Images: ‘Lost’ New England Archaeology Sites Revealed in LiDAR Photos

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Photos:

By Jeanna Bryner, Managing Editor   |   January 16, 2014 02:21pm ET

– See more at: http://www.livescience.com/42638-lost-new-england-archaeology-lidar-photos.html#sthash.7AtQOIud.dpuf

Stone Walls Come into View

Credit: Katharine Johnson and William Ouimet, Journal of Archaeological Science

Examinations of airborne scans, using light detection and ranging (LiDAR), of three New England towns have revealed networks of old stone walls, building foundations, old roads, dams and other features, many of which long were forgotten. Here, stone walls are yellow, abandoned roads are red, and building foundations are outlined by green squares.

Shady Landscape

Credit: Katharine Johnson and William Ouimet, Journal of Archaeological Science

These stone walls and other archaeological features could not be seen with traditional aerial photographs shown here. This figure illustrates the advantage of LiDAR data with a point spacing of 1 meter or better over traditional map views of the landscape for archaeological purposes. The images here show leaf-off (left) and leaf-on (right) aerial photographs with a modern road superimposed through the northeast corner of the image for reference (National Agricultural Imagery Program, 2012).

Credit: Katharine Johnson and William Ouimet, Journal of Archaeological Science

In addition to building foundations, LiDAR allows scientists to see other archaeological features such as dams, mills, stone walls and old roads. Here, a dam and walls in Ashford, Conn., that were once part of a mill complex.

Sawmill

Credit: Katharine Johnson and William Ouimet, Journal of Archaeological Science

This race for an 18th-century sawmill in Tiverton, R.I., shows up in the LiDAR image (right).

Stone Walls

Credit: Katharine Johnson and William Ouimet, Journal of Archaeological Science

Here, a stone wall showing different initial construction heights, with the LiDAR image on the right.

Preservation Stage

Credit: Katharine Johnson and William Ouimet, Journal of Archaeological Science

Here, a stone wall at various stages of preservation, with the LiDAR image on the right.

Power of LiDAR

Credit: UConn Libraries Map and Geographic Information Center (MAGIC) and Connecticut State Library

“LiDAR is not only a powerful tool on its own; it can also be used in conjunction with the many types of historical documents available to those performing research in this geographic area,” Johnson and Ouimet write in the Journal of Archaeological Science. As an example, this 1934 aerial photograph taken of an area in Preston, Conn., shows a farmstead — cleared fields, forest, stone walls or fences, a house, a barn and other outbuildings, and a road running through the farm. Check out the next slide with the 2012 aerial image.

Hidden from View

Credit: Connecticut Environmental Conditions Online (CTECO)

Here, an aerial photograph of the area from 2012 shows the farmstead has been completely abandoned and overgrown by forest. Check out the next slide showing the LiDAR image taken of this overgrown forest.

Farm Abandonment

Credit: 2010 USDA NRCS

In a LiDAR image of the long-lost farmstead in Preston, Conn., reveals features such as building foundations, stone walls and an old road. “Ongoing research suggests preliminarily that individual abandoned fields might impact the modern vegetation patterns. This is just one example of farm abandonment, a process that took place on a much smaller scale in Ashford, where entire portions of the town that were once cleared are now completely forested,” Johnson and Ouimet write in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

 

How to shelter from fallout after a nuclear attack on your city

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ANNALEE NEWITZ on IO9

Terrorists have detonated a low-yield nuclear warhead in your city. How long should you hide, and where, to avoid the worst effects of radioactive fallout? We talked to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory atmospheric scientist Michael Dillon to find out.

Yesterday Dillon published a paper on this topic in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A. He’s spent his career researching how the government should respond to disasters with an airborne component, whether that’s a chemical accident, an epidemic, or nuclear fallout. After poring over dozens of studies on how fallout behaves, and analyzing as many factors as possible related to urban detonations, he’s come up with a disaster plan that he hopes can be implemented by governments from the local to the federal level.

The best part of Dillon’s fallout plan is that it’s aimed at people like you and I, who won’t have access to information about wind direction and blast magnitude. It’s a plan that works even if all you know is that a nuclear bomb has gone off in your city.

This Is Not A Cold War Bomb

When I spoke to Dillon about his work, he was quick to point out that his disaster plan is still theoretical. Nobody has yet had a chance to study a low-yield nuclear blast in a real-world city — “thankfully, these are rare events,” Dillon said. But as the threat of a terrorist nuclear attack grows more likely than a Cold War scenario, it’s crucial for cities to have plans in place. And that means a major paradigm shift in how we think about nuclear attack.

The classic nuclear attack scenario that most of us imagine comes straight out of the Cold War — or movies like Terminator. Multiple megaton-class bombs go off all over the world. The results are catastrophic, with whole regions burned to a crisp, mass deaths, and a fallout plume that stretches hundreds of miles. But the scenario we’re more likely to encounter today involves bombs that are anywhere from .1 kilotons to 10 kilotons. They’re small compared to the bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and infinitesimal compared to the warheads we had in our Cold War arsenals.

“These events are more like a Katrina-level disaster,” Dillon said. “Your city has the potential to survive, and that’s what we’re planning for.”

The chart below gives you a sense of the damage radius of the bombs that Dillon studies, as opposed to Cold War weapons. The worst damage occurs in the pink areas (psi stands for pounds-force per square inch, and is used to measure blast force). People inside the pink dotted line run the risk of getting pretty severe burns, and those outside are more at risk for doses of radiation and injury from fire or other blast damage. What’s most important, though, is that you can see the range of radiation danger is much smaller with today’s nuclear bomb threats. A 1 kiloton warhead will pose a radiation danger up to 2 kilometers away from ground zero. Compare that to a 10 megaton, Cold War bomb, which irradiates areas as much as 40 kilometers away.

So you can appreciate why a nuclear attack today doesn’t have to mean instant death for everyone around — and could even be something that your city would recover from.

Taken from the Student Guide to Federal Nuclear Detonation Response Planning

What To Do When the Bomb Goes Off

If the bomb goes off and you are unhurt in the initial blast, you need to worry about protection from radioactive fallout. Because we’re not in a Cold War world anymore, Dillon said, “You don’t need a specific fallout shelter to get the protection you need.” You just have to be aware of what kinds of buildings will provide adequate shelter and which won’t.

Emergency responders measure the effectiveness of a fallout shelter on the “PF” scale (you can see a FEMA guide about that here), but Dillon is assuming you won’t have PF numbers on all the buildings in your neighborhood. What you want to do is try to find what he calls “adequate shelter” in the first 30 minutes after the bomb goes off. What is adequate? Said Dillon:

Put as much mass and material weight between you and bomb as possible. Distance [from the blast] is good but weight — heavy things, concrete, large stacks of books, earth — those are good. Go underground, if you can get there. Again, you’re looking for concrete roofs and walls. Even just deep inside big buildings. A basement is the classic spot.

Think about your city. Where is the nearest adequate shelter to your home and your work? Is it a subway station? A library with thick concrete walls lined with books? Your basement? A large building with lots of interior rooms that are shielded by many walls? Dillon warns that you want to try to reach this place in 30 minutes, but don’t count on being able to drive there. Traffic may be at a standstill. Make plans that will allow you to walk or possibly bicycle to your adequate shelter.

Then the question becomes how long to wait in this shelter until it’s safe to go outside. In the movies, of course, we see all kinds of ridiculous scenarios, from people going outside within minutes to whole civilizations remaining underground for centuries. None of those are really accurate, said Dillon.

Your best bet is to stay until emergency responders come. Given that we’re talking about a low-yield bomb, which may have a blast radius of less than a mile, this isn’t a disaster that has taken out the nation’s power structure. Help will arrive soon. But let’s say nobody does come. Dillon says his personal preference would be to wait about 12-24 hours before going outside. But, he emphasized, “wait for emergency responders because they’ll help with an evacuation route.” You don’t want to jump out of your fallout shelter and walk right into the path of the radiation.

How Does Fallout Work?

My first reaction to Dillon’s advice was disbelief. I could be relatively safe walking out of a fallout shelter less than a day after the blast? The answer is yes, because the most immediate danger is from what’s called early fallout, which is comprised of radioactive particles that are heavy enough to fall within hours of the blast. They usually fall in zones fairly close to the blast, depending on wind direction and intensity.

Said Dillon, “It’s going to be falling for hours after the blast. These large particles are the most dangerous and have the highest levels of radiation. This is the stuff that’s going to make you physically sick immediately.” He contrasts the radiation sickness you can get from this early fallout to other kinds of illnesses, like cancer, that you can get many years after radiation exposure. Sheltering from fallout may not prevent cancer in the future, but it will prevent you from dying immediately of radiation exposure.

The other thing to keep in mind is that fallout isn’t a magical substance that floats everywhere and gets into everything. “There will exist a physical region that’s contaminated with highly radioactive particles,” he said. “After leaving the shelter, you want to exit that region.” That’s where emergency responders can help, of course — they’ll be able to tell you how to avoid that zone, and how far away to go. Certainly there are lighter fallout particles that can stay airborne for much longer than the early fallout, but those particles are not going to cause immediate radiation sickness — which is what you’re trying to avoid in the bomb’s aftermath.

Dillon added that the early, dangerous fallout also “decays really fast.” The “dangerous zone shrinks quickly, and it’s a lot safer to be outside in 24 hours” than it is an hour after the blast.

Our pop culture is still straining to catch up with a world where nuclear blasts result in a scenario more like Katrina than On the Beach. We’ve been trained to think of nuclear attack as the end of the world, but it’s like many other disasters: horrific, but something that we can survive. While we’re waiting for a movie that realistically depicts a low-yield nuclear attack in the post-Cold War era, we can start planning our real-life escape routes and shelters in the citiscapes around us. One day, that big ugly building downtown with the thick concrete walls could save your life.

Read the full scientific study in

New Class of Drug Shows Promise in the Treatment of Herpes

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ROBERT T. GONZALEZ on IO9

Genital herpes, one of the most common sexually transmitted infections, remains incurable. But now, newly published findings suggest one of the most promising experimental herpes- treatments in decades can significantly reduce the virus’ ability to replicate and spread, and do so without the side-effects of current therapies

Above: TEM micrograph of a herpes simplex virus | Via Wikimedia Commons

The preliminary investigation – the results of which are published in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine – sought to test the effectiveness of an experimental drug called pritelivir, by monitoring its ability to curb viral shedding in people with genital herpes. Viral shedding can occur even in the absence of physical symptoms of herpes simplex virus 1 and 2 (HSV-1 and 2), the two major members of the herpes family that infect humans. That the virus is transmissible, even in the absence of visible or otherwise noticeable symptoms, is one reason herpes is so common, affecting an estimated 50-million Americans, alone. Novel therapies like pritelivir show promise in their ability to not only decrease the length of time the virus is active, but also shrink the time window during which the infection is transmissible to sexual partners of people carrying the STI via viral shedding.

In the study, which the researchers admit was limited in size and duration, 156 HSV-2–positive test subjects were administered one of four doses of oral pritelivir for 28 days:

1. 5 mg/day

2. 25 mg/day

3. 75 mg/day

4. 400 mg, once-per-week

Swabs for HSV-2 testing were taken from the test subjects’ genital areas daily, and participants maintained a diary of viral symptoms. The researchers describe their results:

HSV shedding among placebo recipients was detected on 16.6% of days; shedding among pritelivir recipients was detected on 18.2% of days among those receiving 5 mg daily, 9.3% of days among those receiving 25 mg daily, 2.1% of days among those receiving 75 mg daily, and 5.3% of days among those receiving 400 mg weekly.

In other words, pritelivir was shown to be effective in a dose-dependent fashion; the more of the drug people took, the lower their rate of HSV shedding. The 400 mg/week dose, while less effective than the 75 mg daily dose, might be easier to administer, or for people to remember, than a daily pill. The authors continue:

The percentage of days with genital lesions was also significantly reduced, from 9.0% in the placebo group to 1.2% in both the group receiving 75 mg of pritelivir daily (relative risk, 0.13; 95% CI, 0.02 to 0.70) and the group receiving 400 mg weekly (relative risk, 0.13; 95% CI, 0.03 to 0.52). The rate of adverse events was similar in all groups.

“This study represents a major a step forward in herpes research,” said Dr. Stephen Tyring, a professor of dermatology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and coauthor of the study, in an interview with the Houston Chronicle. “The drug is still a few years from the market, but it should be a boon to the many people for whom existing therapy [like valacyclovir and acyclovir] has lost effectiveness.”

The study is published in the New England Journal of Medicine. For more general information, visit US News & World Report and The Houston Chronicle. More on helicase-primase inhbitors (the class of therapies to which pritelivir belongs) at MedScape.

Scientists set a new world record for the longest echo

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GEORGE DVORSKY on IO9

Working in a unique underground fuel depot, acoustic scientists fired a pistol to hear how long the reverb would last. The resulting echo rang on and on and on — completely obliterating the previous record.

One minute and 52 seconds. That’s the new standard, shattering the previous one — set in 1970 at the Hamilton Mausoleum in Lanarkshire — by an entire 15 seconds.

The test was conducted at the Inchindown tunnels located in Scotland near Invergordon. The oil tanks were dug into the hillside in the late 1930s to conceal and protect them from enemy attack, namely the Germans who were re-arming at the time. The tank was designed to hold 6.7 million gallons (25.5 million litres) of fuel and has walls 17.7 inches (45 cm) thick. The space is about twice the length of a football field, 30 feet (9 meters) wide and 44 feet (13.5 meters) high.

The shots (which were blanks) were fired by Allan Kilpatrick about a third of the way into one of the massive storage tanks. He works for the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS) and regularly conducts tours of the historic facility. The reverberations were recorded by microphones a third of the way down at the opposite end.

“Never before had I heard such a rush of echoes and reverberation,” he said. “My initial reaction was disbelief — the reverberation times were just too long.”

[BBC | Independent | Image: RCAHMS]

For Kids with Autism, Sights and Sounds Are Disjoined

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By Bahar Gholipour, Staff Writer   |   January 14, 2014 06:01pm ET

– See more at: http://www.livescience.com/42572-autism-sights-sounds-are-disjoined.html#sthash.nf3pE8Z6.dpuf

Human brain integrates signals simultaneously coming from different senses.
Credit: Johan Swanepoel | ShutterstockView full size image–  

The world for children with autism may resemble watching a movie with the audio out of sync. New research shows these children have trouble putting together what they see with what they hear, and that these deficits may underlie their speech and communication problems.

For most people, the signals arriving in the brain from the ears and the eyes within a time window of 100 to 200 milliseconds, are put together, to form one perception. For example, hearing the sound of a word and seeing the movement of lips together creates the perception of a spoken word.

The new study showed that in children with autism, the time window for binding signals together is wider, meaning that the brain integrates events that happened as much as half a second (500 milliseconds) apart, and should have been perceived as separate events, according to the study. The findings are published today (Jan. 14) in the Journal of Neuroscience.

“Children with autism have trouble integrating simultaneous information from their eyes and their ears,” said study researcher Stephen Camarata, professor of hearing and speech sciences at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. “It is like they are watching a foreign movie that was badly dubbed.”

What’s more, the researchers found that the wider the time window, the poorer a child’s ability to properly bind lip movements to speech — an important mechanism in language learning.

In children with autism, “when audio and visual signals happen during word learning, they don’t get linked properly,” said Camarata, who works with autistic children on their language and communication skills. “For example, when I point to a cup on my desk and say ‘cup’, the word gets bound to the image of the cup. But in children with autism, they might be looking at something else, and then the word cup comes and gets bound to the hat they are looking at.”

Illusions

The new study included 32 typical children and 32 high-functioning children with autism, ages 6 to 18. Researchers used simple auditory and visual stimuli, such as flashes and beeps played on a computer, and also more complex environmental stimuli, such as spoken words and a hammer hitting a nail. Scientists asked the participants to say whether the visual and auditory events happened at the same time.

In one set of experiments, the researchers used a sound-induced flash illusion, in which hearing two beeps deceives most people into thinking they saw two flashes when only one flash has appeared on a screen.[See video of the sound-induced flash illusion]

 

http://www.livescience.com/24223-how-sound-changes-sight-how-many-flashes-do-you-see-video.html

 

For the illusion to work, the beeps must happen nearly simultaneously with the flash, within a 200-millisecond window. If the beeps and the flash happen further apart, the auditory and visual events remain separated in the mind.

However, “in autism, if the flashes and the beeps are even as far as half a second apart, people may say there are two flashes,” Camarata said.

Next, the researchers used another well-known illusion, called the McGurk effect. In this audiovisual illusion, when the visual component of one sound is coupled with the auditory component of another sound, people bind these signals together and perceive a third sound. For example, when an actor says “ga-ga,” but the audio dubbed over his voice says “ba-ba,” people report hearing “da-da.” [10 Things You Didn’t Know About the Brain]

In the new study, children with autism were less likely than typical children to bind the information together and report a third sound. Moreover, the poorer their acuity in the first flash-beep task, the lesser was their ability to combine auditory and visual information in the second illusion. 

Building blocks of language

Insights from the results may help improve therapies for children with autism who have communication difficulties, the researchers said.

“If we can fix this deficit in early sensory function, then maybe we can see benefits in language and communication and social interactions,” said study researcher Mark Wallace, director of the Vanderbilt Brain Institute. 

Possible therapies may include training the brain to narrow the binding window, or, when teaching language, presenting the words in a way that they are very salient, Camarata said. “In other words, when I point to my coffee cup, I might do it over and over again, in a clear environment, increasing the chances that the word cup would get bound to the image of the cup,” he said.

Email Bahar Gholipour or follow her @alterwired. Follow us @LiveScience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.

 

Vivid Symmetrical Shapes of Algae Revealed in Stunning Photo

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by Nina Sen, LiveScience Contributor   |   January 14, 2014 12:53pm ET

A composite image showing a collection of single-cell fresh water algae, desmids. Dr. Igor Siwanowicz, Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm Research Campus in Virginia, created the composite image, which placed third in the 2013 Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition.
Credit: Dr. Igor Siwanowicz, Third Place, 2013 Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition® | www.olympusbioscapes.com

View full size image  

This amazing image isn’t a new type of flower. It’s a composite showing a collection of single-cell freshwater green algae called desmids. Dr. Igor Siwanowicz, Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm Research Campus in Virginia, created the composite image, which placed third in the 2013 Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition.

Desmids exhibit a vast diversity of sizes from 10 microns or smaller to 0.3 mm. The red in the image comes from the innate fluorescence — the process by which light of a certain wavelength is absorbed by a substance and emitted, usually at a different wavelength — of chlorophyll. By stacking several desmids together, Siwanowicz was able to create the flowerlike appearance.

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Photographs of Atomic Bomb Tests Are Like Science Fiction Made Real

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VINCZE MIKLÓS on IO9

During the Cold War, scientists tested atomic bombs in remote areas of the globe. These terrifying and beautiful images were used in research, but they were also used to intimidate anyone who would be stupid enough to challenge the US or USSR in an armed conflict.

High-speed photos by Harold “Doc” Edgerton, taken during the first three milliseconds of Trinity test, July 16, 1945.

(via Edgerton Digital Collections)

0.016 seconds after an explosion at Trinity Site, July 16, 1945.

(via Wikimedia Commons/Berlyn Brixner)

Atomic cloud rises during the ‘Baker Day’ blast at Bikini Island in the Pacific, on July 25, 1946.

(Photo by National Archive/Newsmakers, Keystone/Getty Images and Trinity Atomic Web Site)

Explosion of George, the third of the four explosions during Operation Greenhouse, on May 9, 1951

(via U.S. Department of Defense and Wikimedia Commons)

Ivy Mike, the first test of a thermonuclear weapon, on October 31/November 1, 1952

(via Wikimedia Commons)

Ivy King, the detonation of a very high yield pure-fission bomb, November 15, 1952

(via Wikimedia Commons)

The 15-kiloton Grable, test fired from a 280 mm cannon on May 25, 1953 as a part of Operation Upshot-Knothole.

(via National Nuclear Security Administration Nevada Site Office Photo Library/Wikimedia Commons)

Castle Bravo, the first American test of a dry fuel hydrogen bomb, detonated at Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands, March 1, 1954.

(via Wikimedia Commons/United States Government)

Castle Romeo, a test of the TX-17 thermonuclear weapon, March 27, 1954

(via United States Department of Energy/Wikimedia Commons)

Radioactive clouds at the Bikini Atoll on May 21, 1956

(Photo by AP)

Licorne, a test of a 914 kiloton thermonuclear bomb in the Mururoa Atoll, French Polynesia, July 3, 1970

(via Pierre J/Flickr)

Graves and Grog: Images of Nordic Artifacts

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By Stephanie Pappas, Senior Writer   |   January 14, 2014 01:50pm ET

– See more at: http://www.livescience.com/42556-graves-nordic-grog.html?cmpid=556431#sthash.pQarmCD3.dpuf

Ancient Drinking Set

Credit: Nylen and Statens Historiska Museum, Stockholm

An ancient drinking set discovered in Havor, Sweden, dates back to the first century AD. The set, imported from Rome, included a bucket, ladle and strainer and drinking cups. Analyses of artifacts, including this one, reveal that ancient Scandinavians drank grog made of grain, honey, fruits and herbs.

Egtved Girl

Credit: National Museum of Denmark

A young woman with yellow hair, found buried in an oak trunk coffin in Denmark. “Egtved Girl” lived between 1500 BC and 1300 BC and was likely a priestess. She wears a tasseled dress ornamented with a bronze disk and had a birch-bark bucket of grog at her feet.

Birch Bucket

Credit: National Museum of Denmark

Birch-bark bucket found at the feet of Egyved girl. The bucket contain traces of Nordic grog.

Juellinge Grave

Credit: National Museum of Denmark

A 30-year-old woman buried at Juellinge, Denmark around 200 BC clutched a bronze strainer, used for serving alcoholic beverages, in her hand. Residue analysis from grave artifacts revealed grog made with imported grape wine and juniper.

Dogfish Head Label

Credit: Dogfish Head Craft Brewery

With the help of archaeologist Patrick McGovern, Dogfish Head Craft Brewery recreated the Nordic grog, dubbing it Kvasir after a mytholigcal wise man.The woman on the label wears Egtved Girl’s outfit.

Brewing Grog

Credit: Dogfish Head Craft Brewery

Sam Calagione, founder and President of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, and Patrick McGovern of the Penn Museum’s Biomolecular Archaeology Project, brew up an ancient ale.