Unique Roman Glass Dish Discovered At London Grave

Archeologists have discovered an exquisite Roman polychrome millefiori dish in East London, U.K. The dish is made up of hundreds of indented glass petals (the term millefiori means simply “a thousand flowers”) in an intricate repeated pattern and was found during excavations in Prescot Street, Aldgate, by L – P : Archaeology. It was highly fragmented but miraculously held together by nothing more than the earth around it.

It has been painstakingly reassembled by Museum of London Archaeology conservator Liz Goodman.

The dish is extremely rare and an unprecedented find, not only from London but from across the Western Roman empire. Originally the blue translucent petals, bordered with white, would have been embedded in a bright red opaque glass matrix. The hue was still present when the dish was uncovered, with the vermillion appearance diminishing as the water-saturated glass dried out. The red colouring can be seen around the rim. The complexity of its manufacture indicates that the dish was a highly-prized and valuable item. Beautifully crafted vessels like this were particularly in vogue in the 1st and early 2nd centuries. Dating is underway to establish the precise period of the find.

The dish formed part of the grave goods of a Roman Londoner whose cremated remains were uncovered, probably buried in a wooden container, in a cemetery in Londinium’s Eastern quarter. A number of other ceramic and glass vessels were also ranged along the sides of the casket, suggesting a rich and unusual burial.

The excavations at Prescot Street have continued the process of the recording of the extensive eastern cemetery of Roman London which, by law, lay outside the city wall. This and previous excavations have found both cremations and inhumations (burial of the body) that spanned over 400 years of Roman occupation from the late 1st to early 5th century. This burial came from an area of intense burials at the eastern end of the site where there was also a stone mausoleum, a possible funerary structure and a series of burial groups which perhaps indicate the on-going use of cemetery plots. Indeed, this particular burial had, at a later date, had another cremation burial interred on the same spot which may point to a family connection.

Liz Goodman, Museum of London Archaeology conservator said ““Piecing together and conserving such a complete artefact offered a rare and thrilling challenge. We occasionally get tiny fragments of millefiori, but the opportunity to work on a whole artefact of this nature is extraordinary. The dish is extremely fragile but the glasswork is intact and illuminates beautifully nearly two millennia after being crafted.”

Guy Hunt, Director, L – P : Archaeology said “The dig at Prescot Street produced an amazing range of Roman cemetery archaeology; it is fantastic for us that one of the many finds is such an exciting and beautiful object. It is great to be able to put an object such as this into context and to get a first hand impression of a rather wealthy east Londoner.”

About Milleflore Glass

Millefiore is a glass-working technique created from glass rods with multi coloured patterns that are only visible at the cut ends – like a stick of rock with the writing only visible once cut. These rods are created by heating and melding lengths of different coloured glass to create an individual pattern. Here, a solid red cane is set at the core with blue and white canes set around it to produce the petal effect. The small cross sections of glass rod are then used to create bigger pieces. It is a very labour intensive – and hence very exclusive – craft.

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Statues of pharaoh discovered

One of Egypt's most noted Pharaohs - Amenhotep III, the deputy seal-bearer of the Pharaoh Tuthmosis III - who ruled Egypt some 3,400 years ago, is once more standing tall and looking out across the Nile Valley as a result of the efforts of a team of Egyptian and European archaeologists and with a little help from the British Museum, according to the country's archaeology chief Zahi Hawass, head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.

These colossal statues of Amenhotep III, grandfather of Tutankhamun and ruler of Egypt for more than 36 years, have not only been raised but also given back their heads. The two large statues of Amenhotep III were discovered in 1880 then lost in the sand.

However, the statues were found again while the excavation team was clearing out a temple dedicated to him on the west bank of the Nile in the southern city of Luxor, said Hawass. Hawass said one statue is made of black granite and shows Amenhotep wearing a traditional pharaonic headcover, while the second one depicts him in the shape of a sphinx - the mythological creature with a human head and body of a lion.

Amenhotep was the ninth pharaoh of the 18th dynasty, in what is known as the New Kingdom.

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Gene variant for autism discovered

In the world's largest DNA scan for autism, US scientists have uncovered a new gene variant, called CDH10, which is highly common in children suffering from the disorder.

In partnership with 30 research institutions across the US, scientists scrutinized the activity of CDH10 and found that it is most active in key regions that support language, speech and interpreting social behaviour.

The two findings suggest that CDH10 plays a critical role in shaping the developing brain and may contribute to a prenatal risk of autism.

"While this gene variant is common in the general population, we discovered that it occurs about 20 percent more often in children with autism. A major change like this in the genetic code is too common to be a simple mutation - it is a risk factor in the origin of the disease," Nature quoted study author Dr. Daniel Geschwind, director of the UCLA Center for Autism Treatment and Research, as saying.

Using the largest population sample till date, the scientists systematically scanned the DNA of 3,100 individuals from 780 families nationwide. Each family had at least two autistic children.

The scan linked autism to a specific region of chromosome 5, which was previously named as a hub for genetic variations linked to higher autism risk.

To verify the findings, researchers conducted a second scan on the DNA of 1,200 individuals from families affected by autism, as well as nearly 6,500 healthy controls. All participants shared European ancestry.

The scientists evaluated the relationship of more than half a million gene variants to autism and consistently discovered six changes that occurred more frequently in autistic children than in the control group.

It was found that the variants sat on chromosome 5 between two genes, CDH9 and CDH10.

In the second half of the study, the UCLA team looked at the two genes' presence in the developing human brain.

While CDH9's presence appeared minimal, the scientists discovered that CDH10 was most active in the fetal brain's frontal cortex, a region critical to language, social behaviour and complex thought processes such as judgment.

"This is a landmark finding. It's no coincidence that a gene linked to autism has a higher concentration in key brain regions that regulate speech and the ability to interpret social interaction. Our research suggests that CDH10 is switched on at a very early stage and plays an important role in regulating the developing brain. This prenatal activity somehow makes the infant more susceptible to autism," said Geschwind.

He claimed that by influencing the development of important brain structures, CDH10 provides a tangible link between genes, brain circuitry and a child's future behaviour.

The study is published in the advance online edition of the journal Nature.

ANI

New treatment discovered for restless legs syndrome improves sleep

A drug widely used to treat seizures and anxiety appears to be an effective treatment for restless legs syndrome (RLS) and helps people with the disorder get a better night's sleep, according to a study that will be presented as part of the Late-breaking Science Program at the American Academy of Neurology's 61st Annual Meeting in Seattle, April 25 – May 2, 2009. RLS affects up to one in ten people.

The 12 week study involved 58 people with RLS. Of the group, 30 people received the drug pregabalin and the rest received placebo. Sleep studies were performed at the beginning and end of the research.

Researchers found nearly two-thirds of the people who took pregabalin had no RLS symptoms while taking the drug. For people who still had symptoms, those symptoms had improved by 66 percent while taking the drug, compared to the placebo group where symptoms worsened by 29 percent.

Sleep also improved for those taking pregabalin. The study showed the group spent more time in slow wave sleep, otherwise known as Stage 3 or deep sleep, and they spent less time in the lighter sleep stages known as Stage 1 or Stage 2 sleep compared to those taking placebo.

"Since RLS symptoms get worse at night, it's difficult for people with RLS to get adequate sleep," said study author Diego Garcia-Borreguero, MD, Director of the Sleep Research Institute in Madrid, Spain. "However, our findings show pregabalin helped people get more deep sleep. The drug was well tolerated and is a promising alternative to current treatments because of its superior effects on quality of sleep."

Pregabalin has been approved for epilepsy, nerve pain, generalized anxiety and fibromyalgia.

RLS is characterized by an urge to move the legs, generally accompanied by unpleasant numbness, tingling, or burning sensations; an increase in symptoms during rest and a partial, temporary relief from symptoms through activity; and a worsening of symptoms in the evening or at night. Symptoms tend to progress with age.

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Giant Mystery Blob Discovered Near Dawn of Time

A newly found primordial blob may represent the most massive object ever discovered in the early universe, researchers announced today.

The gas cloud, spotted from 12.9 billion light-years away, could signal the earliest stages of galaxy formation back when the universe was just 800 million years old.

"I have never heard about any [similar] objects that could be resolved at this distance," said Masami Ouchi, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution in Pasadena, Calif. "It's kind of record-breaking."

A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers). An object 12.9 billion light-years away is seen as it existed 12.9 billion years ago, and the light is just now arriving.

The cloud predates similar blobs, known as Lyman-Alpha blobs, which existed when the universe was 2 billion to 3 billion years old. Researchers named their new find Himiko, after an ancient Japanese queen with an equally murky past.

Himiko holds more than 10 times as much mass as the next largest object found in the early universe, or roughly the equivalent mass of 40 billion suns. At 55,000 light years across, it spans about half the diameter of our Milky Way Galaxy.

Lyman-Alpha blobs remain a mystery because existing telescopes have a hard time peering so far back to nearly the dawn of the universe.

Himiko sits right on the doorstep of an era called the reionization epoch, which lasted between 200 million and 1 billion years after the Big Bang. That's when the universe had just emerged from its cosmic dark ages and had begun brightening through the formation of stars and galaxies. Hot, energized hydrogen gas from that time period has allowed astronomers to begin seeing some objects — as much good as it does to squint at such fuzzy blobs.

"Even for astronomers, we don't understand," Ouchi told SPACE.com. "We are keen to try to understand what those systems are in the reionization epoch."

Himiko may represent an ionized gas halo surrounding a super-massive black hole, or a cooling gas cloud that indicates a primordial galaxy, Ouchi noted. But it might also be the result of a collision between two young galaxies, or the outgoing wind of a highly active star nursery, or a single giant galaxy.

Pinning down this riddle will require further telescope time. The W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii can help accurately estimate star formation in the blob, while NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory could test the super-massive black hole scenario, Ouchi noted. And even Hubble could get in on the action.

"We're planning deep infrared imaging with the Hubble Space Telescope to tell whether [Himiko] has merger-like qualities or not," Ouchi said.

However, that particular research hinges upon the future success of a risky repair mission to the aging Hubble. Astronauts are slated to blast off with the space shuttle Atlantis in the attempt next month.

For now, researchers may celebrate the fact that they found Himiko at all. They almost overlooked the blob among 207 galaxy candidates, while sweeping a portion of the sky designated the Subaru/XMM-Newton Deep Survey Field.

After making the initial sighting with the Subaru telescope in Hawaii in 2007, Ouchi and his colleagues followed up using instruments from the Keck/DEIMOS and Magellan/IMACS arrays. Those spectrographic observations allowed them to pinpoint the signature of the ionized hydrogen gas and determine the distance and age of the mysterious Himiko.

"We never believed that this bright and large source was a real distant object," Ouchi said. "We thought it was a foreground interloper contaminating our galaxy sample. But we tried anyway."

Source Space.com

30 mummies found in newly discovered tomb in Egypt

A storehouse of 30 Egyptians mummies has been unearthed inside a 2,600-year-old tomb, in a new round of excavations at the vast necropolis of Saqqara outside Cairo, archeologists said Monday.

The tomb was located at the bottom of a 36 foot (11-meter) deep shaft, announced Egypt's top archaeologist Zahi Hawass and eight of the mummies were in sarcophagi, while the rest had been placed in niches along the wall.

Hawass described the discovery as a "storeroom for mummies," dating to 640 B.C. and the 26th Dynasty, which was Egypt's last independent kingdom before it were overthrown by a succession of foreign conquerors beginning with the Persians.

The tomb was discovered at an even more ancient site dating back to 4,300-year-old 6th Dynasty.

Most of the mummies are poorly preserved and archeologists have yet to determine their identity or why so many are in a single room. One of the sarcophagi is made of wood and bears the name Badi N Huri, but no title.

"This one might have been an important figure, but I can't tell because there was no title," Hawass" assistant Abdel Hakim Karar told The Associated Press.

He added that the rest of the sarcophagi — including four which are tightly sealed — have yet to be opened yet.

Karar added that it was quite unusual for mummies of this late period to be stored in rocky niches.

"Niches were known in the very early dynasties, so to find one for the 26th Dynasty, is something rare," Karar said.

Excavations have been ongoing at Saqqara for 150 years, uncovering a vast necropolis of pyramids and tombs dating mostly from the Old Kingdom, but including sites as recent as the Roman era.

In the past, excavations have focused on just one side of the two nearby pyramids — the famous Step Pyramid of King Djoser and that of Unas, the last king of the 5th Dynasty. The area where the current tomb was found, to the southwest, has been largely untouched by archeologists.

But despite the years of excavation, new finds are constantly being made. In December last year, two tombs were found near the current discovery. The two were built for high officials — one responsible for the quarries used to build the nearby pyramids and other for a woman in charge of procuring entertainers for the pharaohs.

In November, Hawass announced the discovery of a new pyramid at Saqqara, the 118th in Egypt, and the 12th to be found just in Saqqara.

According to Hawass only 30% of Egypt's monuments have been uncovered, with the rest still under the sand.

USA Today

A mammoth discovery

Former President Thomas Jefferson would have appreciated the discovery yesterday of an 8-foot tusk, skull and foot bones of a mammoth unearthed at the downtown construction site of a law school named for him.

The remains of the adult Columbian mammoth were found in the East Village, where the Thomas Jefferson School of Law is building its new $68 million campus. Paleontologists from the San Diego Natural History Museum estimate they are about 500,000 years old.

While serving as president in the early 1800s, Jefferson had fossilized bones of a mastodon found in Ohio shipped to the White House so he could examine them, said Rudy Hasl, the law school's dean.

“He was just fascinated with these large creatures,” Hasl said. “It's particularly appropriate that there is a connection between this find and Thomas Jefferson.”

Paleontologists from the museum are excavating the bones for transport to the museum for detailed study. They say the bones hold clues about animal life in the downtown area a half-million years ago, as well as indicators of climate changes that varied from hot to cool in eons past.

“It's a pretty important find,” said Pat Sena, a paleontologist for the museum who identified the bones yesterday morning. “The mammoth itself is a pretty rare find, and this is a really intact skull, foot bones and tusk.”

The museum has collected mammoth tusks elsewhere in the county, but this is its first skull, said Thomas A. Deméré, the museum's curator of paleontology.

“This was the largest land animal of its time,” Deméré said.

Construction workers spotted what they believed was a fossilized redwood Tuesday afternoon, several feet below street level at Island Avenue and Park Boulevard. Sena called for work to stop in that corner of the construction zone yesterday morning when he determined that the fossil was the animal's right tusk.

“I saw a piece of tusk fragment and started digging on in,” Sena said.

The mammoth was 20 percent larger than the modern elephant and lived during a dry period in the area, Deméré said. That's apparent because there is a layer of dirt containing the shells of marine creatures below the bones and another shell-rich layer above the mammoth fossils.

The position of the mammoth fossils – in a stratum that also included the bones of rabbits and rodents – indicates that the mammoth roamed the area at a time when the waters had receded.

Sena, who monitors construction sites for the museum, said he has found mammoth bones in Oceanside, Carlsbad, and the Borrego Springs area.

“It shows that the county was teeming with mammoths and that it had a savannah environment,” he said. “It was a lot wetter than it is today.”

Sign On San Diego

Earliest Evidence For Animal Life Discovered

An international research team of scientists from UC Riverside, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other institutions has found the oldest evidence for animals in the fossil record.

The researchers examined sedimentary rocks in south Oman, and found an anomalously high amount of steroids that date back to 635 million years ago, to around the end of the last ice age. The steroids are produced by sponges – one of the simplest forms of multicellular animals.

The researchers argue that the discovery of the sponges is evidence for multicellular animal life beginning 100 million years before the Cambrian explosion, a well-studied and unique episode in Earth history that began about 530 million years ago when, as indicated by the fossil record, animal life diversified rapidly.

The discovery can help scientists reconstruct Earth’s early ecosystems and explain how animal life may have first evolved on the planet.

“Our findings suggest that the evolution of multicellular animals began earlier than has been thought,” said Gordon Love, an assistant professor of Earth sciences, who led the research group. Love began working on the project while he was a postdoctoral researcher at MIT. “Moreover, sponges live on the seafloor, growing initially in shallow waters and spreading, over time, into deeper waters, implying the existence of oceanic environments which contained dissolved oxygen near the shallow seafloor around 635 million years ago.”

Study results appear in the Feb. 5 issue of Nature.

According to Love, the climatic shock of the extensive glacial episodes of the Neoproterozoic era (1000-542 million years ago) likely caused a major reorganization of marine ecosystems, perhaps by irrevocably altering ocean chemistry.

“This paved the way for the evolution of animal feeders living on the seafloor,” he said. “We believe we are converging on the correct date for the divergence of complex multicellular animal life, on the shallow ocean floor between 635 and 750 million years ago.”

The steroids that Love and his colleagues observed in the Omani rocks are essential biochemicals present in the cell membranes of the sponges, and help provide the membranes with structural support. The sponges are a few millimeters in size, immobile, and were filter feeders existing on the seafloor.

The sponge findings emerged from a project Love was working on at MIT (with Roger Summons, a professor of geobiology) in collaboration with Petroleum Development Oman. Using state-of–the-art techniques, he and his colleagues analyzed 64 Neoproterozoic-Cambrian sedimentary rock samples from the South Oman Salt Basin (SOSB), a region known for some of the best preserved rocks in the world. The researchers also established a robust stratigraphic and temporal framework for the SOSB rocks as part of their analysis.

Next, Love and his colleagues plan to screen other Neoproterozoic sedimentary rocks for animal steroids just before and through the Sturtian and Marinoan glaciations, the greatest ice ages known to have occurred on Earth during 850 to 635 million years ago.

“We aim to investigate the environmental context by which multicellular animal life became viable and flourished,” he said.

Love obtained his Ph.D. in chemistry from University of Strathclyde, Scotland. He was a recipient of the prestigious Natural Environment Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship to carry out organic geochemical research at University of Newcastle, United Kingdom. He joined UCR’s Department of Earth Sciences in January 2007 after a postdoctoral appointment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Love has co-authored 50 research papers in international peer-reviewed scientific journals on petroleum geochemistry, geobiology, cosmochemistry, solid state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and analytical chemistry.

Besides researchers at MIT, Love was joined in the study by colleagues at Geoscience Australia; the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom; the California Institute of Technology; and the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom.

The four-year study was funded by Petroleum Development Oman; the NASA Exobiology Program; the National Science Foundation Division of Earth Sciences; the Agouron Institute; and the NASA Astrobiology Institute.

Science Daily

Fossils of gigantic snakes found in Colombia

Gigantic snakes as long as 13 meters and as heavy as a medium sedan car, which can make the anacondas and pythons of today look tiny, once slithered in the rain forests of the planet, latest discovery of fossils in Latin American country Colombia reveals.

The 60-million year old fossils found in Columbia by an international team of scientists are a proof that these reptiles were dotting the landscape of the South American rain forests six million years after the extinction of the dreaded predator dinosaur 'Tyrannosaurus rex'.

Christened as "Titanoboa" these 1,100 kg monster snake was a non-venomous constrictor, like anacondas and boas, ate giant turtles and crocodiles which were the other prominent reptile species in rain forests during Paleocene Epoch, five to six million years immediately following the extinction of dinosaurs from the Earth.

"This new species of snake is the largest ever known, living or fossil. The largest living snakes are pythons and anacondas, which normally grow up to about six meters long and occasionally get as big as nine meters. The largest fossil snakes known up to now got to be about 10 meters long. This new snake was normally about 13 meters long, so by far the largest known," David Polly, geologist from Indiana University, US told.

The findings published in the latest edition of the journal 'Nature' will help in understanding the impact of temperatures on the size of cold-blooded species. Scientists say that body size of snakes and other reptiles get limited by the ambient temperature of where they live.

Bureau Report

Newly discovered non-coding genes control critical disease processes

Researchers from the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center have discovered a vast new class of previously unrecognized mammalian genes that do not encode proteins, but instead function as long RNA molecules. The findings, appearing in the journal Nature, show that these "large intervening non-coding RNAs" (lincRNAs) play critical roles in both health and disease, including cancer, immune signaling and stem cell biology.

"We've known that the human genome still has many tricks up its sleeve," said the Broad Institute's Eric Lander. "But, it is astounding to realize that there is a huge class of RNA-based genes that we have almost entirely missed until now."

Standard textbook genes encode RNAs that are translated into proteins, and mammalian genomes harbor about 20,000 such protein-coding genes. Some genes, however, encode functional RNAs that are never translated into proteins. These include a handful of classical examples known for decades and some recently discovered classes of tiny RNAs, such as microRNAs.

By contrast, the newly discovered lincRNAs are thousands of bases long. Because only about ten examples of functional lincRNAs were known previously, they seemed more like genomic oddities than critical components. But the new Nature study shows that there are actually thousands of such genes, and that they have been conserved across mammalian evolution.

"The challenge in finding these lincRNAs is that they have been hiding in plain sight," said Harvard co-researcher John Rinn. "The human and mouse genomes are already known to produce many large RNA molecules, but the vast majority show no evolutionary conservation across species, suggesting that they may simply be 'genomic noise' without any biological function."

To uncover the new genes, the team looked not at the RNA molecules themselves but at telltale signs in the DNA called chromatin modifications or epigenomic marks. They searched for genomic regions that have the same chromatin patterns as protein-coding genes, but do not encode proteins. By surveying the genomes of four different types of mouse cells, they found an astonishing 1,586 such loci that had not been previously described. The researchers also found that the vast majority of these genomic regions are transcribed into lincRNAs, and that these are conserved across mammals.

"The epigenomic marks revealed where these genes were hiding," said MIT's Mitch Guttman. "Analysis of their sequence then revealed that the genes are highly conserved in mammalian genomes, which strongly suggested that these genes play critical biological functions." By correlating the expression patterns of lincRNAs in various cell types with the expression patterns of known critical protein-coding genes in those same cells, the researchers observed that lincRNAs likely play critical roles in helping to regulate a variety of different cellular processes, including cell proliferation, immune surveillance, maintenance of embryonic stem cell pluripotency, neuronal and muscle development, and gametogenesis.

Teasingly, because of the stringent experimental conditions imposed by the researchers in identifying the 1,600 lincRNAs in the Nature study, it is likely that there are many more lincRNA genes hiding in plain sight in the genome, as well as other RNA-encoding genes that are as important to genome function as their better-recognized protein-coding counterparts.

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