The weather conditions allowed experts to take aerial photos of ‘cropmark sites’.

The marks are produced when crops growing over buried features develop at a different rate from those growing next to them.

A Roman camp near Bradford Abbas, Dorset, was revealed in June after three sides became visible in rain-parched fields of barley.

The lightly-built defensive enclosure would have provided basic protection for Roman soldiers while on manoeuvres in the first century AD and is one of only four discovered in the south west of England, English Heritage said.

An aerial view of a Roman fort dating back 2,000 years was found in North Yorkshire, above. ‘Cropmark sites’ occur when when crops growing over buried features develop at a different rate from those growing next to them

The stone walls of a Roman fort dating back 2,000 years can clearly be seen through crops in Newton Kyme in North Yorkshire. The images were taken by English Heritage from a Cessna light aircraft

Flights over the Holderness area of the East Riding proved particularly productive with around 60 new sites, mainly prehistoric, found in just one day including livestock and settlement enclosures.

A Roman camp was discovered in June near Bradford Abbas, Dorset, above, after three sides became visible in rain-parched fields of barley

Researchers hope to discover new sites after examining the photographs taken this summer. This image shows a ‘lost’ beach where the Romans landed 2,000 years ago to begin their invasion of Britain. Found two years ago, the remains of the shingle harbour were buried beneath 6ft of soil nearly two miles inland from the modern Kent Coast

English Heritage said some sites which have not been visible since the drought of 1976 reappeared this summer.

Damian Grady, a Swindon-based English Heritage senior investigator, said: ‘Promising signs started to emerge in late May when the dry conditions had started to reveal cropmarks on well drained soils, especially river gravels and chalk in the east and south east of England.

‘By June it became clear that the continuing dry conditions would produce good results across most of the country.

‘We then targeted areas that do not always produce cropmarks, such as clay soils, or have seen little reconnaissance in recent years due to recent wet summers or busy airspace.

‘Unfortunately July saw deterioration in the weather which reduced the amount of flying we could do and the cropmarks started to disappear just before the harvest got under way.’

Mr Grady added: ‘It will take some time to take stock of all the sites we have photographed, but we expect to discover several hundred new sites across England.’
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1307333/Hidden-archaeological-sites-revealed-fields-country-dry-weather.html?ITO=socialnet-twitter-dmailnews#ixzz0yDdypiAr

August 27, 2010 – UFO reports have been taking a dramatic turn lately with more witnesses describing events related to a sort of conflict between military forces and large black triangular craft. Such craft were seen in Canada earlier this week allegedly being fired upon by helicopters and another was spotted near Fresno California crashed into the side of a mountain with military vehicles quickly surrounding it. What uncertainty does this bear for the future?

Reported TR-3B (Triangle) Crash Sighting, Witnessed by Family

Wang has done the astronomical observation work for 39 years and he publicized his opinion on a science forum held in Guangzhou today.

Wang also found that in the terrestrial space between the height of 130 kilometers and 1,500 kilometers, UFOs have appeared many times. Their flying speed is much slower than the first cosmic velocity. Some are even as slow as 0.29 kilometers per second and they can fly in the 1,460 kilometers’ height for more than 25 minutes.

This means UFOs have the anti-gravity ability. Otherwise, they would fall soon. Wang came to these conclusions based on the spherical astronomy and physics method and his years of observation at Purple Hills Observatory as well as the quantitative analysis of some significant UFO events.

Many people are worried that the aliens would invade the earth and if they do exit, is could be a calamity for human beings. Hawking is one person who holds such a theory.

However, Wang said it’s too early to come to this conclusion.

“If they are friendly to us, we can promote the human beings’ civilization through exchange and cooperation with them. If they are not, as long as we prepared for their invasion, we can beat them back based on their weaknesses. After all, they are life entities, they would show their slips,” Wang said.

Missouri’s tight restrictions on protests and picketing outside military funerals were tossed out by a federal judge Monday, over free speech concerns.

A small Kansas church had brought suit over its claimed right to loudly march outside the burials and memorial services of those killed in overseas conflicts. The state legislature had passed a law to keep members of the Topeka-based Westboro Baptist Church from demonstrating within 300 feet of such private services.

Church members, led by pastor Fred Phelps, believe God is punishing the United States for “the sin of homosexuality” through events including soldiers’ deaths. Members have traveled the country, shouting at grieving family members at funerals and displaying such signs as “Thank God for Dead Soldiers,” “God Blew Up the Troops” and “AIDS Cures Fags.”

The Supreme Court last year had granted a temporary injunction blocking enforcement of the law until it could be challenged. The justices will hear a similar challenge this fall involving the same church.

Judge Fernando Gaitan in a 19-page order, dismissed the state legislation.

The laws, said the Kansas City-based judge, “could have the effect of criminalizing speech the mourners want to hear, including speech from counter-protesters to plaintiffs’ [the Westboro Church's] message. As the law burdens substantially more speech than is necessary to further the government’s interest, [the law] violates the free speech clause of the First Amendment.”

Phelps, his daughter, Shirley Phelps-Roper, and other church members had protested near the August 2005 funeral of Army Spc. Edward Lee Myers in St. Joseph, Missouri. The married Army Airborne Ranger died while on patrol in Samarra, Iraq, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his Humvee military vehicle. He was 21, and in addition to his wife, he left behind a daughter. He was later buried at Leavenworth National Cemetery in Kansas.

In response to that protest, Missouri lawmakers passed the “Spc. Edward Lee Myers Law,” criminalizing picketing “in front or about” a funeral location or procession.

Phelps-Roper then went to federal court to ask for a preliminary injunction to block enforcement of the statute until its constitutionality could be reviewed. A federal appeals court eventually agreed. That court did not address the broader First Amendment claims, but noted the law was overly intrusive, since it “restricts expressive activity not just within or on the premises of a cemetery of a church, but also on traditional public fora such as the adjacent public streets and sidewalks.”

The Supreme Court has never addressed the specific issues of laws designed to protect the “sanctity and dignity of memorial and funeral services,” as well as the privacy of family and friends of the deceased. But the justices in October will hear an appeal from the father of a U.S. solider killed in Iraq, after members of the Westboro Church conducted an angry demonstration at his son’s burial service in Maryland. The family of the Marine had won a $5 million judgment from the protesters, which was overturned by lower federal courts.

At issue is a balancing test between the privacy rights of grieving families and the free-speech rights of demonstrators, however disturbing and provocative their message. Several other states besides Missouri have attempted to impose specific limits on when and where the church members can protest.

The justices are being asked to address how far states can go to justify picket-free zones and the use of “floating buffers” to silence or restrict the speech or movements of demonstrators exercising their constitutional rights in a funeral setting. Various jurisdictions across the nation have responded to the protests with varying levels of control over the church protesters.

According to a legal brief it filed with the Supreme Court, church members believe it is their duty to protest and picket at certain events, including funerals, to promote their religious message: “That God’s promise of love and heaven for those who obey him in this life is counterbalanced by God’s wrath and hell for those who do not obey him.”

The congregation is made up mostly of Phelps and his family. The pastor has 13 children, and at least 54 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. He described himself as an “old-time” gospel preacher in a CNN interview in 2006, saying, “You can’t preach the Bible without preaching the hatred of God.”

The church has also protested at least since 1993 at funerals of gay persons, those who died from AIDS, and others whose lifestyles are deemed sinful but were touted as heroic upon their death.

Missouri officials said the appeals court improperly balanced the free speech rights of both sides in favor of the church.

“Mourners cannot avoid a message that targets funerals without forgoing their right to partake in funeral or burial services, so are appropriately viewed as a captive audience” that is simply unable to shut out the offensive message, said state attorneys.

The case is Phelps-Roper v. Koster (06-4156-cv).

No anonymity is the future of web in the opinion of Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt. He said many creepy things about privacy at the Techonomy Conference. The focus of the conference was how technology is changing and can change society. Schmidt’s message was that anonymity is a dangerous thing and governments will demand an end to it.

Whether it was a Freudian slip or a simple misstatement, Schmidt is correct; it is not obvious that if you are anonymous, you are therefore likely to commit a “terrible, evil crime.”

Anonymity equaling a future heinous act seems to be the direction some online security experts are headed. The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace proposes to do away with anonymous multiple identities in favor of one real identity. Part of the reasoning behind one trusted identity is to do away with crime. But isn’t this the same logic of anonymity breeding anti-social behavior and criminals?

According to ReadWriteWeb, Schmidt said of anti-social behavior, “The only way to manage this is true transparency and no anonymity. In a world of asynchronous threats, it is too dangerous for there not to be some way to identify you. We need a [verified] name service for people. Governments will demand it.”

Since Google’s CEO has proclaimed the future of the web is no anonymity, does that make it a fact? If we keep hearing that privacy is dead and long buried, how long before we accept that anonymity is an anti-social behavior and a crime?

Security expert Bruce Schneier suggests that we protect our privacy if we are thinking about it, but we give up our privacy when we are not thinking about it.

Schneier wrote, “Here’s the problem: The very companies whose CEOs eulogize privacy make their money by controlling vast amounts of their users’ information. Whether through targeted advertising, cross-selling or simply convincing their users to spend more time on their site and sign up their friends, more information shared in more ways, more publicly means more profits. This means these companies are motivated to continually ratchet down the privacy of their services, while at the same time pronouncing privacy erosions as inevitable and giving users the illusion of control.”

The loss of anonymity will endanger privacy. It’s unsettling to think “governments will demand” an end to anonymous identities. Even if Schmidt is Google’s CEO, his message of anonymity as a dangerous thing is highly controversial. Google is in the business of mining and monetizing data, so isn’t that a conflict of interest? Look how much Google knows about you now.

Bruce Schneier put it eloquently, “If we believe privacy is a social good, something necessary for democracy, liberty and human dignity, then we can’t rely on market forces to maintain it.”

PHOENIX – He’s been at the center of the discussions and controversies surrounding illegal immigration enforcement in Arizona for quite a while.

On the day parts of Arizona’s immigration law, SB 1070, went into effect, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is in the news for another reason: there’s a price on his head – allegedly offered by a Mexican drug cartel.

The audio message in Spanish is a bit garbled, but the text is clear.

“It’s offering a million dollars for Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s head and offering a thousand dollars for anyone who wants to join the Mexican cartel.”

A man who wants to remain anonymous says his wife received the text message Tuesday evening. It also included an international phone number and instructions to pass the message along.

“She showed it to me..I was kind of disgusted..I reported it to the Sheriff’s department yesterday..they said they were going to direct the threat squad on it.”

Lisa Allen of the Sheriff’s office says they believe the message originated in Mexico.

Although the Sheriff has received numerous death threats in the past, they believe this threat is credible because of its timing.

“Arpaio gets threats pretty routinely, but obviously with this heightened awareness of his role in the immigration issue we’ve got to take this one a little bit more seriously with a million dollar contract out on him,” said Allen.

But she says what really concerns investigators is how quickly the message may have been spread. “It’s going so many different places that our folks are looking at it and thinking well at any given point in time it could land in front of some crazy person who thinks I can do that.”

As for Arpaio’s reaction to the threat, “It’s a little bit like water off a duck’s back for him, but you never know if it’s that sense of false bravado with him..you just can’t read it, I’m sure he’s concerned, I’m sure he’s concerned for his family more than anything else,” said Allen.

The Sheriff’s office says investigators are trying to trace exactly where the text message came from, but because it did originate from an international number, that will be difficult too.

India on Thursday unveiled a prototype tablet computer that would sell for a mere 1,500 rupees, or $35, with the price possibly dropping even further as R&D efforts continue.

Kapil Sibal, the country’s Minister for Human Resource Development, showed off the super-cheap touch-screen device in New Delhi as part of a push to provide high-quality education to students across the country. The tablet also comes with a solar-power option that could make it more feasible for rural areas.

The Linux-based computer at first glance resembles an Apple iPad and features basic functions you’d expect to see in a tablet–a Web browser, multimedia player, PDF reader, Wi-Fi, and video conferencing ability. It has 2GB of RAM (but no hard disk, instead using a memory card) and USB ports and could be available to kids from primary school up to the university level as early as next year.

Students from several branches of the Indian Institute of Technology co-designed motherboards for the computer, which the ministry would like to see dropping to $20 and possibly getting as low as $10.

Sibal called the as-yet-unnamed device India’s answer to MIT’s famed OLPC laptop aimed at children in developing nations, which started off five years ago with a projected cost of $100, but ended up going for $200. In May, Marvell Technologies announced that it would partner with the OLPC foundation to create the hardware for a proposed OLPC tablet, currently named the XO-3, that would go for around $100.

But while the extremely low price of India’s newly unveiled tablet is generating much hoopla, the gadget still faces hurdles before it lands in the public’s hands.

“This is just a prototype,” education expert Zubin Malhotra told Newsxlive. “We need to find people who will be able to manufacture these devices at these price points and continue to develop them going forward.”

The tablet is part of a larger initiative aimed at improving India’s educational system through technology. Nearly 8,500 colleges in the country have already gotten broadband connectivity, according to the Ministry for Human Resource Development, and some 500 Web-based and video courses are available for upload on YouTube and other online portals, with more in the works.

 

Collapsed pit-crater shaft leading down to a sub-selenean tunnel?

The tunnels aren’t thought to be the work of long-extinct (or perhaps still surviving) intelligent moon aliens, perhaps driven to adopt a subterranean existence by a notional disappearing atmosphere aeons ago. Nor is any involvement by Tibetans, Elvis or others seeking a secluded dwelling far from prying human eyes suspected.

Instead, top moonologists think that they may be on the track of “lava tubes” not dissimilar to those of Earth. A lava tube, unsurprisingly, is a tube in solid surrounding rock along which at some point liquid lava has flowed (or is still flowing, in some Earthly cases).

 

View down into an Earthly lava tube.

When the lava cools and solidifies, there is often an open space left above its surface, forming a tunnel.

In some cases, parts of the roof of such a tunnel will collapse, forming a so-called “pit crater”. If the pit crater forms while the lava is still flowing, it will have a smooth bottom. If the collapse happens once the lava has hardened, the bottom of the pit crater will be home to a pile of rubble.

Scientists analysing results from our old friend the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), placed into a very low Moon orbit by NASA so as to map our satellite in great detail, believe they may have found such pit craters – so pointing the way to subterraneanselenean lava-tube tunnels.

“To date, we have about ten candidate pits awaiting confirmation,” report boffins at the LRO Camera team.

“Do these pits provide access to open lava tubes?” they ask.

That’s a question which the LRO scientists will attempt to answer by snapping pics from the LRO at such angles – and with the Sun at such a position in the sky above – that they could spot overhangs indicating whether or not the possible lava-tube tunnels are still “open and accessible”.

President Obama has lately stated that there will be no manned return to the Moon, as had formerly been planned (indeed without the Moon-return plans it is unlikely that NASA would have bothered to send up the LRO).

However there are less ambitious plans for robotic visits to Earth’s satellite – some of them even, perhaps, featuring a tunnelling mole-cruiser subselenean probecraft.

Humanity may yet one day gaze upon the mysteries lying hidden in the Moon’s unseen, cavernous tunnel complexes – if only by proxy

British scientists believe they have found the answer to an ages-old question: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Scientists cracked the puzzle after discovering that the formation of eggs is possible only thanks to a protein found in chicken’s ovaries. That means eggs have to be formed in chickens first.

The protein — called ovocledidin-17 (OC-17) — speeds up the development of the shell. Researchers from Sheffield and Warwick universities in England laid out their findings in the paper “Structural Control of Crystal Nuclei by an Eggshell Protein.”

They used a supercomputer to zoom in on the formation of an egg and realized the protein is vital in kick-starting the crystallization process. It works by converting calcium carbonate into the calcite crystals that make up the egg shell.

Dr Colin Freeman, from Sheffield University’s Department of Engineering Materials, said “it had long been suspected that the egg came first — but now we have the scientific proof that shows that in fact the chicken came first.”

“The protein had been identified before and it was linked to egg formation, but by examining it closely we have been able to see how it controls the process,” Freeman said.

“It’s very interesting to find that different types of avian species seem to have a variation of the protein that does the same job.”

It is hoped the discovery leads to the invention of new materials.

A new article in the journal Psychology & Marketing investigates the role avatars play in the virtual and consumer environment, how well avatars reflect the personality of their creators, the psychology behind self-representation, and how these virtually made identities are perceived by other members of the virtual community. According to the study, avatars can portray a very lifelike and accurate depiction of a person’s true personality, within the virtual world.

Dr. H. Onur Bodur of Concordia University and his colleagues used the sophisticated avatar-based community Second Life as their model for the study, which has its own economy and facilitates real-money transactions. The membership of Second Life has increased more than 20 fold between 2006 and 2009 to reach 15 million, and many real-world companies (e.g., Adidas, American Apparel, Dell, Nike, and Toyota) have appeared in Second Life.

Members of the community use particular avatar traits or visual cues, such as attractiveness, gender, stylish hair, or expression (“babyfaceness” is associated with cooperation), to form impressions or opinions about the human behind the avatar. The researchers argue that well-known psychological principles such as Social Response Theory (SRT) and anthropomorphism come into play at this stage of discovery and discernment. Bodur’s study finds that these impressions, based solely on fairly limited or superficial traits of the avatar, may accurately match the true personality of the real person behind the avatar.

Dr. Bodur says, “This research, which aligns with other research that says that accurate impressions can be formed through access to very limited information, such as images of someone’s dorm room, work space, or website. This and future research can show whether online presentations of consumers (e.g., avatars) can be used to identify and segment consumers.”

This article is part of the relatively new field of research surrounding the use of this new graphic media, and plays a major role in analyzing its impact on social psychology and marketing practices.