An expedition team in Antarctica has successfully cleared away layers of thick ice from inside the hut of the famous Australian explorer Sir Douglas Mawson, revealing a century-old frozen bowl of peas, books on the shelves, candles, matches and “old-style woolen underwear”. The team used picks and chainsaws to remove the ice that had filled the main living quarters used […]
Read more
For centuries, explorers and treasure hunters have searched in vain for the ancient lost White City the legendary home of a long lost Central American civilization. Now American and Honduran researchers think they’ve finally found the pre-Columbian settlement deep in the Honduran rain forest. The ruins of La Ciudad Blanca were first identified in 2012 by an aerial survey that […]
Read more
“When the Japanese mend broken objects, they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold. They believe that when something’s suffered damage and has a history it becomes more beautiful.” – Barbara Bloom
Read more
“There is no inevitability in history except as men make it.” – Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter
Read more
It’s official: There really was a giant, flightless bird with a head the size of a horse’s wandering about in the winter twilight of the high Arctic some 53 million years ago. The confirmation comes from a new study by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and the University of Colorado Boulder that describes the first and […]
Read more
Native Americans’ Siberian Roots have been documented in recent research. The skeleton of a girl who died over 12k years ago has provided DNA confirming evidence that Native Americans must have originally migrated from Siberia. Analysis of the DNA showed a genetic marker commonly found in today’s Native American population. Human geneticist Chris Tyler says, “From archaeological, genetic, and […]
Read more
While restoring one of the exploration huts in Antarctica, Conservators of the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust discovered a 100 year old box that turned out to be a remarkable treasure. It contained 22 never-before-seen cellulose nitrate negatives documenting the life of Antarctic explorers a 100 years back. Preserved in a block of ice, this 100 year old box of negatives surprisingly […]
Read more
“We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage — almost as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence. And surely this is, often enough, an adequate description. But history is also the narratives of grace, the recountings of those blessed and inexplicable moments […]
Read more
When the atmosphere had much higher levels of carbon dioxide, Antarctica was as warm as California. New research has revealed that 430 million to 50 million years ago, temperatures on the frozen continent averaged 57 degrees Fahrenheit, with part of the surrounding Pacific Ocean reaching up to 72 degrees. In this ancient era, known as the Eocene epoch, carbon dioxide […]
Read more
Some new thinking may have brought astronomers a step closer to solving the mystery of how our moon formed. Researchers have long believed that the moon was cleaved from a Mars-sized planet that collided with Earth some 4.5 billion years ago. Yet recent tests of lunar rock samples suggest that the moon’s chemical makeup is too similar to Earth’s to […]
Read more