Blood of guillotined French king 'authentic'

Blood of guillotined French king 'authentic' - Scientists have authenticated that a rag believed to have been dipped in the blood of France’s monarch Louis XVI is the genuine article.

The discovery also proves the authenticity of a mummified head which was believed to be that of 16th century French king Henri IV – which was used to make the DNA comparison.

Louis XVI was executed by guillotine on January 21, 1793, the first victim of the “Reign of Terror” that followed France’s infamous revolutionary uprising.

As was the habit at the executions of French aristocrats, spectators dipped their handkerchiefs in the gore of the decapitated victim as a morbid keepsake.

One such rag found its way into a calabash – a form of squash that is dried and used as a bottle – on which was inscribed: “On January 21, Maximilien Bourdaloue dipped his handkerchief in the blood of Louis XVI after his decapitation.”

The artefact has been owned by an Italian family for more than a century – but the absolute authenticity has not been proved until now.

In 2010 DNA samples taken from the rag showed a good match between someone of Louis’ description, including his blue eyes.

'No doubt'

But analysts were unable to prove the blood’s authenticity beyond doubt because there was no DNA from any of his relatives - until they examined the supposed head of 16th century king Henri IV which had been stolen from the royal chapel at Saint Denis near Paris by revolutionaries.

Henri IV, one of France’s most popular monarchs who was able briefly to reconcile the country’s Protestant and Catholic communities, was assassinated by a Catholic fanatic in 1610 at the age of 57.

After the mummified head was stolen during the revolution, it changed hands several times, was sold at auction and kept in private collections.

In 2010 Henri’s DNA was tested and, as in Louis’ case, scientists said they believed it was authentic because the genetic material was consistent with descriptions of the 16th century king.

But in the latest study, conducted by French and Italian experts, both sets of remains were authenticated after the team found a rare genetic signature shared by the two men, despite being separated by seven generations.

"This study shows that [the remains] share a genetic heritage passed on through the paternal line,” forensic pathologist Philippe Charlier told AFP. “They have a direct link to one another through their fathers. One could say that there is absolutely no doubt any more.”

“It is about 250 times more likely that [Henri’s] head and [Louis’] blood are paternally related, than unrelated," co-author Carles Lalueza-Fox of the Institut de Biologia Evolutiva in Barcelona told the agency.

It would be "extremely surprising" if the remains did not belong to the two assassinated monarchs, he added. ( france24.com )

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After Mayan Apocalypse Failure, Believers May Suffer

After Mayan Apocalypse Failure, Believers May Suffer - You might expect the world not ending to be a cause for celebration. But for believers in doomsdays like yesterday's supposed Mayan apocalypse, the continued existence of the planet can be quite traumatic.

Yesterday (Dec. 21) was widely rumored online to be the end of the world, a misunderstanding of a calendar used by the ancient Maya people. Although the Maya made no doomsday predictions, some modern individuals and groups claimed they had foretold the end on Dec. 21, 2012.

This silkscreen shows dates in the Maya Long Count Calendar and a sacred calendar called the Tzolk'in. The silkscreen is based on carvings found in Quirigua, Guatemala.

Because the doomsday predictions were largely grassroots and spread online, the fallout from their failure is likely to be more varied than in doomsdays past, said Stephen Kent, a University of Alberta sociologist. Most of the time, doomsday predictions are made by charismatic leaders, often in cultlike settings.

"It appears that believers in the Mayan calendar apocalypse range from troubled individuals to groups following charismatic leaders," Kent told LiveScience. "Consequently, the fallout could be very complicated."

When the world won't end

After a failed doomsday, believers respond with a range of reactions, from disavowing their former apocalyptic beliefs to, surprisingly, believing more than ever. One classic reaction is the one made by Harold Camping, a radio preacher who first predicted Judgment Day in 1994. When that date didn't pan out, Camping made a common claim among doomsday prophets — the math had been wrong, but the ultimate prophecy would still prove true. He then predicted a widely publicized Judgment Day in May 2011, which also failed to occur. After that failure, Camping claimed the Judgment Day had been "spiritual" in nature and that the world would still end in a few short months.

When that claim also failed, Camping finally admitted his error. Rationalizing and attempting to explain away failure is common among failed doomsday groups, said Lorenzo DiTommaso, a professor of religion at Concordia University in Montreal. In some cases, groups even claim that their prayers saved the world.

The Mayan apocalypse is likely to be different, if only because the Internet is bursting with dozens of contradictory prophecies about the day, DiTommaso told LiveScience.

"There are so many different predictions ridered onto the 2012 phenomenon, everyone's going to have a different response," DiTommaso said. "And because it's not a leader or a church or a doctrine or Karl Marx forecasting what the future is going to be like, there's not going to be a leader against whom you can forecast your dissatisfaction."

Facing mortality

Doomsday believers tend to pick up and get on with their lives more successfully if they have strong networks of family and friends, Kent said. The grassroots nature of the Mayan apocalypse predictions is therefore troubling, he said.

"The isolated individuals who encounter these predictions on the Internet may be terribly alone," he said. Some may be "really quite lost" in the wake of the uneventful day.

"It's not just the usual suspects," said DiTommaso of the 2012 apocalypse believers. "Lots of people can buy into 2012 for different reasons."

Part of the reason that failed doomsdays can be so traumatic, Kent said, is that they appear to be a way that people grapple with their mortality. Believers usually think they'll survive the end, whether by being one of God's chosen people, by building an underground bunker, or by hitching a ride on a friendly UFO. If you survive the end of the world, Kent said, you never have to face your own death.

"The believers always predict that their special knowledge will allow them to survive, that they will escape the mortality that all of us face," Kent said. "And so far, everyone's been proven wrong on that fact."

However, hope springs eternal. Matching the dates of the Mayan calendar to our modern calendar is not an exact science, offering doomsday believers a "we got the math wrong" rationalization for the failed prediction.

Already, "there's a bit of chatter for 2015," DiTommaso said. ( LiveScience.com )

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Killer Cave May Have Inspired Myth of Hades

Killer Cave May Have Inspired Myth of Hades - A giant cave that might have helped serve as the inspiration for the mythic ancient Greek underworld Hades once housed hundreds of people, potentially making it one of the oldest and most important prehistoric villages in Europe before it collapsed and killed everyone inside, researchers say.

The complex settlement seen in this cave suggests, along with other sites from about the same time, that early prehistoric Europe may have been more complex than previously thought.

The cave, located in southern Greece and discovered in 1958, is called Alepotrypa, which means "foxhole."

"The legend is that in a village nearby, a guy was hunting for foxes with his dog, and the dog went into the hole and the man went after the dog and discovered the cave," said researcher Michael Galaty, an archaeologist at Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss. "The story's probably apocryphal — depending on who you ask in the village, they all claim it was their grandfather who found the cave."

A prehistoric cathedral

After its discovery, Greek officials originally saw the cave as a potential tourist attraction. However, when archaeologists realized the historical secrets it might hold, they led efforts to keep tourism from inadvertently destroying the site.

The main chamber of the cave is about 200 feet (60 meters) tall and up to about 330 feet (100 m) wide. Altogether, the cave is nearly 3,300 feet (1,000 m) long, large enough to have its own lake, in which famed explorer Jacques Cousteau once scuba-dived.

"If you've ever seen 'The Lord of the Rings,' this might make you recall the mines of Moria — the cave is really that impressive," Galaty told LiveScience.

Excavations that have taken place at Alepotrypa since 1970 uncovered tools, pottery, obsidian and even silver and copper artifacts that date back to the Neolithic or New Stone Age, which in Greece began about 9,000 years ago.

"Alepotrypa existed right before the Bronze Age in Mycenaean Greece, so we're kind of seeing the beginnings of things that produced the age of heroes in Greece," Galaty said.

Cave dwellers apparently used the cavern not only as a shelter, but also as a cemetery and place of ritual.

"You have to imagine the place torchlit, filled with people lighting bonfires and burying the dead," Galaty said. "It was quite like a prehistoric cathedral, a pilgrimage site that attracted people from all over the region and perhaps from further afield."

Cave settlements

The cave apparently went through a series of occupations and abandonments.

"Alepotrypa was at a perfect place to intercept sea trade from Africa all the way to the eastern Mediterranean, being right at the southern tip of Greece," Galaty said.

Settlement at the cave abruptly ended when its entrance collapsed about 5,000 years ago, perhaps due to an earthquake, burying cave dwellers alive.

"It is and was an amazing place, the closest thing we have to a Neolithic Pompeii," Galaty said, referring to the ancient Roman town of Pompeii, which was buried when Mt. Vesuvius erupted nearly 2,000 years ago. Ash entombed and preserved Pompeii, and excavations there have given archaeologists extraordinarily detailed views of life during that time. In much the same way, the final cave collapse left everything in place in Alepotrypa, with everything inside getting a pearly mineral coating over the years.

Intriguingly, people apparently performed burials in the cave while conducting rituals that involved burning huge amounts of dung and depositing large amounts of colored and finely painted pottery.

"The burial sites and rituals that took place really do give the cave an underworld feel. It's like Hades, complete with its own River Styx," Galaty added, referring to the river that in Greek myth served as the boundary between the mortal realm and the netherworld.

Alepotrypa archaeology

For about 40 years, excavations at Alepotrypa were largely the singlehanded work of Greek archaeologist Giorgos Papathanassopoulos. In the last three years, Papathanassopoulos has reached out to other archaeologists, who have helped uncover a wealth of new insights on the site.

For instance, surveys around the cave now show there was a settlement outside. Altogether, hundreds of people may have lived at the site in its heyday, making it one of the largest, most complex known Neolithic villages in Europe.

In addition, analysis by researcher Panagiotis Karkanas at the Ephoreia of Paleoanthropology and Speleology of Southern Greece in Athens and his colleagues is confirming that rituals were conducted there regularly.

Much remains unknown about the cave. For instance, "we don't know how much deeper deposits go. For all we know, we might have Neanderthals down there," Galaty said. "The next bay over, you have Neanderthal artifacts in caves, so it's hard to believe there wouldn't be such evidence in Alepotrypa. We just haven't dug deep enough to know."

Chemical analysis of the pottery can also shed light on its origins.

"Giorgos Papathanassopoulos has always argued this pottery was not local to the site, but came from elsewhere — that the cave was a kind of pilgrimage site where important people were buried, leading to the fanciful idea that this was the original entrance to Hades, that it was the source of the Greek fascination with the underworld," Galaty said.

Chemical analysis of the bones can yield similar insights. "Are people actually bringing bodies from distant locales to bury?" Galaty said.

This site, along with others in Europe, might help confirm that complex societies arose earlier than currently thought on the continent.

Papathanassopoulos, Karkanas and Galaty, along with Anastasia Papathanasiou, William Parkinson, Daniel Pullen and their colleagues, will detail this year's findings at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America on Jan. 6 in Seattle. ( LiveScience.com )

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First Polynesians Arrived in Tonga 2,800 Years Ago

First Polynesians Arrived in Tonga 2,800 Years Ago - The first Polynesian settlers sailed to Tonga between 2,830 and 2,846 years ago, according to new research.

The findings, published Nov. 7 in the journal PLoS One, relied on ultraprecise dating of coral tools found at Tonga's first settlement.

"The technique provides us with unbelievable precision in dating quite ancient materials," said David Burley, a co-author of the study and an archaeologist at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. "This stuff is almost 3,000 years old, and the date range is within 16 years."

The new techniques could be used to trace the migration of Polynesia's prehistoric seafarers as they colonized the archipelagos of the Pacific Ocean, he said.

The Lapita people, the ancestors of modern-day Pacific Islanders, first sailed from coastal New Guinea roughly 5,000 years ago, reaching the Solomon Islands around 3,100 years ago and gradually expanding farther east toward what is now the archipelago Tonga, Burley told LiveScience.

Across a string of Pacific islands, the Lapita left traces of their culture: primitive nail files broken from staghorn coral reefs. The ancient inhabitants of Oceania likely used these coral files to smooth the surfaces of wooden objects or shell bracelets, Burley said.

Archaeologists determine when the Lapita migrated to an island by estimating the age of the earliest coral files there. Historically, they dated the coral files using radioactive carbon isotopes (atoms of the same element with different weights). But precise numbers were elusive, because carbon dating can be off by a few hundred years.

To see if they could do better, Burley and his team analyzed 16 coral files found buried in the sand under the site of Polynesia's oldest known settlement, a small village called Nukuleka on the Tongan island of Tongatapu.

But instead of using radioactive carbon, the team used radioactive uranium and developed a method to date the ancient coral fragments with incredible precision.

The researchers pinpointed the date of first landfall at Tonga to within eight years of 826 B.C.

Because the Lapita scattered such coral files at many sites, the new technique could be used to retrace the steps of the ancient seafarers throughout Oceania with astonishing accuracy, Burley said.

"We can look at this progression across the Pacific in ways we couldn't before," he said. ( LiveScience.com )

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How Did Armstrong Get Busted?

How Did Armstrong Get Busted? - Lance Armstrong has announced that he will no longer fight accusations from the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) that he used performance-enhancing drugs during his historic cycling career. Though the seven-time Tour de France winner still asserts his innocence, he now faces the loss of all the titles and associated prize money he has won since 1998. But what set Armstrong's epic fall from grace in motion and why is it culminating now? Life's Little Mysteries explains.

The United States Anti-Doping Agency claims to have blood tests from Lance Armstrong that are "fully consistent" with blood doping.

Why did authorities suspect Armstrong of doping in the first place?

Anyone who emerges from a bout with cancer to make a record-obliterating run on one of the world's premier sporting events is sure to draw skepticism, so it's not surprising that Armstrong has contended with allegations of doping for more than a decade. But his unprecedented domination was not the only source of suspicion. Even in 1999, the year of his first Tour de France win, there were already objective suggestions that Armstrong's success may not have been entirely on the up and up. That year, his urine sample showed a small trace of a banned steroid used to assist muscle recovery, but he was cleared when his team produced a medical certificate showing that the chemical was present in a cream Armstrong used for "saddle sores."

In 2005, a French newspaper reported that Armstrong's 1999 urine samples had retroactively tested positive for the "blood booster" Erythropoietin (EPO), a banned substance that couldn't yet be detected in urine tests in 1999. But because the 2005 urine tests were not conducted according to official standards, the results had no effect on Armstrong's standing.

Most damaging to Armstrong's claims to innocence has been mounting testimony from former teammates and associates who say they have witnessed or shared in Armstrong's alleged doping practices. Indeed, the USADA case that caused Armstrong to back down from arbitration rests in large part on a group of 10 former teammates who the agency says will testify to having firsthand knowledge of Armstrong's doping.

What types of drugs did Armstrong allegedly use?

The USADA accuses Armstrong of using EPO, human growth hormone, testosterone, anti-inflammatory steroids and various masking agents used to cover up his other alleged abuses. The agency claims to have physical evidence for Armstrong's supposed "blood doping," a practice designed to boost an athlete's red blood cell count that can either involve blood transfusions or the use of synthetic EPO.

What is EPO and what do blood transfusions have to do with athletic success?

EPO is a naturally occurring hormone in humans that regulates the production of red blood cells and — because red blood cells carry oxygen throughout the body — determines a person's oxygen-carrying capacity. A surge of red blood cells will temporarily supercharge an athlete's ability to deliver oxygen to muscles and thereby improve his or her endurance.

Without using synthetic EPO, cheating athletes can increase their red blood cells by temporarily extracting a unit of blood a few weeks before an event, waiting for their body to naturally recoup the missing red blood cells and then transfusing the backup unit into their bloodstream when they want a boost.

The USADA has accused Armstrong of using both methods of blood doping. Their claim is based on blood tests from 2009 and 2010 that they say are "fully consistent" with blood doping.

If the USADA has blood tests showing that Armstrong practiced blood doping in 2009 and 2010, does he have any grounds to continue to deny their allegations?

Because synthetic EPO is nearly identical to the hormone that naturally occurs in athletes' urine, it is notoriously hard to test for. A testing method capable of distinguishing synthetic EPO was not developed until 2000, and since then, athletes have successfully argued that it has yielded false positives.

There is still no sure test to detect a blood transfusion consisting of the athlete's own blood, and in suspected cases of non-synthetic blood doping, determinations of guilt are based on observed overabundances in red blood cells. Judgments like these can easily be called into question by athletes and sometimes explained by natural variations in red blood cell production.

It is not clear whether the USADA's claim of having tests "fully consistent" with blood doping rests on a positive test for synthetic EPO or on observations of anomalous red blood cell levels. The wording of their claim, that they have data "fully consistent with blood manipulation including EPO use and/or blood transfusions," suggests a degree of uncertainty about what conclusions can be drawn from the tests.

Is it a sure thing that Armstrong will be stripped of all of his titles and prize money now that he's stopped fighting the USADA's charges?

The International Cycling Union (UCI), the world governing body for sports cycling, disputed the USADA's authority to arbitrate the doping case, so it is still theoretically possible that the cycling union will appeal the USADA's ruling.

The UCI says it will withhold comment on Armstrong's USADA-mandated suspension until the agency has submitted a "reasoned decision" to the body, as they are obligated to do by the World Anti-Doping Code. In turn, the International Olympic Committee said that it will await decisions from the USADA and UCI before deciding whether to revoke Armstrong's bronze medal from the 2000 Sydney Olympics. But USADA chief executive Travis Tygart has said that the cycling union is "bound to recognize our decision and impose it." ( LiveScience.com )

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Little Green 'Aliens' Invading Antarctica

Little Green 'Aliens' Invading Antarctica - Dangerous green aliens are invading Antarctica, scientists warn, brought not by fantastical spaceships but traveling aboard far more mundane transport — the shoes, clothing and luggage of visitors to the frigid continent, new research reveals.

Although invasive insects, plants and animals have already taken root on islands near Antarctica, it wasn't entirely clear what risk outside species posed to the continent itself — typically a more formidable environment, and therefore one that is far more pristine, since only the hardiest organisms can survive there.

So a group of scientists decided to find out. Their study, which found that invasive, alien plants are finding their way to the bottom of the world, is published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"We asked a simple question — can non-indigenous species make it in Antarctica, and if so, where?" said lead author Steven L. Chown, a professor at South Africa's Stellenbosch University, and director of its Center for Invasion Biology.

Seed stowaways

To help answer that question, scientists needed to seek out any seeds that visitors were inadvertently carrying to Antarctica. The Antarctic Treaty essentially forbids the deliberate introduction of foreign species to the continent, so any interlopers are likely arriving by accident.

But how to find these tiny stowaways? A vacuum cleaner, of course.

Researchers vacuumed the clothing and baggage of nearly 1,000 volunteers — tourists, workers and scientists alike — who visited Antarctic during the 2007-2008 field season.

"They were not wearing the gear at the time," Chown told OurAmazingPlanet in an email. "Often they were amazed at what they had left in their pockets and had missed for some time."

Scientists painstakingly sorted through the pocket fluff and candy wrappers collected, and found more than 2,800 seeds — on average, about 9.5 seeds per tourist, far more for scientists. The team also identified what family the inchoate plants belonged to in nearly 90 percent of the seeds collected.

Chown said that not only was it surprising just how many seeds were making it to Antarctica, but that "so many of them are from cold climate areas such as the sub-Antarctic and Arctic," making it far more likely they'll be able to establish themselves on the Antarctic continent.

Invasion under way

Indeed, he said, perhaps the most surprising thing the research revealed is that an alien plant — Poa annua, an annual grass common across the United States and one often treated as a weed — has already invaded the Antarctic Peninsula, the long finger of land that points toward South America.

The region is one of the most swiftly warming places on Earth — the area around the peninsula has warmed by about 4 degrees Fahrenheit (2.2 degrees Celsius) over the last five decades. It has been the site of catastrophic ice-shelf collapses in recent years, and is the area of Antarctica the study identified as most vulnerable to biological invaders.

"In the future, other ice-free areas will also be at risk as global climate change continues to impact the Antarctic," Chown said. ( LiveScience.com )

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Scientists Welcome Two New Elements to the Periodic Table

Scientists Welcome Two New Elements to the Periodic Table - You may have grown up thinking you knew what was what in science, back when Pluto was a planet, the opposite sex had cooties, and the last 10% of every beverage was known to be backwash. But things change, including the periodic table, which just made two new elements official.

Sadly, they don't have names yet, according to the AP. So for now, we'll just have to call them #114 and #116 (numbers which refer to the number of protons in their nuclei and which give them their unique boxes on the table). We know that they last for less than a second, and that "the new elements were made by slamming two lighter elements together in the hopes that they'd stick."

Elements are sometimes listed before they're voted into the table, as was the case with #114 and #116 before an international committee of scientists gave them the go-ahead, and as is currently the case with #113 and #115, who continue to languish in periodic table purgatory. The total number of officially recognized elements, a Carnegie Mellon professor told the AP, is now 114, given this condition. He also noted that over the last 250 years, elements have been added every two-and-a-half years on average. Which all goes to show, saying "It's science," might not be as definitive a statement of truth as you thought.

A Brief History of the Periodic Table

Six atoms may seem minuscule--especially if they exist for only fractions of a second--but they can have huge implications. The recent announcement that Russian and American scientists finally managed to produce a tiny bit of element 117 by firing calcium atoms (element 20) at berkelium (element 97) fills in a missing spot on the periodic table. When the results are confirmed, "ununseptium" will get a catchier moniker and occupy the square between 116 and 118--elements that also await proper names from the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry.

We've come a long way from the classical list of earth, wind, water and fire. Modern elements, with all their complexities, require a chart whose rows and columns reflect their properties and how they interact with one another. In the 19th century, several scientists worked on developing a periodic table that arranged the elements according to their atomic weight. It is Russian chemistry professor Dmitri Mendeleev, however, who is credited with developing the first real table in 1869. He organized the 63 then known elements into groups with similar properties and left some spaces blank for those whose existence he could not yet prove. In 1913 physicist Henry Moseley's experiments showed definitively that the order was dependent not on atomic weight but on atomic number--the number of protons in an atom's nucleus.

Like most of those after uranium (element 92), "ununseptium" is artificially made. This latest find supports the idea that as-yet-undiscovered stable elements exist, but no one knows for sure if there is an end point to the table or if additional artificially engineered elements will expand it even further. The question of how much bigger the 141-year-old chart can get is anything but elementary. ( time.com )

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