure may be the work of Homo heidelbergensis, a predecessor of modern humans that lived in the region.

The scientists arrived at Kalambo Falls in 2019 hoping to press on with excavations made in 2006, only to find the river had shifted course and flooded the area.

Barham’s plan B involved sliding down a 30ft cliff to a strip of beach on the Kalambo River upstream of a 770ft waterfall that plunges towards Lake Tanganyika. There he found the first of the wooden items recovered on the trip, a digging stick dated to about 390,000 years ago.

Other wooden items included a wedge, a split branch with a notch that may have formed part of a trap, and a log cut at both ends. “It might be a work surface, like a Black and Decker workbench,” Barham said of the log.

The findings, published in Nature, are remarkable because wood so rarely survives for long periods. The material at Kalambo Falls was preserved by waterlogged sediments that are starved of oxygen.

“It may not be the beginning of the built environment, but it is the earliest time we have of people taking trees, taking charge of this material, and shaping something that has no precedent, that has no natural form to emulate,” Barham said. “It’s a real cultural imposition on the landscape.”

The site probably contains more ancient wooden objects, and Barham said the priority was to work with the Zambian government to get Kalambo Falls recognised as a Unesco world heritage site.

Dr Sonia Harmand, an expert in early stone age archaeology at Stony Brook University in New York called it a groundbreaking discovery.

“We know so few things about the use of organic materials during the early stages of our evolution that this makes it a very wanted discovery,” she said. “The team is formed of world experts and no doubt the discovery is solid.”

Dr Annemieke Milks, a Palaeolithic archaeologist at the University of Reading, said the interlocking, shaped logs were evidence of a “behavioural threshold”, showing that as early as 476,000 years ago, humans used large-scale materials to transform their lived environment.

“Although quite simple in nature, the shaped and interlocking logs indicate that these humans structured their environment,” she said. “While many other animals engage in such behaviours, the Kalambo Falls humans made use of multiple materials – at the very least stone and wood, and possibly fire – to do so.

“The rarity of wood preservation implies that such behaviours were more widespread than what we witness in the archaeological record,” she added. “Although the use of wood for tools and structures remains commonplace today, their findings provide a rare glimpse into the role that this simple material played in human evolution.”

^ A tool shop more than 1 million years old.

Massive, 1.2 million-year-old tool workshop in Ethiopia made by 'clever' group of unknown human relatives | Live Science

I would occasionally see him (and stop for a sec to watch) while flicking channels when I was younger. Good to know people might enjoy having an original.

• Bob Ross’s first TV painting goes on sale for nearly $10m

Bob Ross was an artist who brought painting to the people, his works completed for PBS viewers in less than a half hour with little more than a large bristle brush, a putty knife and plenty of encouragement. It is unlikely he would have envisioned one of his works going up for sale for nearly $10m.

But that is the price a Minneapolis gallery is now asking for A Walk in the Woods, the first of more than 400 paintings Ross produced on-air for his TV series The Joy of Painting.

“It is season one, episode one of what you would call the rookie card for Bob Ross,” Ryan Nelson, who owns the Modern Artifact gallery, said of the work created in the show’s debut, which aired on 11 January 1983.

Nelson said he was introduced to art through Ross’s show and loved his paintings. He does not expect a quick sale given the high asking price, which he sees as an opportunity to display the painting for a larger audience.

On that first show, Ross – sporting perm, full beard and unbuttoned shirt – stressed that painting did not need to be pretentious.

“We have avoided painting for so long because I think all of our lives we’ve been told that you have to go to school half your life, maybe even have to be blessed by Michelangelo at birth, to ever be able to paint a picture,” Ross said. “And here, we want to show you that that’s not true. That you can paint a picture.”

Ross, who died in 1995, hosted the show from 1983 until 1994. In each episode, he spoke directly to viewers he encouraged to paint with him as he created idealized scenes of streams backed by mountains, waterfalls, and rustic cabins and mills – all done very quickly.

None of Ross’s paintings, including A Walk in the Woods, would be confused for masterpieces. But that wasn’t the point.

“What this piece represents is the people’s artist,” Nelson said. “This isn’t an institution that’s telling you that Bob Ross is great. It’s not some high-brow gallery telling you that Bob Ross is great. This is the masses, the population in the world that are saying that Bob Ross is great.”

The first season of The Joy of Painting was filmed in Falls Creek, Virginia. The painting from the first show was sold to raise funds for the local PBS station. A volunteer bought the painting for an undisclosed price and hung it in her home for 39 years until getting in touch with Nelson, who has bought and sold more than 100 of Ross’s works.

Nelson bought the painting last year then gave it a “not for sale” price of $9.85m, said his publicist, Megan Hoffman.

Hoffman said the asking price was far more than any other Ross painting has sold for, but A Walk in the Woods was unique and Nelson was not looking for a quick sale. She noted that Ross’s popularity has soared, with 5.63 million subscribers to a YouTube channel featuring his shows.

“Ryan would prefer to take [the painting] out, tour it around to museums and things like that so people can enjoy it and appreciate it,” Hoffman said. “He will take offers but he’s not in a hurry to sell it.”

• ‘Large’ creature — with blue groin — discovered as new species in forest of Indonesia

Perched high above the ground, a “large” creature bellowed into the humid air of the Indonesian rainforest.

“Tonk … tonk … tonk.”

The call “abruptly” split the air and caught the attention of nearby scientists. Following the “loud, harsh” sound, they located its source — and discovered a new species.

Researchers ventured into the rainforest on the western side of New Guinea, an island north of Australia, according to a July 13 study published in the Raffles Bulletin of Zoology. They were searching for frogs, but not just any frogs.

The researchers wanted to find treefrogs that live so high in the canopy that they are “relatively rarely collected and remain poorly known, even in areas where they are frequently heard calling,” the study said.

So when they heard that “tonk ... tonk ... tonk” sound, they followed it. The sound came from over 30 feet up in the trees “near a waterfall on a mountain stream,” according to the study.

The source of the sound was a “big spectacular frog,” co-author Paul Oliver told McClatchy News. “It is not the sort of thing you can easily overlook.”

The frog was identified as a new species: Litoria azuroscelis, or the Azure-thighed treefrog.

The Azure-thighed treefrog is about 2.5 inches in size, the study said. It has “dark green” coloring on its back with “purplish blue” groin and thighs. When the frog’s hindlimbs are stretched out, this hidden coloring is clearly visible, photos show.

The new species was recognized as distinct based on its size, coloring, body shape and the webbing on its hand, the study said. Researchers did not provide an analysis of the frog’s DNA.

Researchers collected two Azure-thighed treefrogs and heard several more calling in the area, the study said.

“We know nearly nothing about its ecology, but hopefully now (that) it is named, over (the) coming years we can learn more about where it lives and what it does,” Oliver said.

The Azure-thighed treefrog has only been found on the Wandammen Peninsula, an Indonesian region on the northwestern coast of New Guinea. The treefrog “is probably more widespread” but its distribution needs to be studied further, researchers said.

“New Guinea is (a) world hotspot of frog diversity, however the Indonesia half of the island remains very poorly known,” Oliver said. “This is just the tip of the iceberg — there are likely hundreds more new frog species to be described.”

The research team included Rainer Günther, Stephen Richards, Amir Hamidy, Wahyu Trilaksono, Taufan Sulaeman and Oliver.

What a suspiciously odd way to sign a painting.

• First evidence of spinning black hole detected by scientists

Astronomers have captured the first direct evidence of a black hole spinning, providing new insights into the universe’s most enigmatic objects.

The observations focus on the supermassive black hole at the centre of the neighbouring Messier 87 galaxy, whose shadow was imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope. Like many supermassive black holes, M87 features powerful jets that are launched from the poles at close to the speed of light into intergalactic space.

Scientists have predicted that the rotation of a black hole powers these cosmic jets, but until now direct evidence was elusive.

“After the success of black hole imaging in this galaxy with the Event Horizon Telescope, whether this black hole is spinning or not has been a central concern among scientists,” said Dr Kazuhiro Hada, of the national astronomical observatory of Japan and co-author. “Now anticipation has turned into certainty. This monster black hole is indeed spinning.”

M87 is located 55m light years from the Earth and harbours a black hole 6.5bn times more massive than the Sun. Just beyond the black hole is an accretion disk of gas and dust, swirling on the precipice of the cosmic sinkhole. Some of this material is destined to fall into the black hole, disappearing for ever. But a fraction will be ejected out from the poles of the black hole at more than 99.99% of the speed of light.

Theoretical models suggest that the black hole’s spin is responsible for this phenomenon. Scientists think that charged particles in the disk produce a powerful magnetic field and that as the black hole spins, it drags the field with it. This winds up the field in a way that can accelerate particles away from the black hole as jets, extracting energy from the rotation of the black hole in the process.

The latest work, published in Nature, used observations of M87 from a global network of radio telescopes taken from 2000 to 2022. This revealed a recurring 11-year cycle in the jet, which was found to precess around a central point at the edge of the black hole. This indicated a misalignment between the black hole’s spin axis and the accretion disk, leading the jet to wobble like a spinning top.

“Detecting this precession provides unequivocal evidence that the supermassive black hole in M87 is indeed spinning, thus enhancing our understanding of the nature of supermassive black holes,” the authors said.

Dr Ziri Younsi, an astrophysicist at UCL, said: “That’s exciting because it’s telling us that it can only precess if the black hole has non-zero spin. It’s an indirect but extremely strong confirmation of spin.”

Younsi added that a black hole’s spin could, in future, give insights into the cataclysmic events that led to the formation of the supermassive black hole. “The fact that it’s spinning and there’s a tilt tells you that something pretty crazy happened in the past,” he said. “At some point in its history, something violent happened. It provides tantalising hints that that might be the case.”

Manatee are called but few are chosen, neep takin' the tablets as they told Moses

Snorkeling with them

Originally Posted by S Landreth

Snorkeling with them

Rare shot of me in my youth before the world turned randy and rancid

Not that strange, but nice to know they were recognized

• Scientists behind mRNA vaccines win Nobel Prize in Medicine

Two scientists on Monday were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for research that laid the foundation for the COVID-19 vaccines developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.

Why it matters: The prize recognized Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, whose research on mRNA vaccines was originally overlooked by the scientific and medical communities.

• It now underpins one of the most successful tools against COVID to date.

What they're saying: "The laureates contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times," the Nobel Prize committee said.

The big picture: Weissman and Karikó discovered a method to use mRNA, which carries instructions for making proteins, for vaccines and other therapies.

• The research partners produced variants to mRNA so that it could be used for vaccines without alerting the body's immune system.
• But their work, published in 2005, initially flew under the radar, and they failed to gain traction for years before two companies — Moderna and BioNTech — took an interest in the technology.

Details: Weissman is a professor in vaccine research at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine.

• Karikó was a senior vice president at BioNTech, and now works as a professor at Szeged University in Hungary and an adjunct professor at Perelman.
• The two professors "are brilliant researchers who represent the epitome of scientific inspiration and determination," Penn President Liz Magill said Monday.

• Cayo margarita: Newly discovered snail in Florida Keys is named after Jimmy Buffett song

The late singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett has an unsuspecting figure to add to his legacy — a newly discovered species of sea snail found in the Florida Reef.

Named Cayo margarita as a nod to Buffett’s song “Margaritaville,” the bright yellow specimen is a worm snail, a type of mollusk that sticks to hard surfaces within the coral reef and forms a tubular shell around itself, according to a study published Monday in the journal PeerJ. (Buffett died September 1 at age 76.)

Biologist Rüdiger Bieler, the report’s lead author, first saw the snail while scuba diving and noted its citrusy color, which reminded him of the popular cocktail.

“In some ways, our team was no stranger to the regional signature drink. And of course, Jimmy Buffett’s music,” Bieler said, calling himself “a bit of a Parrothead,” as fans of the singer are known. “So when we came up with a species name, we really wanted to allude to the color of the drink and the fact that it lives in the Florida Keys.”

Bieler, who is curator of invertebrates at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, said the discovery of Cayo margarita has contributed to a better understanding of the biodiversity within coral reefs.

“This is a rather charismatic little snail that can show us how little we know about the biological diversity around us,” Bieler said. “You have a lot of tourists snorkeling, diving in that area, and still there are undescribed and understudied organisms right under our noses.”

• Afterglow of cataclysmic collision between two planets seen for first time

The warm afterglow of a worlds-shattering collision between two massive planets has been seen for the first time after astronomers trained their telescopes on a distant sun-like star.

The cataclysmic event is believed to have destroyed a pair of ice giant planets that slammed into one another to produce a shower of debris and a hot, spinning object potentially hundreds of times the size of Earth.

Computer simulations of the intense heat and bright vapour as the two ice giant planets collide in a distant space system 1,800 light years away from Earth.

“It would be very spectacular,” said Dr Matthew Kenworthy, a co-lead author on the study at the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands. “The energy of the collision would turn the remnant into something resembling a star, fainter than the main star in the system but about seven times larger in size, visible all through the rest of the stellar system.”

The discovery came about after an amateur astronomer responded to a social media post from Kenworthy about a star known as ASASSN-21qj. Kenworthy was looking for shadows cast by giant rings around planets as they cross the face of their parent star. ASASSN-21qj, which lies 1,800 light years from Earth, piqued his interest because in December 2021 it suddenly and inexplicably dimmed.

On reading the post, Arttu Sainio, a volunteer citizen scientist for Nasa, checked past observations of the star by Nasa’s Neowise mission, an infrared space telescope. He found that 900 days before the star dimmed, Neowise saw a steady and sustained brightening of infrared light from the same location.

“I was looking for something completely different,” Kenworthy said. “The infrared brightening told us something unusual had happened in the neighbourhood of this star, and so it took us down this new path.”

After a detailed analysis of the observations, the astronomers concluded that the blast of infrared radiation came from a hot new object or “synestia” created by the collision of two planets nearly as large as Neptune. Based on the infrared readings, the vast spinning object had a temperature of more than 700C for about three years. It will eventually cool and form a new planet around the star.

According to details published in Nature, the star began to dim about 2.5 years after the afterglow began as a massive cloud of fine impact debris drifted across the face of the star.

“It’s the first time we’ve seen the afterglow from such an event,” said Simon Lock, another co-lead author at the University of Bristol. “We’ve seen debris and discs before, but we have never seen the afterglow of the planetary body that’s produced.”

Astronomers are now keen to follow up the observations to confirm what they suspect has unfolded. If the dust cloud continues to orbit the star, then in about five to 10 years the cloud will have moved to one side of the star and astronomers should see the star’s light reflected from the dust with the largest ground-based telescopes, Kenworthy said.

It may also be possible for the James Webb Space Telescope to detect infrared radiation from the dust and the new planet created in the collision.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s415...heguardian.com

• Ancient rock carvings revealed by receding Amazon waters amid drought

Human faces and other figures etched in stone up to 2,000 years ago have been revealed on Amazon riverbanks as a historic drought in the Brazilian region has brought water levels to unprecedented lows.

The petroglyphs, which include animals and other natural forms, have been revealed on the shores of the Rio Negro, at an archeological site known as the Ponto das Lajes, or Place of Slabs.

Researchers estimate the markings to be between 1,000 and 2,000 years old.

The carvings had previously been sighted during a severe drought in 2010, when the Rio Negro’s water levels dropped to 13.63 metres, then an all-time low.

They re-emerged this month, with more markings appearing as the waters receded further. Amid an unusually dry season which scientists attribute to the El Niño weather pattern and warming in the North Atlantic linked to climate change, the Rio Negro has dropped below 13 metres for the first time ever, with a depth of 12.89 metres recorded on Monday.

As well as anthropomorphic faces and depictions of water, some rocks display grooves that suggest the site was also used to produce stone tools.

Carlos Augusto da Silva of the Federal University of Amazonas identified 25 groups of carvings on a single rock which he believes was used as a whetstone to sharpen various instruments. “This was an area for the preparation of tools,” the archaeologist told the local news site Amazônia Real.

Fragments of ceramics thought to be thousands of years old have also reportedly been found at the site, which was home to large Indigenous villages in pre-Columbian times.

Despite being designated an archaeological site, the Ponto das Lajes petroglyphs have not been studied, and researchers are estimating their age based on similar rock carvings in other parts of central Amazonia.

“These locations, today archeological sites with black soil, large quantities of ceramics fragments, and rock carvings, tell the region’s ancient Indigenous history and must be treated with respect by all of us who live in Manaus today,” the archaeologist Filippo Stampanoni Bassi told Amazônia Real.