Dead Sea Scroll Ten Commandments on Display in Israel are Oldest Complete Copy on Record

""The world’s oldest complete copy of the Ten Commandments is going on rare display at Israel’s leading museum in an exhibit tracing civilization’s most pivotal moments.

The 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scroll, from a collection of the world’s most ancient biblical manuscripts discovered near the Dead Sea east of Jerusalem, has never before been publicly displayed in Israel and has only been shown in brief exhibits abroad, said Pnina Shor of the Israel Antiquities Authority.

The manuscript is so brittle that it will only be on display at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem for two weeks before it is returned to a secure, pitch-black, climate-controlled storage facility there.

It is one of 14 ancient objects displayed in A Brief History of Humankind, an exhibit of historical objects spanning hundreds of thousands of years.

“When you are thinking about universal law, the universal principle of ethics ... this is the first law that comes to your mind,” exhibit curator Tania Coen-Uzzielli said.

The exhibit includes tools used in an elephant hunt from 1.5m years ago, the oldest known remains of a communal bonfire from 800,000 years ago, skulls from the oldest remains of a family burial and the world’s oldest complete sickle — a 9,000-year-old object that represents the transition from hunter-gatherers to settled civilization working the land.""

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/may/06/ten-commandments-dead-sea-scroll-to-go-on-display-for-two-weeks-in-israel

Ancient Roman Nanotechnology Found in Goblet Chalice Stuns Experts

""A Roman goblet could be an 1,600-year-old example of nanotechnology, according to experts. The mysterious Lycurgus Cup is made of dichroic glass and appears green when lit from the front and turns bright red when a light is shone on it from behind.

The chalice, which is on display at The British Museum, London, uses similar techniques to modern nanotechnology - the manipulation of materials on an atomic and molecular scale - which scientists believe could be used for everything from diagnosing diseases to identifying bioharzards at airports.

Scientists only solved the mystery of the color-changing chalice in 1990, after being baffled by its behavior for decades, Smithsonian Magazine reported. 

After putting broken fragments of glass under a microscope, scientists found the Romans had impregnated it with particles of sliver and gold, which they ground down to tiny proportions - around 50 nanometres in diameter - a thousand times smaller than a grain of salt.

The precise amount of metals has lead experts to hail the Romans as 'nanotechnology pioneers' who really knew what they were doing. Archaeologist Ian Freestone, of University College London, who researched the cup and its unusual optical properties, called its construction an 'amazing feat'.

The cup appears to change color as when light hits it as the flecks of metals' electrons vibrate in ways that seem to change the color, depending on where the observer is looking at it. The chalice was used to hold drink on special occasions and experts believe that when it was filled, the behavior of the vibrating electrons changed, as well as it's color.

Gang Logan Liu, an engineer and nanotechnology expert at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign told the publication: 'The Romans knew how to make and use nano-particles for beautiful art.'

Of course scientists could not investigate the effects of the one-of-a-kind cup by filling it with liquid. Instead, they reportedly imprinted billions of little wells onto a piece of plastic the size of a postage stamp and sprayed them with gold and silver nano-particles to essentially re-create the special configuration of the cup.

The scientists then poured different liquids into the wells to note the effect they had. When they filled a well with water it turned the surface light blue, while pouring oil inside turned it bright red.""

http://humansarefree.com/2013/08/proof-of-nanotechnology-in-ancient-rome.html

Millennium Aged Buddha Statue Conceals Mummified Monk Undergoing DNA Testing

""A Buddhist statue exhibited at The Netherlands' Drents Museum has been revealed to be harboring a secret within, housing a mummified monk in its hollows for the last 1,000 years.

Taken to Amersfoort's Meander Medical Center, the statue underwent a full CT scan and had samples taken from inside it. The mummified monk is believed to be Liuquan, a Buddhist master from the Chinese Medidation School. The discovery of the statue is of great cultural importance but it was made even more remarkable with the mummified monk inside.

The results of the CT scan also offered something more curious. Aside from samples yet to be identified, the results also showed paper scraps in spaces where the organs used to be, all inscribed with ancient Chinese characters.

Bone material was also collected from the mummified monk and will be subjected to DNA testing.

Liuquan died around 1100 AD and is thought to be an example of self-mummification, a grueling process undertaken to essentially become a "living Buddha." Though mummification essentially ends life, it is not believed to be death but rather the achievement of a highly advanced state of spirituality. To others, it's a state of higher enlightenment.

Self-mummification begins with a 1,000-day regimen of just eating seeds and nuts with water. This is followed by another 1,000 days of consuming just pine bark, roots and a special Chinese lacquer tree tea, a toxic concoction to prevent bacteria and maggots from festering the body.

After the special diet is completed, a monk will be sealed in a tomb. After another 1,000 days have passed, the tomb will be unsealed. If a monk has achieved mummification, it is taken out and venerated in temples. Those who failed are kept entombed, forever gaining the respect of followers for having attempted self-mummification.""

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http://www.techtimes.com/articles/34773/20150223/mummified-monk-discovered-hidden-inside-1000-year-old-statue-of-buddha.htm

Origins of Snake Ancestors Lengthened by Aeons, New Found Fossils Now Date as Far Back a 167 Million Years

According to research published Tuesday in Nature Communications, we may need to slither back the clock on snake evolution.

In fact, we may have been pretty wrong about just how snakes evolved from the common ancestors they share with modern lizards. Until now, the oldest-known snake fossils were only about 100 million years old. The new study presents not one, but four new specimens that are much older -- dating back as many as 167 million years -- found in neglected museum collections around the world. And these older fossils show the long, thin skulls that distinguish snakes from lizards today. Many scientists previously believed that snakes became long and limbless before they evolved their distinctive heads.

"The skulls of these animals are much more snakelike than even I thought they would have been," said study author Michael Caldwell, a paleontologist at the University of Alberta. "Which means that this quality of snake-ness had clearly occurred much earlier than we'd thought."

That's not so shocking when you look at lizard evolution.

"We can recognize that most of the major groups of lizards were already present at the time," he said. So it seems that snakes were evolving at much the same pace, as opposed to undergoing some rapid deviation from lizards 100 million years ago.

The new fossils are just small fragments of snake -- enough to show that they had snake-like heads, but not much else. Caldwell feels fairly certain that they still have had four limbs at the time, but can't be sure.

Caldwell and his colleagues found the new specimens by digging through museum drawers instead of archaeological sites. Many museums have untapped fossil and skeleton collections just waiting for specialized researchers to examine them.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2015/01/28/museum-fossil-find-pushes-snake-origins-back-by-65-million-years/

Urban Archaeologist Solves Mystery of Missing Civil War's Submarines?

""A local historian and urban archaeologist thinks he's solved a mystery: What happened to four Confederate submersibles known to be in Shreveport the last two years of the Civil War, but missing in action since then.

Marty Loschen, director of the Spring Street Museum in downtown Shreveport, thinks he's found remnants of the hand-propelled craft in the banks of a branch of Cross Bayou about a half-mile west of where the Confederate Navy had a shipyard. At Cross Bayou's mouth on Red River it was home to the leaky ironclad CSS Missouri and a fast packet, the Webb, whose presence overshadowed the humbler underwater vessels.

Several months ago, before recent rains raised water levels on Cross Bayou and its feeder streams, Loschen and his brother found decades-old rusted metal and some oddly formed tree roots whose shape suggested they had grown over something curved that had long rotted or rusted away. The site was on a bank revealed by low water on Bowman's chute, near Bowman and Dowling Streets in Allendale north of the Canaan Village apartments.

"It's breathtakingly beautiful out there," says Loschen, who spends much of his time exploring the more remote, forgotten and forbidding parts of old Shreveport. He points to the 1864 Venable Map of the defenses of Shreveport which shows several small buildings near where he found the artifacts.

"There's your sub base," he said. "On the Venable map there's an island out there. My theory is if you're going to have a clandestine sub base, you're going to put it out there. Look, there are structures out there, near what I found out beached — it has to be."

He's waiting for another period of low water.

"It's under at least 10 feet of water now," he said. "I'm trying to wait for the water to go down to go see those subs."

Famed diver Ralph Wilbanks, who found the wreck of the submarine CSS Hunley off Charleston Harbor in 1995, visited Shreveport twice in the last 15 years to search for the local submarines at the behest of best-selling author Clive Cussler, who also drove the search for the Hunley.

Wilbanks and a team of well-known fellow diver-researchers performed sonar and magnetometer searches of Red River and parts of Cross Bayou and Cross Lake, finding traces of old trucks from the flapper era, a dock that once served as a ferry link between Shreveport and Bossier City before bridges were built across the Red, and the remains of a Civil War gunboat, the Iron Duke.

But Wilbanks never went as far back into the murkier and shallower waters of Cross Bayou near where it traces its way through Ledbetter Heights and Allendale on its way to Cross Lake. Loschen's sub site is just west of where Wilbanks' surveys stopped.""

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http://www.shreveporttimes.com/story/news/local/2015/01/23/civil-war-subs-lost/22232231/