Remains of Henge Monument and Roman Pottery Center Discovered in England


Archaeologists have found the remains of what they believe to be a henge monument and Roman pottery center in Nottinghamshire, England. The pottery finds make it a site of “national importance”.

At the Middlebeck housing site, experts were called in to survey the area where they identified evidence of human activity. Dating back 12,000 years, they discovered 73 Roman kilns, as well as a circular ditch with upright timbers.

The pottery, an Oxford archaeology spokesperson told BBC News, “probably represents a previously unknown pottery production centre that is of regional, if not national, importance.”

An enclosure dating to 3300 BCE contained the remains of internal posts and pits. The team believes they may have formed one or more concentric arcs of erect timbers. Situated at the beginning of a spring may indicate a larger cultural and religious signifcance.

Additionally, a polished stone axe head from Langdale, Cumbria was identified and is believed to be from the same period. It was, however, found with Iron Age pottery from roughly 3,000 years later and has marks indicating possible reuse as a whetstone.

Thirty-five cremation burials from the Bronze Age were also found on site, with necklace beads from the same time. The team believes these are traces of a large Iron Age farming cohort.

The area is known for its connection to the 17th–century Civil War, but there have also been traces of human existence identified in previous excavations that date back to the end of the ice ages.

A 694-acre extension south of Newark, Middlebeck is expected to grow to accommodate more than 3,000 homes that will be serviced by a £100 million ($1.24 million) link road.

Rare elephant twins born in Kenya, spotted on camera: "Amazing odds!"



An elephant in Kenya has given birth to a set of twins, a conservation group said on Friday, a rare event for the planet's largest land mammals. Save the Elephants said that the twins, both female, were born in the Samburu National Reserve in northern Kenya to a mother named Alto, describing it as "double joy."

Twins make up only about one percent of elephant births, although another pair -- one male and one female -- were born in the same reserve in early 2022.

A video posted to social media by Save the Elephants, showed the baby elephants feeding from their mother, alongside other members of the herd with the caption: "Amazing odds!"

African elephants have the largest gestation period of any living mammal, carrying their young for nearly 22 months, and give birth roughly every four years.

However, elephant twins do not often fare so well. About two years ago, an elephant named Bora gave birth to twins in the Samburu National Reserve.

"Bora's twins (male and female) were born during one of the worst droughts but despite her excellent mothering skills, the female twin sadly died," Save the Elephants said in a Facebook post.

Still, the conservation group says it remains optimistic about the prospects for Alto's babies.

"Elephant twins rarely survive in the wild but we're optimistic about Alto's twins as there's lots of food in the park following the rains so Alto should be able to produce plenty of milk to feed her hungry brood plus she also has the amazing support of her herd," the group wrote.

A previous pair of twins born in Samburu in 2006 failed to survive more than a few days.

The African savanna elephant is classified as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which says poaching and habitat destruction had a devastating effect on elephant numbers in Africa as a whole.

According to the Kenya Wildlife Service, there are more than 36,000 elephants in the East African country, with efforts to stem poaching halting a decline in numbers.

The elephant population in Kenya stood at 170,000 in the 1970s and early 1980s but plunged to only 16,000 by the end of 1989 because of the demand for ivory, it said.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rare-elephant-twins-born-kenya-captured-on-camera/

First Thanksgiving wasn’t in Plymouth — it was in Florida 56 years prior: historian

Prepare to have your Thanksgiving history turned on its head this holiday season!

If you thought Plymouth, Massachusetts, was the birthplace of the first Thanksgiving, think again.

According to late Florida historian Michael Gannon, the true origins of this beloved feast trace back to a surprising location: sunny St. Augustine, Florida, a confounding 56 years before the Pilgrims’ famed gathering.

Gannon’s groundbreaking discovery, backed by compelling historical documents, solidifies Florida’s claim to hosting the inaugural Thanksgiving celebration.

The year? 1565.

Picture this: Pedro Menéndez de Avilés and a cohort of 800 Spanish settlers step foot in St. Augustine and kick off their arrival with a monumental Mass of Thanksgiving.

The guest list?

The native Seloy tribe was graciously invited by Menéndez himself to partake in this historic occasion.

First Thanksgiving 1621 by Karen Rinaldo.



Records suggest the spread might have consisted of ship-storable fare like hearty stews, sea biscuits and the ever-essential red wine from the Spaniards’ maritime provisions.

But did the Native Americans contribute to this inaugural feast?

Historian Rodney Kite-Powell speculates that indigenous delicacies such as alligator, gopher turtles, venison and gourds might have graced the table had the Seloy tribe brought their own bounty.

This event, considered the first communal act of gratitude and religious observance in the inaugural European settlement of North America, finds its place in history books, though overshadowed by the later prominence of Thanksgiving observances by British forces during the 18th century.

While not etched into the national tradition, this overlooked celebration remains a pivotal moment in Florida’s rich history.

To honor this legacy, a towering 250-foot cross stands tall at the very spot where the Spaniards made their historic landing, a steadfast monument to Florida’s forgotten feast.

https://nypost.com/2023/11/23/lifestyle ... historian/

[rflash8]

Meet Aitana: Sexy Spanish model makes $11k a month thanks to her racy photos — but she isn’t real



Aitana Lopez is a vivacious, 25-year-old pink-haired model who has garnered a massive online following thanks to her stunning looks.

But there’s a catch: She isn’t real, although her income sure is.

The buxom babe is actually a bot dreamed up by Spanish designer Rubén Cruz, who uses artificial intelligence to help make thew animated model look as lifelike as possible.

Thanks to Aitana’s lusty online fans, the designer is now making a fortune, netting up to $10,900 per month.

“We did it so that we could make a better living and not be dependent on other people who have egos, who have manias, or who just want to make a lot of money by posing,” Rubén Cruz, told EuroNews.

The innovative designer is the founder of the AI model agency The Clueless.

Last summer, the idea to design Aitana came to Cruz after he struggled with the logistics of working with real-life influencers.

Now, a team from his AI agency meticulously curates Aitana and her life with the help of Photoshop, deciding what she’ll do, where she’ll go and which content to post — all without the hassle of working with human creators.







People “follow lives, not images,” Cruz explained, so her creators were tasked to “tell a story” with her content, since she isn’t a real person.

“A lot of thought has gone into Aitana,” Cruz said. “We created her based on what society likes most. We thought about the tastes, hobbies and niches that have been trending in recent years.”

Aitana is billed as a Barcelona-based fitness influencer and gamer, who even has a star sign (she’s a Scorpio, for the record).

Aitana has amassed an Instagram following of 132,000, and Cruz and his team can now charge up to $1,000 for an advertisement featuring her image,

Fans also fork out money for sultry images of the busty bot on the subscription-based platform Fanvue — an OnlyFans rival that has an array of profiles featuring AI models.



She’s so eerily real that high profile celebrities will slide into her DMs, not realizing she’s computer-made.

“One day, a well-known Latin American actor texted to ask her out,” Cruz dished. “He had no idea Aitana didn’t exist.”

Due to Aitana’s massive success, the designers crafted a second model, Maia, who they described as “a little more shy.”

They have now received an influx of requests from brands who want their own AI models.

“They want to have an image that is not a real person and that represents their brand values, so that there are no continuity problems if they have to fire someone or can no longer count on them,” Cruz explained.

The companies can also cut costs by employing a virtual influencer, rather than people like mogul Kim Kardashian or TikToker Alix Earle, who are rumored to charge a pretty penny for brand deals.

The Clueless thinks their digitized strategy could lower market prices and provide smaller companies the opportunity to create ad campaigns they otherwise would not be able to afford.

While the agency’s models pander to societal beauty norms — which have been criticized for promoting unrealistic body standards and hyper-sexualizing women — Cruz argues that it’s necessary for the models’ success.

“If we don’t follow this aesthetic, brands won’t be interested,” he said. “To change this system, you have to change the vision of the brands. The world in general is sexualized.”

But that has not been the only hiccup in artificial intelligence integration — the tech is used to cheat on schoolwork, create scarily realistic deepfakes and generate inappropriate images of underage girls.

Because of generative AI’s rapidly advancing capabilities — for example, a fake photo of a Pentagon explosion caused mass confusion earlier this year — some platforms have begun putting disclaimers on content that is created with the software.

[PennySerenade]

Why this baby emperor penguin is so special



They heard noise and detected movement from inside the egg.

But then nothing … for three long days.

Luckily a team of zoo specialists was on hand to give this tiny dinosaur descendant a helping hand.

On Sept. 12, SeaWorld San Diego, in California, celebrated the first hatching of an emperor penguin chick since 2010.

“This is the most exciting thing we’ll do all year, potentially all decade,” said Justin Brackett, curator of birds at SeaWorld San Diego, in a video provided by the marine life theme park.

In the wild, emperor penguins live exclusively in Antarctica.

SeaWorld says it’s the only zoo in the Western Hemisphere where anyone can see emperor penguins outside their natural habitat.

These penguins lay just one egg per year and this egg was laid on July 7.

“Their breeding activity is quite different than most penguin species,” wrote David Ainley, an ecologist based in Los Gatos, California, in an email to CBC Kids News

“In the wild, only the male incubates the egg.”

Incubating an egg means to keep it warm until it develops enough to hatch.

In this case, the mother did not transfer the egg to the father, so staff took the egg into their care to help it incubate.



The little chick had a tough time making her way into the world.

Emperor penguins lay eggs with very thick shells to help them survive in the harsh, cold conditions in the Antarctic.

It takes a lot of energy for a chick to break through its shell.

On Sept. 7, the chick started to stir and make noise from inside the egg.

The zoo specialists watched for 72 hours, but the bird didn’t make any progress in breaking through its eggshell.

The team helped by poking a wee hole in the egg.

From there the team identified that she had a beak malformation that would have kept her from hatching on her own.

Over the next two days, they helped her out of the shell.

Because of how rare the emperor penguins are outside of their natural habitat, this was a big moment for the staff.



After she hatched, SeaWorld San Diego launched an online vote for the public to choose her name.

The choices were Pearl, Pandora or Astrid.

More than 29,000 people voted and the winning name got more than half of the votes.

They announced the baby chick’s name on Nov. 9.

Which name do you think won?

Click play to see her hatch & find out what her name is!

[goldie0608]

Family Celebrates Thanksgiving After Dad Gets Double Organ Transplant from Sons: 'Amazing Gift'

When Jon Montgomery needed a kidney and a liver transplant, his sons offered to be his donors — now they're grateful to be able to spend the holiday together



Jon Montgomery was on a waiting list to receive both a liver and a kidney transplant when his two sons learned they could become living donors. Together, they saved their father's life.

“I'm always thanking them,” Jon Montgomery, 55, of East Liverpool, Ohio, tells PEOPLE. “It's just an unbelievable blessing.”

This Thanksgiving, the family is grateful to be able to spend the holiday together — and they're sharing their story in the hopes of encouraging others to become organ donors.

The family learned Montgomery's liver and kidney were failing two years ago when without trying, he lost 75 lbs.

“We panicked,” says the dad, who owns a dental laboratory. “How do you survive two organs failing? It was just a terrible time."

Montgomery was placed on the deceased donor transplant list as his health continued to fail.

While he was hospitalized, his family learned about the possibility of a living donor transplant. Immediately, his son Jonathan volunteered to donate a portion of his liver, while his other son Christopher volunteered to give his dad a kidney.

Both brothers emphasize that their dad did not ask them for anything — becoming a donor was something they wanted to do.

"There was no question," Christopher, a 24-year-old dental student at the University of Pittsburgh. "I want to keep him around as long as I can...I want him to know my children. I couldn't imagine life without him."



Both brothers are thankful that they matched their dad.

“My dad's one of my best friends,"adds Jonathan, 25, who is earning a PhD in biochemistry at Ohio State. "I'm going to do whatever it takes to make sure he's okay, because I know he would do the same for us."

On August 1, a life-saving double transplant was performed at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

“They're a very remarkable family,” says Dr. Abhinav Humar, Chief of Transplantation at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. “A very close-knit family where the sons are obviously willing to do anything for their father.”

After the transplant, Montgomery didn't even have words to thank his sons. “All I could do was just hug them,” he says.

“My two boys, they sacrificed so much to do this for me, but two weeks later, three weeks later, they're living their lives again," he adds, going on to praise their "amazing gift."

His sons hope others will sign up to be living donors too.

“You took a couple weeks out of your life to change somebody else's? It's worth it every time,” Jonathan says. “Before we knew that we were able to donate, things were very bleak. We were scared, we didn't know what was going to happen."

"Since the surgery, when I look at my dad and I can see the smile on his face, it's so genuine. You can tell that he is just so happy now," the 25-year-old adds. "He's back."

[Alessa9]

Robbery suspect’s colorful underwear helped police arrest him, authorities say

NEW YORK (AP) — A pair of multicolored briefs peeking out above a robbery suspect’s low-slung trousers helped police arrest him more than a year later, federal authorities in New York said Wednesday.

The robbery happened at a tobacco shop in Queens on Sept. 14, 2022. Three masked men got out of a Mazda and entered the store, according to a complaint filed in federal court last week.

Two of the men pointed guns at employees and customers while the third emptied the cash register and grabbed merchandise and employees’ cellphones, the complaint said. The robbers fled in the Mazda

Surveillance videos that were disseminated through the media showed the third robber wearing brightly colored briefs with a large letter R in white and the year 1990 in yellow.

Man Keeps Rock For Years Thinking It's Gold. It Turned Out to Be Far More Valuable.


The Maryborough meteorite. (Museums Victoria)

In 2015, David Hole was prospecting in Maryborough Regional Park near Melbourne, Australia.

Armed with a metal detector, he discovered something out of the ordinary – a very heavy, reddish rock resting in some yellow clay.

He took it home and tried everything to open it, sure that there was a gold nugget inside the rock – after all, Maryborough is in the Goldfields region, where the Australian gold rush peaked in the 19th century.

To break open his find, Hole tried a rock saw, an angle grinder, a drill, even dousing the thing in acid. However, not even a sledgehammer could make a crack. That's because what he was trying so hard to open was no gold nugget.

As he found out years later, it was a rare meteorite.

"It had this sculpted, dimpled look to it," Melbourne Museum geologist Dermot Henry told The Sydney Morning Herald in 2019.

"That's formed when they come through the atmosphere, they are melting on the outside, and the atmosphere sculpts them."

Unable to open the 'rock', but still intrigued, Hole took the nugget to the Melbourne Museum for identification.

"I've looked at a lot of rocks that people think are meteorites," Henry told Channel 10 News.

In fact, after 37 years of working at the museum and examining thousands of rocks, Henry said only two of the offerings had ever turned out to be real meteorites.

This was one of the two.


The Maryborough meteorite, with a slab cut from the mass. (Melbourne Museum)

"If you saw a rock on Earth like this, and you picked it up, it shouldn't be that heavy," Melbourne Museum geologist, Bill Birch, explained to The Sydney Morning Herald.

The researchers published a scientific paper describing the 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite, which they called Maryborough after the town near where it was found.

It weighs a whopping 17 kilograms (37.5 pounds), and after using a diamond saw to cut off a small slice, the researchers discovered its composition had a high percentage of iron, making it a H5 ordinary chondrite.

Once open, you can also see the tiny crystallized droplets of metallic minerals throughout it, called chondrules.

"Meteorites provide the cheapest form of space exploration. They transport us back in time, providing clues to the age, formation, and chemistry of our Solar System (including Earth)," said Henry.

"Some provide a glimpse at the deep interior of our planet. In some meteorites, there is 'stardust' even older than our Solar System, which shows us how stars form and evolve to create elements of the periodic table.

"Other rare meteorites contain organic molecules such as amino acids; the building blocks of life."


A slab cut from the Maryborough meteorite. (Birch et al., PRSV, 2019)

Although the researchers don't yet know where the meteorite came from and how long it may have been on Earth, they do have some guesses.

Our Solar System was once a spinning pile of dust and chondrite rocks. Eventually gravity pulled a lot of this material together into planets, but the leftovers mostly ended up in a huge asteroid belt.

"This particular meteorite most probably comes out of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and it's been nudged out of there by some asteroids smashing into each other, then one day it smashes into Earth," Henry told Channel 10 News.

Carbon dating suggests the meteorite has been on Earth between 100 and 1,000 years, and there's been a number of meteor sightings between 1889 and 1951 that could correspond to its arrival on our planet.

The researchers argue that the Maryborough meteorite is much rarer than gold, making it far more valuable to science. It's one of only 17 meteorites ever recorded in the Australian state of Victoria, and it's the second largest chondritic mass, after a huge 55-kilogram specimen identified in 2003.

"This is only the 17th meteorite found in Victoria, whereas there's been thousands of gold nuggets found," Henry told Channel 10 News.

"Looking at the chain of events, it's quite, you might say, astronomical it being discovered at all."
It's not even the first meteorite to take a few years to make it to a museum. In a particularly amazing story ScienceAlert covered in 2018, one space rock took 80 years, two owners, and a stint as a doorstop before finally being revealed for what it truly was.

Now is probably as good a time as any to check your backyard for particularly heavy and hard-to-break rocks – you might be sitting on a metaphorical gold mine.

The study was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria.

[Misstee]

Momentous Discovery Shows Neanderthals Could Produce Human-Like Speech
25 November 2023
By Michelle Starr



La Chapelle-aux-Saints 1, one of the Neanderthal skulls scanned for the study. (Eunostos/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)



Our Neanderthal cousins had the capacity to both hear and produce the speech sounds of modern humans, a study published in 2021 found.

Based on a detailed analysis and digital reconstruction of the structure of the bones in their skulls, the study settled one aspect of a decades-long debate over the linguistic capabilities of Neanderthals.

"This is one of the most important studies I have been involved in during my career," said palaeoanthropologist Rolf Quam of Binghamton University back in 2021.

"The results are solid and clearly show the Neanderthals had the capacity to perceive and produce human speech. This is one of the very few current, ongoing research lines relying on fossil evidence to study the evolution of language, a notoriously tricky subject in anthropology."

The notion that Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalis) were much more primitive than modern humans (Homo sapiens) is outdated, and in recent years a growing body of evidence demonstrates that they were much more intelligent than we once assumed. They developed technology, crafted tools, created art and held funerals for their dead.

Whether they actually spoke with each other, however, has remained a mystery. Their complex behaviors seem to suggest that they would have had to be able to communicate, but some scientists have contended that only modern humans have ever had the mental capacity for complex linguistic processes.

Whether that's the case is going to be very difficult to prove one way or another, but the first step would be to determine if Neanderthals could produce and perceive sounds in the optimal range for speech-based communication.




3D model of modern human (left) and Neanderthal (right) ear anatomy. (Mercedes Conde-Valverde)



So, using a bunch of really old bones, this is what a team led by palaeoanthropologist Mercedes Conde-Valverde of the University of Alcalá in Spain set out to do.

They took high-resolution CT scans of the skulls of five Neanderthals to create virtual 3D models of the ear structures. They also modeled the ear structures in Homo sapiens, and a much older fossil - the skull of a Sima de los Huesos hominin, also known as the Sima hominin, the ancestor of Neanderthals, dating back to around 430,000 years ago.

A model of the hearing capacity of these structures from the field of auditory bioengineering was then employed to understand frequency range to which the ears were most sensitive, also known as the occupied bandwidth. For modern humans, the occupied bandwidth is the human vocal range.

The team found that Neanderthals had better hearing in the 4 to 5 kilohertz range than the Sima ancestor, and that the Neanderthal occupied bandwidth was closer to that of modern humans than that of the Sima hominin. This optimization strongly suggests that Neanderthals needed to hear each other's voices.




The occupied bandwidth of modern humans (blue), Neanderthals (grey) and the Sima hominin (red). (Conde-Valverde et al., Nat. Ecol. Evol., 2021)



"This really is the key," Conde-Valverde said.

"The presence of similar hearing abilities, particularly the bandwidth, demonstrates that the Neanderthals possessed a communication system that was as complex and efficient as modern human speech."

Interestingly, the occupied bandwidth of Neanderthals extended into frequencies above 3 kilohertz that are primarily involved in consonant production. This, the team noted, would distinguish Neanderthal vocalizations from the vowel-based vocalizations of non-human primates and other mammals.

"Most previous studies of Neanderthal speech capacities focused on their ability to produce the main vowels in English spoken language," Quam said.

"However, we feel this emphasis is misplaced, since the use of consonants is a way to include more information in the vocal signal and it also separates human speech and language from the communication patterns in nearly all other primates. The fact that our study picked up on this is a really interesting aspect of the research and is a novel suggestion regarding the linguistic capacities in our fossil ancestors."

Having the anatomy capable of producing and hearing speech doesn't necessarily mean that Neanderthals had the cognitive ability to do so, the researchers cautioned. But, they point out, we have no evidence that the Sima hominins exhibited the complex symbolic behavior, such as funerals and art, that we've found associated with Neanderthals.

This difference in behavior parallels the difference in hearing capacity between Neanderthals and Sima hominins, which, the researchers say, suggests a coevolution of complex behaviors and the ability to communicate vocally.

"Our results," they wrote in their paper, "together with recent discoveries indicating symbolic behaviors in Neanderthals, reinforce the idea that they possessed a type of human language, one that was very different in its complexity and efficiency from any other oral communication system used by non-human organisms on the planet."

The research has been published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

A version of this article was first published in March 2021.

[lush]

World’s Fastest Non-Motorized Sport Lets You Reach Speeds of Over 310 Mph
100623*

Speed skydiving is an extreme sport that requires practicians to jump out of an airplane and try to reach and maintain the highest possible terminal velocity.

Invented in the late 1990s, speed skydiving is recognized as the fastest non-motorized sport on Earth. Competitions begin with skydivers jumping out of an airplane between 13,000ft and 14,000ft (3,962m to 4,267m), then turning 90° from the direction in which the aircraft is traveling, alternately left and right. Next, competitors go into free fall head-first towards the earth, while trying to be as aerodynamic as possible. It is within this stage that they reach the highest speeds. Depending on a variety of factors, including body mass, orientation, and weather conditions, competitors can reach speeds of over 500 km/h (310 mph).


Photo: Filipe Dos Santos Mendes/Unsplash

World speed skydiving champion Kyle Lobpries compared the sensation of speed skydiving with what slipping into a wormhole in a sci-fi movie must feel like, “where all the stars get blurred and turn into lines.” Using only gravity as fuel, speed skydivers achieve speeds greater than those of Formula One cars, with the record for the fastest male skydive currently sitting at 529.77 km/h, and the one for fastest female skydive at 491.99 km/h. Both records were set in October of 2022.

A lot of people believe that the main factor in speed skydiving is weight, but the most successful athletes in this sport will tell you that there is a lot more to it than that. Achieving and maintaining the best posture while literally falling towards the ground at breakneck speeds is essential, but extremely hard to do.

“You get to a certain speed in the dive where you start to wobble,” speed skydiver Maxine Tate told CNN. “And you have to push through that wobble, being very relaxed, but still maintaining body form and not reacting to the wobbles. It’s a real mental and physical game.”

“I’d say that 95 percent of how fast you can go is your skill at staying nice and smooth and going as straight down as possible,” Kyle Lobpries confirmed.



So how do you accurately measure the speed of a human falling out of the sky? Well, in the case of speed skydiving, you need something extremely accurate, but luckily modern technology is a big help. Every speed skydiving competitor uses a FlySight speed measuring device (SMD) on their helmet. Nowadays, these devices use GPS technology, but they previously relied on barometric measuring.

Although physics experts will tell you that terminal velocity will reach its theoretic peak when the force of the air’s resistance becomes equal to the gravitational pull, making further acceleration impossible, skydivers believe that is no cause for concern right now, simply because of the skill involved to reach terminal velocity.



“Because there’s so much skill involved in flying your body, I don’t think that anyone has reached that yet, including myself,” Kyle Lobpries said. “And we have a lot of upward potential before we decide that the sport is limited by terminal velocities. I still think that the skill of flying your body is the main determining factor in who wins.”