Drought Reveals Warsaw Treasure

A drought affecting Poland's Vistula River, at its lowest level since records began in the 18th century, have revealed 12 tons of 17th-century marble pieces looted from Kazimierz Palace during the Swedish Deluge and sinking to the river bottom with the barge that carried them away some 350 years ago.

Tectonic Plate Break-Up

Earthquakes of magnitude 8.6 and 8.2 occurring in the Indian Ocean the same day this past April is the latest evidence of geologic stresses pulling apart the Indo-Australian plate and the possible formation of a new tectonic structure for the region.

Antimicrobial Eye Proteins

Researchers have found small fragments of keratin proteins in the human eye have remarkably strong and versatile antimicrobial properties, possibly providing an easily manufactured and biocompatible line of low-cost therapeutic drugs.

Stone Age Dental Filling

Locked away in a museum for 101 years, recent x-ray imaging of a 6500-year-old fossilized jawbone originally found in Slovenia reveals an artificial beeswax filling perfectly filling a cavity on a cracked canine tooth, the oldest known example of Neolithic dentistry.

Enormous Roman Bath Mosaic

A "pristine" open-air Roman poolside mosaic of some 1600 square feet has been unearthed in a freshly plowed farmer's field in the city of Antiochia ad Cragum in southern Turkey, likely dating back to the third or fourth century A.D.

Astronomical Unit Fixed

Astronomers have elected to abandon the unreliable historical definition of the astronomical unit (AU), traditionally found through a parallax calculation or one transforming angular measurements with a Gaussian constant, and have unanimously adopted the fixed linear value of exactly 149,597,870,700 meters.

Van Gogh Varnish Discoloration

Using sophisticated x-ray beams at two synchrotron sources in Europe, scientists have identified a previously unknown degradation process between paint and protective varnish in Van Gogh's painting, Flowers in a blue vase, a reaction between the cadmium sulphide in the paint and lead ions in the varnish to form an opaque anglesite (PbSO₄) and cadmium oxalate (CdC₂O₄).

Roman Military Camp Found

The oldest known Roman military fortification in Germany has been found southeast of the city of Trier in the Hunsrueck region, presumably built during Julius Caesar's Gallic War in the late 50s B.C. and providing a rich repository of soldiers' artifacts from this historically significant period.

Atomic Bonds Visualized

Scientists have developed a variant of an imaging method called atomic force microscopy (AFM) to take single-molecule images so detailed that the types of atomic bonds and local distortions in atomic arrangement can be seen.

Ants Have Higher Sense of Smell

Completing the first full map of the olfactory system of ants, researchers have discovered that ants have a dramatically more advanced odor-sensing capability than other species with four to five time more odor receptors than flying insects such as moths, mosquitoes and honeybees.

Lost Medieval Church Found

Archaeologists have found evidence beneath a parking lot for the Leicester, England, city council offices that is believed to be the lost Greyfriars church, the final resting place of King Richard III, who was buried here in 1485 after his death in the Battle of Bosworth Field.

Second of Two Extinction Events

New evidence shows an extinction event occurring 200,000 to 300,000 years before the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, an extended period of huge volcanic eruptions causing extinctions of life on the ocean floor and potentially compromising land-based species prior to the larger event.